We're going to be talking about that in this video, so let's do it. So the two things I want to talk about in today's video are listed right here on my whiteboard and I have an average cost for both of these things and for one of these things I have the high cost in the highest state in the United States on average, right? So let's just take a look at this first thing right here and yes that is cigarettes. So remember these numbers guys the average cost per pack of cigarettes these are United States numbers is seven dollars, right? The New York cost which is the most expensive state to buy cigarettes in the United States of America is twelve ninety five but I rounded up to thirteen dollars for the sake of this video and the second thing that we're going to be talking about here is cable television guys so the average cost per month of cable television is eighty five dollars so these are the numbers that we're going to be playing with and you may be asking yourself how can you become a millionaire by simply cutting out these two things. So I'm going to hop into my computer actually go to a compound interest calculator and show you guys if you were to save this money here right we're going to go through a couple of different scenarios and you used this money to invest in the stock market for the sake of this video at an 8% to a 12% interest rate compounded annually you can become a millionaire in some years. So let's hop right into my computer and talk about this on a further basis. Alright guys so here we are the compound interest calculator so before we do start plugging in some numbers and going through a couple of different scenarios let's talk about what compound interest is in the first place for everybody out there that has no idea so the gist of what compound interest is is let's say for example you have $1,000 and you invest in the stock market and you make an 8% return on that $1,000 in one year after that year you're going to have $1,080 and this is when compound interest starts to kick in that second year let's say you make another 8% that 8% is not only going to be applied to your original principle which was $1,000 it's also going to be applied to that $80 that you made in the first year right so pretty much guys compound interest is interest making interest and every single year that goes by you make more money from the money that you made from your original principle years ago right and you can imagine that over the span of 10, 20, 30 years how big this sum of money can become you know simply from the formula of a compound interest so let's pull up my little calculator here and start to play out with a couple of different scenarios from back on that whiteboard remember the average cost of cigarettes is $7 per pack and unfortunately guys a bunch of people out there do smoke a pack of cigarettes per day right so on average that's going to be $7 per day times 7 which is $49 per week on cigarettes times 4 which is going to be $196 per month on cigarettes times 12 and that's going to give us $23.52 $2352 per year on cigarettes so let's just hop right into this compound interest calculator to see if a person smoking a pack a day if they completely quit smoking cigarettes how much money will they have in terms of 10 years from now 20 years 30 years how long is it going to take them to become a millionaire with an 8 to 12% interest rate so in this case we're not going to start out with the principle right we're going to keep the principle zero but the annual addition is going to be that $23.52 that you're saving from simply not smoking right so $23.52 let's say you make an 8% return compounded annually right so let's say let's see rather how much money are you going to have after 10 years of just not smoking daily not finishing a pack of cigarettes at $7 per day daily let's see guys calculate that so simply from not smoking you're going to have $36,798 and you're probably like Stas that's not a millionaire status right but wait take a look at this guys let's just let's just keep going through this so 20 years from now you're going to have $116,000 and remember this is at an 8% which is the average stock market return historically if you're an above average investor let's say you're making 12% the numbers compound even bigger so let's say you're making or rather let's say 30 years let's see what that's going to be now we're talking some more you know big money right a quarter million dollars 287 thousand dollars and let's say 40 40 years you're going to start getting closer and closer to millionaire status 658 thousand dollars what about 50 years now we're officially millionaires guys so think about that you didn't start out with any principle you're just not smoking 23 52 per year compounded for 50 years at 8% you're going to have $1.4 million right absolutely amazing so let's say you're 20 years old unfortunately a lot of people start smoking from a young age right from 20 to 70 right that's 50 years you'll have $1.5 million from not smoking right simply not smoking and you can have you know a job that pays a lot of money and if you're investing with that money you're going to be a multi multi multi millionaire guys it's absolutely unbelievable and with the way people are living nowadays you know 70 years old you might still have 10 20 years of life to enjoy that 1.5 million dollars and let's say you know we're doing 12% interest let's go back to 10 years and do the whole thing again you know if you're making 10% or 12% 10 years you're gonna have 46 thousand dollars in 20 years right you're gonna have a hundred and eighty nine thousand dollars in 30 years you're gonna have 635 thousand dollars and 40 years you're gonna have two million dollars two million dollars at a 12% compounded interest rate for 40 years so think about it from 20 to 60 just not smoking cigarettes guys not smoking cigarettes you're going to have two million dollars so let's hop back over here to the calculator very quickly and let's see you know if you live in New York that high price of $13 this is when the numbers are gonna get fun guys take a look at this so let's say you smoke a pack a day in New York which a lot of people smoke a pack a day in New York 13 times 7 right 7 days in the week that's $91 per week in cigarettes times 4 that's $364 per month in cigarettes on cigarettes times 12 that's $4,368 a year on cigarettes so four three six eight let's pop that back into this calculator here at 10 years let's say we start out with that 8% again that's gonna be $68,000 after 10 years compounded at 8% 20 years that's going to be $215,000 guys 30 years $534,000 unbelievable 40 years that's gonna be $1.2 million so if you live in New York from 20 to 60 you don't smoke cigarettes at $13 per pack 8% compounded in you know annually they're gonna have $1.2 million and take a look guys if we hop back to that 12% this is when the numbers get very very big so in 10 years 85 grand right 20 years you're gonna have $350,000 guys so from 20 years old to 40 if you just don't smoke cigarettes and you live in the city you have you know a job in the city whatever you're doing you're gonna have 350k from just not smoking cigarettes this blows my mind it's unbelievable right so from for 30 years you're gonna have $1.1 million and again this is when the numbers get insane so from 20 to 50 years old if you start or if you start investing you stop smoking at 20 you start investing that money instead $1.1 million take a look at this $43.7 million and 50 guys this is gonna blow your mind right here 11 11 I'm laughing when I'm saying this because this just blows my mind right 11 million dollars 11.7 this is unbelievable so that are those are the numbers really if you just simply not smoke a pack a day so now for the second example here the cable television this is going to take you a bit longer to become a millionaire but it's still very very possible so let's pull out our calculator here our dandy old calculator and let's start doing some math right so we saw $85 is the average monthly cost of cable so 85 times 12 that's going to be $1020 so that's you know a little bit really it's a lot less than the cigarettes in terms of a yearly cost but you can still become a millionaire through your lifetime by simply cutting out this one little thing that a lot of people don't even use anymore right cable is something that no one really uses anymore you know Netflix Hulu you know Apple's coming out the streaming service Disney all these different platforms are a lot a lot cheaper to use than cable and if you don't even like Netflix Hulu whatever you can you know save on not even using those either right so let's just say for example you don't use Netflix you don't use anything you don't watch TV at all right let's see how much you can save from just really investing that 1020 per year at an 8% return for 10 years let's see how much that's going to be so that's going to be 15,958 at 8% so again that's not that much right that is not millionaire status but let's say 20 years that's going to be 50,411 how about 30 years 120 124 792 how about 40 years that's going to be 285 376 50 years that's going to be 632 thousand dollars so 60 years that's when you're going to become a millionaire and again this is really it's going to take a little bit more to become a millionaire by just simply cutting out cable but the idea here is that throughout your lifetime you can become a millionaire by simply cutting out a tiny expense in your life that's the whole purpose of this video right you can really do this with anything right you know take a look at your monthly expenses right if you're paying $30 at a gym per month and you don't use that gym membership plug it into the compound interest calculator to see how long it's going to take you to become a millionaire by just simply canceling that out right and this first in 60 years guys if you're 20 the time you're 80 you're going to have $1.3 million by simply not having cable your entire life right and you'll become a millionaire even quicker at a 12% interest rate let's just do that very quickly again right so in 10 years at 12% compounded in annually $20,000 in 20 years you're gonna have $82,000 in 30 years you're gonna have $275,000 and in 40 years guys drumroll up not yet $876,000 and in 50 years that's when you're gonna become a multi millionaire $2.7 million let's see exactly when you're gonna become a millionaire probably 45 years maybe 42 years alright let's say 42 years so from 20 to 62 years old you don't have cable you're gonna become a millionaire in 42 years at 12% compounded annually so those are just a couple examples to get you thinking you know if you cut out some expenses guys you plug them into this compound interest calculator this will get you understanding how investing and compound interest works and how you can become a millionaire by simply cutting out $100 even $100 to $200 per month in your expenses whatever those expenses are they don't have to be cigarettes they don't have to be cable whatever they are just cut them out invest 8 to 12% you'll become a millionaire in your lifetime so hope you guys enjoyed the video if you did feel free to go down below hit that like button it really supports me in the channel in general if you want to see more content for me I make a bunch of stock market videos trading you know investing analysis personal finance stuff like that feel free to subscribe to the channel hit that notification bell so you're notified every time that I do make a video I'll catch you all in the next video again thanks for watching I appreciate every single one of you guys peace out


That I'm gonna say other current liabilities that Amazon is possibly more gonna gonna handle more of the sales tax than like a Shopify Sometimes maybe but some states you might still have to deal with the sales tax So that's a whole nother issue that we might talk a little bit more about in the future. That's point two It's not bad. I can handle that but still they're nickel and diamond me man Nickel and diamond me Amazon FBA fees. So we've got an Amazon FBA fees 63 11 311 and then we've got Amazon sales tax payable again. All right Amazon sales tax Payable That's usually a liability, but yeah, it's $24 24 and Then we've got the Amazon sales tax payable again Amazon sales tax payable For five dollars and then finally if it all comes out correctly notice It's it's trying to give me the number sometimes. This is gonna be Amazon. I'm gonna put it into an Amazon Zon payment clearing account Boom and that's gonna be an other current liability account other current. I'm sorry other current asset account and I'm gonna say it's gonna be just I'll just put it other current asset. Don't give me and There we go and now it now if I did everything correctly It's gonna try to plug that number in for me to make my debits and credits correct So if I my debits and credits should be correct 931 88 so 931 88 So it's a long tedious process to do the journal entry with the Amazon ones oftentimes because again the reports That you have to deal with often have a whole lot of line items and as we saw in the prior presentation in the Excel problem We can group multiple line items into some of these line items and again the software That's what some of the software Integrations are attempting to do when they pull in the data from a third-party platform such as even the QuickBooks Integration, it's not trying to pull in every customer sale But summarizing the data which means it's gonna pull it in in like a journal entry format Generally, and if you get this in there all correctly then the bottom line should still add up to the amount that Amazon's gonna be distributing the deposit that's gonna hit the bank account now note That we put this this amount not into our checking account, but rather into a clearing account It should be exact so we could have put it like into our checking account Even though we if we were to do that We might want to use like a deposit form and we can put this whole long journal entry into a deposit form And then when you do the bank feeds it could match you could use the matching mechanism To match out the bank feeds to what you put in there But the clearing accounts are often a good system in case there's an issue and this amount doesn't exactly tie out For whatever reason to what was put in to the bank account so that you could see something in the clearing account That doesn't clear because we should be able to take and tie everything out in the clearing account Hopefully I got all the account types correct you could Put put some of these items in a cost of good sold as opposed to an expense item like we talked about and we'll see some of Again the default settings that QuickBooks uses when we use the QuickBooks integration at least for the Shopify Side of things so you can get get an idea of what their defaults are and I think they do use cost good sold for some of the Fees and whatnot. All right, so let's go ahead and save it and close it So I'll save it and close it and I probably I should have put the date on the date of the deposit profits possibly or the date that it was sent out Which should be let's just what did I put on I think I put I think I put 915 or something like that or 925 might be a little bit more specific. Okay save it and close it and Then if I go to my balance sheet and we bring the date up now. We're working in the next months. Oh nine oh one Two five two oh nine thirty one two five. Let's run this side by side month by month now and to hold on a sec oh nine thirty two five and Let's run it there. Okay All right, so then and now I want to see it month by month. Let's make it from oh eight oh one Two five so I can see the two months Okay, so this is as of the end of August as of the end of September if I go into and I'm not going into the checking account It's not there yet. It's in The it should be in the clearing account clearing account clearing account There it is pull it together for crying out loud so there's our clearing account and then when we make the deposit it's going to move from here up into The checking account and this is similar to what some of the integrations will do that we'll take a look at in a future Presentation and then on the income statement side. Let's do the same thing. Let's just bring this up to oh nine Thirty two five and then let's say this is going to be for Four months so I could see the month side by side so now we've got our our Amazon Income and refunds. So here's our Amazon Income and then the refunds are usually considered kind of contra income accounts We put them in the income section it would be nice if it was in the other order and you could order it with like account numbers for example and whatnot or you could use Like Z to a order and I won't get into that now, but There's our our total income and then we've got the gross profit and then we've got the charges and the Amazon FBA fees and again You might put these into like costs to get sold as opposed to down here But the general idea is that there are our expenses We've got the more breakout of this information Using this method then we did with the prior method in the prior method We we kind of we just entered the deposit and then we forced the deposit to be tied out to what we


What is going on guys, welcome back to the channel and I do appreciate you here as always.


Here's the thing. I heard something a long time ago that really really hit a note with me, hit a chord with me. A guy told me, he said, listen, never be ashamed of what you do. Never. I hear all the time, insurance agents are right above car salesmen or right below car salesmen and no offense to car salesmen. Man, if you sell cars, sell the nicest cars out there and be the best car salesman there is.  You know who does want to talk to me? It's that widow when I hand her the check and I say, hey, everything's gonna be okay. Yeah. She wants to talk to me.  Everything was sold.     Is there any way you could help me out? Yeah. You know, somebody asked me all the time, how can you work on 100% commission? And I asked them, how the freak can you go into a job and know that this is all you're gonna make this year? No matter how hard you work, that's all you're making. You're capped. I got no cap. It's a good point, man.  Yeah, I've done it. I worked in a factory for years. And there's insurance agents that are like that. Years. I worked in a factory. Man. There's places where they won't give raises. Yep. There's places where, you know, where they won't give you any commission as an agent. Yeah. There are. They're out there. We've heard of local places even in our town, they get like 1%. Call us if that's the case. Call us if that's the case. We can do better than that.


Hey everybody, welcome to episode number 11 of Patterson in Pursuit. This week is another breakdown episode, which I've been looking forward to for several weeks. I've been chopping at the bit, ready to dive into specifically one interview that I conducted a few weeks ago. Before we get into it though, if you guys enjoy this show, could you do me a favor? Go into iTunes, go into Stitcher, and leave a rating and a review. The show's not been around that long, but it's already getting some popularity and what's really going to help it grow in the future is having more ratings and reviews. So if you have a couple minutes and really want to help me out, I would sincerely appreciate it. Since the last interview breakdown, there have been four interviews. I'm going to quickly go through three of them and spend the majority of the time talking about the interview I had at Columbia University about logical contradictions, my favorite topic. I feel like now that I've got several interviews under my belt, I can start pushing the envelope a little bit more. My own analysis, I'll be honest, is a bit sharp. I very strongly disagree with some of the arguments that you're about to hear and I'm not afraid to talk about it. Now I want to emphasize this is nothing personal against anybody that I had interviewed or anybody that I will interview. It's just an analysis of the ideas. Big ideas have very big stakes. And when some foundational claims are fundamentally flawed, it's very important. So in this set of interviews, we talked about egoism, religion, and iron ran with Michael Malus. We talked about completed infinities with Dr. Gary McGuire. We talked about Christianity and a personal Christian experience with Dr. Bob Murphy. And then we talked about logic and epistemology with Dr. Justin Clark Done of Columbia University. So the first thing I want to highlight is how important foundational ideas are in our worldview. Many times there are essential premises which are nestled into our worldview that we've not even examined. We just assume they're true or assume their faults. However, when we actually examine them, things might not be so clear. One premise that most people take as a self-evident truth is the inherent value of human individuals. And Michael challenges this idea. No, I don't. I'm a huge, since I was a kid, when I was a kid, I wanted to be a zookeeper. So I'm a huge zoology person. So I don't regard human beings as special and awesome and every human like this magic. I reject that completely. That's also a function of growing up in a Soviet household. So that kind of thinking is just completely foreign to me. Really? Yeah. Now, whether or not individual human beings are valuable is not a self-evident question. It's something that everybody needs to examine for themselves. And the implications of that belief are quite large in terms of having an influence on other areas of our worldview. So the next two points that I want to highlight are essential in mathematics. As the series progresses, we're going to have more and more interviews with mathematicians talking about mathematics. The question that I had for Dr. Gary McGuire was about trying to understand infinities, trying to understand this idea of a completed infinity, which strikes me as logically contradictory. And in mathematics, there is what's called the axiom of infinity, which is an explicit assumption that there are such things as infinite sets, that there's at least one infinite set. And what I'm trying to get to the bottom of is whether or not that assumption is justified, if that even makes sense to say there could be such a thing as an infinite set. As we were saying earlier, you postulate the existence of the infinite set. We assume the existence of the positive integers. We just kind of assume they exist, and we assume that we can put them into a set that mathematics does. So this is the standard response in modern mathematics. It is an assumption that they don't necessarily examine, and they just go from there. This is also something you'll hear in the interview at Columbia about logic. They say, well, whether or not a square circle exists, that's an empirical question. Let's assume that one does and go from there and see what follows. I think this is a huge mistake. You can't just assume things that are potentially logically, conceptually contradictory. All right, the other critical point to take away from this interview is this idea right here. I'm trying to rephrase what Gary has said, and then he ends up agreeing with me. So are you saying that conceptually speaking, there's nothing that infinity adds to the equation that you just can't get from finite mathematics, but let's say the calculations and the formulations are a lot easier when you allow infinities? That's exactly right. In my opinion, that's a perfect way of putting it. That's right. There is nothing essential that infinity brings to the table that you can't accomplish with finiteist mathematics. It just makes the calculations a little bit more difficult. Which in my opinion, not being a mathematician is obviously a worthwhile trade-off. A little bit more work to have something that is conceptually coherent. Now in the same vein, I thought a really neat part of the interview I have with Dr. Bob Murphy about Christianity was a point that he brought up about death. It's very tempting and very intuitive to assume from our normal human standpoint that death is a bad thing, that murder is a tragedy, smallpox killing, 100 million people is a tragedy and so on. But Bob brought up a point that I really hadn't thought about before, that was kind of one of those fundamental assumptions that I had that I just hadn't examined. So yeah, I actually got telling Joshua to lead his army in and slaughter babies. That is like, what the heck is going on there? So let me just say this, if you think that the God of the Bible exists, it's not as if those pagan babies growing up and then dying of old age from a heart attack when they're 87, God still killed them.  Every moment of existence is exactly what he wills it to be. It's not that, oh yeah, there's nature running its track over here. Then once in a while God comes in and intervenes and does something.   And so to me, it's a kind of silly human convention to say, oh no, he's a murderer. If he tells somebody to stick a sword in somebody, or if he just kills them because the kid has a rock fall on him or because there's a tornado that goes through or he dies of a heart attack when he's 87, ultimately God is in charge of all that. I think there's some meat to this argument here. There's a lot of people are skeptical for good reason of the idea of a benevolent God or that God loves everybody and yet he causes all these bad things to happen. However, I think Bob makes a good point that actually, if it's the case that there is a God and God is in control of all of these things and orchestrating it all, that means every single death this God would be responsible for from the miscarriage to the infant death to the child death to the teenagers, tragic death and a car accident to somebody that dies when they're 105 of old age. Every single one the God would be responsible for. We humans would be drawing the lines between a tragic death and an okay death, a justified death and an unjustified death. When in reality, if this is all some kind of storyline that's being orchestrated and played out, then it does seem kind of silly to argue against the existence of some kind of God just because there is what appears to be tragic deaths from our perspective. So if you haven't had a chance to listen to those interviews, make sure you go back and listen to them. They're very insightful. I'm going to devote the rest of this podcast to breaking down the interview I had with a professor at Columbia University who was arguing for the existence of logical contradictions. He's a super nice guy and we got along very well, but I just agree with him in the most radical and fundamental way. All right, so this clip is kind of the central point that Justin is making here. We're talking about logic, we're talking about contradictions. Is it possible to have a true contradiction? We know that there are different views as to what follows from what. You can't just pound your fist and say, well, you know, it's just contradictory to say P and not P because in another logic, it is not contradictory in the sense that it can never hold. Sometimes I come to the table believing the standard classical logic.  I have a lot of discussions. I think about the semantic paradoxes or whatever. And I say, actually, we've got to make an amendment somewhere. So all I'm saying, I just want to be clear about the view. I mean, one view, which I definitely don't agree with is just like because there's a bunch of different formal systems, there's no correct logic or it must be the weakest one or whatever. I definitely don't think that what I'm saying is because there's all these logics, one can't just pound one's fist and assume that the logic one happens to adopt the one that one is inherited is the correct one. OK, so he's essentially taking the position that, look, there's a lot of different logics out there. We can't be frivolous in choosing from them. However, he explicitly says, I'm not claiming just because there's a lot of logics out there that means we can't make any progress. It doesn't mean that none is essentially any better than the other. And then very shortly after that, he says this. Another question is it doesn't even make sense to say that one logic is correct. Right. So there's another issue, which is known as the issue of logical pluralism according to which, well, I mean, there's different formulations. But one formulation would just say, OK, well, we know there are different logics in the sense of formal systems. What more, what more, you know, what other question might you have? And one one view would be, well, the remaining question is essentially a normative question. How ought I reason? And just as there's, you know, relativism about ethics, there's relativism about reasoning, good reasoning. You know, you and I might have different standards about and what would it be relative to, you might say? Well, it might be relative to goals, right? I mean, so certain logics are essentially more conservative than others. And maybe you care more about not believing falsehoods than, you know, than I do. So there's another issue, which is not about degree of confidence in the logic we adopt. It's about does the notion of correct logic make any sense to begin with? Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, I personally have sympathy for the view. It doesn't make a lot of sense. But but what I was saying previously is that even if you think that there is a correct logic, I don't think that logic is different than any other theory about the world in that we can somehow be dogmatic or just, you know, the alternative views are just somehow immediately dismissible as being unintelligible or something. Isn't this an indigesting proposition to claim that because there are multiple competing logics out there, the claim that there is a correct logic doesn't even make sense. Now, my own personal beliefs are exactly exactly the opposite of this, where I would say that to claim logical pluralism is true, to claim that there is no logical basis for evaluating something as being true or false, that this is all just a cultural phenomena and we have to choose based on some normative framework to me is incomprehensible. The reason is because you can always come back as I do in this interview to the laws of non-contradiction and identity and very quickly discover that, yes, there are some inescapable groundwork rules in order to make sense of anything. What would you say to somebody I think like myself who would say that in all claims to knowledge and all methods for reasoning, there is an implicit presupposition of classical logic that even when somebody is trying to make the case, let's say for a grand priest logic that even in the construction of his arguments, he's presupposing what he's trying to defeat. It's there's what you might call this notion of inescapability to, you know, if you're claiming a, well, then you're claiming a.  Even if you claim you can, you really can't. Yeah, no, good.   And this is, in fact, an objection people have made sometimes to the way non-classical logicians have often pursued their craft. They've, you know, they've said, here's the rules for correct reasoning. But then when they, you know, explored the meta theory, they're just using the rules that they say you're not supposed to use. So it seems like, OK, this is actually just a formal trick. I mean, everybody agrees you can lay down rules that, you know, conflict with the rules. But what's interesting is that doesn't seem, you said in a scapegoat, it doesn't seem inescapable. There are people, para-consistent logicians who use para-consistent logic in the meta theory. And even if you think they're wrong, even if you think like you're using that, you can make sense of it. You can evaluate it. It doesn't seem understanding. So to put this another way, my claim and the claim of perhaps the classical logicians is to say there's no way to sensibly contradict yourself, to include logical contradictions into your worldview or into your argument is making a catastrophic error. The response of the para-consistent logicians is to say, no, no, you're just using classical logic. Yes, I contradict myself. And yes, my proofs contradict themselves. And yes, even every feature of my arguments is contradictory. But that's OK because I allow contradictions into my worldview. My response would be to say, well, you don't understand what you're doing when you allow contradictions into your worldview. You are quite literally defeating your own argument. But that leads me to this question. Do you think it's possible then to make sense of a logical contradiction? Yeah, I mean, so a key question is what do you mean by make sense of? Right. And this is another case where I think like, you know, we just kind of have to choose an interesting notion. For me, an interesting notion to make sense of can't be one where there's no sort of third person perspective that we can agree to where we can figure out in a principled way, whether whether something can be made sense of. In other words, it shouldn't be the case that sort of you perform just as though somebody would who were making sense. But I pound my fist and say it doesn't make sense. It has to be that there's some sort of perspective you can you and I can both occupy that will decide the matter or give us reason, not not a criterion, but but evidence. So there has to be a perspective where one cannot act as if one is making sense. And then the other party pounds their fist and says, no, no, you aren't making sense. Now, this is what throughout this interview happens. It is taking the appearance of sensibility and saying, well, therefore it's sensible. And notice also the really interesting use of language, which says, what do we mean by sensibility? I think we have to choose something that's interesting. This reminds me of the interview I had with Dr. John Stur at Emory University, who's the American pragmatist who kept coming back as well. We have to have interesting notions that this is interesting. And I go, oh, well, the old, old use of classical logic is not, it's not really interesting. What do you mean interesting? I agree to some extremely superficial degree. Somebody claiming that they can sensibly contradict themselves is interesting, but that doesn't justify taking the arguments seriously or heaven forbid acting that just because somebody goes through the motions of making a sensible argument that somehow we think, oh, well, it's as if they've made a sensible argument. Therefore, classical logic isn't this impenetrable thing. As we keep talking, this argument keeps coming up the idea that you can assert a logical contradiction and act as if you're making sense of it. Therefore, we can't simply say contradictions don't exist. You know, one of the things I keep coming back to is it's striking that in these debates about different logics and stuff from the outside, it looks just like a debate about any other philosophical issue. People write journal articles, people respond, people, you know, they get into details and sometimes work out, you know, their differences most of the time they don't, but it's not at all like people speaking different languages. Like really, there's just no contact. Like I can't understand what you're saying. You might as well have just written random letters. It looks from, you know, here's a good analogy. You know, people also disagree about the axioms of math and set theory, right? Now that is almost all against the backdrop of classical logic. You know, almost everyone in those debates agrees to the principles of reasoning, but they're disagreeing about, you know, whether every set is well-founded or, you know, the axiom of replacement or the axiom of choice or whatever. Now, what's striking is someone who doesn't really, hasn't taken a bunch of philosophy and doesn't know the difference between logic and math. Many people I think would regard them as essentially the same thing. If you look at these debates from the outside, they look essentially identical. Now, here's a question. Is there a principled reason to say that the second, the debate over the axioms of math, is an intelligible, sensible debate that we can, you know, get involved with and potentially make progress on? And the debate about logic is not. Maybe, but I'm inclined to say there's not. Listen to this argument, the idea that from the outside, people who don't understand the field, people who don't understand what they're talking about, will overhear these arguments between philosophers and say, oh, well, that sounds just like any other claim. Therefore, there must be nothing intrinsically unique about it. But this is completely irrelevant. If you were to take somebody who was wearing a lampcoat and was talking about biology, for example, human biology, and they were to make up a bunch of gibberish words that didn't actually correlate to anything in the body, it was just your fruit of Fra Fra and the left ventricle of your, of your major pinard is now being blocked by some metal rabituaries in the grunt. People who don't know anything about the field will go, oh, yeah, well, that seems entirely plausible.  Oh, isn't that interesting? But therefore, what I just said, the gibberish I just spoke, should be somehow evaluated as that potentially that's true. It's like saying we have no principal position to discern gibberish from actual words, because to somebody who doesn't understand the language, they sound the same. So you have two choices. You can either say, well, it doesn't even make sense to question the axiom of replacement or the axiom of choice or something. That's just an unintelligible debate. It's the axioms of math. Pound your fist or you got to say, actually, the logic case is not different. We might not make progress. It might be very difficult, but now I also don't think that it's coincidental that the example that he brings up comes to the axioms of math because specifically in mathematics, something that I keep hinting at, I've written a little bit about and some of my interviews talk about is the idea of the axioms of math actually being logically flawed, specifically the axiom of infinity, the idea that there is an infinite set. I would say when you unpack the concept of infinity and set, these two things are logically mutually exclusive. And therefore, yes, we can argue about them, but that doesn't somehow give the argument credibility when there is a conceptual contradiction with the terms involved in the axiom. And in fact, this is one of the reasons that I got interested in mathematics is precisely because a lot of people when they're arguing for the existence of logical contradictions will come back to mathematics. They'll say even more radical claims like, I overheard Lawrence Krause once in a lecture that 2 plus 2 equals 5 when you have extremely large magnitudes of 2. That's not a joke. You can Google it, there's a YouTube video of him saying that. Now how could it be that we get to such a point in our intellectual culture where somebody can seriously say 2 plus 2 sometimes equals 5? I think ultimately if you follow the trail of what I call irrational arguments, a lot of it leads back to mathematics. In set theory in particular, which throughout this interview, Justin keeps coming back to. Okay, so I asked him a question that takes away all the abstract. We're talking about concrete contradictions. If you all take a listen. So let's go to some concrete, something like, is there a way to make sense of a claim like in some circumstances there is a married bachelor. There's a married unmarried man. Yeah. Is that, is that intelligible?  So let's just start from, you know, a sort of argument that you'll probably think is naive, but, but we'll get us into it. So first of all, what we're talking about the moment is not certainty, degrees of certainty. We're talking about possibility.  This is the other consistent thing that you see with intellectuals and academicians in general. With all due respect to Dr. Justin Clark Stone, this is jargonism. This is obscuring a crystal clear question to try to say, oh, well, actually this resembles some debate in some paper somewhere, and I can use all these jargonistic terms to try to act like I've answered the question when I actually haven't. Very crystal clear question. And there's a very clear reason in my mind why he's uncomfortable answering it. So the question is, is it possible that some bachelor is married? Okay, well, okay, so what do you mean by possible, right? Well, you say I don't mean epistemically possible because that's just another way of talking about credence, right?  I mean, is there a world, even if it's not the actual one where that obtains?  I mean, it's, it's not a first order logical truth that some bachelor is married. Did you catch that? Yes. So the question was, is there a way to make sense of something like a married bachelor? And the answer was a bunch of jargon. And I want to say, I do want to say one more thing on the subject. One of the nefarious things in academia, one of the reasons that I'm not in academia is because of this type of stuff, the way that many academics phrase arguments is the framing of issues is fundamentally mistaken because it comes from their profession. So there's a particular way of arguing a particular way of reasoning, a particular set of questions that people are dealing with in academic journals and in academic discussions. And if those fundamental questions are framed incorrectly, I think it's a gigantic waste of time to be talking about them so much. This is an excellent example. Only, only in the world of academia would such a simple question be met with such a complex and indirect answer. Only in the world of academia would such an answer satisfy somebody who asked the question. A lot of people's tendency is to run away when they ask a question like this and that's the response they get to go, oh, I just must not be smart enough to understand that answer. Surely it's not the case that that answer was actually completely vacuous and jargonistic and obfuscatory. So I'm just going to act like I understand what's going on and we'll move on. Fortunately, I'm not in that circumstance. I don't have anything to prove. Am I suspicion of the last several years has been confirmed that when you hear an answer like this, it's not a sign of you being unintelligent. It's not a sign of the question being a super difficult one to answer that, oh, this is the best we can do. No, it's a sign of somebody intentionally being obscure and trying to sound academic so that they can weasel out of an answer. So that's my internal experience. But of course, in the middle of an interview, I can't say that. And I don't want to be mean. I want to be respectful in all these interviews. So this is what I ask. I don't understand that. I don't understand the idea that they intersect in some way. Can you explain what that means? Yeah, so I just mean, you know, so first standard classical first order logic, right? You know, what something is a logical truth that there's no assignment of the predicates to semantic values and, you know, a specification of a domain such that the thing comes out false. And the point is there is an assignment of of predicates to semantic values in this case and a specification of a domain such that the thing comes out false. But isn't that isn't that still taking the meta analytical approach that you're looking at like just purely the structure and not the actual context of it's being claimed. Okay, right. Yeah. This is also why if I may be so bold, the world of academia as I understand it has a population bias in it. Because in order to be an academician in order to be a professional philosopher, mathematician or in any social science field, and perhaps even in the hard sciences, you have to be able to put up with this. This kind of argument really gets under my skin, I'll be honest, I'm on the pursuit of truth. And there's supposed to be an institution out there, which is academia, which is filled with people who are intellectual truth seekers who care about critical reasoning more than they do their careers. What I think has happened is the only people that can make it in academia are the people who can stomach nonsensical and vacuous fluff. The question is clear. The answer is outrageous. So so you might say this is naive because you're talking about language, I'm talking about, you know, bachelors, and I'm interested in whether, well, okay, I mean, but you know, people have people have brought up already sort of cases where it's dubious that, you know, somebody falls clearly into one or the other category like the Pope, right?  And, and well, anyway, say now we have a clear answer. I'm asking, is there any way to make sense of the idea that you could have a married bachelor and the responses? Well, is the pope married? Maybe. This is an unsatisfactory answer. There is a very simple resolution to the question. It depends on what we mean by married, and it depends on what we mean by bachelor. If we're simply explicit about what we mean and we don't change the meaning of our terms, then no, the pope is not a married bachelor. What you also find when you're searching for the root cause of irrational ideas is a lot of stuff like this, that when you start asking simple questions and you try to get clear answers, you get a lot of jargon, you get a lot of references to other people's work and stuff that is supposed to be very complex and difficult to sort through. And then when you actually get an answer that is clear, a lot of times it's outrageous. So for example, in the world of quantum physics, something that I'm going to be having a couple of up cupping interviews talking about, when you actually sort through the jargon and you get to the central claims of what's called the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, which people use to argue that logical contradictions can exist. The argument is preposterous and extremely easy to resolve. Or another example that somebody was arguing when we were talking about logical contradictions was is George Costanza bald? Or if you don't know who George Costanza is just Google George Costanza, he's a character on Seinfeld. And he's like he's half bald, right? He's just done that the edge was like, well, he's kind of bald, where he's not kind of bald, you can make both argument. And this is supposed to show how contradictions of paradoxes can exist. Well, he is bald and he's not bald at the same time.  And of course, the resolution to that is also very simple. Bald is a word that different people use to mean different things. So my conception of what bald is, when I use that term is different than when other people use that term. It's a subjective criteria. If we want to be precise, then we can talk about the objective surface area coverage of George Costanza's hair. He has a certain amount of hairs on his head. Whether you call that bald or not is entirely irrelevant. The metaphysical reality of George Costanza's hairline is not something that somehow justifies the existence of logical contradictions. And this is a similar circumstance. No, the Pope is not actually a case of some metaphysical logical contradiction existing. Let's let's take the claim that it's not the case that all bachelors are unmarried. It is not the case that all bachelors are unmarried. Right. Well, okay. So how would you argue that? Well, I mean, one way is like imagine that you can get convinced of some theoretical view in metaphysics where, you know, some properties exist and others don't. Right. So I mean, people do this all the time when they talk about supervenient properties and fundamental properties. Maybe there's only physical properties or something. I mean, couldn't isn't it an entertainable view that, for example, there's the property of being a bachelor, but not the property of being unmarried? No, not getting not given the terms involved. I mean, that's what, isn't that what we mean by bachelors not married? What we mean? I mean, um, yeah, I mean, you know, I'm inclined to think that, you know, there's not a clear, this is essentially the content of the, the coin paper I mentioned before. I'm inclined to think there's not a clear division between questions of meaning and just theory. Right. And it seems to me like, you know, so here's another, let me put it a different way. So suppose I say something like, suppose that some bachelor is married. Now, let's start working out what, what else would be the case. You know, you might say that that's an absurdity. That's a violation of the rules of language or something. But what's striking is you'll be able to pursue that counterfactual basically exactly like you pursue any other counterfactual. And there it is again. First of all, no, it is not even sensible to say imagine some world in where there's a bachelor, there's a property of being a bachelor and there's a property of being married together. Couldn't that be possible? No, not if we're precise about what we mean by the terms. And then there is the resorting to what I was talking about earlier. Well, let's assume that's the case. Let's assume that there's a square circle and we can talk about it in a similar way that we could talk about other things. Therefore, maybe it's possible the square circle exists. Here's what I would say that all non self contradictory claims presuppose classical logic. So we can talk about, you know, different axioms that are just asserted and then we go from there in mathematics. But what I'm saying is any sensible proposition at all, any axiomatic claim, any claim whatsoever presupposes that there's no self contradiction about it presupposes the law of identity and the law of non-contradiction. And I'm fine exploring the idea of, well, maybe that's incorrect. But what I'm saying is, is there any way to make it intelligible? So something just like it is the case that, you know, my shoes are black and it is not the case that my shoes are black at the same time in the same way. Is there any conceivable way to think, Oh, I understand what that means.   You know, some people think that sentence is both, it's, you know, it's both the case that it's true and it's also the case that it's not the case that it's true. Again, no direct answer to the question. I'm talking specifically trying to talk about a metaphysical contradiction, my shoes being black and not black at the same time in the same way. And we're talking about the Pope, we're talking about the axioms of mathematics, we're talking about the liar's paradox. Now, in my worldview, it is absolutely crystal clear why there is not a response to such a simple question. And that's because the answer is obvious. What we mean by a logical contradiction is precisely that there hasn't been an error committed. When we make any given claim was that the shoes are on my feet. That claim also comes with an implicit premise.  And that is, it is false to say that the shoes are not on my feet. So every proposition that comes with this two fold claim, identity and non contradiction. So the shoes are on my feet means it would be false to claim that the shoes are not on my feet. Therefore, when you put these things together, it's a simple confusion about what we mean by assertion and what negation does. Every assertion implies that a negation is false. That's what we mean by the assertion. So the answer is very crystal clear. Well, is there any way to make sense of a contradiction? Well, no, not if we're clear about the concepts and understanding what we mean by any given proposition in all circumstances. Now, as far as the Liar's Paradox goes, I'm not going to play it here, but I have a perfectly satisfactory resolution to the Liar's Paradox. I talked about it in this interview I've written about it. I've done a video about it. And I'm going to have a big section on it in my upcoming book, Square One, The Foundations of Knowledge. All right, so here's another attempt at giving some kind of metaphysical possibility to the ideological contradiction. Yeah, there are other alleged counter-examples, right? So I think Grand Priest, for example, talks about, you know, laws are typically, you know, very often they involve implicit contradictions, right? Like, yeah, like constitutional documents, right? So you'll have a bunch of obligations, but if you actually unpack them all, you'll get a sentence of the form you're obligated to do this and it's not the case you're obligated to do that.  The first is that's not, you know, maybe that's true. I don't know. I haven't thought about it enough. But the second is even if it's not, like I can make sense of that, and if I can make sense of that, then why can't I claim that there is a scenario where the law of non-contradiction holds? It might be extremely distant, you can call it impossible if you want, but for all practical purposes, it's just like any other possibility. Again, here we have a concrete claim that is very easily resolved. If you're playing Simon says, and the person who's Simon goes, all right everybody, stand on one leg and don't stand on one leg at the same time. It doesn't imply that logical contradictions exist. It implies that that thing can't be done. If some lawmakers write down a bunch of rules and say every Tuesday you have to wear a green hat and every Tuesday you must not wear a green hat. That does not imply, we have discovered a logical contradiction because the people have wrote it down on paper. No, that means that simply can't be done because of classical logic.  What we mean by wearing a hat on Tuesday is precisely not not wearing a hat on Tuesday. So no, it cannot be done. It's as if we're talking about language and we're discussing is it possible to write down a sentence without using words? And somebody comes along and writes down a sentence that says, this sentence is not written using words. And somebody looks at it and goes, oh my gosh, we've just discovered a contradiction. It's a sentence that's written down in words, but it's not written down in words because it says it's not written down in words. That's a contradiction. No, of course, that's not a contradiction. That's just several layers of confusion about the relationship between language and metaphysical reality. All right, so this next clip, you have to listen to very carefully. It reminds me a bit of the conversation again I had with a pragmatist in Atlanta. All right, so this next clip you have to listen to very carefully. It reminds me a bit of the conversation again I had with a pragmatist in Atlanta. People have been appealing to like concepts just follows from the concept since the beginning of philosophy, right? And what's striking is none of the questions have gone away.  It's not like anything really was resolved by making that additional claim. We're right that we might as well have set aside concepts and just had the first order disagreement about whether contradictions are possible because it doesn't seem like any action. Here's another way to put it. If you and I disagree about what's packed into the concept of good or packed into the concept concept of set, let's take the set case. If you and I disagree about, say, the axiom of foundation if every set is well founded we're of course going to disagree about what's packed into the concept of set, right? It's not like we're going to make much progress by saying, well, just think about the concept, though. It's obvious that every set is well fit. Well, if I don't think that the axiom of foundation is true, then, of course, I don't think that follows from the concept. So the first point I want to make is just this doesn't seem to me likely to advance the discussion much. OK, so before we go on, let me just clarify that for people who are unfamiliar. Again, we're talking about mathematics, but the idea is universal. We're talking about what is implied by a concept. So if we have a very clear conception of what a square is or what a cube is, is it the case that it is implied that that cube is not spherical? Does one imply the other? My position is, yes, certainly, of course. And his position is no. And then listen to what he does. So let's again take a cleaner case. Let's take the concept of set. Suppose that you were to, you know, we did like conceptual surgery on the concept of set and we just got super clear and it's just obvious that, you know, sets are things that are built at, you know, at different stages in this transfinite generation process and it just doesn't make sense to talk about a set, you know, that precedes itself. So no set can contain itself, for example. And there's no infinitely descending chains and stuff. Okay, fine. You know, here's something that we can introduce. We can introduce a concept of Schmitt. And Schmitts are exactly like sets, except some Schmitts can contain themselves. Now, what metaphysical question could be resolved by just figuring out what's packed into the concept of set? Because now the question is, are there sets or are there Schmitts? So there it comes up again. Instead of sets, let's talk about the cube versus the sphere. The discussion is whether or not you could have a spherical cube. Classical logicians like myself would say no, you absolutely certainly cannot. What we mean by the concept of cube is mutually exclusive with the concept of what we mean by a sphere. And so his response and the response of logical pluralists and American pragmatists is to say, well, assume that a spherical cube exists. And then what follows from there? Now the discussion is not whether or not the concept makes sense. It's whether or not such a thing exists. And they think they can get away with this by simply renaming it. So OK, yeah, cubes can't be spheres. Yes, spheres can't be cubes. But the question is whether or not there are cubeheres. And what a cube here is, is it has the property of being spherical and it has the property of being cubicle? Do such things exist? Is an empirical question? This, in my mind, is a gigantic, catastrophic sleight of hand. It is, again, instead of going into the concrete to examine what is packed into our concepts, it abstracts. It says, well, let's not deal with the concrete. Let's just assume that a logical contradiction exists or assume that two mutually exclusive things can be together and see what follows. And now it's an empirical question because we renamed that thing. OK, so this next question that I ask him is about whether or not things could have been different. So we're talking about the laws of physics might have been different, the laws of any given country might be different. Could the laws of logic be different? Now, his position so far has been, well, let's keep an open mind. Maybe these laws could have been different. And my question is very, very, very simple. And listen to the answer. I would just say an excellent example in terms of what you're talking about is something like two plus two equals four. Right. Is that something where you still have the same position? Right, so good. So you might say, well, maybe it's like vague the boundary, but aren't there. I mean, here, I'm inclined to think let's be very clear about what we're talking about. So two plus two is four. On a standard analysis is like the present king of France is bald, right? It's a claim that involves reference to things. It says the plus function map maps an object to itself and to four, right? It's talking about individuals, numbers. And it's it fails to hold if there are no such numbers. But as Russell pointed out already, you know, in his work on the foundations of math, it seems like we can make sense of a world without anything. It seems intelligible to imagine an empty world. So my question is about two plus two equals four. That is a logical relationship between the concepts of two and the concept of four. And he's trying to say, well, if there are no objects, then maybe that law doesn't hold, right? That response with all due respect is exactly what you would expect from an academic. From somebody that is has decided their career is going to be an academia making arguments like this, two plus two equals four. Is that always and everywhere true? Or is it possible that could be false, you know, and go and you are free to go back and play the response. So the last thing that I want to play for you is a question that I asked him that I've asked lots of people in my pursuits and in my own personal conversations, I've met lots of people that argue that logical contradictions exist. I've not really met anybody that claims they can make full conceptual sense of that. So I asked him earlier in this conversation, can you make sense of a logical contradiction? And the example that he gave of making sense of it is in set theory, not coincidentally in mathematics and in set theory, yes, in some way he can make sense of logical contradiction. So then I ask him this question. But I do think it's interesting and I guess we'll have to end it here and in some mystery and awe that you have a way of cleanly conceptualizing a contradiction in whether it's in, I think the example you gave is in set theory, would you feel comfortable claiming that kind of understanding outside of mathematics, like, for example, I've been talking about things having properties that contradict, you know, something being circular and being square at the same time. Can you have that ability as well? Because I view that as very incredible. And I'm like, I'm missing something. Yeah.  Right. I mean, to be honest, I haven't thought about the cases I almost solely think about or the abstract sciences. Of course, you know, people often talk about physics in this connection. I haven't thought about that case enough to know what I think about that. And also, I don't get the sense that a lot of people know what they think about that, even though there's different theories on the table. I find this really interesting question. And I would ask my listeners, you know, why do you think that's the case? If it's if it's possible that people can make sense of logical contradictions in set theory and in mathematics, or at least they claim that they can, why is it that they can't seem to in metaphysics? In his case, I find it odd that this is not something he's thought about. And just in common sense, every day, metaphysical language, oh, I wonder if there's any way that a cat could exist and not exist at the same time. He just concerns himself with the higher abstract sciences. Again, I don't think that's coincidental, but I'll leave that to you to decide. So that's everything that I have for you today. I got some really awesome upcoming interviews, including an interview with a professor at Cambridge about quantum physics, which is simply directly related to the idea of contradictions. Everybody who's interested in philosophy seems to like to bring up quantum physics at all the wrong times. So I'm talking about the basics of quantum physics with a professor from Cambridge. Make sure to tune in. I think that's going to be next week's episode. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a rating and a review. Make sure to subscribe. If you're a big fan, check out my Patreon page at patreon.com slash Steve Patterson. And you can support the creation of more shows like this. All right, everybody, I hope you enjoyed it. Have a great day.


Escape extinction. I know what you're thinking. Escape on extinction.  Kind of is. So, to put escape on extinction means you can't escape the stimulus or the demand if you will. So how do you do that? Well, we've had multiple kids where you implement some demands, say, touch the tablet. And they try to run away. And that's where you get into this type of thing where you learn how to weave your legs between chairs and tables to keep the kid at the table. I'm not saying force him to the table or hold him down. This is not abuse. This is escape extinction. There's a big difference. I can see where all the heads and comments are going to come from. I don't want to hear it. I'm not hurting the kiddo. I'm making him realize that when there's a demand in place, you're not going to get away with just running out of the room. Extinction. You're going to follow through with touching the tablet before you're allowed to escape.


On the breakfast today, will the worldwide celebration of nurses for the work they do for others, do nurses have a right and how can their rights be protected? Also on the breakfast will bring you the latest update in the exciting world of sports. And then forget we also will be looking through today's newspapers and analyzing the biggest stories of the day. Good morning to you, many thanks for joining us on the breakfast and plus TV Africa. I am Justin at the, it is a wet, wet Friday morning in the city of Lagos and how are you coping? How are you trying to get to your offices or to your place of work this morning? A whole lot of people are going to be a bit stranded. A lot of people might just get to your offices very late. You know how it is when it rains in Lagos and being a Friday when everyone is trying to be on the road at the same time would drainage is not working as they should be. You just find floods and flash floods all over the place. It was a herculean task trying to get to the office today, but I made it here in one piece. I trust that you would also try and get to your office, even if it's a bit late and then try and shake off the cold somehow, maybe get a cup of coffee, cocoa, whatever works for you. I have a cup of tea here and I'll be doing justice to that over time. Let's just slide over to top trending and we will start with them 2023, the next country is almost here and a whole lot of people are jostling for the soul of the nation's presidency. A lot of people are making declarations, but this time around, Hanez and Ibo is in the news. Yes, they are in the news and they have politicians from the Ibo extraction from accepting vice presidency slots. This time around they are saying it is the South East that will be producing the next president come 2023, and they feel that if they accept anything short, it will seem as if they are playing a second fiddle. Let me just give you a background of how the story went yesterday. Now, the APS social political organization in the South East that Hanez and Ibo, now the clandest that no Ibo politician should accept to be running made to any presidential candidate in 2023, but the president general of the organization, George Obieuzer, made a declaration at the Ibo meeting in Elegu. Now, Obieuzer said the clamor for Ibo to be elected president of Nigeria was morally and historically justifiable and a project to which every Ibo must commit. Let me just quote him for about him. He said, all the double delights about zoning and rotation of power are orchestrated conspiracy to deprive the South East of the right to produce the president. And he went on to say, I encourage all the presidential aspirants from the Zoom to remain focused, tenacious and optimistic. He explained that political action committee, the PAC of the Hanez and Ibo would meet several eminent Nigerians to persuade them to appreciate why a politician of South East extraction should be elected as president of Nigeria. He went on to say many things. Just yesterday, we were talking about the South East presidency. We had a she-who sunny here with us. He joined us on the phone and he was talking about how if the South East wants to produce the next president in 2023 to bring and or an informal end to all the clamors for agitation, the civil war, which has been fought like 50 years ago, but some people have not been able to find closure. According to him, that would actually bring a bit of peace to the South East. So he was saying that both the two leading political parties in Nigeria, that's the APC and the PDP, should actually swing their flagburst to the South East, although there have been talks about the South taking the hems of affairs come next year. But specifically, he was advocating that it should be moved not just to any part of the South, but the South East. And the South Eastern has been feeling shortchanged and marginalized over the years, according to the reports and all that they have not yet produced the president in about 22 years. And the highest body of the ebos are saying that they will not accept anything short of the presidency come next year. We can't take second fiddle. We can't take the VP slot except we are giving the slot of the presidency. So it is actually making the rounds and Nigerians have been talking and reacting about it on Twitter and across various social media platforms. We'll just leave that one at that. Let's take at the next story making headlines and trending across social media. Virgin Plain was actually turned back over the pilot's uncompleted flying test. You know that the pilot has actually almost got into his destination, but he was not allowed to actually land because he didn't complete his flying test yesterday or two days ago. We're talking about, you know, plane mishaps and then an accident that almost occurred in Nigeria because of some maybe checks not being done. But this time around, the Virgin Plain was actually turned back because not as though the pilot could not fly, it was not approved to fly, but his flying test was not complete. And they just could not take the risk because they feel that it actually was a huge risk, you know, just accepting a pilot flying into their own airspace without having all the necessary requirements. What do you think about that? How can you allow someone who is not completely tested or accredited in sort of flying an international plane? So that's what happened. That's what trended and it got a whole lot of people talking. You know, Virgin Atlantic plane was turned back. It is actually a very, very sad situation. But my thought goes out to go out to the people who were actually on that particular flight. You know, they would have almost landed to their destination, but they were just turned all the way back to where they were coming from. It is really a very, very sad, sad one. But then it's better to be saved than just making up excuses for the people who actually are not approved to be doing things to do what they had to do. So a lot of people were saved yesterday. And what do you think about it? Let's get your reaction. Let's just talk about it on our social media platforms. We'll take a quick break and when we return, we'll go straight to off the press. In the moment, it's still breakfast on Plus TV Africa. Stay with us.


nd affecting the brain and leading to dementia in some cases. What is your understanding of that? The statin drugs is a very complicated history in Alzheimer's disease because the cholesterol issues increase risk later on for Alzheimer's disease. There's an increased risk factor. Some people thought that cholesterol lowering medications would prevent or treat, and we've tried clinical trials in that as a matter of fact, and they failed. Whether or not they're increasing risk in some patients, the science, it's not really clear yet, and that concerns me. The thing that I think has turned out interesting is there are these new cholesterol drugs in the pipeline. They're called PKC9 inhibitors, and they're incredibly potent. These are drugs that drop cholesterol overnight. They're wonderful. They're amazing. Actually, a trial just got stopped because they thought they may cause cognitive problems in some people. Now, they figured it out. They've moved on. The drugs are wonderful. These are going to be probably the best cholesterol drugs ever to hit the market, but there may be something with that, and we have to understand it. I will tell you that a lot of people now, what they're looking at in aging, which is what Dr. Oaks really was hinting at, is relaxing a lot of medications. We know that tight control over diabetes, for example, and those 70, 80 plus can be bad. HBAMC under eight is considered controlled, and those who are over age 70. That tight control of some of these things that we want to do in the 40-year-olds may be really bad for the brain in late life, but we just don't know enough. The biology of it is incredibly complicated. The PKC9 inhibitors lower the cholesterol in the periphery, in the heart, and in the brain. Well, cholesterol is kind of important. It helps transport things. It heads in brains. It may be that what happens with a lot of our diseases, the pathology isn't necessarily pathology. It's normal biology that's gotten bad. Inflammation, for example. Inflammation is a wonderful thing.  So you want inflammation. Cholesterol. You want cholesterol. When we start getting in later life, what it may be is that too tight control of some of these things is causing biological changes that we don't fully understand. Also, keep in mind that up until the last 20 years, most of the science was done on 20-year-olds and 30-year-olds. I mean, 50 years ago, all of our medical knowledge was based on medical students who were all young and white. How reflective of that is the Texas population? So now we're trying to understand just aging. Unfortunately, one of the scientists that I work with is brilliant. He's actually just studying aging, so we can understand what's normal aging. We really don't have a good conceptualization of what normal aging is. Why? Because we used to not live this long. So now we're living 80-plus years, and we have to understand what that means. Beta amyloid accumulating in the brain may simply be aging. It just might be that. I don't know. I can't answer that question. And people who say they can't answer it, either they're smarter than me, or they're just not realizing they don't know what they don't know. I'm perfectly happy saying, I don't know. Somewhere here. Yes, ma'am. It's a beautiful jacket, by the way. Thank you for coming and enlightening us on all of the studies. And I am a family caregiver, so I'm a bit uneducated in some of these things. But my question to you was, during your studies, has anyone made any correlations as to diet, proper diet for speaking as a Hispanic woman? We know the Hispanics are more prone to obesity and diabetes and heart disease. And so as far as not, well, I don't know if you can say prevention, but a healthy diet that can help you maintain the proper levels of beta amyloid.  Don't qualify what you're doing to anyone. I respect you for what you do. Diet. Diet, that's a complicated question. You probably know about as much as I do. We, every week it seems like something hits the news about green tea or the Mediterranean diet or curcumin or whatever and how it's going to prevent Alzheimer's disease and do this and do that and do this. So there's some research that shows that you can do a specific type of diet and you can actually change the beta amyloid levels in the brain. So there's a diet study ongoing right now in the United States to treat early Alzheimer's disease. It's actually diet and exercise combined. Dr. Laura Baker at Wake Forest is running it and she's amazing. So diet is a very complicated question. Can I finish answering? Oh yeah, I just, when you're done with that question, we have some on cards that I'll read to you. Awesome. And we thought you'd stay till like noon tomorrow. Is that okay? My wife might be upset about that one. You call her. Have at it. I don't even want to be in the room to hear what she tells you. I know what she would tell me. So diet, the best answer that I can have that I can be 100% confident in saying is anything that's good for your heart is good for your brain. So everything about the heart diet, it's great for your brain. I just wish that we could get that put into the heart association stuff. I know the Alzheimer's association's here and I say this to them all the time. I work with them nationally and I say this all the time. Don't tell the heart association to put that in their stuff because everything that's good for the heart is good for the brain. So heart healthy diet, heart healthy exercise is preventative against brain, bad brain stuff. Now to say this one diet thing is more important than the other. I mean, I'm friends with the guy who created the Mediterranean diet and he, every time someone tries to parse it out to this type of grain and that he just laughs. He says, how can you do that? Do you realize that every time you take a bite of anything you eat, that makes taking 10 medications look like nothing? Because there are so many nutrients in your food that are going to act in your body. Thousands and it's just difficult to understand. The best science that I see so far would simply say good for your heart, good for your brain. Yes, sir. All right, we have a number of you put questions down and we thank you for that and we'll toss some of these at Dr. O'Brien. What is your opinion of medications slowing down dementia systems? Symptoms, are they effective? That's what they do. So the medication slow the disease, they slow progression. There's research after research after research to show that that is the case. So I'm a very big proponent of getting on the medications, gets back to this. I'm a psychologist, improve quality of life. I want patients to have as much functional capacity as they can, as long as they can. So the medications do slow the disease. They do not cure it or fundamentally change it. They just slow it. Telling about FTD, frontal temporal dementia, any new tests or treatments that you're aware of. It's a terrible disease for those who don't know about it. That's, it's heart-wrenching. Every time I see one of those patients, there's a wonderful consortium that's dealing with the tauopathies, which is FTD is one of those. And it's actually funded largely by a Texas-based group. It's, right now we still have basically no treatments. It's symptomatic only. And it's devastating for any of you who've ever seen it. It's a disease that affects earlier. And the first thing it does is it changes personality. So patients go from docile and nice and friendly to aggressive, abusive, spending fortunes. It's horrific. But as of right now, they're still trying to look at it. But and when misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's, some of the treatments, medications exacerbate FTD? Potentially. Some of the Alzheimer's medicines shouldn't hurt, but some of the treatments maybe can. There's also other diseases though that the Alzheimer's medicines do make worse. And then what happens though is they also get put on antipsychotics, which don't help. Unfortunately, they might make them worse. Sometimes some patients they do help. But the other thing about antipsychotics is they're black boxed in the elderly. Why? Increased risk of stroke, heart attack, and death. So the antipsychotics are useful, but they're dangerous. What is operational, what is the operational definition of accuracy in the blood test you've talked about and how is that confirmed? That's it. That came from the FDA. Let's say that's a really, really pointed question. So I'll, all right, I'm not going to get that technical with it. Whoever wrote it, pin me in the corner and I'll go into the bioinformatics if you'd like. That was against clinical diagnosis. So the gold standard was someone went through a multi-disciplinary specialist clinic. So they were seen here in Texas by dementia specialist and that was a diagnosis. The blood test is compared against that clinical diagnosis. Early stage disease, what I talked about was the overall accuracy of it, which is the weighting of sensitivity and specificity of the disease. Ours now has 90% sensitivity and specificity, which means that we can, without getting too technical, I can adjust the statistics such that I can be 90% accurate in a primary care setting where the base rate of disease is only 10% of patients walking through the door. So it's accurate. I heard recently from a so-called health-oriented radio program that the aluminum, and I believe it was also mercury in flu shots caused Alzheimer's disease. Is there any truth to this? For those of you watching on television and only listening to the sound, he's smiling. So it kind of gets to that whole similar to altism, real political stuff that is still going on by the way. I have not seen convincing evidence and data to suggest that. The other thing to say is Alzheimer's is a cumulative thing. It happens over the course of your life. It happens over the course of time. Having flu shots, I haven't seen any data to suggest that. Until I do, I'm going to say get a flu shot if you're 65 and above because I don't want you dying of the flu. For right now, that's kind of where I stand on that one. And thousands die of the flu every year. Yep. And they die risk or older and younger. In your opinion, how accurate or effective is a mini mental status exam in determining a diagnosis? Come on. Who's the healthcare provider in here? That's good. Doing MMSCs. All right. So the MMSC, it's in atrocity actually. It's great for a bedside clinical exam. So when I was seeing inpatients, I would use that as part of my exam. But I'm a neuropsychologist, so we do a lot more than that. The MMSC is okay. It's going to be really bad at detecting really early, and it's going to be in atrocity at detecting pre. If you want a better test that doesn't take any more time, go look up what's called the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, the MOCA, and it's free. The MMSC, by the way, is now copyrighted. So if you're photocopying it and using it, I'm going to say don't do that. That's just my opinion. I do still use it in research because everybody thinks I have to, so I pay for it. But clinically, I would use the MOCA these days. At the same MOCA at Starbucks? No, and it doesn't taste near as good. It has more fiber in the paper, but you know. Where can we find information on enrolling in a clinical trial? So I know that the Alzheimer's Association is represented here. If you go to the Alzheimer's Association webpage, who's the Alzheimer's Association representative? Where are you? Come on. I know you're here. They're outside. Go to Trial Match. It is an absolutely wonderful facility. It's an online system. You can get registered. You can go into it, and it will notify you if there's a trial that you might be interested in in your area. So go to Trial Match. It's the best way to find out, and if you're looking for something specific and can't find it, contact him. They'd have my email address. See, I was just prompting trial, I was supporting Trial Match, but I couldn't remember what it was. Sure, but we need to get you on a microphone, and here it comes. Thank you, Pete. All right. Trial Match is something that the Alzheimer's Association has partnered with, and what it is, you go to that website, and you can sign on to be a volunteer to, you know, be included in some of the trial matches, and you fill out and you give them certain information, and then they contact you on a regular basis when there's something going on, you know, in your area, and you're free to decline if you don't want to. Some of it can be done, you know, via computer. I took one through a computer, you know, just memory testing is what they were doing to evaluate, but they also let you know about different things that are going on. There was one where they were having a spinal tap here, and that wasn't anything I was interested in at the time, but there's a lot of different, you know, areas that it can involve medication in some cases and others. It's, you know, different things, but they will alert you about them once you've signed up, and then you're free to either accept, you know, taking that on, and sometimes it may not be local. The one that I took with memory testing was through University of Berkeley in California, and it was all computer for like three months, but it's very interesting, and as I said, it's a great opportunity because so many times we don't think about it, you know, when you pick up that bottle of Allegro or your tranquilizer or whatever, how did it get from there into your hand? And it involves people, you know, willing to, you know, try the placebo or the medication, so, but absolutely, it's an amazing program, and you can just, yes. No, there's no cost. Now sometimes, depending on who is doing the study, they do reimburse you to some extent, so it just depends on what trial you get involved with. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you very much. Just a couple more questions. You okay? What times your flight? I don't think it's till like two, so I'll get out of here and check in. Oh, wait a minute, it's in 45. Can someone have both MS and Alzheimer's disease? Yes. You can have multiple diseases, multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer's are less common, but you can have, for example, about 20% of Parkinson's patients have Alzheimer's disease and vice versa, 20% of Alzheimer's have Parkinson's disease. That comorbid thing makes things really difficult. Bless you, by the way. So having more than one of these diseases is definitely possible. What about someone who no longer has active MS lesions? So the pathologies of the disease overlap, but they're not exactly the same, so yes. And that's, I have seen patients before who unfortunately had MS early in life and then later in life they developed Alzheimer's and that's unfair. Last question, you're doing well on your oral exam. We appreciate it. Thank you. You'll get that degree pretty soon. One day. I'll call my parents, they'll be happy. And proud. And proud. As you mentioned at the outset, you're using dementia and Alzheimer's disease, someone interchangeably, but I understand all dementia's are not Alzheimer's and all Alzheimer's are not dementia. So the term dementia, all it means is change in thinking. That's it. That's the umbrella. Okay. Beneath that umbrella, it's like that image that I showed up here. I'll get there. Give me just a second. Right there. So just take that as, if I said this is dementia, Alzheimer's would be here. You could have Parkinson's due to dementia, dementia due to Lewy body's frontal temporal dementia, you can have dementia due to traumatic brain injury, the chronic traumatic encephalitis with CTE, which is so big right now because of head injuries and football players, but absolutely correct. The reason why they get lumped together oftentimes is that Alzheimer's disease is anywhere between 50 and 80% of all dementias. So it is by far the most prevalent dementia. So oftentimes you'll hear people use them interchangeably, but they're not the same thing. As a matter of fact, the new diagnostic manual that's come out, the DSM-5 doesn't use the word dementia in it anymore. Can you not pop stem cells into that shrunken little brain and regrow it? Unfortunately, because of the types of neurons, no. We've tried that in Parkinson's disease and we try to get into the substantia nigra and allow the new neurons to grow. Unfortunately, something's still killing the cells and we haven't figured it out as a science. In Alzheimer's disease, that would be, it would almost be akin to someone cutting off their arm and you growing it back because what you'd be doing is replacing an entire system in the brain, the hippocampal system. I do at some point hope we can get there. We're not even close to that right now. We can take stem cells out of your teeth, out of, do skin biopsy. There's lots of ways to grow stem cells, most of which is not by what the media says it is, and turn them into neurons, but growing them into fully functional hippocampal different. Keep in mind that that's a memory system that develops over time. Even if we can, you may not have the right connections to actually be able to resource and use your memories. Thank you very much. This is wonderful. Thank you.


So what if we took that same Tree that we had and I did make a little bit of a change I added a 1 to both the 7 and 8 because what if I rear back and I give you another insertion With another insert 7 so normal binary search tree rules apply. I see that I'm greater than 5 I'm less than 17. I'm greater than 6 and so that 7 would come in and Be applied here to the right child of 6 once again every node that has been Adjusted since we are in AVL trees. We have to Refactor their balance factors so 7 being a newly added in leaf node is going to have a zero because I can't go any further 6 is going to have in this case a 1 because its right node is heavier than its non-existent left node 8 since it happens to be 18 since it happens to be Here we'll go ahead and add it in since we're going to need to do a math medical calculation with it later 17 ah, so 17 we see that on my right side. I can go one node and on my left side. I can go two nodes So we see that it is that node is a little left heavy, but it's not terrible But this 5 you see 5 can go to the right Sorry the left once but to the right. I have the ability to go one two Three nodes what whichever node is the or whichever path is the largest my depth? If you will is where I would put this Now the reason why we kind of see this and it's a negative 2 The issue we have going on here is if I Notice I don't have sort of a parent going on here. I don't have a Z To work off of in my try node restructuring But I can't do a left rotation either you see if I were to do a left rotation just to sort of you can Do it on your own as a little practice If I were to do that left rotation, I would still see sort of my five. I'd get my six seven 1718 I'd see this structure right here and this is wrong wrong Because if you'd rebalanced out the the chart if you calculated out the tree you'd notice that 17 our root node would now just have a 2 as its balance factor So we did nothing to solve that so what can we do? Well once again since a Simple rotation does not work since a simple rotation does Not work We can change to the trinode Restructuring now in this case. I don't have a seven. I don't sorry a Z to work off of here. However If I were to view this structure right here since this is kind of where that seven was coming from I See that I can Sort of still make the same application apply I see that I happen to have my my parent node where it was super heavy I see been happened to have a another node that will call it sort of our normal parent node our Simple grandparent node and some other node Now in our case. We do the exact same thing. We've seen in the past. We need to map out in our case. What our a B and C Let me put those a little cleaner C We need to map out which one of our x y and z nodes is A B and C again. We follow in order proceedings in order means We would do left self right And so as we see here, I would see that my left child. I don't access it for this I know that seems odd. You're like, oh, no, that needs to be my a No, we're not caring about that. We're only dealing with these Three nodes right here. If you do this No, so I see that seven or sorry Z. I keep seeing that as a Let me fix that a little bit Z. There we go I see that my Z is going to be my a and then just like we've seen in our previous video We don't go directly to why because we have to go from self then we go to all our right children So when I get to 17 I deal with my left children first That's where that x comes into play and then my y is the remaining node Once again, if we're dealing with this restructuring node B is going to become the new parent a is going to get T1 and T2 and then C is going to get t3 and T4 So in this case, I'm going to move over just a hair in this case We see that by doing a Trinode restructure We are still going to make our B, which is in our case our x Our y and our z we're going to make our x the new Root node in our case. We're going to make y our right child We're going to make our z our left child And so now we get to look at where those t1s t2s t3s and t4s are so again the t1 is The left node of whatever our original z was so five is going to get the two Now what does five get well five is going to get either the t2 of x Or the t3 of x or the t4 of y in our case since we're on the left side It's going to get t2 t2 So in that case it gets nothing Now we go over to our Y and we see that y is going to get my t3 and my t4 So it gets the t3 as its left node and it gets the t4 as its Right node Since we made our rotation we can make a balance check to see that everything's fine. So As we've done in the past our leaf nodes. We know can't go any further. So they all get zeros Both five and seventeen can only go down one node each now our five happens to be left heavy and our 17 happens to be balanced and Finally our six it can go to on the right one two or one two and it can go to on the left one two And so we see that now we have a balanced tree