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[Music] thank you [Music] welcome to an intro to sirius philosophy this is of course a Halloween special but don't be fooled by silly appearances because this is going to be one of the most serious philosophy episodes that you'll find anywhere online if you're a student of philosophy or you're interested in philosophy this is going to be some of the best advice you can ever get about how to do philosophy how to get into philosophy I'm going to give you my lifetime's worth of tips and advice for how to do that this is supposed to be my top advice for philosophy students or aspiring philosophers funny enough uh nobody really teaches you how to do philosophy I'm a philosophy major I went to University for philosophy I studied it academically seriously you might say and Way Beyond I'll get into that in a minute but what's funny is that in University nobody sat down and taught me how to do philosophy it's amazing it's amazing how bad it is so before we get into all that though because I have some strong opinions about how to do proper philosophy because see philosophy is my life purpose my whole life has been about one thing understanding reality and that's essentially what philosophy is I started doing philosophy in my mid teens all through high school and through University I spent about two decades over two decades doing philosophy I effectively became a professional philosopher that's basically what I am I do this full time I've turned philosophy into a million dollar career not a lot of philosophers can say that and those of you who have been able to do that usually if they're able to do that it's because their philosophy is very shallow what's interesting about my career is that I've been able to find a unique way of doing philosophy outside of the academic setting which is even deeper than the philosophy you find within Academia and also I've been able to make it popular and successful so uh that's that's pretty rare and there's a lot of lessons that I have discovered in doing that I basically taught myself how to do philosophy even though I went to University for it what I learned in University was nothing like real philosophy all the real philosophy that I learned I had to teach myself through years of trial and error and so I have a lot of wisdom I can share with you on that if you're interested now even though I'm just some YouTube blowhard again don't let appearances fool you and one of the top lessons by the way of philosophy is that appearances can be very deceiving reality is a very deceptive thing it's full of all sorts of appearances that uh hide the truth from you so even though I'm just some YouTube blowhard you might think you know um you know how serious of a philosopher can this guy be you might wonder to be giving me this kind of advice uh well actually I have probably over two phds worth of uh study that I've done just on my own independently I don't have a PhD but the thing that you'll learn if you do philosophy the way that I the way that I do it the way that I'm going to teach you how to do it is that if you do this for a few decades you're going to have a deeper understanding of philosophy and reality than any University professor at the best of universities that's a pretty bold claim but again appearances can be deceiving and a PhD is just an appearance it's just a credential it doesn't mean that the Mind actually comprehends the significance of existence that's two very different things a PhD is given out to somebody you know it doesn't it's not a guarantor guarantor that that person who receives it really understands what reality is what philosophy is believe it or not if these claims were not bold enough here's an even more bold claim which is that I've used philosophy to reach an absolute understanding of reality I've used it to reach what I call omniscience most philosophers would tell you that this is impossible yeah it's impossible the way that they do philosophy but there are better and worse ways of doing philosophy which we're going to talk about uh and um here's an even more bold claim is that I'm one of the only philosophers on this planet who has reached the literal end of philosophy how is that possible you might wonder am I am I just being arrogant and boastful am I just exaggerating or is this actually possible the literal end of philosophy what is the end of philosophy see most philosophers don't even think there is an end to philosophy they think it's a philosophy just endless debating and arguing and Naval gazing and speculating but that's not really what philosophy is about and we'll get into that in a bit here as well but to just wrap up this introduction the point of this episode is that I want to give young aspiring philosophers tips from my journey tips that will save you Decades of wasted effort a device that will transform your whole life if you follow it and stick with it and one of the tricky things about philosophy is that it's very easy to get lost in it it's easy to get lost in the Labyrinth of your own mind and to spend decades doing it and not getting anywhere and that's precisely what I can save you from now my style of philosophy is very grounded it's very advanced yet at the same time it's practical and it's quite unique I have some very strong views about how to do philosophy and that is because in my opinion philosophy has been badly abused especially in the West and mostly what we'll be talking about here is sort of the western philosophical perspective although of course I've studied a lot of Eastern philosophy as well and there's a lot of good stuff to be found there but we'll get to that in due time so philosophy in the west has been badly abused and I see that one of my purposes and functions in life is to show mankind how to do philosophy properly now you might say well Leo who are you you know who made you the pope of philosophy who are you to say what's the right way in the right and the wrong way of doing philosophy aren't these just your biases well again maybe that's what's going on here but maybe there actually are right ways and wrong ways of doing philosophy and maybe there is an end point to philosophy because see if you think of philosophy it's just as this endless blowing around in the wind like a leaf just sort of exploring this topic or that topic speculating about things in your armchair if you think that that's all philosophy is then to you this this claim can seem preposterous isn't it all just relative but consider the possibility that actually there is something that we might call absolute truth that you can reach with philosophy and to reach that absolute truth requires doing philosophy in the proper ways not just willy-nilly however you decide it's not just all subjective and relative although relativity is important topic within philosophy which I've discussed in the past I have a whole series of episodes on that so actually this leads us to a very interesting topic which is the topic of meta philosophy what is meta philosophy well meta philosophy is philosophy about how to do good philosophy questions such as are we doing philosophy properly are there right and wrong ways of doing philosophy and if there are what are they and how can we know about them can we know them for certain or are these just subjective and biased and relative what leads to corruption within philosophy and why what are the Corruptions of philosophy and if there are right ways of doing philosophy how can we teach those right ways of doing philosophy to the majority of people what are the obstacles to doing that so these sorts of questions would be the topic of meta philosophy now many of these questions are too advanced to be answering here maybe I'll have a whole separate episode just called meta philosophy that goes into that but this just gives you an idea of how deep this can go because if you embark on the Journey of doing philosophy at all immediately you start to have meta questions you can reflect on the process you say wait a minute am I doing philosophy properly wait a minute is this even going to be worthwhile where's this going to get me am I doing it um the wrong way am I being biased am I being corrupt are the people who are teaching me teaching me the wrong ways of doing philosophy and if they are then I'm going to waste Decades of my life doing philosophy in the wrong ways and then where's that going to get me you see so before you can do philosophy you got to really answer the questions of meta philosophy which is sort of what this uh intro will be pointing you in direction of we're going to be talking about sort of the methodology of philosophy more so than the actual answers I'm not interested in this episode in giving you answers to what the absolute truth is or what reality is I have other episodes that cover that topic first of all second of all that's actually less important because whatever the truth happens to be I can't tell it to you you have to go through the process of deriving it for yourself and so I want to introduce you to the philosophical method the right way of doing philosophy and then you generate your own answers so that I'm not brain washing you with those so here are the questions that we will answer in this episode what is philosophy why do philosophy how to know if philosophy is right for you how to do philosophy is there one correct philosophy is there an Ultimate end point to philosophy and if so what is it which philosophies are worth reading and studying and which ones are not what are the traps of contemporary philosophy what are the common mistakes and Corruptions that exist should you become a professional philosopher an academic or a professor should you turn philosophy into a career is philosophy worthwhile isn't philosophy just all mental masturbation can philosophy actually be useful or practical what can you expect out of doing philosophy how to become an excellent philosopher proper motivations for serious philosophy essential skills and practices that every philosopher needs to learn and to master how to get started with philosophy are you too young to start doing philosophy and what are the downsides of doing philosophy so all of these we will tackle over the next few hours so get comfortable sit back and let's get started but before we get into like the technical details of doing philosophy and the method and so forth I want to share with you a little bit of my personal story of how I got interested in philosophy in the first place because this might be Illuminating for you if you're toying around with the idea of getting serious about philosophy as well for me it really began when I was young when I was a kid just when I was eight years old 10 years old I remember my earliest memories I remember a philosophy is just like sitting in a hot tub with my dad or with my family we would sit there in the hot tub late at night looking up at the stars and you know we had nothing to do so we would just sort of ask interesting questions about life about reality we would wonder about the Stars what are the stars where'd they come from how far away are they how old are they you know those Stars when you're looking up at those stars and you're wondering you know it takes thousands and perhaps millions of years for the light from some of those most distant stars to reach your eyes so really when you're looking at those Stars those are stars that might have long ago gone extinguished and yet you're still seeing them and that kind of makes you wonder like oh wow that's amazing and you think about how many stars are there up there and that makes you go wow that's amazing and where do they all come from and what are you doing here sitting here on this rock orbiting some random sun which is just one of these out of millions and billions of stars circling around at some crazy velocity you know how is all this possible where did the planet come from where did humans come from you look at your own body and you just wonder I have this incredible body how does it work it's made up of cells and those are made up of DNA and various kinds of molecules and all this just makes you wonder at least it did for me now honestly most people especially most kids don't wonder about these things they just go play with their friends and so forth but I was deeply curious about these kinds of questions very early in my childhood and throughout the rest of my life from then on and this is how philosophy really begins is just by wondering about what it is you're doing here and how things work so I started thinking about stars science technology cells DNA evolution animals one of the things that fascinated me is animal Consciousness what are animals conscious of how come humans treat animals so much worse than they treat other humans are animals really as dumb as humans think they are or are humans just so arrogant and selfish and biased that we actually discount the intelligence of animals I started to wonder about that I also started to wonder like this you know if an animal is so dumb as humans think like an ant or a a mouse what does a mouse or an ant know about reality compared to a human they know nothing a mouse knows nothing a mouse probably doesn't even see the stars doesn't even know that it's on a planet doesn't even know what the sun is I mean it experiences the Sun but doesn't really know what a sun is doesn't know that some nuclear reaction happening uh millions of miles away it doesn't know what evolution is it doesn't know what DNA is or what cells are it doesn't even know what mathematics is and then you start to think well if a mouse is just that conscious and then we think maybe a dog is a little bit more conscious and an ant is even less conscious than a mouse like what does an ant know or what does a worm know a worm that lives in the earth doesn't even know that there are forests outside doesn't even know what the sky looks like it spent its whole life living a mile beneath the Earth uh or a fish that's living at the bottom of the ocean a mile below the ocean what does that fish know it doesn't even know that it's on a planet or there's there's a surface it doesn't know there's a sky it doesn't know there's light uh and there's a that there's night and day because it lives so deep and then of course the next sort of extrapolation beyond that it's like well humans supposedly know quite a bit more than than those creatures but then why do we assume it stops there what if there's something beyond what humans understand to the same order of magnitude as that of a eel living a mile beneath the ocean and that makes you really wonder how much more there is Beyond human understanding after all if you were alive 2000 years ago even humans 2000 years ago understood so little about nature and reality they had so many silly ideas religious superstitions and weird theories that we now know were completely ridiculous and wrong but at the time they thought they understood the cosmos makes you really wonder what if we're in that same situation right now in the 21st century see so I started wondering about all this and this got me thinking about some very deep existential topics and I specifically remember one time my family and I we were doing a road trip somewhere you know sometimes we would go skiing we'd have to do like a long six hour road trip to Lake Tahoe or somewhere and on that road trip we would be driving in the middle of the night to our destination there was nothing to do back then there was no podcast to listen to or anything like that so we would just have conversations and we would have conversations uh I remember my dad would bring up like some topic to talk about or my my mom would and it would be some kind of existential philosophical topic and we would sit there for hours and just debate it in the car sometimes we'd get into heated arguments other times it would just be a nice dialogue of different perspectives and we would basically be doing armchair speculation we will be speculating about this thing or about animals or about like I remember one time we were in the car and um and we were kind of arguing about you know could there be animals that are more conscious than humans more intelligent than humans and I would say something like well what about the elephant doesn't the elephant have a bigger brain than a human how do we know the elephant doesn't know more than a human if it has a bigger brain supposedly Consciousness comes from the brain right and I remember my dad he argued that actually the elephant has a smaller brain than the human and I know that I knew that this couldn't be correct like the volume of the brain mass of an elephant has to be larger than that of a human but my dad actually disputed this so we would argue about this so just kind of silly things like this um that ultimately led to nowhere but here's here's the heart of it here's why I'm explaining all this to you might say like so what what's so important about this well here's the key what I discovered and maybe I was just 12 years old at that time when this conversation happened is I discovered that I got most passionate and most excited about life when I was in these conversations to me this was the most interesting aspect of being alive is being engaged in these conversations to me this was more interesting than playing a video game or listening to music or even having sex is thinking about these questions now at that time I didn't explicitly understand this but now in retrospect I'm just telling you in retrospect you know I had to go through a whole process to to come to realize like oh this is what my life purpose is is to be asking these questions and to be pursuing these answers took me a long time to figure that out which is why I'm sharing this with you because maybe this will help you figure out if philosophy is right for you because if you're not interested in these kinds of questions then you're not interested in philosophy then when I got into High School in high school I would engage in debates really with one of my best friends who was a deeply devoutly religious Evangelical Christian he was from Brazil they're very religious down there he was a Catholic or something like that I don't know is he image like I don't remember what he was just very devout he would walk around High School carrying a Bible that's how religious he was and I did not go to a religious school this was just a public school nobody else was doing this but I remember him and I we would argue about the existence of God I didn't believe God existed he of course did as a Christian we would argue and debate about all this kinds of stuff and I noticed that him and his religious friends he hung out with a circle of religious friends that the way that they reasoned and argued when I would ask them sort of probing existential questions about you know like questions such as well if God exists who created God and if you say God created himself well then why couldn't the universe have just created himself itself if God could have so questions like this and they didn't have good answers and I could see that they were fooling themselves because they had a belief in God but they didn't really have an understanding of what God is they didn't have good arguments it was just it was just pure Dogma so I already saw that that's a problem because how do I know that what they say is true because somebody else might believe in something else how do I know that's true how do I know what is true this question started to Rack my mind in high school so I started really deeply contemplating this question this got me into what's called epistemology the theory of knowledge how do we know anything for certain at all that's the subfield of philosophy called epistemology so I spent a lot of time contemplating reality science my situation in life like what am I going to be doing with the rest of my life I also started thinking about you know myself in relation to reality see philosophy is not just thinking about reality in some sort of clinical objective manner it's also about what's my relationship to reality what should be my relationship towards animals towards humans towards the Stars towards planet Earth I started thinking about religion I was also studying history at this point in European history especially and I was just looking at all the religious wars that happened in Europe how many people were killed Christians killing Christians Christians killing Muslims Christians killing Jews over what over just ideas and beliefs so I started thinking and contemplating about all this and then I got my first philosophy book which was not actually a a specific philosopher it was an encyclopedia philosophy which listed all the different philosophical schools and a few pages about each one so I flip through and read through different ones and I found it fascinating just to think about the different philosophies that exist what are all the different philosophies out there materialism idealism solipsism existentialism nihilism and so on and then I started thinking about well they all disagree with each other so how do I know which one is true and of course the encyclopedia doesn't tell you which one is true it just gives them all to you and then it's your job to figure it out and I wasn't just interested in studying Philosophy for the sake of philosophy I was interested in what's the truth I don't want to just memorize 20 different philosophical schools and be able to recite them to somebody as some purely academic Pursuit I care about what's actually true what's the nature of reality I also went online this was the early internet days there wasn't that much internet content back then but there was some and I started to look at various philosophical schools online like reading basically Wikipedia entries about them brushing up on them there were some very exotic and interesting ones and it was confusing and I didn't know how to differentiate between the good ones and the bad ones I also started reading western philosophers like David Hume he was one of the first philosophers I read I also was studying science at the time because I figured you know science gives me a good understanding of what reality is so I was very curious about physics and chemistry and biology for example and evolution in fact I started reading Charles Darwin's Book On the Origin of Species just on my own because I was so interested about evolution understanding how it worked so I did that and then one day I told my dad that I decided I want to become a professional philosopher and he told me oh Leo you know philosophy it's all just mental masturbation you're going to regret it you got to do something more practical so I took that into consideration and I figured he has a a good point there um but I still kept doing philosophy in fact I started doing very deep late night contemplation sessions I would just sit in my room at 2 A.M with a piece of paper just trying to figure out what what is reality and how do I figure out what reality is what are the different ways I can go about it and I had some early breakthroughs even then this was before I even read a bunch of different philosophy at that point I was literally just doing it on my own and even then one of my earliest deepest breakthroughs was the realization that all of reality is groundless and that all belief systems are groundless including science itself I was able to see that just by sitting with a piece of paper and thinking through how does science work how does science come to its conclusions how does religion work how does religion come to its conclusions and I very quickly saw that these are belief systems and ideologies and methodologies that are ultimately grounded in nothing they're circularly Justified or not justified at all this was uh important an important breakthrough in epistemology for me at this point I was also experimenting with radical skepticism of all the different philosophical schools that I read about I resonated the most with skepticism also called pyranism in ancient Greece there was a school of philosophers called the peroneians who were the radical Skeptics and they basically doubted that it's possible to know anything about reality and that's sort of the conclusion that I came to is that like I don't know how to know but this is tricky because if you say that I know it's impossible to know anything about reality that's true for certain if you say that that's actually a knowledge claim that means you know that but I was so skeptical that I wasn't even willing to say that I knew that because I didn't even know that I didn't even know whether I could know or I couldn't know and so that just left me in this kind of like empty null state at that point I had dreams of writing a book a world transforming book that would destroy every philosophical system because every philosophical system that I read I could see it had its assumptions and all those assumptions if you question them deeply enough eventually this philosophical system would collapse you would deconstruct it and so I wanted to create my own philosophy which was the philosophy of deconstruction and then but but then see I realized wait a minute but if I create my own philosophy which is supposed to deconstruct all the philosophies then what about my own philosophy that one too has assumptions to it and that too needs to be deconstructed and so what happens if I deconstruct my own deconstructed philos deconstructing philosophy where do I end up I can't even write a book at that point and so I tried writing philosophy at that point this was maybe like when I was 18 years old but everything I write it I hated because every time I wrote down some positive constructive statement I already realized that it's limited it comes from various assumptions and that I can't possibly be I can't know for sure that it's true and so I struggled with this then I went to University started studying philosophy and University and I started researching the possibility of what it would take to become a professional philosopher as like a university professor I actually bought a book that explained you know how do you become a University PHD I kind of like looked through the whole process and then I realized very quickly that the whole PhD process is the pyramid scheme especially when it comes to Fields such as philosophy because you have to go through this whole you know eight or ten years of getting your PhD and then you have to go back into the system and there has to be a spot for you in the system but there's so few spots in the system for philosophy phds that there's way too many people clamoring for every position and not enough positions for everybody because it's basically it is a pyramid scheme essentially because what you're doing is you're becoming philosophy Professor who then needs a bunch of students underneath you to fuel your career and your position so for every one philosophy Professor there has to be hundreds of philosophy students and I was really disappointed by this I saw how corrupt the whole university system is and I realized that I can't pursue the truth within this kind of system because this system is not prioritizing truth seeking or Genuine philosophy when it's prioritizing is it's prioritizing the academic bureaucracy and then you have to play by the games of this academic bureaucracy in order to have a position and as soon as you stop playing by their rules and doing philosophy the way that they like to do philosophy they're going to kick you out and you're not going to get the position the people who get the position because there's so few positions in so many people are the people who basically become lap dogs of the University system and that's not what I was interested in so then at around age 20 or 21 I decided that uh I would reject the university and academic system on purpose because if I didn't then that would be selling my soul to the devil and it would corrupt my whole philosophy and that would be perverse so I would rather do philosophy on my own or not do philosophy at all than become a [ __ ] to the university system and so that's what I did so I dropped the idea of becoming a philosopher and I switched my focus to video game design which is something I was always interested in as well as a kid I focused on that for the next few years I became a professional video game designer and during that time I stopped doing philosophy and then from game design I started my own business online business because even Within game design I realized that as a game designer working for a large AAA Studio I would also be hoarding myself out to that studio system which I also didn't like I had too much Integrity to consign confine myself to any kind of system what I really wanted is I wanted to pursue my own creative interests completely autonomously without any external forces influencing me or corrupting my work without any kind of financial obligations and so forth without some boss telling me what I can and can't do so even though I didn't want to I forced myself to start my own business I wasn't really interested in business other than that I was interested in having complete Financial Independence so that I could have the creative freedom that I needed to do the work that I knew I needed to do so I spent a few years building that business and became financially independent and got my autonomy and creative freedom and at that point I could do anything I wanted to and that's when I got into self-education reading a lot of non-fiction books science books and personal development I got into personal development around this time and then as I got into that I also needed to work on my dating life because I had been neglecting that for all these years because I was so focused on figuring out the nature of reality that I I didn't even I didn't even consider having a relationship with a girl until I was over 25 years old simply because I was so focused on figuring out what the [ __ ] is reality and what is my role within reality that's how focused I was it's not that I wasn't interested in sex it's just that I was way more interested in philosophy than I was in sex so I put that on the back burner but then I turned 25 26 and I decided that and I got to take care of this as well um this thing that I've been procrastinating on so I got it to pick up started learning theory about attraction how to get better with girls all that kind of stuff that took me down a certain rabbit hole I started listening to this guy named Owen Cook from RSD um and what's interesting about Owen Cook is that he's a very philosophical guy in addition to just teaching you pick up skills he talked a lot about philosophical deep profound Concepts and for me this re-sparked my passion for philosophy I immediately saw the value in having a a sort of a database of all these interesting philosophical Concepts because they could also be very practical and uh that's actually when I first got my idea for what actualize.org would be is this catalog of philosophical Concepts that would be both profound and also practical at the same time then I was uh stumbling around on the RSD Forum just reading pick up advice this was back in 2012 or so and then I saw an off-topic section of the Forum where people just talking talking about random non-pickup stuff and there there was a thread and the thread said something like this is the most dangerous book you'll ever read in your life and as soon as I read that thread title I didn't even click on the thread yet I immediately knew I had to read this book I mean how could you not read that book the most dangerous book you could read in your life so I clicked on the thread found out what the book was bought it on Amazon it arrived I started reading it the book was titled Enlightenment The damnedest Thing by Jed McKenna it's a very radical book I read that book after I finished reading that book it made me depressed for about a week because kind of deconstruct deconstructs all your Illusions about reality and life but anyways in that book he talks about this notion of Enlightenment that's when I really first learned about Enlightenment and what it is and how serious it is and at that point as soon as I learned about Enlightenment I understood immediately that this is the most important thing in the world is Enlightenment I didn't even know at that time exactly what enlightenment was I just knew it was the most important thing in the world I also knew that somehow it connected to the the deep contemplations that I was doing when I was younger in high school you know sitting alone at night contemplating the nature of epistemology and knowledge and how do I know anything at all and the sort of groundlessness of various kinds of beliefs is I knew somehow it connected to that but I wasn't sure how it was just an intuition so I started following up on that then I became a life coach did that for a bit then I started experimenting with meditation did that for a bit then I launched actualize.org and then I got seriously involved in that and I got very serious about personal development topics which I was also researching at the same time I was researching both philosophy and personal development and also a lot of psychology and I saw a lot of connections between all these topics then I got very serious about meditation and non-duality Retreats and self-inquiry so I started doing a lot of that then during a 10-day vipassana Meditation Retreat I had my first Enlightenment experience sober that was so amazing that that showed me that there's a whole new dimension to reality that most people don't know that exist that I didn't knew existed then I got into psychedelics and that opened up a whole new dimension to reality that nobody knew existed and so I dived very deep into psychedelics and I did other things that I won't go into here because we're running short on time but in a nutshell essentially what happened is that I did so much philosophy so much psychedelics so much self-inquiry so much meditation so much deconstruction and I interconnected all these Concepts in my mind so deeply that at some point I reached omniscience by which I mean I reached a complete and total and absolute understanding of the nature of existence as incredible and impossible as that sounds I did achieve that and when you achieve that only then do you understand what all a philosophy is really about and where it really leads to and also you understand why all the ways that philosophy has been done in the West by all the famous philosophers and all the ways it's done in universities in Academia and even within science and so forth that all of that is deeply deeply flawed and that using those methods you will never reach omniscience which is the true aim of philosophy so that's my journey that was my process the reason I share it with you is so that you can learn some lessons for yourself if you're an aspiring philosopher you can see does this resonate with you now let's get into some of the meat here so ultimately why do philosophy because you are insatiably curious because you cannot live without answers it's really that simple in the end philosophy is simply the pursuit and love of pure understanding for its own sake either you love understanding for its own sake or you don't if you don't you have no business being a philosopher if you do then this is for you personally for me there is nothing more meaningful in my life than philosophy I do philosophy because I cannot stop doing philosophy not questioning reality is not even an option for me if I stop questioning reality I'd just rather be dead to me life would be meaningless in the worst possible way to me the whole meaning of life is that it has such profound depth and you can question it and question it and question it and get meaningful answers and have genuine insights and learn about the magical ways in which reality works and you can see patterns and you can see patterns in the functioning of your own mind and humans and nature and animals and this really is the root of science philosophy is more fundamental than science science is like a narrow sliver of what philosophy is about because science is like one narrow methodology whereas philosophy is a more broad inquiring to the nature of everything because maybe science is not broad enough to Encompass all of reality Maybe it's too Limited see and actually historically science just was an offshoot of philosophy science used to be called natural philosophy before there was science there was philosophy because science is actually a sub philosophy someone had to invent the scientific method who was that a philosopher philosophers invented science how do they do that by asking questions by being insatiably curious people wanted to know stuff like why do rocks fall down and they don't fall up why are there rainbows what is lightning why are there earthquakes why are there tsunamis why are there famines and plagues why do humans live for 80 to 100 years but not any longer basic questions like this from this comes all of knowledge you see if you value knowledge at all you must value philosophy because philosophy is the root and source of all knowledge if you think back to the first human who could ask questions and think in a sort of a rational way you might say maybe 500 000 years ago or however long it was at some point there was the first human on this planet who asked himself the question wait a minute what's going on here where did I come from who am I what is all this how does it all work and why does it work this way and not that way there had to be there had to think about just think about how profound this is like let's even broaden this out Beyond just this planet in our universe where we have billions and trillions of galaxies and stars which have billions and trillions of planets probably by by just basic logic there are millions of civilizations and sentient beings around the whole universe probably many of them older than Humanity but there had to be in the history of our universe there had to be the first creature who could think and ask itself the question how did I come to exist like I'm alive here I am I'm conscious of myself where did I come from where did all this come from where did the universe come from imagine being that first creature think about how mysterious this whole thing was for you because see nowadays the problem is that you're born and you're just fed with all these ideas immediately you're immediately brainwashed with all the answers of where you came from so it's no longer as mysterious as it used to be which is actually a shame because all the stuff you're programmed with most of it is wrong so imagine the mystery of being the first one to recognize your own existence and to wonder where you came from and what reality is and how it works and notice in that position you're in a position of total ignorance you don't know anything you don't have the scientific method you don't even have logic and reason yet because you don't even know you're in such a position of ignorance you don't know whether science exists or is valid or not you don't know whether logic will get you to the truth or to the answers you don't know these things maybe reading tea leaves will get you to the answers you don't know maybe doing a rain dance will get you the answers you don't know at that point you see how mysterious it is and you have none of the answers so imagine not knowing that you're even on a planet because he today you know you're on a planet but our ancestors didn't know that and today you know where the planet came from because science tells you that it is it's Stardust that congealed billions of years ago but ancient humans didn't know that they didn't know about Stardust they didn't know about gravity collapsing dust together into a ball they didn't know these kinds of these these ideas were not so like it was it's a complete mystery and it when it rains you don't know what rain is and when you see a rainbow you don't know what a rainbow is and when you see a rhinoceros you don't know what the [ __ ] a rhinoceros is you don't know if it's friendly or if it's dangerous and we when you see a mushroom growing out of the earth you don't know what that thing is and so naturally you start to question and you start to wonder but these days science has filled many of these gaps for us to the point where most people don't even bother wondering anymore because they just accept the ready-made answers of science or of religion or whatever other cultural conditioning you get you just accept those answers and then you cease wondering so to be really philosophical you have to wonder about the most fundamental questions and things even those things that everybody else around you takes for granted as already understood and known the stuff that science tells you is already known you have to ask yourself but what is that anyways because science can convince you that it knows what a rock is science can convince you that it that it knows what the sun is and science can convince you that it knows what light is and what the color red is and what a rhinoceros is and you have to challenge science back and say wait a minute but what are those things anyways beyond all your you know shallow explanations so philosophy is about going deep and that to me is the most meaningful thing about life that's what I love the most about life is that it has this depth to it but the sad thing is the majority of mankind are completely missing out on all this depth they just go about life pursuing pleasure sex Fame success money a car a house a family some children that's all they care about and they never really deeply question life to me this is a Preposterous way to live I don't know how anybody can live this way but actually the majority of people live this way if you can't stomach living that way then maybe that means you're a philosopher philosophy really has two functions function number one is your own personal development understanding and Awakening just for its own sake just so that you understand notice that there can be a pleasure that you derive just from understanding something like think of a situation where you didn't understand the situation and you were confused by it and then you through experience and questioning eventually you understood it you came to understand it like maybe at first you didn't understand how your computer worked and then you figured out how to use computers and how they worked and there was a joy that came from understanding how to use a computer not because the computer could be used to get sex or because the computer could be used to make money or to print documents for your boss but simply because there's a joy in understanding how a computer works for its own sake try to connect with that Joy so that's function number one and function number two is generating useful insights for mankind you can use Philosophy for example to create a better Society by asking the question what is society and how do we make a better one what are the ways in which society is bad what are the things that corrupt society and how do we change those or for example you can use philosophy to do better science you can ask the question what is science how do we improve science what are the limitations of science what are the obstacles and Corruptions that prevent us from improving science you can also use philosophy to reduce suffering for yourself and for others which can be useful you can use for example philosophy to generate money you can ask the question such as what is success what makes people successful and then you'd have a philosophy of success you could outline principles you could find principles that successful people follow to become successful and make lots of money and then you can also find all the things like all the traps and mistakes that normal people make that keep them poor the heart of philosophy what's so beautiful about it is it's so simple the heart of philosophy is just questioning questioning questioning is actually a thing that humans take for granted because if you think about it what is a question and how is it that questions even work if you start thinking about this deeply and you do a sort of inquiry into the nature of questioning uh at some point it's going to stun you and all you the mystery of questioning it's amazing that you can ask questions of reality and you can get meaningful answers of course you can also get bad answers you can get a bunch of [ __ ] and speculation and ideology and Dogma those would be the bad answers but also notice it is possible to get genuine legitimate answers to questions about reality how is that possible that's amazing that this is possible what allows for that why is reality structured in such a way because you could imagine a reality where you couldn't even ask questions of it you could imagine being a mouse and a mouse probably as far as we know is not asking deep questions about reality it probably doesn't even have a questioning function but you as a human you have a questioning function thanks to language and so forth and this questioning function is not just a a language game you're not just shuffling symbols and labels and words around when you're asking questions it is possible to ask very deep questions and to get deep answers you could for example ask the question if the Earth is round what is it that keeps objects attached to the Earth rather than floating away into outer space and there is a good answer to that you can find good answers to that it's not just all mental masturbation even though of course that's possible you could mentally masturbate about that question but you could also do some legitimate serious inquiry into that question so I want you to appreciate that asking questions is a superpower and there are many degrees at which you can exercise this power most people are under utilizing grossly under utilizing this power to them it hasn't been turned into a superpower but you could you could Master the art of asking questions you could start asking very powerful very deep questions and you could do it consistently and persistently to the point where you reach very deep answers you could but will you do you have the wisdom to see the power that this could be for you in your life just this one understanding right here could transform your whole life because it's going to mean the difference between exercising this power and just letting it atrophy everybody asks questions at one point in his or her life that's not the issue the issue is are you going to turn this into an art or are you just going to do it haphazardly in a piss-poor way whenever you're put into a corner the philosopher is one who undertakes a deliberate cultivation of the art of asking questions doesn't leave it up to chance and doesn't just do it for purely pragmatic reasons see most people they only ask questions when it personally serves them like they might ask the question how do I get more sex but even though of course you can ask that question you can get good answers and you can actually use that question to get a lot of sex but you see this is a this is a trivial utilization of this superpower because you could also use that same superpower to ask way way way more interesting and important questions than how to get sex but what's going to motivate you to do that see most people look like animals and if you're an animal then for you you're motivated by sex but what if you want to live in a deeper Way Beyond just the way that an animal lives well that would be the path of philosophy here's a list of examples of philosophical questions that could get you started in this process as I'm going to be listing off the next you know 30 questions here um write down the ones that really strike your curiosity some of these you won't care about you won't find them interesting but some of them you'll be like wow yeah that's an amazing question I want to know more about that make a note of that that right there these are Clues to what you should be inquiring into with your life and with your philosophical Pursuits so here we go here's a list where did reality come from why is there something rather than nothing what is language what is consciousness is a rock conscious are plants conscious can a machine become conscious what is the relationship between mind and matter what is truth does ultimate truth even exist what makes for a good life why do people suffer and how do we reduce suffering is there anything valid to religion does God exist what is God and where did God come from how do we know we can trust science what makes science better than religion what is rationality can anything be known for certain is philosophy even worth doing how can I be sure anything exists outside of my own consciousness what are the best ways to understand nature what do the results of quantum mechanics mean what is the color red how do I know I'm not fooling myself what is life how did life originate where did the laws of physics come from could they have been different what is time is time travel possible why does War happen why does it keep happening again and again and again and again why can't we stop it what would it be like to communicate with an advanced alien intelligence how would it be different or more advanced than humans how do we construct the best Society possible can all true things be proven and what is proof anyway what constitutes proof why is the world ordered what is more certain perceptions or Reason which one should we trust more over the other how do I know which sources of information I can trust does philosophy have right and wrong answers or is everything just subjective and relative so this is just a small list of the kind of questions that philosophers ask of course there can be hundreds more questions but think about this list as a pretty Broad and diverse list ask yourself if any of these have piqued your curiosity I have an older episode called the 64 Most Fascinating questions that a human can ask go check out that episode if you're interested in more so how do you know philosophy is right for you here's how are you deeply curious about fundamental existential questions are you unable to stop wondering and questioning everything do you love truth and pure understanding for its own sake do you love to question to contemplate do you love to do thought experiments does asking existential questions excite you do you love conversations about profound existential topics with other humans if so then philosophy is right for you and here's a question since we're talking about questions here's a question you should write down and wonder for yourself if you're going to be a philosopher what is it that you want out of philosophy why are you doing philosophy what are your motivations it's very important that you're clear about this for yourself and that you contemplate this and see the contemplation of these questions is not something you just do for a few seconds or for a few minutes you can contemplate this question such as what is it you want out of philosophy you can contemplate that for years and you will get deeper and deeper insight into the situation so it's not just about getting some quick answer or asking me for the answer like Leo tell me what I should want out of philosophy no philosophy is about going through the process and deriving your own answers what are the various fields of philosophy that you might be interested in there's not that many of them here they are all of them basically there is metaphysics which deals with what is anything otherwise known as ontology it's like the most fundamental things like what is existence that's a metaphysical question or does God exist and what is God that's a metaphysical question or is reality material or is it mental these are metaphysical questions then there is epistemology epistemology is everything about knowledge questions about how do we know what we know how do we know that it's true how do we know we're not fooling ourselves how do we answer skeptic the questions and challenges posed by Skeptics radical Skeptics that's epistemology then you have ethics and morality that's the whole sort of like moral philosophy subfield which deals with questions of what's right what's wrong what's good what's evil if God exists how come God allows for evil why do people behave in evil ways how do we stop people from being evil how do we make more good people questions like this you know how do you construct an ethical moral Society for example is it is it moral to indoctrinate your children into your religion or not then there's the field of Aesthetics which has to deal with with beauty and so forth questions around that and art and what is beaut what is the beautiful what is good art questions like that then there's political philosophy which deal with how do you construct the best political system and what are the different pros and cons of various kinds of political and economic systems democracy versus monarchy versus socialism versus communism versus Marxism versus capitalists and this kind of stuff then there's science there's a field called philosophy of science in science there's a lot of fundamental questions about what kind of scientific methods are correct what kind of scientific paradigms need to be used scientific models how to model all these kinds of technical questions then there's the field of logic and Mathematics different kinds of Logics how do they work how do they connect with mathematics what is mathematics mathematics of science is it more fundamental than science is mathematics absolute truth what makes mathematics true how do we know that one plus one equals two questions like this questions such as can everything be explained with mathematics can everything be explained with logic then there's religion philosophy of religion all the different religions out there you can study them all compare them all you can ask questions about which one is the right one what's the what's the best ones what's the worst ones how do you compare them to each other are they all talking about the same thing are they talking about different things and so on you can try to reconcile science and religion maybe you believe you can maybe you believe you can't do you think science and religion are totally separate domains or do you think that they connect somehow and they need to be integrated and synthesized and if so how do you do that then there's philosophy of mind questions specifically about Consciousness what is the mind what is conscience how does it arise what are qualia can science study Consciousness and the mind or are these inaccessible to science what is subjectivity emotions colors perceptions how do we explain all these things and how does all this arise from the physical brain so to speak how does mind and matter combine connect what is the relationship is there two things one thing called mine and one thing called matter or are they actually one thing and if they're one thing is it all matter or is it all mind or maybe there's some other third possibility speaking of mine there's psychology now psychology is usually not considered philosophy but actually for me psychology is critical to philosophy because as you're doing philosophy you're coming into contact with your own psychology if your psychology is screwed up how are you going to do good philosophy for example if you have a mental illness are you going to be able to do good philosophy if your psychology is wrong and there's a lot of psychological tricks and biases that the mind has which you're gonna have to take into account when you're doing your philosophy then there's the field of Sociology which is usually not considered philosophy but to me it's very related because sociology deals with culture and it deals with society and after all philosophy and Science and religion these are cultural constructions and artifacts the only reason you know about religion or science or philosophy is because of culture and because you live in a society and these cultures and societies you know they're different philosophy is done differently in the East than in the West and it's done differently in America than it is in the Middle East and it's different and it's done differently in China because there's different cultural norms and it's also done differently throughout different eras in time the ancient Greeks did different philosophy than the medieval period and then and then the medieval philosophy was different from Renaissance philosophy and Renaissance philosophy was different from uh you know German philosophy and then that's different from today's American philosophy then there's history of course history is separate from philosophy but also how can you do philosophy without history in fact most of what philosophy is taught in universities is just history it's not philosophy they teach you about various historical figures who did philosophy but basically they're just teaching you history the history of philosophy then there's the field of spirituality you might say spirituality is not philosophy but then again spirituality is interested in the same questions philosophy is interested in what is reality what is consciousness what is God what is spirit what is the soul do Souls exist do spirits exist then there's mysticism also related to that and then lastly there's the field of language the philosophy of language what is language how does it work how does language shape the way that we think about reality of course there are all sorts of more specialized subfields of philosophy but these are the big ones so think about which ones are these you're most interested in all right so now let's get into sort of like how to actually do philosophy philosophy requires serious work it's not just sitting around an armchair speculating so I'd like you to make a distinction here you can actually create distinctions in your mind one of the distinctions you can make which is very powerful is the distinction between on the one hand speculation and beliefs and on the other hand genuine observation and insights these are different things a lot of people think that speculation and belief and ideology that this is philosophy it really isn't philosophy is about making genuine observation about reality or about your own mind or about your own self or about people and having genuine insights it's not about just sitting back and coming up with ideas randomly and then believing in them in fact this here speculation and belief and Dogma this is the chief obstacle to good philosophy because when you have a lot of beliefs and ideas and preconceived notion and dogmas about how reality is you can't question effectively you see to question effectively you have to have a completely open mind you have to be unbiased unprejudiced you can't your mind can't be filled with a bunch of cultural programming and fundamentalist religion and stuff like this you have to seriously be willing to question everything and observe everything you can't observe a thing honestly when you have preconceived notions that you're projecting upon that thing and you're interpreting it according to your preconceived biases and prejudices and the way that you want things to be because see we're not interested in how we want things to be in philosophy we're interested in how things are I might want to live on a flat Earth but that's not the issue the issue is is the earth flat and how do we know that and if your mind is close to the idea of the Earth is flat and you just believe the Earth is round how do you know you're not tricking yourself how do you know that the ideas that you got the Earth is around are not just delusions from culture at large because look throughout every era of human history we know for a fact that there were people who believed all sorts of silly ideas about the Earth at about nature which turned out to be grossly wrong in retrospect this mask is starting to hurt me I have to bear the pain here so um so yeah you have to be so open-minded in doing philosophy that you have to be open-minded to the Earth being flat on the other hand you don't want to just believe that the Earth is flat either because if you just believe the Earth is flat and there's some Global conspiracy well how do you know that that's also you just accepting ideas from culture you see so it's really really tricky and true philosophy only begins when you understand how tricky all these questions are as it turns out almost every single fundamental question like the basic questions that you could ask about nature and life and reality they seem so simple on the surface but when you probe into them you realize how difficult they actually are even a basic question like what is light that seems like an easy question what is light but when you dig into it it's not easy at all it's mind-boggling bogglingly complicated and difficult to explain and understand what light is and pretty soon you realize that this isn't just true of light there's nothing special about light per se that makes it so complicated it's true about everything what is water what is a human what is an animal what is life what is consciousness what is what is a star what is gravity what is empty space everyday culture makes these things seem simple and resolved when in fact none of them are the only way to become a great philosopher is to spend thousands of hours in deep questioning and contemplation it's just like any other activity if you want to become a chess Grandmaster there's no way you can do that without playing thousands of games and if you want to become a world-class golfer you have to play thousands of games of golf and so it is with every activity and the same thing with philosophy only with philosophy here's the trick is that a lot of people convince themselves that they are already good philosophers they begin philosophizing and they just believe whatever their mind comes up with and they think that they don't need to spend thousands of hours practicing it to be good at it they they just accept their own conclusions immediately and therefore they fool themselves into all sorts of ideologies and belief systems the Mind very easily convinces itself that its own conclusions are correct that doesn't make them correct and so philosophy is one of the trickiest activities to learn how to do well because when you're learning golf or how to play pool or how to play soccer or even how to paint and draw um you have very objective criteria like it's very easy for someone to take a look at your drawing and tell you that it's ugly or take a look at your golf swing and just see you miss app you know miss miss your golf swings ugly ugly golf swings and you can see it yourself you can't really fool yourself that you have a great golf swing when you don't and you can't fool yourself that you're a great artist when you aren't but it's extremely easy to fool yourself that you're a great philosopher when you aren't knowing how to question well is not a skill you're born with it has to be developed and knowing how to think is not a trivial skill most people are very poor thinkers they're very biased in their thinking they fall into various traps of self-deception like projection confirmation bias confabulation rationalization and justification reasoning backwards from conclusions question begging reasoning in circles and many many others I have a whole series called self-deception where I outline it's a three-part series self-deception part one part two part three where I outline dozens of various kinds of self-deception mechanisms that I've discovered how did I discover those did I read those in a book did I get them from God no I sat down for thousands of hours doing contemplation just doing philosophy and observing my own mind fooling itself having various kinds of biases observing myself falling prey to projections and other these mechanisms that I have explained and noticing how tricky my own mind is to the point where now I'm so aware of my own self-deceptions that I'm pretty good at avoiding them although I'm still not perfect the self-deceptions are so sneaky that even after thousands of hours and Decades of philosophy I can still be self-deceived and I catch myself sometimes but the difference is that unlike most people I am able to catch and correct myself that doesn't make I won't that doesn't mean I won't make a mistake I can make mistakes and I can make mistakes in public but then a week later a month later a year later I'll catch myself and correct myself whereas most people when they make self-deception errors they do it and then they make that mistake and they keep doing it and doubling down on it for the rest of their life see philosophy is about improving the quality of your thinking most people you'll notice are very very poor thinkers and even if they're good at thinking about some narrow aspect of life they're bad about thinking in general so there's a difference there are a lot of for example mathematicians who are really good at mathematical thinking or physicists who are really good at physical type of thinking and Engineers who are good at engineering and programmers who are good at programming program thinking and then other kinds of people who are good at thinking about their little you know narrow Niche but then they're really bad when it comes to thinking about outside of their domain of specialization and philosophy is about knowing how to think in general about anything think about how powerful that is as a skill if you develop that how is philosophical work accomplished basically through contemplation and observation the combination of both these things You observe then you contemplate you contemplate then you observe and you keep going back and forth between the two I have episodes that explain what is contemplation how to do contemplation go check that out I have episodes that explain observation I have an episode called learning equals observation go check that out to explain that concept so you closely observe how reality works or how some part of reality works and you also observe how your own mind works and You observe how other minds work you can literally go outside your house sit down on the curb find an ant and just observe that ant for an hour when you're observing that ant you're not judging it you're not projecting upon it you're not telling it what to do or anything like that you're just observing it neutrally without commentary you're just observing what it does noticing its patterns maybe you notice that it moves its legs in a certain way maybe you notice that it blinks its eyes maybe you notice that it Wiggles its antenna maybe you notice that it grabs a piece of food and how does it do that and where is it taking it this is the beginning of philosophy in the beginning of science and then you can also contemplate on that and that's really the work of philosophy also you can do thought experiments you can do a thought experiment such as what would happen if I took one ant put them in a cup take another ant put them in a cup and then combine the two cups together what are the ants gonna do that's a thought experiment and then you can actually do it in real life and then observe what happens and notice that there's a difference between what you think will happen and what actually happens What You observe happening philosophy philosophical work is also accomplished by exploring various perspectives and points of view this by itself can be very valuable ah because your own mind your own imagination is so limited that you can't even imagine all the possible perspectives that you can have on a situation whereas other Minds can have other kinds of perspectives that are different from yours and it can be valuable because they might have some idea that you won't have in 20 years so it's valuable just to go through and just to do a cursory review of different perspectives on various kinds of situations for example if you're a man you as a man have a certain perspective about women and if all you talk to is other men they're also going to have their male perspectives about women and that's all going to tend to reinforce this I'll create like an echo chamber but what about women's perspective of women you see that's a different perspective so if you want to be a good philosopher you can't just ask men about women you should also ask women about women you should also ask children about women you know if you could ask animals you should ask animals about women you know um or maybe you should ask about women from different cultures you know middle easterners will have a different perspective on women than Americans than Scandinavians than Africans than Asians and so as a philosopher you should be less interested in which perspective is the ultimate right perspective and you should be less interested in demonizing perspectives you should be just more interested in exploring perspectives for their own sake just to see what you can get out of a perspective and appreciating a perspective for just being its own perspective it doesn't have to be right or wrong it's just a perspective I have an episode called what if everything is just perspective go check that out and then you do philosophical work by asking powerful questions and questioning everything questioning all assumptions I have an episode called assumption is the mother of all fuckups which explains the importance of assumptions I also have an episode you should check out called the power of asking questions and I have an episode called learning equals making distinctions distinctions are a crucial distinction that you need to learn how to make and utilize as a philosopher because a lot of philosophies about making distinctions and also very importantly learning how to collapse distinctions can you see that learning how to think and how to question is very valuable just for its own sake after all you will be thinking for the rest of your life about every kind of thing there's no option of going through Modern Life and not thinking you're going to be thinking the only question is is it going to be good thinking or is it going to be bad thinking and for most people it's bad thinking so just think about the difference in your life whether you decide to be a good thinker or not because if you don't deliberately take measures to become a good thinker by default you're going to be a bad thinker nobody's a good thinker by default think of what difference that will make for you in your love life in your business relationships in your finances in your investment schemes in your ability to raise children to do science the next point is that philosophy is about self-reflection well you have to be very careful about as a philosopher is how your own mind gets in its own way as you're doing philosophy you're not just some neutral objective Observer the way that scientists imagine when they're doing science you are a biased creature you are selfish you have needs and fears and you have cultural programming that you've already received for 20 or 30 years before you even began doing philosophy and all this is going to influence the way you do philosophy so one of the most important tools that a philosopher has is introspecting and looking inwards I have an episode called developing introspection that's crucial go check that out so self-reflection is about going meta and thinking about yourself as you're thinking observing yourself as you're thinking observing yourself as you're doing philosophy I also have an episode called what it means to go meta go check that out that's going to be crucial for you because a lot of philosophy is about going meta in fact you could almost say that all of philosophy is about going meta and see when you ask the question what is going meta what does that really mean see you're already doing philosophy you're asking a question and that's a very good question and do you know how I generated that episode what it means to go meta I sat down for a few weeks and I contemplated the question what does it mean to go meta and I generated a whole list of stuff and I created a whole episode from that very powerful episode that was an example of me doing philosophy after all how do you know that your own thought process is legitimate what if it isn't what if you're fooling yourself so a crucial aspect of philosophy is self-honesty you have to really be honest with yourself hold your own feet to the fire and the avoidance of all possible bias this is absolutely crucial because if you're not honest with yourself about your own biases and if you're not able to reflect deeply enough to become aware of your own biases you're just going to be acting out your biases and projecting them out onto the world creating sort of echo chamber effect where your own biases are just going to be projected out and then what you see and observe and then what you think is just going to be your own biases reflected back at you you see and then you're not getting at the truth of the situation you're just reinforcing your own ideas which is not serious philosophy now let's talk about what philosophy is not the traps of philosophy philosophy is not arm share speculation and just guessing it's like you know well I think that plants are not conscious I think that rocks are not conscious no that's not philosophy you're just coming up with ideas that's not interesting that's not useful that doesn't get you any closer to truth the question is if you really want to know about plant conscious you have to ask yourself what might plant Consciousness look like and how do I access it how do I verify that plants are conscious or not conscious that would be an interesting question that would require some serious work you see the mistakes people make is they say oh well Leo philosophy is just mental masturbation no that's just bad philosophy as mental masturbation because you see bad philosophy doesn't require any work it's like sort of like a lazy man's philosophy you can just sit around and say ah I believe this and I believe that and maybe this and maybe that and then after all that is said and done then you just go back to your normal life and nothing changes and you don't do you don't lift a finger to do any work whereas real philosophy is like you know like you know I think the Earth is flat I think the Earth might be flat there's a good there's a good chance the Earth might be flat but it doesn't stop there then you say and you know what I am going to now work to earn the money to buy a ticket on a Russian Mig airplane that's going to take me out to the edge of the atmosphere it costs about twenty thousand dollars for one of these flights on a MIG you take a Russian Mig all the way to the to the edge of the atmosphere and you look down on the earth and you see is it round or is it flat so real philosophy means you're going to spend twenty thousand dollars to verify that or you know it doesn't have to be that method any other method you want you whatever method you want but you see most people are so lazy that they don't want to invest twenty thousand dollars doing that but then that means you're not really interested in the answer you're not interested in truth because if you were interested in truth as a flat earther you would want to go out there and actually validate the fact the Earth is flat you wouldn't just post on Reddit conspiracy theories you'd actually want to go out there and see it for yourself and also notice if you were a true philosopher and let's say you went I mean you these days you can even buy a ticket outer space I believe Jeff Bezos sells them now or the Richard Branson sells them some some of these com space companies you can buy a ticket for like a hundred thousand dollars that will fly you into low low earth you're not going to be in orbit but you're going to be like just on the very edge of outer uh on the very edge of the Earth from where you should be able to see the roundness of it or not um if you were serious a serious philosopher you would you would happily pay a hundred thousand dollars to take that ride and to confirm whether the Earth is flat or round and you would be happy with either conclusion right because as a as a genuine philosopher you don't care you're not attached to the Earth being flat or round or Square it could be a [ __ ] pyramid you don't you don't care what you care about is the truth you want to know how it actually is see and so if you take a flight up there and you find out that the Earth is actually a a pentagon then you'll be happy with that Discovery because that's the truth it's a pentagon you see but this is not how most people do philosophy most people when they're doing cortical philosophy they're just trying to reinforce their existing biases they're not interested in the truth so all the philosophy hinges on your genuine deeply honest desire for truth which means that you're willing to surrender any of your ideas and you're willing to admit that you've been wrong which most people are not willing to do so that's the first trap the next trap is group think ideology beliefs and justifying your world view we've already talked about this a bit most of what people call philosophy is just ideology and group think they're not generating any new insights or making any personal observations about anything it's just group think there's a difference between reading Karl Marx and his philosophy of Marxism and subscribing to it and calling yourself a Marxist versus sitting down and actually deeply thinking about and generating unique insights about economics you see these are two totally different activities and most people who call themselves socialists marxists Communists and so forth they've never done any serious economic philosophy they've just read some stuff and they're subscribing to an ideology or to groupthink that they happen to like because it serves their political agenda they're not actually generating insights about economics so please understand this oh man I really regret wearing this mask it's super uncomfortable after an hour and a half but I'm committed now the things I do for you guys I'm just enduring excruciating pain right now while I talk about philosophy but now we have to go we don't have time to stop so uh make a distinction between inquiry and rationalization these are two different things inquiry is when you're actually thinking about something asking questions coming to grips with with truth deriving answers whereas rationalization is when you're just coming up with stories about why you believe what you believe and why it's true and why other things are false you see most people when they're doing philosophy what they're doing is they're just doing rationalization they're not really doing inquiry the next trap of philosophy is debating arguing debunking and critiquing these are extremely popular especially on YouTube on Reddit online on forums and so forth this is not serious philosophy debating about which philosopher was right and which was wrong this is not serious philosophy because when you're debating you're not doing inquiry you're trying to argue towards some kind of conclusion you're doing rationalization the mind is extremely good at rationalization in fact the mind can rationalize absolutely anything the mind can rationalize raping and gassing children so do you think the mind will have any problem rationalizing whatever philosopher or philosophy you think is the best your mind will convince you that any philosophy is the best if you so desire there's no limit to what your mind can rationalize how do you know that's true look at human history look at intellectual history of the last two thousand years human have believed humans have believed all sorts of crazy things and rationalize it to themselves you can rationalize torturing people you can rationalize lying you can rationalize building a cult so be careful the next trap is history of philosophy and scholarship like I said one of my biggest critiques of academic philosophy is that it's not really philosophy it's not inquiry what it is is it's reading the writings of old dead white men and then regurgitating them and memorizing them and debating over them and interpreting them and then ask a question like well did Descartes mean this or did he mean this or did he mean that and who was you know who's who's better on this point Hume or Descartes or Plato or Aristotle this is not a serious philosophy reading the works of another philosopher and then trying to nitpick it and doing scholarship on it trying to figure out what did David Hume say what did Aristotle say what what did Plato really mean this is not philosophy you're not inquiring into anything when you do this this is a huge mistake it's so obvious but this is what they teach you in University it's not real philosophy decipher deciphering ancient texts is not philosophy getting too Technical and academic getting bogged down and all sorts of trivia and technicalities this is not true philosophy this is a distraction philosophy is about basic symbol fun simple and fundamental questions it doesn't hinge on technicalities and the reason that is because you can be technically correct about many things but then grossly misunderstand the larger picture philosophy is about the big picture getting the big picture right not the technicalities a lot of what happens in philosophy departments and universities is that they completely ignore the big picture and they earn their phds and write all their papers on such minor technical minutia which really doesn't serve them it doesn't increase their understanding of reality of themselves and it doesn't really appeal or is practical to the majority of mankind which is why academic philosophy is rightly looked down upon academic philosophy is a complete bastardization of what philosophy should be philosophy is not writing and Publishing papers it has nothing to do with publishing papers it doesn't matter how many papers you've published that does not make you a good philosopher I've published zero papers other philosophers at MIT are Stanford or Harvard have published hundreds of papers I guarantee you I have better philosophy skills than those people I have a deeper understanding of reality that's the ultimate thing philosophy is not subscribing to some philosophy or philosopher so one of the biggest mistakes you can make is to say something like you know what I'm a capitalist I'm a Marxist I'm a Cartesian I'm a empiricist I'm a rationalist I'm an atheist I'm a solipsist I'm a whatever and then defend that position I'm a libertarian and then spend the rest of your life defending that position that's not serious philosophy you're just identifying with an ideology or even worse you're attaching yourself to some human Persona like you really love Descartes or you really admire Plato or you really admire hate admire Hegel or you admire Jacques derida or whatever who gives a [ __ ] I don't give a [ __ ] who you admire it doesn't matter who you admire philosophy is not the pursuit of a personality cult it's not about status it's not about credentials it's pure understanding the true measure of philosopher is How Deeply do you understand yourself mankind the workings of the Mind Consciousness and reality that's it everything else is a sideshow it's a distraction it's a red herring philosophy is not making proofs or proving things to others this is a big mistake you can fall into the strap of like oh I gotta I gotta prove my understanding of reality to somebody no you don't whether you understand something or not is one thing and whether you can prove something to somebody is a totally different thing first of all there are such deep things you can recognize about reality that you won't be able to prove it to anybody number one number two even those things that are supposedly provable um there are people out there who are so close-minded and stubborn that you won't be able to prove to them that water is wet that's not your problem that's their problem and in fact most people are like this most people are so stubborn that there's many things you can't prove to them which are true but you're never going to prove it to them because they're not interested in truth they're too biased and too close-minded the next trap of philosophy is judging the quality of philosophy based on Authority credentials and status thinking that Plato is a great philosopher just because he's Plato no what if Plato's a bad philosopher what if the card is a bad philosopher what if his philosophy is bad it's not even about the person it's about their ideas their ideas can just be bad ideas from Plato can be just as bad as ideas from from a Nazi bad ideas are a dime a dozen almost everybody has bad ideas including very intelligent people have bad ideas Einstein had bad ideas so one's Authority does not guarantee your ideas are good or valid and no matter how many good ideas you've had up to this point the next idea you have could be a bad idea see just because you know let's say Einstein was still alive and still doing physics that doesn't mean his physics are right he could easily still be doing you know the next theory he publishes could be the wrong one and it's a mistake to put him on a pedestal oh this is Einstein it doesn't matter the next trap is using philosophy and Theory as a way to avoid facing the realities of survival and practical life you can turn philosophy into sort of Escape this is a huge trap especially for those of us who are very intellectual so one of the things in my work and the way that I do philosophy is I force myself to to come into contact with reality I don't just sit around on the couch brainstorming stuff all day although I do but like I put my philosophy to the test in the real world I do business I run a business I I have to make money I have to be profitable I go out I socialize I talk to girls for example that puts all Theory to the test it's one thing to sit around on your arms and say oh you know you know relationships should work like this and sexuality should work like this and girls should be attracted to this thing and not that thing and I think this is the right way to attract girls when you go into a loud ass Vegas nightclub music is [ __ ] blasting your ears so loud you can't even think straight and you have to approach a [ __ ] group of 20 hot girls that are all dolled up and [ __ ] and dancing crazy and drunk that's a very different situation no philosophy will save you then also when it comes to your own emotions and suffering you know when you have a breakup when you lose a hundred thousand dollars when your neighbor runs over your your favorite cat when your parent dies or your child dies when your girlfriend gets raped this is the real test of your philosophy how are you gonna react when people criticize you attack you get make insults at you troll you online how do you respond this is the true test of your philosophy and you will see very quickly that all of your philosophy crumbles in the face of reality one of the things that I really look down upon is someone who's a philosopher really high Noble philosopher but then isn't able to run a business isn't able to buy himself a house isn't able to go attract a girlfriend this is a misuse of philosophy what I believe in is that you should do very deep theoretical work and you should balance it out with a lot of practice and then you should synthesize those two together and in fact the practice will help to inform and ground your work because otherwise your work is going to be very airy fairy you're going to be talking about chakras and spirits and past lives and all sorts of [ __ ] but then in real life you're going to be miserable because you can't get a girlfriend you don't have your car broke down you can't pay for an oil change because you're so broke your parents kicked you out of your house you have nowhere to live you're homeless you're suicidal your emotions are out of control and you're sitting there doing philosophy no this is you're just you're fooling yourself you're not a real philosopher real philosophy requires embodying your your understanding of reality when you truly understand situations and things it's not Theory it's not just you're not just writing a textbook this is transforming you at a deep level it's transforming your emotional system it's transforming how you interact with humans it's transforming the words that come out of your mouth it's transforming the depth of your capacity to love it's transforming how you think of yourself it's transforming how you suffer it transforms how happy you are whether you're depressed or not whether you argue with people whether you're a jerk and an [ __ ] to people or whether you're kind and loving all of this is affected by real philosophy so a lot and of course this is threatening because this this requires changing yourself a lot of people would prefer that philosophy not actually touch oneself and one's life because then it can be done in a purely conceptual manner then it's safe you know it's safe to sit on your couch and think whatever theories you want and then just go about your normal life you don't have to change but if you're doing really deep philosophy you think about stuff and then then you realize wait a minute I have to change my behavior for example if I'm thinking about animal Consciousness and I realize that animals are actually sentient and maybe even intelligent then that means I can't just like go to Burger King anymore the way that I used to and get the same old burgers that are Factory farmed you have to change but that's not comfortable so most people the people who say that philosophy is just mental masturbation their problem is is that they actually want it that way because they're too weak and they're too afraid to do the serious philosophy which would put the burden on them now to take a lot more responsibility for their behaviors people don't want to take that kind of responsibility if you did true philosophy you might have to quit your job because you would find that your job is immoral and unethical you might have to end a relationship because you realize you're just doing this relationship for some sort of like cheap shallow sex and you don't really love this person you won't have to end that because you realize that you know true philosophy will maybe tell you that you gotta get love from your relationships for example stuff like that that's extremely threatening if you're a scientist or an academic and you do serious philosophy the way I'm telling you eventually you might come to the point where you realize you have to leave science and Academia behind because it will not get you to the ultimate truth and the ultimate aim of philosophy and that's going to be extremely threatening to you because how are you going to cope with that after you've invested 20 30 years into science and Academia and that's what you use to put bread on your table and feed your children are you going to have enough integrity and courage to quit most people won't which is why they never even begin serious philosophy because it's too threatening serious philosophy is very threatening in fact that's a really good way to know whether you're doing serious philosophy or you're just bullshitting is how threatened are you by the work it should scare you serious philosophy is so serious that you might even reach a point where you think that you're losing your sanity and at that point you still have to keep going you're not done because see when most people get to the point of thinking you know thinking thinking thinking that they think that they're losing their sanity then they get afraid and say oh okay I better stop I better stop and just go back and watch some TV and just do what normal people do but you failed philosophy requires very deep courage it's the courage of Truth seeking if truth leads you to Insanity a true philosopher will choose to become insane because that's the truth so you have to be a very clear as to what your priorities are and if anything is a higher priority for you than truth then you're going to fail at philosophy and that's exactly what happens to most philosophers including the academic ones the scientific ones the professional ones and the last trap of philosophy that I'll mention here is political activism and power games philosophy is not about achieving some political goals like ushering in a Marxist Revolution or power games like your party winning the presidency or something like that or you having power in your University this is not serious philosophy because as soon as you start to carry to care about winning these power games what happens is you have to stop caring about truth power becomes a higher priority than truth and as soon as this happens you've sold your soul to the devil because remember philosophy is about pure understanding we don't really care where the understanding leads us to we don't care what the consequences of the understanding are and the reason we don't care about that is because we don't even know what the consequences will be we don't know what the consequences of finding the ultimate truth will be assuming there even is such a thing but let's just assume there is what are the consequences will it make you happy will it make you suicidal we don't know but a real philosopher will say I want the truth anyways even if it's going to make me suicidal why because a true philosopher cares about understanding for its own sake damn the costs if you're not comfortable with that then you shouldn't be doing philosophy now you might say well Leo aren't these just your biased ideas of what philosophy should be after all who made you the king of philosophy why don't you teach philosophy in a more neutral way the way that a university Professor might because see a university Professor is not going to be as forceful with you as I am here that might make it seem as though I'm kind of biased and in a sense I am biased you know what I'm biased towards I'm biased towards truth I'm forceful because if I'm not forceful with you then you're gonna engage in [ __ ] and [ __ ] is the obstacle to truth so we have to be very ruthless in cutting out the [ __ ] so yeah my style of philosophy is extremely ruthless about [ __ ] as incredible as this sounds philosophy has a tangible endpoint there are right and wrong ways of doing philosophy and here's what the endpoint is the end point is this it's possible to understand yourself and reality completely completely Imagine This open your mind to this possibility now maybe I'm wrong you don't know if I'm right yet and I'm not asking you to just to believe me blindly this is something you have to prove to yourself by doing it but just open your mind to the possibility that you can do so much philosophy so deeply if you do it in the right way that eventually you will come to complete understanding of yourself and reality now either that's possible or it's not the problem is you don't know which the only way you could know is by trying it seeing if you can do it in the same way that you don't know how high you can jump until you try jumping so don't just dismiss this possibility right off the bat without trying it you have to try it and you have to try it seriously that's how science Works science requires serious experimentation you can't just do a half-assed experiment you have to do a genuine honest experiment you know with your full effort and see if it if it pans out and works I'm sweating a bit under this mask okay um so my claim is that if you do philosophy correctly you will answer every existential question that you have about reality and you will understand why everything exists precisely as it exists this is possible to answer but the answer is so profound that it cannot be put it easily into words although I've done so in other episodes but you are correct in your skepticism in that see the reason you're skeptical about this and you might think that what I'm saying here is impossible fantastic exaggerated or delusional is because you just don't know anybody in in real life who has achieved this in fact you don't know almost of a single philosopher in Western philosophy who has achieved this or who even claims is possible usually philosophers play this game of humility where they just try to act like oh well there's so much stuff in the world it's so complicated we can't know it we can't possibly know it this is this is false humility of people who don't know what they're talking about any philosopher who tells you this is impossible is simply full of [ __ ] and the reason that is is because it's not that they're lying it's just that they don't know how to do proper philosophy because philosophy is so tricky and complicated that almost nobody has succeeded in doing it properly in fact this is so common that it's gone so bad to the point where if you tell people there is a proper way to do philosophy they will argue with you about this and they'll say no Leo there isn't it's all just subjective and relative and these are just all your biases and you're just delusional well that's one possibility but the other possibility is that it's actually possible but you have to be very strict about your doing a philosophy you can't just take it willy-nilly and do it any which way you want now I want to introduce the notion of what I call pure philosophy I'm trademarking this pure philosophy capital P capital p Ure Capital pure Capital philosophy what do I mean by pure philosophy its philosophy that's completely free of history and named individuals which makes it very different from academic philosophy and the history of philosophy we don't care about Plato or Aristotle or Descartes or David Hume or shock derida or anybody we also don't care about history we don't care about who said what what did they really mean did Plato really mean this or they mean this and when was this said and you know how did these ideas develop historically we don't care in pure philosophy all we care about is the ideas themselves pure philosophy is an impersonal collection of ideas and Concepts think of it as a spreadsheet of every possible idea and concept you could have about reality every perspective every way to understand it in pure philosophy we then evaluate all these Concepts and ideas based on their Merit we edit them freely we reinterpret them and we blend them together to create the best possible understanding of reality we don't care who said what we don't care if we're interpreting Descartes correctly or not we don't care about arguing about this philosopher versus that philosopher and so forth we don't care about east or west we just care about understanding reality as best as we can and we're going to use whatever ideas invented by whomever to do this in pure philosophy there is no debating there is no arguing there is no proving there is no debunking and there is no ideology this is done purely for your own understanding as long as you understand reality correctly that's it we're not trying to prove it to anybody else we're not trying to discredit anybody else we're not trying to invent an ideology we're not trying to write a book we're not trying to write a research paper that gets approved by somebody we're not interested in convincing the whole world that they're that we're right and that they're wrong we're not interested in being the best were interested simply in pure understanding of reality and in this Pursuit we are willing to question absolutely every single assumption that mankind makes about everything it knows everything we will question everything nothing is sacred we will even question whether your mother is actually your mother everything will be questioned we will even question one plus one equals two we will even question a equals a we'll question everything we're willing to burn everything down to the ground and we do all this outside of any institution or bureaucracy not in a university not as part of some school not as part of some group not as part of some collective project it's just personally you understanding reality just pure philosophy in pure philosophy nothing has ever taken for granted everything is questioned we even question why water is wet in pure philosophy everything must be explained from scratch without any appeals to Authority history status cultural norms or even morality we will even question is rape bad we will question that that's not taken for granted that rape is bad we have to derive whether it is or not and maybe it isn't we're open to that with pure philosophy we have infinite open-mindedness we're open to absolutely anything and we don't care about the consequences of any of our ideas that means that if if we have some idea that is going to annihilate the entirety of mankind we will choose to annihilate all of mankind just to get a glimpse of that idea because we just care about pure understanding if we get to the point where our understanding grows so deeply that we annihilate the entire universe and all the living beings in it we will take the understanding over the entire universe and all the living beings if we have to torture somebody to understand what the universe is we will torture as many people as possible to understand what the universe is that's pure philosophy like radical I'm talking about radical things I'm talking about dangerous things we understand that what we're doing here is very dangerous and threatening to society and to mankind and we appreciate that but also we understand that we can't be meek here and we can't be scared we have to pursue the truth at all costs that's pure philosophy in pure philosophy we make a profound study of self-deception we assume that the doer of the philosophy is in the greatest danger of self-deception we don't worry about the self-deceptions of anybody else except ourselves and this is a constant perennial Danger that we have to worry about we worry about it from now to the end of our lives and with pure philosophy we are crucially concerned with the Transcendence well first of all with the identification and then the Transcendence of all of our biases especially our personal biases we're not interested in the biases of other people you're interested in your own biases as philosopher and your understanding is trying to transcend every possible bias you have whatever it might be if you like kitty cats that's a bias you have you as a philosopher have to be concerned about that and how it's going to skew your ability to understand reality that's pure philosophy to me this is what philosophy actually is when I say philosophy that's what I mean I don't mean what's done to universities What's Done in universities should not even be called philosophy because they ain't doing this they're not doing what I just described there are really four questions at the heart of pure philosophy just four from these four questions every other question is derived here it is and I'll throw in a fifth bonus one but here's the four key ones write them down this is the most important these are the most important questions in in the universe write these down number one how the [ __ ] is anything possible number two what the [ __ ] is anything number three where the [ __ ] did you come from number four what the [ __ ] is consciousness and the fifth bonus one is how do I live the best life that's it that's the heart of philosophy if you can answer these five questions you figured out the whole universe that's powerful now of course there's many other questions you can ask which we can consider sub questions of these questions you know you can ask questions like how do we create a great society that's a good philosophical question but all of that is secondary to these core questions so I'm not saying you can't specialize you know you can have your more narrow interests but just be careful not to get lost in the minutia it's very easy to get distracted pursuing some kind of like you know tangent here and then miss the big questions how can you call yourself a philosopher and not be interested in these five core big questions that I outlined for you here if you're not interested in answering these then what are you doing you're chasing after peanuts don't miss the elephant in the room that's the mistake that most philosophers make they're chasing after peanuts okay here are the top techniques for serious philosophers number one sit down and contemplate for hours in solitude actually do this this takes work this is hard thinking is hard sitting alone in a room by yourself late at night for two hours thinking about something deliberately with Focus this is more than most people are willing to do most people probably haven't done this even once in their whole life try it do it number two asking powerful questions and getting better and better at asking more powerful questions clarifying your questions honing your questions number three Simplicity Clarity and cutting through all human [ __ ] this is key a huge mistake in academic philosophy is that they get so jargony so technical they use giant words and complex vocabulary this all obscures the pure pursuit of understanding one of the things that I've tried to model in my work with actualized audience I've deliberately dumped down all of my language deliberately not because I don't have access to fancy vocabulary words and academic jargon I could have done that and it would have made my work seem much more intellectual and academic I deliberately didn't do that because to me if you understand something you should be able to communicate it as though to a child using simple vocabulary and by the way when you do access omniscience and absolute truth as I claim is possible your understanding will be so pure and so powerful and so direct and so clear that you will not use complicated jargon to explain it you'll be able to explain it very simply with simple metaphors basic vocabulary you'll be able to explain it to a child I can explain the nature of the entire universe to a child I don't need to write some complicated philosophical manuscript that only uh uh PhD Professor can decipher after five years of of you know parsing the the words look at my teachings my teachings are extremely clear the reason that is is because if they weren't my own mind if my own mind wasn't clear enough I would never have been able to reach the levels of understanding that I've been able to reach the only reason I've been able to reach these levels of understanding is because I've been ruthless monstrously ruthless was cutting through all of [ __ ] all of Mankind's [ __ ] all of the [ __ ] and philosophy all the [ __ ] and science and um all the [ __ ] of intellectuals and all of my own [ __ ] as well the next technique for serious philosophers is radical skepticism be skeptical of anything of everything question everything but also don't abuse skepticism you have to also apply skepticism to all of your own ideas and skepticism itself for this see my episode called um I believe it's called false versus true skepticism which explains the mistakes of misusing skepticism so the proper use of skepticism is necessary the next technique for serious philosophers is study all philosophies a little bit so that you're familiar with the entire landscape of philosophy rather than going deep on one philosopher do a shallow overview of all the different philosophies that are out there this will help you much more so watch lectures videos read books and summaries read Wikipedia to get a cursory overview of the whole landscape the next top technique is explore radical perspectives and points of view you should be thirsting for an exploration of different perspectives every time you see or hear of a new totally unique perspective on some situation or the world you should be excited about that and you should make a catalog of all these different perspectives because all these are just like possibilities in the whole landscape the next technique for serious philosophers is radical open-mindedness you need to be so open-minded you can't even imagine uncomfortable levels of open-mindedness are required the reason most philosophers never reach omniscience is simply because they're not open-minded enough actually this is a technical thing that I'm saying right now it's technically true in a way that you won't understand until you you reach the end but um the only way your mind can understand all of reality is if it has infinite requisite variety that's a technical term I have a very important episode on my blog called requisite variety go check that out to understand what I mean basically you need to have infinite mental flexibility in order to understand what reality is at the ultimate level and virtually no human is capable of this which is why the things that I'm saying here are so rare and incredible sounding the next technique for serious philosophers is question science as though it were a religion do not take any of the models or ideas or assumptions of science as true or as a given for example science will tell you that um you will die after your body dies that's accepted within science you can't accept that you need to question that science will tell you that Consciousness is generated by the brain because if we hit your brain with a hammer or a bullet that's going to ruin your consciousness you can't accept that you need to question that science will tell you that the universe is 14 billion years old and came from The Big Bang you can't accept that you have to question that science will tell you that you came from your mother you can't accept that you have to question that the next serious technique for philosophers is psychedelics to me there is no philosophy without psychedelics in fact I will go ahead and make the Bold claim that if you don't do psychedelics you will never understand the true nature of reality and you're not a serious philosopher so you must commit to at least 100 psychedelic trips if you want to be a serious philosopher if you think you can do it without this you're fooling yourself you can't do it you won't do it I guarantee you'll fail and this is one of the greatest mistakes that philosophers throughout history have made although you know um you might say well Leo but you know Descartes didn't use psychedelics and David Hume didn't knew psychedelics and they were great philosophers so how can you say this well first of all they weren't great philosophers they had no idea what they were talking about um almost all the great philosophers in history that are idolized and lionized by academics they were amateurs they're not serious philosophers um but you know also speaking of which did you know that nearly all the ancient philosophers in Greece and in Rome did psychedelics Plato and Aristotle did psychedelics foreign fact what do they do did they do uh did they do wheat no they um they had a psychedelic called keikion which was actually part of the illusion Mysteries so for for hundreds of years the ancient Greeks and Romans would have this ceremony that they did every few years they would do um a pilgrimage to the city of eluses and there they would administer a psychedelic drink called the keikion which was made out of fermented wheat which actually contained ergot which is actually where LSD is derived from so they were literally drinking LSD so when Plato is talking about the The Meta the allegory of the cave if you're familiar with that you know classic philosophical metaphor um yeah he's talking about his insights from taking LSD how do you think Plato got so smart why do you think the ancient Greek philosophers were so smart so wise because they were tripping balls that's how see they don't they don't teach you this in school foreign the next serious technique is keep a commonplace book what is a commonplace book it's basically a repository of all of your notes and quotes that you've collected throughout your whole life I have a separate episode called how to use and keep a commonplace book go check that out I actually show you examples of my commonplace book how I keep it in digital form that's very important for a philosopher uh the next technique is write down all of your major insights you will have so many insights once you begin this process that you're gonna have so many you're going to forget to write them all down but then with an Insight an Insight arises and if you don't write it down usually you're going to forget so write all your insights down on your phone or wherever you want the next technique for serious philosophers is do serious meditation practice go to some meditation retreats some Buddhist ones are good some vipassana ones are good uh as far as your meditation practice I recommend shinzen Young's mindfulness meditation with labeling that's what it's called I have an episode called mindfulness meditation where I explain that technique and I teach it to you but if you want you can learn it from shinzhenyang or one of these other meditation teachers that is out there you can find on YouTube and elsewhere meditation is a crucial technique for for philosophers and even though I [ __ ] on meditation these days a lot because it's simply not powerful enough to get you to the ultimate levels of understanding that you'll need it's still a very important technique I've done years of meditation I've done Retreats I've had sober Enlightenment experiences so this is all important fundamentally what meditation teaches you is how to calm down your mind and really focus inwards on your Sensations which is a lot of what intellectuals and Western academics are terrible at doing this [ __ ] mask okay next um make a deep study of psychology and sociology it's not really possible to do good philosophy without psychology and sociology because you need to see how your own mind works and all the sort of tricks and biases that the mind has and also what you need is you need an understanding of how broader culture works and how culture influences the mind and programs your mind with various kinds of social social conditioning you need to be able to see the social Matrix so to speak you need to see us so deeply that you see science as part of the social Matrix you see full academic philosophy in universities as part of the social Matrix you start to see religion as part of the social Matrix um I'll talk more about sociology in the future I'll teach it more um but in the meantime go check out my episode called the social Matrix which explains that concept the next technique you need is working with making and collapsing distinctions distinctions are a crucial and profound thing that basically explains the nature of all of existence so you want to contemplate what a distinction is for that I have some episodes where I talk about distinctions and what they are and how they work and I talk about dualities go check out my episode like I said learning equals making distinctions and also my episode called um understanding Duality part one part two part three which is all about various kinds of distinctions the next technique you need as a serious philosopher is generate specific and Powerful examples that's how I do most of my philosophy is I sit down and I generate examples and then I analyze those examples and I see how those examples work for example see already I'm using an example to explain to you um but like for example if I'm trying to understand let's say how attraction works with women rather than just sitting and speculating what I will do is I will come up with specific examples like oh there was that one girl I attracted and there was that other girl and that other girl and that girl she didn't get attracted and then I analyzed those four examples and I said I asked myself the question of like okay so what was the attraction in all these examples and then what was the lack of attraction in that one other example and then I'll I'll look at that and then from there I will get my insights and do my observation see observation doesn't just happen in the outer world it's not like you're only observing you know animals and plants and objects in the world you can also do observation on the inside you can observe how your own mind works how your thinking process works or you can observe examples in your own mind but then you have to generate those examples first they have to be clear and specific the next Technique we already talked about which is observation go see my episode called learning equals observation that explains that the next technique is Master language clear communication and the articulation of your ideas it took me years and decades to get to the point where I'm able to articulate abstract ideas so clearly and precisely as I do in my work and in fact if you find my work remarkable that's probably one of the things that makes you think it's remarkable is my ability to do this this didn't happen by accident literally thousands of hours of practicing in the shower in the car when I'm going to bed on the couch cooking dinner doing laundry I'm standing there and in my own mind I'm articulating these ideas I'm not verbalizing it with my mouth but in my own you know inner monologue I'm constantly refining my ideas asking how can I make it a little bit more clear what kind of you know where can I use a better word to explain something this takes a lot of practice but it's a super powerful and unique skill set it's one of those skill sets that will take you years and decades to develop so start working on it bit by bit because you got to do a little bit at a time you can't just sit down and do it all in one weekend doesn't work like that it's a long-term investment that you make but it's going to be so important for you as a philosopher the next technique for serious philosophy is engage other intellectuals in philosophical conversation and dialogue but not debate find somebody online or some friends you have in your University or wherever in your Social Circle with whom you can have deep existential conversations and dialogues without any ideological debate right so don't go on Reddit arguing with people about your philosophy that's not what I'm talking about here dialogue dialogue try to find high quality Minds because there's a lot of stupid people on the internet who you can argue with endlessly who are ideologues this is not going to help you this is actually going to [ __ ] your development as a philosopher you gotta it's not about quantity of people it's quality find one or two high quality people with whom you can have these kinds of conversations uh if you need help with that check out actualized The actualized Forum where you can find people who are like-minded who are into this stuff with whom you can have these kinds of dialogues although also we have debates there too but you know it's hard to avoid debates these days especially online but you can find some people there um try to befriend them try to have offline conversations you can have Skype conversations or you can meet in person you know ideally this would be in person if you're still in University this is a great opportunity for you to find these kinds of people at your University that's going to be the easiest thing or you know if you want even if you're out of University you can go to a university and find some people in the philosophy department or wherever that are interested in kind of in this kind of stuff you can also find these kinds of people in various kinds of spiritual circles the next technique for you is writing write write out your ideas your thoughts do philosophy on paper that helps to keep things organized and it helps to keep you honest it's easier to [ __ ] yourself in your mind than it is on paper because on paper the next day you read what you wrote and you're probably going to be disgusted with yourself at least you should be because most of the stuff you're going to write is going to be horseshit honestly um but it's still good to write it out because that is the process of you growing and developing also that helps you articulate your ideas and the last technique is start a YouTube channel or a blog or start speaking publicly you can go to your local Toastmasters which you can find in any city in the world basically uh starts start actually speaking about some of these ideas you have get them out there that's going to help you to refine your ideas make them more concise simplify them and then one of the best ways to learn philosophy is to teach philosophy you know how much growth I got in the last 10 years of doing actualize.org publishing all this content I learned so much philosophy that I wouldn't be able to have learned otherwise simply because I have to just to put out quality content every week I just have to do so much research and I have to think very carefully and you know methodically and hold my own feet to the fire and also people give feedback and that also holds my feet to the fire because I get a lot of criticism that I have to listen to can't really even avoid it if I wanted to okay here's Leo's top advice for philosophers do not neglect the Practical business and survival aspects of life don't use philosophy as an escape from facing life and handling in a masterful way basic survival stuff like having sex getting a girlfriend getting a spouse having a family having a job managing your finances having a nice place to live and so forth and develop some practical skills in addition to the abstract philosophical skills it's not enough just to know how to think you want practical skills you want to develop some practical skills like computer programming or drawing or music composition or um sales copywriting or sales skills cooking skills engineering skills that kind of stuff because chances are you're not going to be making much money off your philosophy especially not in the beginning the next tip is don't turn philosophy into a defense of any kind of Dogma ideology world view or pet theory that you have true philosophy is not about pet theories it's about pursuing truth which actually means you're gonna have to kill all your pet theories that's the cost of pursuing truth the truth I guarantee you that the truth is not your pet Theory your pet theory is a fantasy it's not the truth don't fool yourself the next piece of advice I have for you is keep your philosophy simple and clear don't get lost in academic and Technical jargon like I said articulate your ideas so clearly that a child can understand you and if you can't that means you probably don't understand what you're talking about the next advice I have for you is be careful of your pet theories and intuitions a lot of times you have intuitions and they're just wrong they turn out to just be your personal biases so question your pet theories and intuitions the next piece of advice is that Consciousness is key consciousness Consciousness Consciousness remember this word consciousness everything is going to boil down to Consciousness so study Consciousness the most what is consciousness what is truth this is your North Star this is what will keep you from getting lost in all sorts of stupid cul-de-sacs within philosophy always come back to what is consciousness in the end you will not understand the ultimate nature of reality without answering the question of what is consciousness you need to have a crystal clear direct experience of what is consciousness and there are many degrees of this that you can have many of you guys who follow me and have had a few Awakenings you think you understand what Consciousness is you don't I promise you you don't you do not understand what Consciousness is and if you think Consciousness is nothing you don't understand what Consciousness is consciousness is not nothing although it also is nothing but let's not get bogged down on that next next piece of advice is be more open-minded you're not being nearly open-minded enough the next piece of advice enjoy the process remember this is not a mad rush to get to the ultimate truth and two omniscience and to answer all the questions no this process realistically will take you a few decades from start to finish uh and really there is no finish line per se you're going to keep doing more and more philosophy even though I've sort of reached the end of philosophy I still keep doing it every day anyways and I still generate more insights uh which just sort of like deepens my understanding of the core ultimate truth um but look enjoy the process enjoy asking questions enjoy not knowing this is actually beautiful because once you're done with the process so to speak once you reach the end and you have the ultimate truth you're gonna look fondly back at all the years you spent struggling trying to figure it all out and you're gonna see that this was all a beautiful Journey it's like a film it's like a movie you don't want to get to the end of the movie and to see the climax of the movie you want the whole process the beginning of the movie is is as good as the climax of the movie enjoy the whole show love the doing of philosophy even more than you want the answers but also not too much to don't love the doing of philosophy so much that you just endlessly go around in circles like an academic and get nowhere that's that is a problem so you do want the end result you're moving towards an end result but you're also enjoying the process the next piece of advice is embody your philosophy don't leave it just purely academic the next piece of advice is beware of self-deception remember this word self-deception self-deception self-deception everything is going to boil down to self-deception not somebody else's your self-deception not my self-deception your self-deception the next piece of advice try to generate some practical insights while you're at it insights can be practical they can change your life you can generate insights about how to make money why not use that power philosophy is not just for pure abstract existential questions it's also for practical stuff be smart about that it's okay to have some materialistic Pursuits in fact it's necessary don't demonize the materialistic stuff especially if you don't have it yet you can transcend it later but if you don't even have it yet you have nothing to transcend don't fool yourself about that the next piece of advice is be an original thinker don't subscribe to any ancient philosopher think for yourself independently why do you need to subscribe to some philosopher why do you got to follow dick hard or Plato or whatever why you don't need this think for yourself steal their ideas and drop them you don't need the person the personality and you know Plato is not going to be offended if you never think of him the next piece of advice is contemplate read less contemplate more contemplation is way more powerful than reading one hour of contemplation is worth 100 hours of reading next piece of advice do not get attached to any one school of philosophy like Buddhism so many people get fooled and deluded by Buddhism because they think they found finally the the greatest philosophy ever Buddhism the absolute truth no no it's Dogma it's groupthink next piece of advice keep it simple and pure focus on the ideas and the insights don't get bogged down in deciphering dense technical philosophy you know some philosophers are very difficult to read you know if you go try to read Hegel or Kant you're going to spend a month just trying to understand what the [ __ ] they're saying this is not a good use of your time instead what you can do is you can go to Wikipedia type in Hegel or Kant and you can get a quick summary of their ideas you don't need their technical arguments you don't need to understand every sense they wrote what you need is just a general idea of their ideas which should be summarizable in a few minutes or in an hour in one video or on one Wikipedia page it should not be hard for you to understand what Kant or Hegel wrote or what they taught you can figure that out in one hour on Wikipedia you don't need to spend a month reading their stupid treatises which are Arcane and esoteric and very difficult to comprehend this is a huge mistake that philosophers make is they actually take on the burden of trying to [ __ ] you know read the original Hegel it doesn't matter what Hegel wrote what matters are the ideas in Hegel Wikipedia is your greatest friend there are so many great summaries of philosophies on Wikipedia the next piece of advice is study self-help traditionally the self-help field is sort of considered inferior to philosophy and it kind of is you know it's not as prestigious it's not really taught in universities and so forth but there's a lot of profound and important lessons within self-help and the self-help field when combined with philosophy that's what's going to make it very personal it's going to start you up you know affect your own life and your own development and it's also going to make it more practical because academic philosophy is so dry and so abstract that you don't see how it can possibly help you in your life you want to bridge the gap between those two and um well you've already found actualize.org and that will help you with with that a lot because that that's what all of my work is about is Bridging the Gap between those two so I've already done most that work for you watch my content and there it is but also you should you know read some classic self-help books and watch some classic self-help teachers stuff like that the next piece of advice is be careful with over specialization and siloing so what happens in universities is that everything is siled and over specialized so nobody is studying the very big picture of philosophy in a university in a university every philosophy department is like broken down like you know one person is studying Descartes another professor is an expert on Hegel another one is an expert on moral philosophy another one is an expert on philosophy of language and it's all siled and nobody is integrating all of that together into the ultimate understanding because they think that's impossible it's not impossible it's just that you're not you're not doing it and not just within philosophy but look you need to integrate not just philosophy philosophy science religion mysticism the new age spirituality self-help integrate all of these together psychology as well sociology as well developmental psychology integrate everything together into a holistic understanding this is how you reach omniscience you can't reach omniscience through only study philosophy or only studying science or only studying the new age or only studying self-help or only studying psychology it won't work the next piece of advice is make Clarity one of your highest values clarity clarity you can't reach truth without clarity I'm going to have a whole episode on Clarity in the future so that will cover that the next piece of advice is just I want to reiterate for you that history of philosophy is not the doing of philosophy these are two different things don't be fooled by that and also memorizing and parroting the words of other philosophers is not true philosophy and the final piece of advice is beware of intellectual fads all throughout philosophy and in every era in every culture there are intellectual fads you need to break free of these fads to reach the ultimate understanding and to do serious philosophy all right so now which philosophies are worth reading and studying I'm going to give you very concrete answers usually you know if you ask this of a university Professor they wouldn't want to answer this kind of question because they want to say well you should decide for yourself just read everything and decide for yourself I mean yeah in theory that would be nice the problem is most of us don't have time to study and read every philosophy and every philosopher there's way too many of them so again you can call me biased and some of these will be my biases but then again I have become conscious of absolute truth and the ultimate nature of Consciousness and reality and omniscience so in retrospect I can clearly look at all the different philosophers and philosophies out there that I've studied and looked at and I can tell you which ones are really good and which ones are really bad and save you a lot of time now of course you don't know if what I'm telling you is true or not from your point of view this could all just be my biases but I'm going to tell it to you anyways um you know just in case you want to believe me or not I don't I really care if you believe me or don't so you know people will disagree and argue with me about this there is no such thing as like one true philosophy there are different schools many different schools of philosophies and different philosophers many of whom had um pretty deep and good understanding they were in the right track they were in the right direction in the right Ballpark and then there was other ones that are not in the right ballpark at all so I'm going to give you a list of the ones that are in the right ballpark that are good that are really worth your time and then I'm going to give you a list of the ones that are not worth your time all right so here we go the following philosophies are quite good and worth your time skepticism pyranism idealism relativism uh political philosophy it's good to just study different kind of political systems there's not one true political philosophy but just the whole field is good to study Eastern philosophy has a lot of really good profound truthful stuff in it Zen Buddhism Hinduism and just various kinds of Hindu philosophies like vedanta for example really good lots of great stuff Zog Chen which is spelled d-z-o-g-chan Zog Chen it's a sort of offshoot of Buddhism um mysticism is good to study non-duality is really good meditation various meditation techniques are great monism is really good solipsism is good and yoga is good many different kinds of yoga again this doesn't mean that all of these are perfect and correct there's a lot of problems with all these no one philosophy is perfect I would say but these are all in the right ballpark now um which philosophers are most worth reading heraclitus anaximander an axagoras platinus sextus empiricus Hegel and various other German idealists that came after Hegel excluding Kant I don't like Kant uh Barkley which is spelled Berkeley which is what you see Berkeley is named after um Thomas [ __ ] Paul fire Robin Willard Klein Spinoza William James the stoics like Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus SRI arabindo Ken Wilbur and Peter Ralston these are all generally quite good and some of them are incredible and amazing all right now which philosophers do I consider to be overrated and really not worth your time this is a very controversial list because this includes most philosophers that academics love but really honestly they're a waste of your time Socrates Plato Aristotle Descartes Hume Kant the post-modernist like daredev co uh lot The Logical positivists especially uh Wittgenstein Hobbs Locke Nietzsche Heidegger Machiavelli Sartre kamu the pragmatists the American pragmatist like Pierce uh Ein Rand Richard rorty Confucius husrell and Russo I would not waste any time reading about reading these philosophers if you want just read the summaries of their work on Wikipedia that will be enough for you the problem is that you could you could spend a decade reading these guys and you won't be any closer to understanding what reality is that's the problem here that's why I'm trying to simplify this for you um all right now the question is there one correct philosophy um in a sense there is in the ballpark and this is what it is it is a combination of idealism pan psychism pantheism monism non-duality Zen Buddhism vedanta radical skepticism piranism mysticism holism relativism Hindu idealism solipsism subjectivism and phenomenology so if you take the best of all those schools of thought and you combine them all together that's going to get you the closest to absolute truth but it still won't get you to absolute truth but it's the best pointer that we've got besides my work so I mean I'm biased um and I don't want to toot my own horn but if I had to you know if you're going to ask me what's the best philosophy I'm going to say it's actualize.org you're going to say well yeah that's that's so selfish of you to say so so narcissistic but then again look look at it like this like I built actualize.org with the deliberate intention of creating the best most advanced most sophisticated most accurate philosophy possible that's what actualize.org was that that was its Mission from the very beginning I've been working on this for 10 years I think I've done a pretty good job not perfect but a pretty good job especially when you compare it to the Canon of all of Western philosophy uh I'm happy to compare my work to any work of any major philosopher in all of Western history and then you you judge for yourself I mean feel free to compare my work to Plato to Aristotle to Descartes to Kant to Hagel to whatever I'm pretty confident you'll find more depth and more profanity in my work than you will in all of theirs combined but you know that's just my opinion I could be wrong I'm biased so take it with a grain of salt all right now let me answer the question of is philosophy just mental masturbation is philosophy even worth doing what if it's just a waste of time and what can you really expect out of philosophy so in regards to mental masturbation um that is certainly a trap of philosophy it can turn into that but it doesn't have to it really depends on how you do it if you do it properly it can be extremely practical and extremely worthwhile and it can transform your whole life and in fact you can use it like I said you can use philosophy to make lots of money you can use philosophy to get sex you can use philosophy to change your self-image and your self-esteem and to change your depression and your lack of you know emotional mastery you can use philosophy to help you to meditate and to calm down your monkey mind and you can use philosophy to make yourself more happy you can use philosophy to gain a deeper appreciation of life literally more happiness in fact a really good philosophical question is to ask yourself what is happiness and how do I live the happiest possible life that's very practical you can use philosophy to improve your relationships you can use your philosophy to improve your communication with other humans and your ability to empathize and to love you can use philosophy to de-program your mind of all sorts of ideologies conspiracy theories and bad ideas which can be extremely dangerous these days a lot of people getting brainwashed with fascist ideologies Nazi ideologies far right wing ideologies radical communist or Marxist ideologies this is all toxic garbage that's going to ruin your life people's lives are ruined by these bad philosophies and then when it comes to the ultimate aim of philosophy which is the axis of omniscience and absolute truth and ultimate existential understanding you might ask well is this practical or is this just mental masturbation and what I can tell you about this is that this is the most worthwhile thing that a human can pursue there is no more worthwhile thing once you achieve this level of understanding and comprehension it will be the happiest moment of your life nothing else can compare no amount of sex not your wedding day not the birth of your children not the earning of a billion dollars none of that will compare to the peak experience you will gain when you fully comprehend the source of all of existence I can't prove that to you you just have to trust me on that so yes it's worth it of course it's worth it if it wasn't worth it why would I be talking about it also understand this that even if you want to you can't really avoid philosophy you might think see Ordinary People they fool themselves into thinking that they can avoid philosophy you can't avoid philosophy if you don't do philosophy deliberately what that means is that just means that you're going to get programmed automatically by the culture that you happen to grow up in and the era in which you live in which you were born you're going to be programmed with with that thinking you're going to be programmed by your environment by your friends teachers colleagues co-workers businesses advertisers all of that religion science you're going to be your mind's gonna be programmed by all of that philosophy see that's philosophy you're going to be programmed with all that and that's going to be very low quality philosophy low Consciousness low brow philosophy which is not designed to get you to the ultimate truth or to get you to happiness or anything like that or to get you to love it's designed to uh just maintain the status quo of society and to help advertisers sell you materials to shape that you don't even need so the real Choice the only choice you have is will you do philosophy deliberately if not that automatically means you're going to have bad philosophy if you do decide to do philosophy deliberately that still doesn't mean you're out of the woods you can do it deliberately and screw it up and still have bad philosophy but at least you have a better chance and at least there's the opportunity that you might do it correctly by following all the principles I've outlined above following all the tips and advice and then eventually you'll reach to Ultimate understanding and love and all sorts of beautiful profound things and you will purify your mind and you will Break Free of the social Matrix in the best case scenario and that would be very very worth it what can you expect out of philosophy well depends on how you do it if you do it badly you can expect that you're going to construct some kind of ideology it's going to become very toxic you might even become insane or suicidal or you might join or start a cult or you just might become one of these brainwashed ideological political people like one of these you know Maga people one of these you know Neo-Nazi fascists far right Wingers or one of these radical antifa marxists these are the worst case scenarios here's the best case scenario and this leads us to the question of what is the ultimate endpoint of philosophy where do you get to if you do it all correctly and you reach the very end well here it is I've really avoided talking about this this whole episode because I didn't want to freak people out because I could start saying some crazy things here that will completely strain your credulity this is just an intro video that will strain your credulity to the point where you're just gonna click the off button because the truth is that where philosophy ultimately gets you is so radical and so profound that you literally cannot believe that it's going to be true and yet it is so I'd like you to think of philosophy as a maze or a giant tangle of wires and chords that you're trying to untangle this is a good metaphor because what it shows you is that it is possible to reach a state where you know if you ever have one of those giant Tangles of wires maybe behind your TV when you were a kid you had this giant angle of wires you had like video game controllers in there and RCA cables and HDMI cables all this junk and it was so much so tangled you could barely figure out where one began and where one ended and what you even had in there that's kind of like where you start life it's all tangled up then you untangle untangle if you untangle correctly now of course if you do it incorrectly you could tangle it even worse but if you do it correctly you can untangle it and then all your chords will be completely laid out on the floor nicely you know separated and you know bow tied together with push ties and you'll know everything that there is you'll understand all the chords that's actually possible within philosophy that's the end point of philosophy when you do that with your own understanding of existence so there is such a point to reach the reaching of this point leads to the following things it's not just a scientific sort of understanding it's way more profound than that what happens is that you reach something called Awakening Awakening with a capital a you reach absolute truth truth with a capital T you reach what I call God realization you reach infinity you reach love you reach omniscience you reach infinite Consciousness you reach immortality you reach absolute perfection good and total clarity what I'm literally telling you is that if you do philosophy correctly you will become immortal you will become so conscious you will disentangle your mind so completely that you will transcend the possibility of physical death because you will deconstruct the very notion of physicality which turns out to be a construct of your mind I've done this a few other people on the planet have done this it's possible to do this but it's not easy to do this because everything in your mind is designed to keep you from realizing this truth this is not a theoretical abstract realization or truth like some theory of general relativity this is a live palpable life transforming event that will change your entire attitude towards life reality and other people and it will be the happiest day of your life so that is possible these are the stakes this is real this is not Theory also one point I should mention is that philosophy Beyond just that if that wasn't enough is also about the cultivation of your mind and your intellect see the mind and intelligence itself these are beautiful things our culture doesn't appreciate the beauty of the Mind the beauty of intellect and mind and intellect are so deep they can be cultivated so deeply there's almost no end to which you could cultivate your mind and your intellect most people's minds and intellects are completely underdeveloped and one of the greatest Joys that I get Beyond The Awakening and the immortality one of the greatest Joys that I get the fruits of all this work that I've done for decades is that I'm in love with my own mind and my own intelligence I've cultivated it for three decades to the point where my mind is like this beautiful exotic alien flower growing in some Garden perfectly manicured and and like it's just a beautiful thing to look at and I'm not saying that to brag or some sort of narcissistic way it's just that like I myself and am in awe at the intellect that I've been able to cultivate after three decades of near daily cultivation it's incredible I would have never have thought this was possible I sort of just kind of stumbled into it by accident but I'm telling you this so that you can do it deliberately see now you have no excuses you don't need to do it by accident you can cultivate it deliberately I got so much joy from that most of my joy in the in life comes from just dwelling within my own intellect it's better than sex it's better than making money I've had plenty of great sex I've I've made millions of dollars none of that compares to the to the Joy I get from Simply basking in my own intellect and that had to be cultivated okay now I'm going to tell you which philosophies are utterly a waste of your time meaning they're utterly wrong dualism atheism behaviorism materialism physicalism realism scientific materialism logical positivism empiricism rationalism libertarianism nihilism absurdism existentialism and reductionism it's a big list it's also going to be very controversial a lot of people will debate me on this um I'm not saying absolutely everything is wrong it's hard to find a philosophy or worldview where like literally everything about it is wrong that's pretty rare but for the most part these are wrong they're they're wrong in very fundamental ways is what I mean and then maybe they're right in minor ways now the question of should you become a professional philosopher Professor or academic I recommend you don't go into the university system you're not going to find truth in a university that's not what the university is designed for the university is designed for the survival of the University so if you love philosophy don't become a academic philosopher however if you want to develop a career of being a philosopher you can outside the university system like I have it won't be easy there's quite few slots available you know everyone can't become a a career philosopher but some of you can in order to do so you have to offer something unique something new to the field you can't just regurgitate what everybody else has said or what I have said you have to offer you know new insights um you earn philosophy as a philosopher generating new insights but you know there's so much to Consciousness and there's so much to spirituality and there's so much to philosophy that there's certainly opportunities out there for you if you're endeavoring enough it's not going to be easy but then again you know no career and no business is easy all of them are very competitive for the most part are you too young to start doing philosophy some people have asked me this question via email and comment and private message uh I don't think there's such a thing really I started questioning reality when I was a kid and certainly by my teenage years so the problem is not that you're too young the problem is probably that you're already too old too late now there's no such thing as too old but I mean like you've already you're already behind the curve if you're 15 years old you should have already been doing this for the last five years you missed five years you see so go ahead and get started if you're wondering well Leo am I too old for philosophy what if I'm 60 years old in a certain sense the older you get the more important philosophy gets because you know as you get older you have less gains you can have from sex and from materialistic Pursuits from money from career so you know as you approach your mortality and your death you're gonna have to face some deep some deep challenging questions about existence and you have more free time probably if you're older if you're near retirement age what else you got to do what else are you gonna do with your life you're gonna go chase girls you're gonna go chase money you're gonna go chase Fame probably not at your age uh philosophy might be one of the most worthwhile things you can do and eventually of what you want to get to is you want to you know don't waste time get real serious about it get very straightforward about it cut all the [ __ ] and eventually you know you want to transcend your own death that's the point and yes you can do that uh what are the downsides of doing philosophy the downsides are that you can turn philosophy into a farce where it just becomes like an echo chamber your mind becomes this massive Echo chamber and you just you know you feed all of your own ideas back to yourself and reinforce them and you construct some kind of ideology and you become some sort of ideological cult leader [Music] um or you just got so deluded by your philosophy that you think you have the truth that you know what the truth is but actually you haven't awoken and you can waste a lot of time doing that you can waste a lot of time reading content Hegel and Descartes and arguing and debating and and then doing this online you can start a YouTube channel where you debate and debunk people and and you know you [ __ ] on atheists or you [ __ ] on theists and then you [ __ ] on marxists and capitalism whatever you can do all that and this is just a this would be very counterproductive and then beyond just you doing that you're going to suck other people into your own toxic ideology so be careful of that and also you can neglect the survival aspects of your life relationships sex business art more practical stuff you know family life okay here's a quick list for how to get started with philosophy number one briefly study all the different philosophies that exist just in summary so you understand what's out there number two decide what kind of questions you're most interested in answering make a list number three start independent contemplation don't read sit down and actually contemplate number four observe your own mind at work and make observations and write down new insights about how your own mind is working number five be ruthlessly honest with yourself your own biases and your own deceptions that's it you can get started on philosophy today today is the best time to start pick one question that fascinates you the most out of all the ones that I've talked about sit down on a couch set a timer for an hour or two and just contemplate and have maybe a notebook with you so you can write down some notes but look even taking notes can be a distraction pure philosophy is not even you taking notes pure philosophy is you just sitting there with your eyes closed contemplating some deep question and then if an Insight arises you write it down and then you go back into your contemplation it's not just Mindless writing mindless writing is not proper contemplation you contemplate then you jot down the fruits of your contemplation then you stop writing and you contemplate again right so really judge yourself by the amount of time you spend focused in contemplation I recommend you start today lastly I'll say that philosophy requires integrity and embodiment it's not just enough enough to know a bunch of theory or facts or philosophies it's not enough to recite the things that I've told you philosophy must transform you I'm talking about doing philosophy at such a deep level that you cease to be human philosophy so deep that you transcend death that's true philosophy that's serious philosophy as opposed to all other kinds I want to recommend for you a couple more episodes if you enjoy this one a very important one and relevant one to you will be the episode called how to discover what's true where I guide you through an inquiry process make sure you watch that one also see my series called deconstructing the myth of science part one part two and part three this is some of the most serious philosophical work that I've published it's extremely profound it took me decades to achieve the insights that are present in that series it's really a uh historical work of philosophy it's for free you can find it on YouTube watch that that shows you the depth of philosophy that I do and also the depth of philosophy that you can do it'll also help you a lot to deconstruct many of the myths of this you know signs that have been programmed into your mind help you break free those and then um lastly I'm working on a new episode that's going to be talking about this concept called bootstrapping so remember this word bootstrapping because in the next few months I'm going to publish my bootstrapping episode which is going to be very relevant and sort of continue on and talk about you know fundamental aspects of philosophy and epistemology that you will be interested in here all right that's it I'm done here this was a long one a lot of material here um but this is like my favorite topic so I had to make it juicy come check out my website down below you'll find resources for philosophers there you'll find my blog which has tons of various philosophical insights and resources that I share almost on a daily basis these days I put so much effort into my blog you'd be a fool not to look at it it's all free you can find uh my book reviews on my website you can find the life purpose course I'm going to have future courses coming out soon I'm working on some profound courses that will be coming out in the next year subscribe to the newsletter stay tuned for those those will be through the website um come check out actualize.org the Forum on the Forum you can find like-minded people to have philosophical conversations with you can support me at patreon.com actualized with donations I thank you for those helps me to stay independent and uncorrupted by various kinds of corporate and academic forces and the last thing I'll say is this again I'm biased but I think that actualize.org is the deepest source of philosophy you'll ever find on this planet at this time maybe in the future there'll be something better but for now I don't think there's anything deeper than what I've created that was my goal from the outset hopefully you can appreciate that the majority of people who stumble upon actualize.org will not appreciate that because they're just stumbling around on the internet they're not serious philosophers hopefully a handful of you will understand what's here the value that is here you have to work this value you were lucky to find actualize.org but that doesn't mean you're done this is just the beginning now you have to actually work it work the things I talk about make it practical work it for a few decades and you'll see the amazing results you can get and how profound this work is you won't even appreciate the depth of my work until 10 years afterwards 10 years after doing it then you'll start to understand and my work is just getting started really I'm working on a new course a couple of new courses I'm working on a new book uh really a book which I intend to transform the world it's going to be one of the most important works of philosophy in the last thousand years will be my book I've been working on it for years now it's a it's a it's still going to take years to finish maybe five years from now maybe 10 years from now I don't know I have no time frame on it uh my goal is simply to create the most powerful work of philosophy that mankind has ever written that's that's my work with my goal with the book If I can't do that I won't even publish a book I'm not interested in just publishing some short fluffy self-help book this is going to be the deepest philosophy that there is and in my future upcoming course I'm going to be teaching some extremely Advanced spiritual stuff that is beyond anything that any spiritual teacher has ever taught you I'm going to talk about how to reach not just Awakening and not just God realization I'm going to introduce to you a whole new class of Awakening that I've discovered which is Awakening to alien intelligence that's going to be very unique as a teaching I have not seen anybody teaching this I'm not talking about contacting aliens I'm talking about jailbreaking your mind so profoundly that your own mind accesses alien consciousness so imagine for a second that one day mankind will come into contact with Advanced alien civilizations imagine how much more advanced those aliens will be in their Consciousness than a human it'll be like the difference between a mouse and a human will be the difference between a human and a one of these aliens but now imagine that you could access that alien mind now your own mind can turn into that alien mind imagine that that's even more amazing than talking to an alien I mean actually becoming that alien experiencing its mind and its consciousness how is that possible well that's what my course will help to explain that's the level that I've reached personally in my own work it's Way Beyond Awakening I've gone Way Beyond any kind of normal Awakening or Enlightenment I mean this is insane stuff that nobody else is going to teach you so I'm super excited for that I'm still researching this I'm in the early phases of developing this course but um if you want to go the deepest with me those of you who want to go the deepest with me this is what you're in for this is what you're going to stick around for this is what's going to really blow your mind so stay tuned that will come