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[Music] in this episode we're going to be discussing assumptions and the crucial role that they play within epistemology this is going to be a foundational epistemic episode i talk about epistemology a lot epistemology just basically means how do we know what we know it's the principles behind the gathering of accurate knowledge or understanding of reality and that's very important as you're trying to grow and develop yourself because if you don't have an accurate understanding of reality or you have various kinds of self-deceptions and epistemic errors within your worldview that's going to distort how you go about developing yourself and try to be successful in life and so a lot of the failures that come very practically in your life whether you're trying to start a business or you're trying to get romantic with somebody in a relationship or you're trying to educate yourself you're trying to do spirituality whatever you're trying to do that comes with hidden assumptions and epistemic errors and self-deceptions which then lead to lots of failure and misery and suffering so that's why this topic is so practical and important so assumption lies at the heart of all epistemic error self-deception and untruthfulness these are topics that i've covered a lot in the past go check out my three-part series called self-deception part one part two part three so this episode is going to connect with that and really with all my other epistemic episodes what i want to highlight here for you right off the bat is that there's a deep connection between survival and assumptions and in a certain sense we can boil all of the problems of epistemology and self-deception down to making assumptions and there's some deep reasons for why that connection exists make sure you go watch my previous episodes called understanding survival part one and part two i've talked about survival a lot and so now we're gonna be connecting survival with epistemology and with assumption making all right my notion remember my notion of survival is a much broader deeper notion than what most people mean when they say survival i don't just mean you gathering food and water i'm talking about pretty much all of the activity you do in your life i call that survival all right so look at how this works epistemically speaking you are born into a position of total ignorance that's where you begin life and you are a finite consciousness finite consciousness means that you don't have all the available information or understanding of the universe in other words you're not omniscient and you certainly weren't when you were born but because you consider yourself to be alive and you have a bias towards living that bias automatically puts you into a sort of existential bind where now you're committed to survival survival demands that you make choices and actions regardless of the fact that you don't have all the information and that you're in a position of deep ignorance life requires action survival requires action you don't have time to go and gather perfect information about any situation that's what makes life so challenging and at the same time interesting if you knew everything perfectly if you were omniscient action in all situations would be so easy that it wouldn't even be meaningful or interesting because you would know the the best possible action you could take but that's not how life is life is like it's like playing a game like an rts game with the fog of war there's this fog of war it's the fog of ignorance it's the fog of a lack of omniscience you don't see the entire map and that's actually what makes the game interesting because if you saw all the units on the map and you knew all the hit points and you knew all the resistance and you knew all the stats there would be nothing to discover you'd be omniscient you'd be god and then you'd be in god mode and in god mode there's no game to be played so survival means you must act or you die that's the position that you're put in when you're born therefore you must make assumptions to make sense of reality and to act within it because you need to figure out which way to act because there are thousands of different ways you could act in various situations and some of those can easily get you killed in fact probably the majority of ways you can act in a situation will get you killed and only a small select few actions will not get you killed or will get you actual success in that particular situation and will enhance your survival and maybe even lead to you thriving so see what happens because of this very fundamental existential sort of buying that we're putting in just by being the fact that we're born there's an upside and a downside to this the upside of making assumptions is that you gain short-term utility you make an assumption about a situation this pairs down the number of choices you have the human mind uses various kinds of heuristics tries to make sense of a situation tries to simplify a situation because most situations are pretty complex with hundreds of variables the human mind can't deal with all that information all those variables most of those variables are unknown or unpredictable and rather chaotic they don't follow simple linear logical rules it's kind of hairy and messy and fuzzy and so you just use a sort of a simplified model to make sense of something the upside of that is that you can take short-term action quickly the downside of that is that you sacrifice truthfulness there opens up a greater potential for epistemic error and so what you need to recognize that survival has forced you to make a sort of a devil's bargain of utility over truth and what is the truth well the truth is that you don't know not knowing is the real truth the reality is that 99.999 percent of the universe you don't know you only know a very tiny percentage of the universe and it's even worse than that because even that tiny percentage that you think you know even that you don't fully know a lot of that is wrong too you see and so if you were truly honest you would just admit in every situation that you're in that god i just don't know i don't know what the right course of action is i don't know what i should do but see you can't admit that because survival makes not knowing unacceptable from the point of view of survival not knowing is not an option if you don't know then you got to take a best guess but here's what happens is that here's the kicker is that the more utility that your assumptions have the less likely you are to question them down the road as time passes precisely because they're useful which gets you to rationalize to yourself that oh well if this assumption is useful and it works and i'm able to survive and even thrive by using this set of assumptions then what's the problem you see and so here your life becomes so utilitarian that you forget that there even is such a thing as truth leah why would truth even matter as long as i'm getting the utility i want out of my assumptions that's the trap here that most people fall into because the survival pressures on a human being are so strong that most of us barely make it by life we barely survive and even those people who are thriving you might say well but like celebrities and rich business people they're thriving they don't have this problem yes they do because even though some rich celebrity or whatever you might think that they're they're doing great they have no problems actually they have just as many problems as you even bigger problems and they're still struggling to survive as that celebrity or as that rich person you know a billionaire is struggling to survive as a billionaire every single day that's what poor people don't understand it takes a lot of energy to maintain your billionaire status and you have to worry about losing the money where are you going to put the money who's going to steal your money who's going to kidnap your children to ransom the money from you you know these are these are the kind of problems that billionaires think about in the morning um and so you're not out of survival just because you're a billionaire not at all and in fact the more successful you become the more of a celebrity you become the more fame you acquire the more material wealth you acquire the more money you have the more sex you're able to get through your various kinds of assumptions the more easy it will be for you to rationalize to yourself that there's no problem at all and that your assumptions are truth because leo if it wasn't true how could i have a billion dollars because of it if it wasn't true how come i'm getting laid so easily if it wasn't true how come you know i have a giant house and a fast car and i'm doing great for myself but maybe you're acquiring all those things so easily precisely because you're aligning yourself against the truth with falsehood see don't assume that success and truth are the same thing see already i'm pointing out one assumption to you this is actually sort of a meta assumption we'll get to that in a minute and i'm going to give you a very long list here of various kinds of assumptions that you should be thinking about so the reality is that you hold hundreds and thousands of assumptions and you use them every day just to function in your life these assumptions can be very ordinary simple assumptions or they can be rather abstract sorts of meta assumptions metaphysical assumptions we'll get into those as well those are really the interesting ones but even just the very practical ones are also important so this episode about assumptions it's not purely metaphysics here although we're going to get into that we're going to get into spirituality and issues of science and so forth but uh i want you to start to notice that just even even the simple act of walking into your house and flipping the light switch and expecting that light switch to turn on the lights that is an assumption you have you're assuming that flipping a switch is going to turn on the lights and um and you make hundreds and thousands of these assumptions every single day and while it works a lot of the time sometimes it doesn't work and sometimes it gets you into real trouble and sometimes it gets you really stuck in life it can get you stuck with your dating situation it can get you stuck with your marriage or your relationships it can get you stuck with your children raising your children it can get you stuck with your business with your health with your finances with investing we'll get into all those practical topics here soon so um and the other the other domain where this is so important is with science i've talked about this before in my series deconstructing the myth of science part one two three where we talk about various kinds of assumptions that science makes um and we'll be going over those here as well um but you see one of the biggest problems with science is precisely because it's so effective and it's got so much utility and yet it has so many assumptions that science has to make in order to attain that level of utility that once the utility is there and we can build amazing technology using that utility various kinds of models and theories and equations then it's very easy for scientists and the rest of our society to put science on a pedestal and to assume that science is equivalent to truth because hey if it wasn't true how can we build all this amazing technology using it therefore it's true right wrong of course and so the problem becomes that it becomes so useful that it's difficult to even get scientists or normies so to speak to start to question or even to care to question the foundations of science like leo why even bother questioning it it just works well as i've explained in that series deconstructing the myth of science there's very good reasons to question it because the bottom line is that any assumptions you hold which are false but which you think are true which get you utility and increase your survival there's going to be karmic consequences for that there's always karmic consequences for false understanding for false assumptions it leads to epistemic errors and these errors are not just within the domain of philosophy these errors will be felt in your life they will be felt they will affect your emotional system they will either make you depressed or angry or jealous or sad or suicidal they will affect your ability to construct a business to find meaning and love in your life to to do spiritual work and many other practical things like this your health for example you know a lot of people make assumptions about nutrition nutrition science tends to be very sketchy nutrition science is not very good science uh we still need hundreds of more years of science on nutrition to really get solid understanding of what is and isn't healthy for you and different people have different requirements for what uh what's healthy for them and not and so a lot of people get stuck in these sorts of fad diets they think that they're eating food that is actually healthy but it isn't very practical stuff so anyways in this way epistemic rot can lurk deep within any world view and of course i'm not picking on science here i mean religious people make a [ __ ] ton of assumptions which oftentimes end up being false so religion suffers from this problem too uh philosophers make a lot of assumptions as well when they're doing their philosophy which leads to bad philosophy and bad world views whether you're a nihilist or you're an existentialist or you're an atheist or you're a materialist or an idealist whatever philosophy you subscribe to uh for example within economics economists make all sorts of oversimplifications and assumptions about how people make purchasing decisions the way that the economy works and that's also very sketchy a sketchy sort of form of science you might almost call economics pseudoscience um because it's so so fuzzy and murky and there's a lot of assumptions that go into that and of course within politics there's a lot of assumptions within politics the definition of an assumption is quote a thing accepted as true without proof end quote so your life hinges on making high quality assumptions and a lot of assumptions go unquestioned simply because on the surface it just seems like they work and then questioning these assumptions seems like well it's just some sort of armchair theoretical philosophical pursuit that has nothing to do with improving the material quality of my life but notice that that itself is an assumption again that's a meta assumption we'll get into that in a minute now you might say okay leo so let me sort of swing the pendulum in the opposite direction like i was making a lot of assumptions in early in my life and now i'm gonna i'm gonna swing the opposite way i'm gonna be very very rigorous and make no assumptions at all and that will be how we solve this problem right well if you do that you'll be dead because you'll be stuck in paralysis see proof is a luxury that you don't have because you're an existential bind to survive survival cannot sit around waiting for proof if you're walking through the forest and you hear some growling loud animal noises coming from the bushes near you do you have time to stand there and say well that sounds like it might be a grizzly bear but you know i don't see it yet so that that's just an assumption it's a grizzly bear maybe it's just uh you know maybe some sort of innocent animal and uh and why don't i why don't i get the proof i'm not going to act on this information i'm just i'm going to wait for the proof well if you stand there and wait for the proof then the proof might be the grizzly bear uh cracking your skull open with its jaws that might be the proof and then it's too late see the reason that i often poke fun at and demean overly rational people as idiots is because in a sense they are idiots because what they fail to realize that survival trumps truth survival trumps rationality in fact survival has completely co-opted your reasoning process because if it didn't you'd be dead and you'd be very careful to distinguish between truth and rationality as it is co-opted for the purposes of your survival these are not the same thing at all and overly rational people tend to forget this distinction and therefore they can seem like they're very logical and rational people but there's a deep deep cognitive dissonance going on there because on the one hand they are very rational but on the other hand in practice what runs their life is their emotions the majority of the decisions that you make in your life that drive who you marry who you have sex with how you interact with your children what kind of career you get into what kind of food you eat and things like this very practical stuff this is not done through logic this is not done through proof this is not done through science any kind of scientific rigorous method this is mostly driven by your emotional system because your emotional system is the primary system it's faster than the rational system when the grizzly bear is growling at you through the bushes it's not your logic that saves you it's your emotional system you get a shot of adrenaline you feel fear you're terrified your body is shaking the hair on the back of your neck stands up and you're running milliseconds you know you're jumping milliseconds after hearing that growl you're already reacting and ready to run you can't react that quickly through logic and through reason if you're gonna sit there and rationalize and look for proofs and trying to be all scientific about this the grizzly bear is going to eat you so please understand the the seriousness of what we're talking about here we're not talking about philosophy we're talking about how you survive every single day this is one of my biggest criticisms of academic philosophy is that when philosophy is done academically in universities it's so detached from survival concerns that it becomes uh really delusional because there's there's a sort of fantasy that we can sit in our armchair and and just philosophize about what is the nature of the universe and where did it all come from and what is god and what is love and we can we can do this sort of stuff but you can't get answers to those questions from an armchair and most philosophers don't understand this and in fact one of the appeals of philosophy for very intellectual people is that it allows you to disconnect yourself from mundane everyday survival concerns it allows you to sit in that armchair and to just kind of speculate in the abstract about various kinds of highfalutin questions and thinking that you can arrive at the answers there's a double trap here the double trap is that many scientifically people scientifically minded people will say well yeah leo that's all metaphysical stuff and that's why we don't like philosophy as scientists as hard no scientists we don't like philosophy because it's all just a bunch of abstractions and who really knows it's it's it's uh it's not empirical and you can just do a lot of [ __ ] basically and come up with all sorts of conclusions and and we don't like that we want something more practical and more grounded so that's sort of the scientific perspective um that's a trap actually because see there you're assuming that the answers can't be reached that there are no actual answers there are answers the problem is that you can't reach the answers by sitting in an armchair you have to actually put your own survival on the line to answer some of these deep questions and so the fundamental problem is that people go into philosophy or into spirituality thinking that oh well leo's talking about stuff like love and god sometimes and about spirit and about consciousness these all sound like kind of like interesting cool abstract concepts i kind of like how it all you know comes together and it makes sense to me like yeah that's all like interesting it's all just purely conceptual for you and then you actually maybe try a psychedelic or you go to do a 10-day meditation retreat you actually do some serious spiritual work or some serious deep contemplation and then maybe you discover you know some sort of truth like self equals other or oneness or infinite love or god or whatever you actually come face to face with it experientially and then and then you're like holy [ __ ] my entire life is threatened by this exactly that's why that's why these things that i talk about are not generally talked about within academic philosophy because the whole point of academic philosophy is that the ego has sort of compartmentalized all the philosophy all the theory away from one's actual survival and once you've made that partition you're never gonna really reach the truth because the truth must require you to face your own death for very profound reasons because death isn't true for that go see my episode what is death i will get into that here so basically it's assumptions that get you into epistemic trouble and it's not so obvious how we get ourselves out of this trouble because you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't make assumptions you can't really navigate life without making assumptions and yet by making assumptions you open yourself up to a lot of self-deception so fundamentally really try to ask yourself this question fundamentally why are assumptions necessary think about that contemplate that here's my answer because reality is infinite and yet your mind your human mind is finite and so basically you need to make assumptions because you're not omniscient and because you have a bias towards survival if you were omniscient or you didn't care about survival you would need to make assumptions and by the way that is possible it is both possible for you to be omniscient it's also possible for you to not care about survival but understand what that means that that's a very radical thing don't take those two possibilities lightly uh if you became completely omniscient your life would be over just understand that there would be no more there would be nothing left for you to care about or just to try to survive right because you would be so conscious that the idea of death itself would be laughable to you you would be too conscious to believe that death is real and um and if you didn't care about survival then you'd be dead and then you couldn't be sitting here um i mean what i mean by that is just let me be clear um because i just said that the death doesn't exist now i'm saying that you'd be dead leo how do you reconcile that what i mean by you'd be dead is that this human body would be would expire and i mean the ultimate you never dies but the human body would be dead this experience of life this dream that you're in right now would be would be over so um then you couldn't be sitting here like a human trying to figure out your life because there would not be a human life there anymore but anyways i don't want to get too deeply into that i've covered those issues elsewhere that's some very deep spiritual truths there um let's get back to the more ordinary stuff so notice that you actually you can't do science physics or mathematics without assumptions impossible try to ask yourself why why are assumptions so fundamental to science of course you should also ask and deeply contemplate what are the assumptions of science that's one of the most important questions that if you're serious about science or you fancy yourself a scientist you can spend the next 20 years contemplating every single day the question what are the assumptions of science or what are the assumptions of your specific field of science if you're a biologist if you're a chemist if you're a physicist if you're a whatever an economist or something or a psychologist ask yourself like what are the assumptions of psychology what are the assumptions of my field what are the assumptions of my subfield what is what do all of my colleagues assume and keep questioning that and questioning that deeper and deeper and deeper and if you want to do the most groundbreaking scientific research this is what this is what you need to do this is how you win nobel prizes i want you to actually not just listen to me talking about this conceptually but i want you to actually try to experiment a little bit with how assumptions work in your psyche try to make sense of anything in reality without using assumptions and see if that's possible try it like try to start a business without making any assumptions try to do history without making any assumptions try to go on a date or to do a romantic relationship with any assumptions about your partner see if you can do that see how far you can get actually do it try living your ordinary life without assumptions try going to the grocery store without assumptions try ordering food at the restaurant without assumptions try buying a car without assumptions see how far you can get and as you're doing that be mindful introspective see my episode developing introspection use that introspection self-reflection capacity to notice what kind of assumptions you are making in these situations and why you're making those assumptions and what would happen if you weren't making those assumptions how would that affect your ability to survive in that situation for example you're gonna go buy a used car at the used car dealership in your town okay well you're going in there what kind of assumptions are you making about the dealership the car the salesperson and what would happen if you didn't make those assumptions would you buy a better car or a worse car would you gain money or would you lose money would you be happier or would you increase your suffering try it and see see what happens see how far you can get start with little things right i don't want you to lose a bunch of money buying a used car i mean try it with little things and just see um see what comes up for you it's like an experiment and this is really how you do philosophy you don't just sit in an armchair you have to actually like do it in your everyday life connect your philosophy with your survival that's when things get really interesting most people don't realize how deep assumptions go good epistemology metaphysics philosophy science and spirituality is all about questioning and unearthing hidden assumptions these assumptions are usually part of a sort of a uh epistemic background that colors and informs and is the context of your thinking about any situation and this this epistemic background comes from your culture and the society that you grew up in you pick it up through osmosis so to speak so the key takeaway from this episode just very if you want to boil it down to something very practical is identify and question all assumptions ruthlessly in whatever situation you're in whatever you're doing this is the one key towards reaching the truth question all assumptions but see it's easy for me to say that and you might say well yeah duh of course that sounds so obvious it is obvious the problem is that you're not doing it and the problem is that it's difficult to teach people how to actually question and unearth these hidden assumptions it's difficult to unearth our assumptions because they're largely unconscious implicit hidden and unspoken and because questioning them oftentimes is emotionally disturbing because we've built our survival and our life like a house of cards on a foundation of bad assumptions but they were useful and they were practical and they were utilitarian so we just sort of ignored the fact that they're not really true and we ignored the fact that we didn't really question them very deeply because they just sort of worked and that's all we cared about and so now to go back and start to question assumptions that you made 10 20 30 40 50 years ago at the formation of your early psyche when you were a child or a teenager or a young adult to question those things this is deeply emotionally disturbing and it's not just disturbing for emotional people it's disturbing for rational people it's disturbing for scientists for mathematicians for physicists who have built their careers on various kinds of assumptions and these assumptions sometimes are so simple and they are so obviously wrong and so obviously idiotic that it can almost feel like you know you feel embarrassed to even admit that you subscribed to this assumption and were unable to notice this assumption for 30 or 40 years of your life and that you actually built an entire career upon it like maybe you became a doctor based upon the assumption that one the health care system actually improves the health of of people and actually cares about their health and two that as a doctor you would have a sort of a prestige and success and material wealth that would make you happy maybe those were two assumptions that you assumed when you decided when you were in your let's say uh late teen age years in high school that you're gonna become a doctor and then you worked really hard for the next 10 years and you became a doctor and now you're really invested in it you got a bunch of student loans so you got to pay off you know 100 000 of student loans or even more um and but those two assumptions those are two false assumptions it might take you 20 30 years to realize that those two assumptions are false and then when you do um that's gonna be that's gonna sting you emotionally see that's not that's not just a philosophical that's not a philosophical matter this is gonna threaten your whole career it's gonna maybe threaten your marriage it's gonna threaten your financial situation it's gonna leave you in a existential funk or crisis you're not gonna know what what career should you take and how will you transition to that new career you gotta get retrained re-educated how are you going to pay off your loan like you see so the majority of doctors who operate let's say on these two assumptions i'm not saying all doctors do i mean i'm sure some doctors love what they do that's just one example um but if you became a doctor based on these two false assumptions are you going to be incentivized to really deeply introspect and become aware of these two assumptions because see these two assumptions are rather implicit if you don't sit down and and deliberately question them you'll probably never realize they were assumptions and your culture and your society will mislead you and gaslight you because your culture tells you oh being a doctor so prestigious maybe for example when you're you know socializing and you tell women that you're a doctor if you're a man maybe they start to like you know get more attracted to you because oh you're a doctor that's you know that's much better than dating some guy who works at starbucks and so maybe you even get sex from that so are you gonna are you as long as you're getting nice sex um from this you know prestige that you have are you gonna are you gonna question these assumptions no of course not you have too much to lose same so a lot of times there are these kind of perverse incentives and that's because precisely because we're using these various kinds of false assumptions to construct a life and the life that we're constructing is a house of cards and a lot of times what we're doing is that we're collectively we're not just doing this individually we're doing it collectively see when you become a doctor you don't just become a doctor by yourself you're doing it as part of a culture your culture puts certain value and prestige and status on the fact that you're a doctor you get a certain title um you get a certain credential and you get certain privileges and people look up to you and maybe more people have sex with you and they give you more money and blah blah blah blah you can charge more per hour and um and see all these are these create a sort of perverse incentive when you have all these goodies that you get from that you stop caring about the truth you forget about the fact that you've built a house of cards and that your house of cards your whole life is very fragile and then you actually become sort of defensive about it too and then what can happen is that you actually you can start to feel bad about your life but then you won't even understand where your bad feelings are coming from for example you might be a doctor a successful doctor but you're depressed why are you depressed well you're depressed because let's say i mean there's many reasons you could be depressed but in this case for the purpose of this example one reason might be that you wanted to become a doctor originally because you really wanted to help people but then when you became a doctor you realize that the healthcare industry is not so much about helping people it's more about charging people and um it's not about really looking out for their holistic well-being it's about fixing some very narrow problem that they have and then they can be sick in many other ways and like helping the richest rather than helping the ones who need it the most and maybe that doesn't sit well with you because you just assumed that by becoming a doctor you would be helping the ones who need it the most and you would actually be looking out for their overall health and well-being and then you discover that's not the case within much of the healthcare industry in the west um and then that might make you depressed but then see you might be depressed but then you won't even be honest with yourself about where the depression is coming from you might miss attribute it to something else because to properly understand its source you would have to look at these assumptions and then admit that you've been building this house of cards on a false foundation and maybe you're depressed because of the second assumption you believe that having the status and the and the material wealth that that being a doctor would give you that this would make you happy and fulfilled in life but you realize that that's not how happiness works so you had you had a false assumption about human psychology and about happiness really and that's very difficult to admit because again you might be depressed and you might not know well why am i depressed i have a house i have a nice wife i got children i have all the material good i a fast sports car and i'm still not happy we'll see you have to go back like 30 years into your past to realize oh i made a bad assumption about how human psychology and happiness works and and the role that material possessions fit play into that but then why did i spend 30 years working so hard to acquire all these material things if they don't make me happy right you see leads to an existential crisis then you have to re-evaluate your whole like decision-making paradigm and your whole value structure and then you have to ask yourself well so then how do i become happy and then you might say well maybe i need to go meditate maybe i need to quit work and go live in a cave or something for a year and it's like well but if i do that then i'm going to lose my wife i'm going to lose my house i'm going to lose my my sports car and then what you see these are the sort of traps we get ourselves into so anyways back to science science is full of unquestioned metaphysical and epistemic assumptions i've talked about this many times before as i've railed against science um the limits of science so unearthing these assumptions is crucial for good science and yet most scientists poo poo epistemology and metaphysics and philosophy so they're never able to question their assumptions deeply enough and this creates bad science this creates paradigm lock see my older episode called um how paradigms work i believe that's what it's called where i talk about paradigm log see fundamentally the the trouble here is that questioning assumptions requires selflessness of course why well if you watched my previous content you should know that there's deep there's a deep relationship between selflessness and truth because the truth is that there is no self and so one of the deepest assumptions you have metaphysical assumptions is that you assume that there is a self and you don't want to question that assumption that assumption turned out to be false and that's the whole point of spirituality is to question that one uh mother of all assumptions so the mother the mother of all fuck-ups is assuming that there's a there's there's a fight itself so also you know we're tying a lot of episodes together here a lot of concepts together that i've talked about previously we're going to talk about now self bias see my episodes on self bias so self bias and attachment will prevent you from questioning the deepest and most important assumptions why because your finite sense of self the human biographical self that you have is made up of out of a bunch of very deep metaphysical assumptions that if they are questioned the self will unravel and collapse your your your ego mind will collapse and all the stuff that you're attached to all of that will collapse it will be very threatening to you and it'll feel like your whole life has imploded and so most people spend their lives avoiding actively avoiding this kind of self-reflection to to prevent the collapse of their finite sense of self and so in a sense they're they're actively running around avoiding spirituality that's the that's the trick it's not that they're not doing spirituality they're they're actively anti-spiritual so i recognize the importance of questioning assumptions really early in my life when i was like age 15 and i started doing philosophy i just saw that a lot of science a lot of religion was filled with with assumptions and i didn't see that these assumptions were grounded or well justified in anything and this made me very suspicious first of religion and then of science see it's it's much easier to see the false assumptions of religion it's harder to see the assumptions of science that takes more intelligence that takes a deeper level of contemplation and it takes a real um sort of a lack of self-bias a real neutrality because culture imprints you with the idea that science is neutral and objective but that itself is just an assumption and so basically all of my epistemic work and i think the power of my teachings stems ultimately from the fact that i was very serious early on in my life about questioning assumptions i took that seriously i saw it as important i didn't take it for granted and so i want to impart that attitude upon you in this episode so that you don't take it for granted and then you can get the the sort of fruits of decades of questioning assumptions in your life that's basically what the last few decades of my life have been and i see that for most people it isn't like that and i can see that they suffer as a result of that they're not able to get to that deep level of understanding that i know is possible from having questioned assumptions for for a few decades and the earlier you begin this process the better because when your mind is still young it's more fluid and flexible once your mind gets older it gets more rigid and those assumptions get so deeply baked into your mind that they can become virtually impossible to see all right so here are some domains within which you should start to question assumptions science atheism rationality relationships dating family socializing and attraction politics economics investing health and nutrition and fitness about yourself your self-image your self-beliefs your victim mindset all the ways you think of yourself there are a lot of assumptions you have about yourself that create a lot of suffering for you there for example you might assume that you're not an attractive person you might assume that you're too short you might assume that you're too shy you might assume you have bad genetics you might assume that you're not good at business you might assume that you're not an artistic person you're not a disciplined person things like this you've got to be really careful with those uh another domain is philosophy within philosophy you got a question all assumptions basically any philosopher that you read as you're reading that philosopher you should just be like keeping a mental list of every assumption that this philosopher makes about reality and you'll quickly be able to deconstruct uh any philosophical system in this way and then and then you don't get trapped into it you see the way you get trapped in some kind of worldview or ideology or paradigm or philosophy or even into science is by just swallowing it wholesale and not questioning its assumptions and and really you're not seeing its assumptions that's the problem you're not conscious of the assumptions so whether it's christianity or hinduism or buddhism or existentialism or nihilism or materialism or idealism they all have assumptions you need to become conscious of what those assumptions are science also has many assumptions as we've said within religion spirituality and the new age there are many assumptions too that you have to question so not just organized religion yeah of course there's a lot of assumptions in catholicism that you got a question or an islam but also there's a lot of sort of new agey cult-like sort of woo spiritual teachings these days that you could find online even non-dual teachings and teachers they make assumptions too you got to question those because again see people people sort of like bounce from one thing to another thing they're sort of reactive it's like well orthodox religion is full of assumptions and [ __ ] and then you might even say well even materialist science is full of assumptions and [ __ ] and then you might say even the new age is full of assumptions and [ __ ] but then non-duality ah leo i've discovered non-duality and and advaita and there now there's no assumptions no there's many assumptions there there are many many many many assumptions that your favorite non-dual teachers make so be careful you have to question those uh the the other domain is business career and uh and when it comes to money a lot of assumptions go into that and in the personal development field in the self-help field there's also a lot of assumptions that are made there's also cultural assumptions so there's assumptions that you personally make in your life and then there's assumptions that your culture feeds you this is like the collective ego go see my episode about about collective ego it's one of my best episodes so um assumptions are baked into your culture and absorbed by osmosis imprinting indoctrination i've talked about that before whatever your tribe or group or culture assumes and takes for granted you will tend to assume it and take it for granted too you will take it as reality and it's very difficult to question that which you hold as physical reality because part of your notion of physical reality is that it's real and therefore it can't be questioned it can't be changed but that begs the question because how do you know it's real to begin with so you assumed it was real you assumed it was physical but what if it isn't this is the trap that many materials fall into so there are many cultural assumptions that you adopt when it comes to domains like religion business science philosophy art morality sexuality nutrition relationships many of the things you believe about these different domains are assumptions that you never questioned that you absorbed from your culture so now we're going to start to move into a list i'm going to give you a large list of various kinds of assumptions mundane assumptions metaphysical assumptions and so forth that you should be thinking about this will just start to get your mind jogging in the right direction i will point out assumptions that you hold which you should question uh of course the hard part is just seeing the assumption and then articulating the assumption that requires some contemplative work you have to figure out how to articulate it the mind is very sneaky and it can take you years just to articulate a simple assumption that you hold that you held your whole life yet the beauty of assumptions that they tend to be fairly simple one statement sorry one line statements and so when you discover it and articulate it as a single sentence short statement it can be very clear and powerful and then you can once you identify the assumption then you can sort of step outside of the assumption and you're no longer swimming in it so to speak like a fish in water not seeing the water so for example here's here's some assumptions to get us rolling uh the twisting of a door knob will open the door that's an assumption you have and notice sometimes that assumption is subverted sometimes you will twist a doorknob and the door won't open and you'll be puzzled and surprised and that's exactly what happens when one of your assumptions is subverted is that you get surprised you get a little mind [ __ ] moment now how big the mind [ __ ] is it can be small if it's something trivial and mundane like a doorknob or it can be something very significant and profound which we'll get to later in this list when it's something deep and metaphysical like you know the idea that there is no self no finite self for example also like the assumption that the clock that you're looking at is showing the correct time you assume that when you look at a clock the assumption that the person you're texting is still alive why would you text somebody unless you assumed they were alive but maybe they died since the last time you texted you don't know you assumed they didn't but imagine imagine that you're texting your friend and then your your friend is responding and then and then your friend stops responding for a few days and you start to wonder like what happened did i say something wrong is he mad at me is he busy and then a week passes and now you're gonna start to get worried and then you get a phone call telling you that your friend is dead you're gonna be very surprised aren't you because you were assuming that he's alive and do you see in this example how problematic it would be if you kept living your life under the assumption that he's alive when he's actually dead can you see can you see the problem there because i feel like there's a tendency for people to say well leo assumptions they're what's the big deal about assumptions but notice imagine that you assumed your friend was alive yet he was dead for an entire year and you weren't informed about it and you kept living your life and making plans as though your friend is alive you kept planning vacations together and you kept thinking about him and talking to him in your head and all this sorts of stuff you see so there is a cost to pay when your mental models of reality diverge more and more from truth how about the assumption that the person that you're talking to understood your communication this is a very practical one usually when we're speaking to somebody we assume they understood us but a lot of times what they understood is different than what we were trying to get them to understand and we only find this out much much much much later at great cost for example maybe i'm hiring an employee so you know we do an interview i communicate certain job requirements and expectations that i have for him working for me and then it seems like he understands and that we're on the same page you know you got to show up on time here are your hours your shop you're coming nine to five five days a week monday through friday and all these other sorts of standard things and it seems like we understood each other you're going to be getting your paycheck you know every two weeks and blah blah blah but then you know a month passes or so and then the employee does something horrible that hurts my business and then i ask him you know why'd you do that and then we find out that oh he didn't understand some some principle a rule that i said that he was supposed to be following he didn't understand it correctly i thought he understood it but he didn't understand it and now it comes back to bite me in the ass hurts my business see uh clear communication is a huge topic i'm gonna do a whole series on conscious communication because it's very important um that's for another another day um here's an assumption that the person you're dealing with is honest usually you assume that but that's not always the case and that can lead to huge huge practical consequences can destroy your entire life if you make this mistake with the wrong person in the wrong situation the assumption that you took your wallet with you when you left the house the assumption that you don't have cancer right now the assumption that the product you purchased isn't defective the assumption that things will go according to plan the assumption that the future will be like the past that the sun will rise tomorrow that winter will end the assumption that there won't be a mass shooting at your child's school the assumption when you get on a plane that your plane won't crash the assumption that whatever you're investing in will pay off the assumption that your business plan will work out the assumption that you'll be able to get clients through this method here the assumption that you will hate this food that you've never tried before like maybe you've never eaten pig intestines because you assume you would hate it but is that true the assumption that you will hate some activity maybe you've never tried anal sex you've never tried let's say anal sex because you assume you wouldn't enjoy it but what if you would the assumption that the news you read is accurate and doesn't withhold certain information or isn't biased or distorted the assumption that the waiter didn't spit in your food the assumption that you're going to close the deal or the sale that's a huge one when i was in a different line of work in a different business that i used to run i had an online business before actualize.org it involved more sales and sort of deals and partnerships that i you know did with with big clients and companies and um and in those cases a lot of times you know i would expect a business deal to go through and then it doesn't go through and it can be very disappointing when that happens or the deal you know there's some snag in the deal there's some assumption that i made about the deal but then like the price or the terms of the time frame and then it turns out those assumptions were wrong and that can really hurt you in business so part of becoming good at business for example is getting really good and clear about the communications and the assumptions that go into all the business deals all the marketing strategies all the product development plans that sort of stuff if you're bad at that you're going to be bad at business and you're going to go bankrupt real quick the assumptions that your parents are your actual biological parents the assumption that you're going to live beyond tomorrow a lot of people take that for granted um see no notice notice that most the time you go through life just expecting tomorrow to be to be there for you but what if you knew that tomorrow wasn't going to be there how would that change your life the assumption that eating fat makes you fat what if eating sugar makes you more fat than eating fat makes you fat that's a little counterintuitive there the assumption that this person you're sleeping with is not going to give you an std the assumption that your pregnancy will be a single baby and not twins or triplets and therefore you're gonna have twice the cost imagine you plan for a baby and you're like okay you know i've put all my finances together i have enough for for you know for this baby that we're gonna have and then you have a triplets now you have three babies you need three times the money for the clothes for the food for the bedrooms for them for college that's a rather rude awakening there the assumption that your insurance will cover your loss you assume that when you total your car or there's a fire in your house that your insurance will cover it but what if there's some sort of you know niggly legal detail in the contract that allows the insurance company not to pay you the assumption that the cashier charged you accurately when you're buying your groceries or whatever the assumption that the police will treat you fairly the assumption that that the things your professors taught you in university were true the assumption that the history you learned in school was accurate the assumption that the things you're reading in this book that you're reading right now are true the assumption that x will make you happy whatever that x is it could be money it could be a car it could be a house it could be sex it could be drugs the assumption that your appointment will show up on time the assumption that you're too short or too ugly as a guy to attract a hot girl a lot of guys hold this assumption also these sorts of guys tend to hold the assumption that girls are [ __ ] who will cheat on you uh how about this one this one's also a painful one the assumption that if a girl gives you her phone number when you flirt with her after you flip over there that she will respond to your texts and actually want to go on a date with you oh man if you hold this assumption you're in for a rude awakening uh the assumption that rich and successful people are happy the assumption that people are equal the assumption that all people want democracy the assumption that corruption is bad see people don't assume that corruption is bad but for the people who are corrupt corruption is not bad for them corruption is good that's why corruption exists if corruption was universally bad there would be no corruption how about the assumption that climate change is a bad thing again if climate change was a universal bad thing it would not exist or let's say pollution for example um the reason pollution exists is because it's a good thing for many people many people profit off of pollution in fact you profit off pollution because you know your car pollutes if you have a car and uh but you you you don't care you still drive your car even though it pollutes why because it benefits you for you literally that pollution is a good thing if if pollution was bad for you you would stop driving your car but you don't the assumption that owning a gun will make you safer actually the statistics show that if you have a gun you're in more danger than if you don't because of the high likelihood of a misfire or using that gun for suicide or some children getting their hands on that gun how about the assumption that the the food you eat is healthy you think it's healthy but is it really healthy how would you know the assumption that whatever ex scientific study is accurate a lot of times you read cnn or some sort of mainstream news site and they oftentimes publish you know some new trendy study that came out you know some new studies shows you that avocados are good for your heart some new study shows you that coffee is causes cancer some new study shows that drinking glass of wine per day will you know improve your chances of not getting all timers or whatever um and you just read these studies and you kind of just take them at face value but then a lot of times these studies are contradicted by future studies five years later and usually you just assume that these studies are true actually like some crazy number like 40 or even 50 percent of all scientific studies that are that are published they've actually done sort of meta meta meta studies on the studies going back in time and they discovered like 40 or 50 of those studies um are eventually invalidated and they can't be replicated which means it's [ __ ] science up to 50 percent think about that and you put so much stock into science the assumption that your doctor knows what he's talking about when he's giving you advice i've had a lot of doctors give me horrible advice just awful advice but if you're naive you can go into a doctor and just think that your doctor knows everything a lot of times you can you can learn more about your condition or your disease or your a element just by doing five hours of research online you can find out more accurate information than you will by paying 200 to go see a doctor the assumption that christ was a real person see if you're a christian it never even occurs to you to question that assumption you just assume it but you don't really know that jesus was a real person and moreover you don't want to seriously question that assumption you don't even want to acknowledge that it's an assumption because as soon as you acknowledge that christ being a real person is just an assumption as soon as you admit that i mean this undermines the entire house of cards uh house of cards of of what you know we would call christianity that might be the foundation of your whole life and so your mind will rationalize to you like oh well no i can't admit that jesus christ was an assumption i can't admit that that would be a sin to admit that you see so the way that a paradigm log happens again go see my episode about how paradigms work the way paradigm lock happens is that your world view has a mechanism in there that demonizes the questioning of the worldview right so in the christian worldview it's like a hermetically sealed bubble it maintains its integrity and it survives in the world you survive uh by demonizing calling out the assumptions of the worldview by the way science does this too in in its own way so watch out you know uh a christian cannot admit that christ might be an assumption well it's not that it might be it is an assumption the fact that christ was a real person is an assumption because you have no direct experience of christ so it is an assumption you hold that this was a real person um and just to admit that to yourself for most christians that's beyond the pale to them that they would consider that a sin you're supposed to have faith but it's not true the truth is that it's an assumption now maybe he was a real person but you are assuming that the assumption that your food isn't poisonous you make that assumption every single time you eat and notice you don't even think about it so here's the real trick and devil of the assumption game is that these assumptions are so buried think about when you sit down to eat a meal how many assumptions are buried that you never even think about that never even cross your mind until just now i'm bringing it up to you like you're assuming nobody's spat in your food you're assuming there's no salmonella in your food you're assuming there's no poison in your food you're assuming your food is cooked properly you're assuming that this food is healthy for you like there's probably a thousand assumptions that go into just eating a single plate of food and if you sat there questioning all these assumptions you would starve to death that's my point and yet one of these assumptions if you get it wrong it can kill you you see how tricky this is your assumption that your boyfriend or girlfriend isn't cheating on you the assumption that male and female are biological objective facts your assumption that your body is your property a lot of libertarians make this assumption your assumption that you have certain inalienable rights this is some [ __ ] that was invented in the us constitution there's no such thing as inalienable rights human rights are a complete fiction there's no such thing as human rights but people just assume it again because you know we're taught in school that if you're an american that you have the constitution guarantees you certain inalienable rights and blah blah blah i mean it's just pure [ __ ] fantasy it's just an assumption uh your assumption that your religion is true notice that that's a meta assumption you assume that um or conversely if you're an atheist your assumption that all religion is [ __ ] in superstition that's also just an assumption you hold and it's it's also not true uh your assumption that ufos are a hoax the assumption that you are human and yes that is an assumption you actually assume that you're human your assumption that you were born and that you will die yes those are assumptions your assumption that the world existed before you were born yes that is an assumption your assumption that other people exist or have subjective experience outside of you yes that's an assumption too the assumption that there's anything outside of consciousness or perception that's an assumption the assumption of object permanence when you're not looking at the moon yet you assume the moon exists that's an assumption the assumption that psychedelics are a hallucination in the brain that's an assumption the assumption that you can handle a double dose of psychedelic that one can get you in a lot of trouble the assumption that psychedelics will affect your friend in the same way they affect you watch out for that one a lot of people get themselves or their friends in trouble this in this way like you know well leo i took two tabs of lsd and for me it was fine i i was fine and then i gave my friend two tabs of lsd two because we were tripping together and he had a complete freak out and meltdown yeah because you assumed that your friend has the same tolerance level as you and it turns out that your friend is twice as sensitive as you so in effect what you thought were two tabs turned out to be four tabs for him oops the assumption that the mind or consciousness is produced by the brain this is a really problematic assumption for scientists and materialists and neuroscientists the assumption that nothing can move faster than the speed of light the assumption that time and space are absolute the assumption that philosophy is a waste of time the assumption that iq measures intelligence accurately the assumption that expertx whatever the expert name is expert's name is is correct about something you know a lot of times we look up to experts on tv on youtube or public speakers we just assume that they're experts and that they know the answer some doctor some lawyer some military person some government person we assume that they're an expert therefore they must be correct but experts are all often wrong the assumption that you only have one life that's an assumption the assumption that evil exists the assumption that slavery is objectively wrong that's an assumption the assumption that terrorists are acting from bad intentions that's an assumption you make the assumption that physical reality is not a dream that's something you assume most people do at least the assumption that pain and suffering prove that something is real it shocks me on this point how gullible people are a lot of times people try to refute certain arguments that i make by saying that oh leo but you know if we cut off your hand or we we shoot you in the leg and you know you're going to experience suffering and pain and then all of your philosophy will fly out the window and it will get disproven love and god and all the truth it'll all get disproven no nothing is disproven with pain and suffering pain and suffering does not prove the reality of absolutely anything in a dream you can experience extreme pain and suffering that doesn't make the dream real you're just assuming that the assumption that truth can be proven and validated and falsified this is a silly assumption that a lot of scientific people make uh scientifically-minded people make the assumption that the paranormal is uh subject to scientific method see scientists just assume that oh well if it's paranormal i can use a scientific method on it and prove it no why would you assume that i mean maybe that maybe you could for certain paranormal things but for other paranormal things maybe you can't do that the assumption that university or academia is interested in truth-seeking and that that is what it's about see you just to assume that if you're going to university and being an academic that well i'm a truth seeker no you're not that's not primarily what university is about the assumption that a phd means someone is smart and knows the truth no you can have five phds and still not know the truth the assumption that if the truth were known it could be taught to you it could be communicated to you but what if truth is such a thing that it can't be communicated why are you assuming that it could the assumption that science is the best epistemic method a lot of people make this assumption but notice that's just an assumption the assumption that science is willing to correct itself a lot of people make this assumption but oftentimes science is not willing to correct itself science can be very stubborn in maintaining its dogmas and errors the assumption that everything real and true can be proven with science again this is a huge assumption of science which isn't true the assumption that everything real and true is logical and rational this is another one that we've talked about in the past it's not true the assumption that science is true because it works the assumption that direct experience to absolute truth is impossible the assumption that no one has answered the deepest existential questions of life because they can't be answered for example a lot of people assume that it's impossible to answer definitively and absolutely the question of why is there something rather than nothing why does the universe exist you can absolutely answer this question but most people assume you can't the assumption that a scientific method exists there's no such thing as a scientific method that never was this is just a myth of culture the assumption that reality is mathematical the assumption that reality is run by cause and effect the assumption that reality is a simulation the assumption that there is a veil of perception which means that you assume that there's there's a there's some sort of veil between the perceptions you have and the truth most scientists make this mistake this assumption the assumption that rocks don't have consciousness the assumption that there's a difference between reality and fantasy the assumption that science is superior to religion the assumption that reality is finite or limited the assumption that love is just a human emotion the assumption that god does not exist or the assumption that god does exist you can make the assumption in both directions on that one the assumption that god exists but is other than you is not you that's an assumption that most religious people make uh the assumption that the bible of the quran is true or false you could assume both in both directions and you'd be wrong uh the assumption that your guru isn't misleading you a lot of spiritual and new age people make this mistake is it they just assumed that well i found my guru and my guru can't mislead me oh boy you're in for a rude awakening if you assume that the assumption that an enlightened master can't sexually abuse you oh boy watch out for that one especially you ladies watch out for that one uh the assumption that an enlightened master cannot be wrong again same situation the assumption that meditation will get you to the highest levels of consciousness and awakening a lot of spiritual people make that assumption the assumption that meditation is equally effective for everybody that's a that's a really problematic assumption that i see very commonly in in non-dual circles in meditative circles the assumption that solipsism can't can't be true the assumption that modern man is more advanced than man was in the past i mean mankind the assumption that people inhabit the same reality like we just tend to assume that you know i have a reality and you have your reality and there's the same reality but what if my reality is different than your reality the assumption that science and mathematics are objective the assumption that there's a difference between mind and body there's an assumption that any finite method can capture reality all of reality the assumption that you've reached the highest level of awakening watch out for that one i've spoken many times about deeper levels of awakening and the traps that come with getting stuck on the lower levels and assuming that you're done when you're not the assumption that there is some objective way that reality is at all that's a very deep one the assumption that academics understand more than mystics the assumption that reality must be non-mystical the assumption that eventually science will demystify all of reality but you see how would you know whether science can demystify all of reality you're just begging the question there you're assuming reality can be demystified in its total you know ultimately in its totality because you're assuming reality must be non-mystical but what if reality is mystical then you can't demystify it the assumption that reality is quantifiable this is a huge limitation of science is that if you can't quantify they basically consider it unreal but what if there are real things which can't be quantified in fact what if most things in the universe can't be quantified well that's a big problem for you mathematicians and scientists um the assumption that scientific method applies to consciousness what if it doesn't what if consciousness is prior to scientific method after all scientific method is a part of consciousness consciousness is not a part of scientific method you got that backwards the assumption that reality cannot be magic that's a big mind [ __ ] when you discover that it is um the assumption that telepathy omniscience angels are woo the assumption that all woo is false what if some woo is true the assumption that your ideas of good and bad are objective what if they're not the assumption that there could be multiple realities as in not one but two or three the assumption that reality has a bottom level or scale to it like a sort of a plank length what if reality goes on forever what if you can zoom into it forever zoom out of it forever or if it's infinite the assumption that the religion is [ __ ] the new age is [ __ ] ghosts are [ __ ] those are assumptions you don't know that ghosts are [ __ ] you just assume that the assumption that the miracles of jesus are just myths and exaggeration what if they weren't what if they were real the assumption that the whole can be understood by breaking it up into parts this is a huge assumption within science this is otherwise known as reductionism which is in opposition to holism go see my episodes called understanding holistic thinking and part one and part two and also hold ons water hold ons that's a third episode the assumption that you interpreted the data correctly like you're doing science you're gathering data okay great but then you just assume that okay well i gathered the data and everything is good right and my scientific study shows this conclusion here yeah but that conclusion only holds as long as you assume you interpreted the data correctly and you gathered it correctly which is dangerous to assume data can be difficult to gather and it can be even more difficult to interpret it correctly the assumption that data wasn't cherry-picked the assumption that you're not self-deceived i mean this is one of the like biggest meta assumptions that most people hold most people assume that they're not self-deceived and yet most people are self-deceived so of course if you were self-deceived you would precisely assume that you weren't which is how you became self-deceived in the first place a corollary related assumption to this is assuming that what your mind is telling you is truthful and accurate people just assume like your mind is talking it's like a little you know gremlin in your head talking talking talking talking and you just trust whatever your mind says you know your mind might say like oh i suck i'm ugly i'm bad with money i'm bad with women i'm bad in relationships i'm i'm this and i'm that and i'll never make it and i and all this like you're my your mind a little gremlin in your mind can be telling you all that and you're just you're just being a fool and accepting all of that is true that's a huge paradigm shift when you realize that's just an assumption all right so that's the list of assumptions i have for you you should question all of these think about them very deeply and of course continue building your own list what kind of assumptions do you hold in your life and how might they be holding you back and what prevents you from questioning them deeper more deeply here are some practical areas of application for assumptions because i really want to drive home point the point to you of how practical this episode is so for example in the area of business and making hiring decisions when you're hiring an employee it's very tempting to assume things about this person based on their age their appearance their dress their style you know you tend to judge a person by their initial appearances by their resume by their application things like that it's easy to make sort of assumptions about will this person fit my company or my project or won't they um and this can get you into a lot of trouble so like one practical takeaway from this if you're if you're doing business and you're hiring people just one little shift you can make that will improve your business is in the future when you're hiring people be much more open-minded and very careful and kind of like cognizant mindful or introspective about assumptions you make about people that you're you know different candidates that you're potentially going to hire and and then when you when you do hire one of them uh be careful your assumptions about your communications with them like a lot of times business problems happen because you're not clearly communicating with your partner business partner or employee or your boss or whatever and you two have different ideas about like what we need to do for this project like let's say we need to we need to create an ad for our new ad campaign okay but then my idea for the ad and your idea for the ad are gonna be two different ideas and we're gonna be kind of working against each other and miscommunicating while assuming that we both are on the same page right so it's good to double check are we really on the same page and to kind of do that a lot within business otherwise you're going to waste a lot of time working in opposite directions also with business there's a lot of assumptions that go into sales marketing advertising a lot of times you will let's say you're gonna consider spending five thousand dollars on some ad campaign and you're assuming that well if i'm gonna get a thousand clicks let's say i'm going to get 100 000 impressions with a certain percentage conversion rate i'm going to get x number of clicks those clicks will turn into x number of sales from a conversion rate then i'm going to you know those sales are going to get me this much money and then from that money i can then do in the next marketing campaign right so you assume all these numbers and things and then you get really like invested in that and then you realize that none of those numbers actually are accurate or let's say you're starting a business and you have a business plan like let's say you're going to be selling some product and then you have to wonder like where are your clients going to come from where is the where is the traffic going to come from that is going to be buying your potential products and you some well i can get those i can get those customers from running this ad you know facebook ad campaign and you assume that the facebook ad campaign will get you the kind of customers that will buy your product but that's not that's not a given you have to test that assumption and you have to be clear with yourself that that's just an assumption and then when you when you are clear about that then you could say okay so that's one avenue of marketing and getting customers but maybe i need five more and then you say well i could run a like a magazine ad i can maybe do a sponsorship deal on some youtube video with some creator i can advertise on the radio i can do something else and so you need multiple of these and all these are have certain assumptions baked into them and then you have to test all of them out and see what actually works this is really how you succeed in business a lot of newbies they get into business and they have like just one strategy for how they're going to market or get customers and then event and quickly they usually learn that it doesn't work and then they they quit a lot of times if you're doing big business deals like multi thousand six figure or even seven figure business deals uh you're buying a large house you're buying a car you're buying a plane you know you're buying an entire business you know there's a lot of assumptions that go into that you have to be very very careful with these sorts of big purchasing decisions how about in the area of investing also very practical you have to be very careful about the assumptions you make when you're investing in you know right now people have been investing a lot in in cryptocurrency it's sort of like a fad that's going on now and i'm not saying not to invest in it per se in fact full disclosure i do own some cryptocurrency but what i see is that a lot of people will will kind of jump on the bandwagon start investing in stuff just assuming that it's going to keep rising it's going to keep rising that's an assumption right you're assuming that you know bitcoin is going to reach 100 000 in the next year you're assuming that you don't know that right this is where you can really get burned with investing of course not just cryptocurrencies but with stocks and bonds like there's so many assumptions that go into making investment decisions and a lot of times you can get so um like rosy in your view of like oh yeah i'm an investment company this is going to keep rising and right you create this sort of fantasy this assumed fantasy in your mind of how your investment is going to rise after you invest in it but you see that that's a very self-serving and biased way of looking at things you overlook your mind overlooks how things could crash how much money you could lose see so people who jump into cryptocurrency they're they're thinking about like how yeah if i invest five thousand dollars and then the cryptocurrency you know increases by a hundredfold then i'm going to become a billionaire a millionaire overnight within a year and then i'm just going to be able to retire and and do whatever i want and travel around the world like yeah but that all hinges on the idea that it it's going to keep rising there's no guarantee of that you have to also consider the opposite of that is what if it all crashes because it's a house of cards that's also very likely and you don't really know which is which so when you have a more balanced perspective then you're going to be more hesitant to just throw your money into the thing and then you could save yourself a lot of heartache i mean people people kill themselves because they make horrible investments that end up completely devastating them financially the next domain which is very practical for you guys especially but also for girls when it comes to romance when it comes to attraction dating and sexuality there are a lot of assumptions that go into that especially because the the domain of attractions and started forming relationships a lot of implicit subtle stuff is happening below the level of conscious awareness so for you guys that are that are struggling and trying to attract girls you make a lot of assumptions about for example what girls are attracted to and what they aren't and a lot of these are wrong you make a lot of assumptions about how attractive you are you make a lot of assumptions about you know which girl will like you and which girl won't you might go to a bar you might see a hot girl and you might want to talk to her but then you make an assumption like ah but that guy next to her is probably her boyfriend ah but if you actually go and talk to her and ask her hey who's this guy next to you she'll say oh this is my gay friend you see but you assumed it was her boyfriend and then you talk to her some more and she would say oh i'm single and i like you but you assumed that she wouldn't like you because you don't like how you look or you think you're too short or whatever you see your mind will play huge tricks on you in this in this domain um uh and that's just the tip of the iceberg i mean there's so many assumptions that go into dating um uh you know for you ladies you might assume that you know well we've had sex therefore he's going to call me back right he's going to have sex with me again not necessarily you might be in for a rude awakening there um you know you ladies might assume that oh you know i like that guy and i sort of like i wanna i wanna flirt with him i wanna i wanna approach him but he but i want him to approach me but he's not approaching me like so i'm gonna i'm assuming that like i want to flirt with him but i shouldn't because it's kind of like socially unacceptable for a woman to initiate the guys supposed to initiate and if i initiate with the guy before he initiates with me then i'm going to come off like a [ __ ] and then he's not going to want to be in a relationship with me you could assume that and then you actually go try it you flirt with him you initiate and then you turn it it it works great and then you you two end up getting married you see um a lot of assumptions with sex you know with sex for example it's important um in the past i made a mistake of assuming a little bit too much about like what the girl finds attractive and what turns her on in sex in bed um and i sort of i made the assumption that basically all girls are turned on by the same sorts of mechanics and imagery and other things in the bedroom and then what i discovered as i got gained more experience and had sex with with various people i discovered that actually it's very important as the guy for example to to actually question your girl about what turns her on the most figure that out and customize your sexual style and how you have sex to her to align with what turns her on like um this is a little a little bit graphic here but but hey this is a real world example from my life so like all the girls i've been with um up to the last one they all love getting fingered and i got really good at fingering girls and then i got into a relationship with with with a new girl and um and like she really didn't like getting fingered it was uncomfortable for her like it didn't turn her on and for me that at first that was weird i found that weird because first of all i love doing it second of all because like i was just i was in the habit of doing that because it's that's how it worked for the other girls but for this girl i had to customize how i do things um you know to make her more happy and that's just one example there's other examples you know they like different positions some like this position some don't like this position some positions for some are painful some whatever so like basically the lesson i took away from that is like going forward if i'm having sex with a girl i'm gonna assume much less and i'm gonna be more curious and kind of inquiring to find out and figure out quickly what actually turns it on so then i can just customize my style to that and then it'll be a much better experience for the both of us see rather than just assuming when it comes to relationships further down you know after you get attraction and sex and dating once you get past that you get into a deep relationship deep intimacy maybe even marriage and so forth you know long-term relationships there so many assumptions will ruin your relationship when it comes to communication communication is is the cornerstone of any long-term relationship if you if you don't get the communication right if you're not communicating consciously i guarantee you your relationship will turn to [ __ ] so that's the topic for today that i will cover i promise we'll talk about conscious relationships and uh conscious communication but anyways yeah there are so many assumptions that we make when we're communicating especially in an intimate relationship about what the other person's needs are what my needs are have i communicated my needs have they commuted their needs are we on the same page so so yeah um assumptions [ __ ] up communication to communicate effectively you need to get really clear that both sides are on the same page and that we're not making different assumptions and and this is why it's helpful after you communicate something you can ask the person repeat back to me what i told you just so that we're on the same page so i knew so i can check if you understood what i was trying to communicate and then vice versa they can do that back to you this would be important if you're trying to communicate something something serious and significant another domain the last domain i'll talk about here that's very practical is health and doctors i've been dealing with some health problems over the last few years uh i've been seeing a lot of doctors and um and when i first started trying to figure out what's going on with my body and so forth i had various kinds of assumptions it might have been this it might be that this doctor will help me that doctor won't help me this pill will help me that pill what would help me like there's a lot of different assumptions i had to try to figure you know figure out what's going on with me and um and a lot of those assumptions turn out to be wrong so the bottom line is if you have any kind of like autoimmune disorder or other sorts of health issues that you're dealing with you have to be very careful about questioning your assumptions as you're troubleshooting your health issues and you have to get multiple perspectives and try multiple things and be very open and sort of non-ideological about how you try stuff out um even with the kind of diet that you eat and how you change your diet you have to be you have to question all your assumptions when it comes to diet things you thought were healthy might turn out to actually worsen your condition for example with my condition i have like a bacterial infection in my stomach i was assuming at the beginning that like fruits and vegetables were going to be very good and healthy for me because hey fruits and vegetables everyone says they're healthy right wrong it made the situation way worse i had to cut out fruits and vegetables um for my specific situation um i'm not saying you should do that but anyways so like right so that was an assumption you see assumptions can get you into a lot of trouble and uh the only way i was really able to start to resolve my situation now it's under control and the only reason i was able to get it under control is because i question that core assumption that fruits and vegetables were healthy for me they weren't not for my situation and that was extremely counter-intuitive it took me over a year to get to the point of questioning that assumption because that's a that's a very sneaky one that you don't you don't really think about so um also i want to stress to you here that there are meta assumptions i've already alluded to this a little bit but let's really underscore this so you have assumptions about your assumptions that's what a meta assumption is for example the assumption that you're not assuming that's a meta assumption for example if i tell you that jesus christ was a real person is an assumption and you tell me oh no no that's not an assumption see that's an assumption that it's not an assumption that's your meta assumption um if you want to know about med the the notion of meta go check out my episode called um what it means to go meta another meta assumption is the assumption that your assumption is not a big deal this is a very sneaky one that oftentimes happened when i'm trying to reason with scientists and materialists you know i can tell a scientist that you know you're assuming reality is finite and the scientist might even say like yeah i'm assuming that but it's not a big deal except it is a big deal it's a huge [ __ ] deal or um or for example i might tell a materialist something like you know you're assuming that you can use science to understand consciousness you're assuming that and he might even say yeah okay i'm assuming that but it's not a big deal but it's a big [ __ ] deal because science is a figment of consciousness science is imaginary you can't actually use science to understand consciousness because consciousness is imagining science a huge [ __ ] deal or for example you could tell a materialist or scientist you know you're assuming that a finite self exists and they might say yeah maybe i am assuming that but it's like so what well but what you don't realize if you're assuming the finite self that finite self distorts your entire perception of reality and science if you truly realized the finite self wasn't real all of science would collapse but you're not you're not seeing that because you're assuming that uh it's a little it's a little niggly detail it's like no it's not a niggly detail it's the core foundation of your entire worldview other examples of meta assumptions for example sure science employs assumptions but that's not a big deal because science just works we landed a man on the moon therefore whatever assumptions exist within science they can't be important that's a meta assumption um another example of that assumption i'm not assuming that i'm a human this basically denies that being a human is an assumption see if i tell you you assume you're a human you say no i'm not leo i'm not assuming that i'm a human that's a meta assumption you're assuming that you're not assuming but you are assuming or for example i might say science is true is an assumption you hold and you might say no leo science is is just true it's not an assum that's not an assumption science is true because it works but that's an assumption you're in denial that that's an assumption that's a meta assumption so look sense making making sense of reality requires a lot of [ __ ] assumptions all right hundreds and thousands of assumptions if you questions assumptions these assumptions deeply enough how reality makes sense to you will radically change and this will open up new possibilities limits that you thought were part of reality will dissolve and i have a little example here to show you this is the nine dot problem i'm sure many of you have already done this little puzzle and you know the answer so if you know the answer to this already then this is sort of falling on deaf ears but assuming this is your first time seeing the nine dot problem here's how it works i want you to actually try to puzzle this out before i give you the answer i'm gonna give you the answer in a minute but try to puzzle this out so you have nine dots here the objective of this little game is as follows draw this on a piece of paper and try to connect these nine dots using only four lines straight lines they have to be straight without lifting the tip of your pencil or pen from the paper so it has to be a continuous four line segments however however you want to draw them draw four line segments all contiguous connected to each other and every dot needs to be touched it needs to cross through every dot so that's the puzzle pause this recording and actually try to do this if you've never seen this before it's a challenging puzzle but also the solution is devilishly simple but it requires thinking outside the box that's why this example is so good so when you see the solution i'm going to show you the solution here in a second it's going to be so obvious and it's going to reveal to you an assumption that you held so what this puzzle the reason this puzzle is so interesting and tricky is that it operates on an implicit assumption that you have about the puzzle so go try to puzzle it out and now i'm going to give you the answer so spoiler alert this is the answer try to actually work it before you get the answer so now i'm going to show you the answer and now you see it and it's extremely obvious what the assumption was so your assumption to make it explicit was that you have to stay within draw your lines within the confines of the dots you were drawing your lines from point to point and what you didn't see because it was implicit is that you can go outside of the nine dots you can draw a line beyond the points the points don't limit to where you can draw your lines and that's what allows you to solve this puzzle this is literally seeing outside the box see and so i'm using this puzzle here this nine dot problem as a metaphor for how your mind gets stuck within a paradigm within a box within a certain set of assumptions and you're literally unable to see outside of it it takes a genius leap of insight to to see outside the box to see the implicit assumptions that you were holding and when you do that what you notice is that you're able to solve challenges in life like this puzzle that you could not solve otherwise so the puzzle is not solved by drawing harder or drawing more lines the puzzle is solved by seeing the situation in a more open expanded way by seeing your own internal limitations so what happens is that the overturning of deeply held implicit assumptions can lead to rude awakening or shock or mind [ __ ] or paradigm shift or a recontextualization i've talked about all these concepts in the past i have an episode about mind [ __ ] called the topic of mind [ __ ] i have an episode about paradigm shifts which is called how paradigms work i have an episode about understanding recontextualization i've talked about rude awakenings a lot surprises so this is how it works to see reality in a radically different way that expands your your own self-imposed limits this is one of the most amazing features of the mind and of consciousness you see what people take for granted especially materialists because they just assume a material reality is they just assume that reality just is how it is and therefore how we think about it isn't a big deal that's true if reality is just an objective material system but it's not as i've talked about elsewhere reality is an infinite mind an infinite mind when it imagines certain limits those limits become its reality and so what's so cool about self-actualizing and spirituality is that you can remove what you previously thought were physical objective limits what you thought was physics you can remove those limits just by changing how you see yourself and reality that's what's so amazing about this work that's what makes this work so much more powerful than normies assume then scientists assume right it's possible to actually go underneath the physics of reality not in all situations in certain situations it's possible to do that and then it's possible to realize incredible things that would otherwise seem crazy and impossible and so in fact the most advanced spiritual truths are inaccessible to most human minds simply because fundamental assumptions have not been questioned deeply enough right like most people assume that they're going to die and they don't understand that death is an assumption and when you tell them hey you know death is an assumption you hold they'll say no no leo you're crazy that's crazy talk that's some woo stuff that's unscientific no it's not unscientific it's just that you need to go underneath [ __ ] science you need to question science so deeply that you deconstruct science and then you even deconstruct death and you deconstruct physics of course but this seems so outlandish and so crazy to the ordinary mind because the ordinary mind is not used to questioning this deeply and it and take for granted the significance of of holding these sorts of assumptions it treats assumptions as some sort of like minor stuff like you know little peanuts it's not peanuts your death is not peanuts so a lot of the things that i talk about sometimes rub people the wrong way and people think that i'm crazy or a cult leader or something because they assume that what i'm talking about is some sort of belief system that i hold or some sort of ideology that i'm trying to indoctrinate you into but that's not what this work is about what this work is about is questioning extremely deeply to the point where then you have crazy epiphanies and realizations that the ordinary mind cannot fathom the order of your mind can't see some of these advanced things that i'm talking about and therefore from its perspective the ordinary mind must somehow explain this and make sense of what i'm talking about and the way it does that is by saying oh it's some sort of new age [ __ ] or wishful thinking or it's an ideology or it's a cult or it's just crazy that which you cannot make sense of you call crazy so be careful that's self-deception here's an exercise for you i want you to make a list based on the following question what major assumptions in your life turned out to be false grab a piece of paper and start making a list every major assumption that turned out to be false throughout your whole life this will be very eye-opening for you and then once you have this list ask yourself for each item how did that affect you this assumption being false how did that affect you what ramifications does this have on your life did it cause suffering did it make you happy did it make you depressed did it make you want to kill yourself did it ruin your sex life like what happened and also ask the question why did you make those assumptions why did you assume that in the first place what was this function what are the functions of these assumptions so do that as a homework assignment what you'll notice is that in many cases you assume a thing because you want it or you need it to be true a lot of times you assume a thing because you can't emotionally stand the sting and the pain of facing the truth that it isn't true now i want you to ask yourself what would happen if you spent the rest of your life questioning all assumptions and that this was now something you were proactively looking for in every situation whether it is in your relationships in your love life in the way you have sex in uh in your business in your career in your schooling in the way you do science in the way you pursue spirituality think about that also a note i should warn you that if you do undertake this project of questioning everything ruthlessly be careful because people will not take kindly when you question their deepest assumptions they will lash out at you they will act out they will get emotional they will distract they will deflect they will gaslight they will project they will attack and they will demonize you why because assumptions are crucial for survival so when you are questioning their assumptions you are threatening their survival they need those assumptions to keep surviving as themselves that's what they're committed to that's what life is surviving as a finite self so see questioning assumptions threatens constructions such as business institutions government universities the media the military the church there are collective assumptions there is group think there is collective ego it is easier to defend assumptions from being questioned within a group which is exactly why humans are so tribal and groupish because it's actually easier to deceive yourself when you're doing it as part of a collective activity with a tribe where everybody else is also deceiving themselves that makes the deception look like reality you see like for example if i just print out a piece of paper on my printer and i say this is a hundred dollar bill and this is actually worth something and it's very very important if i just do that for myself and nobody else does that and money doesn't exist let's say in this situation if i just print that for myself is that going to have a lot of meaning for me this this concept of money this piece of paper i printed out let's say i print out a piece of paper that says a million dollars on it a million dollar bill is that gonna yeah am i gonna wake up in the morning be like oh my god i'm this powerful millionaire no it means nothing it's just my own personal fiction but if every person agrees that this is a million dollar bill and agrees to actually exchange this for goods and services then this million dollar bill actually becomes highly meaningful and highly valuable you see and so this is how humanity generates a lot of its power it's through these collective fictions but there's a cost it's sort of amazing that we're able to construct these collective fictions whether it's religion or media or science or money or whatever um you know cryptocurrency nowadays i mean this is effectively what cryptocurrency is um and it's worth like trillions of dollars uh some of them anyways and and so i mean that that's quite remarkable but there's there's always a hidden cost and the hidden cost is that it comes with certain assumptions and these assumptions now need to be defended and sometimes they're they're defended to the death people will kill each other over you know some cryptocurrency or some money even though cryptocurrency and money are just fictions but they're very useful fictions and if you get enough people convinced of the fiction it becomes indistinguishable from reality so humans we're constructing our own reality as we go and that might seem on a certain on the one hand it might seem great that we have so much power on the other hand with so much power we end up bullshitting ourselves and getting lost in our own constructions you see like with organized religion how many people have have you know bullshitted themselves and completely lost their minds to organize religion millions and millions of people and all sorts of craziness has come from that you know war and torture and and rape and molestation god knows what else has come from that um and it's it's fiction it's fiction and of course we're not just picking out religion here but like the media science politics the military cults the new age business it all works this way a lot of business you know how many businesses would go out of business if we removed all of the collective assumptions and group think and collective ego that exists within our culture that puts certain value on things you know like there are businesses that you know cater to you know having long eyelashes you know they're they're like i'm sure multi-billion dollar i mean eyelash extensions are probably a multi-billion dollar industry and why why did these eyelashes people buy these eyelashes because somehow in our culture we got the assumption that maybe like you know guys will want to like become your boyfriend if you have long eyelashes or something like that they'll find you more attractive you know there's an entire industry on plastic surgery there's an entire industry on sports cars and tattoos and all sorts of weird investment schemes and a lot of these are just based on these collective fictions that we come up with and various kinds of assumptions and so when you start to question those people will get angry at you because literally you're threatening their livelihoods you know if i put out a video about how you know you don't need eyelash extensions to get a boyfriend or husband then you know the people who make eyelash extensions will be upset at me for saying that even though it might be true or maybe it's false i don't know maybe maybe the eyelash extensions do help you i don't know it's just a random example so just understand that even though we're sort of dealing with philosophical abstract issues here it might seem like it's just sort of like very um you know immaterial stuff that we're talking about we're talking about ideology we're talking about belief systems and assumptions and group think like like this it makes it seem like it's it's kind of frivolous it's just like you know um but then what you have to realize is that most of our society is built on this [ __ ] and functions on this [ __ ] it functions on collective fictions so yeah don't be surprised when you start to question these collective fictions that your boss your co-workers your friends your family your spouse even your children even that they they won't take kindly to this because you're disturbing their dream you're robbing them of their illusions that they have spent a lifetime constructing because they're living in an illusion and they don't want to wake up so be careful how you go about it anyways in conclusion i want you to take a way that is very worthwhile to invest time and energy carefully sniffing out for hidden assumptions in all sorts of areas of life this will pay dividends for you the more you do it it's gonna it's gonna have a snowball effect at first it's not gonna pay so much dividends but if you keep doing it for years and decades it will pay huge dividends and and then lastly this is the heart of good epistemology and contemplation in a sense when you're trying to do good epistemology and you're trying to contemplate what you're doing is you're trying to get you're trying to unearth implicit assumptions and you're trying to question them very deeply and in that sense that makes epistemology very simple but it's still not easy to do because you have to have a very open mind to be able to do this see my episode about radical open mindedness and the importance of that this is where that comes into play you have to have a very open mind and you have to be very persistent with it because it can take sometimes it can take years of contemplating a thing before you reach a simple insight about some simple assumption that you held right so even though an assumption can be simple that doesn't mean you can easily unearth it just like in that nine dot puzzle example you know the solution is very simple but it's not obvious and it can take you hours to realize it might even take you a lifetime to realize it until somebody gives you the answer and then you're to say oh my god look how obvious it was right so it's simple but it's not easy and it can take a lot of time but i hope i've convinced you that that investment is worth it you