How Science Keeps You Stuck In Life - Exposing Problems With Scientific Thinking

https://youtu.be/d37fXU8vUTw

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Hey, this is Leo, for actualised.org. And in this video, I want to cover an interesting topic, I want to talk about how to stop using science as an ego defense mechanism. You know, there is an interesting thing that I've noticed, as I've been publishing more and more my videos and interacting with more and more of you guys out there, my audience. And one of the things that I noticed is that what sometimes people will do to keep themselves stuck in life, and not getting the results that they really want. In whatever area of life they want it, whether it's career or relationships, or health, or their own personal inner development, is that they will use this idea of silence and the lack of proof that I'm providing as a reason not to listen to the advice and as a listener, a reason to stay obstinate, and stay stuck in their current paradigm. So what I want to do this video is go into some detail about how this really works and what's really going on. Because, nowadays, we are very scientifically minded. And anything that gets the label of science attached to it is automatically perceived as being true as being accurate, as being superior to anything that gets the label attached as religious, or woowoo, or hippie or positive thinking and these other kinds of labels, that imply that somehow these ideas or concepts are not as important, not as significant, not as accurate as ones that are scientific. But this is an interesting thing, because there's a lot of nuance here between what is scientific and what's not scientific. And I think that a lot of well intentioned, scientific thinking people will get themselves stuck, because what they do is they follow science in a dogmatic sort of way. And this is preventing them from going out there taking the practical, more practical types of steps they need to take to actually improve their life. Because there is a difference between clearly proving something on the one hand, and then actually doing something that works and generates results in your life. On the other hand, these are two very, very different things. And one common assumption that I see people making, especially people that are really into science, and think of themselves as honouring truth and being very intellectually rigorous, I mean, don't get me wrong, I love that, I think it's very important to be intellectually rigorous, because there honestly, there is a lot of bullshit out there in society. And we've come from a tradition, honestly, for the last couple 1000 years, where there was lots and lots and lots of bullshit. And slowly, we're weeding that out of our system out of our social matrix as, as it were, we're slowly weeding more and more of that out, which is great. You know, with the internet, we have better resources, better sources of information. Also, we have worse sources of information. So you have to be more careful about what kind of information you do believe and don't believe, but in general, I think we're getting better and better at that our information overall is getting more and more accurate. But just because our theory, and our scientific models getting more and more accurate, that doesn't necessarily translate into getting you the results that you want in your life. This is a very big distinction that we need to make here. Just because we have some sort of mathematical proof, or a scientific study, or an experiment, or something was written in a textbook, or some college professor told you something. Just because you have that kind of intellectual academic rigor behind a certain idea or concept, doesn't mean that you could just go blindly apply that concept and get good results in your life. And this is actually why IQ doesn't correlate with life success that much. Studies have actually been done on this. And what they found is that after you get about over 120, and 130, IQ, any extra IQ beyond that has to actually start to hurt you and diminish your results in life and your success. Because what's more important in life is having emotional intelligence, rather than just pure intellectual logical intelligence. Because your logic even though it has a lot of good things to it, and you can use it to do a lot of powerful stuff in life. It can also be become a trap for you. Because you start thinking down this very narrow alley, and you miss everything else that's around you. You basically become too narrow, focused, and really to be successful at life. I think one of the things that I'm doing with actualize that org is I'm trying to, to paint a big model, a holistic model of how life works and how you can get the results that you want in your life. So sometimes I'll hear people leaving me these kinds of comments, frankly, So if I'm talking about topics like depression, or positive thinking, or attracting women, or even nutritional type topics about nutrition and health, or if I'm talking about enlightenment, any of these kinds of topics, someone might come in there and say, BillyOh, Where's the proof? Where's that double blind study that we need to show us that what you're saying is accurate and that it will work. Leo, show me a double blind study, rigorously performed, peer reviewed study. And then I'll believe you, and then I'll start to follow your advice. I hear this kind of this kind of objection to be made. Now, this is a very dangerous when I hear this, it shows me that there's, there's too much of a narrow focus in that person's mind on this, this kind of criteria of, of studies, and scientific backing and proof. And what's actually going on on there is, is very deceptive. It's actually an ego game, that you're playing with yourself when you're saying that, because what that's doing is creating blind spots within you. And those blind spots actually are very cleverly designed to keep you stuck where you're at, in life. So it's not really about science, it's not really about proof. It's more about justifications, which your mind is extremely good at coming up with, for keeping you in your current situation life, whether that's your current financial situation, or your current relationship situation, or your current lack of results and success in business, or career, or health or fitness, or anything else like that. So it's tricky, you gotta you gotta really watch out for yourself, because in a lot of ways, your own mind is your own greatest enemy. So this idea of the double blind study, the peer reviewed study, you know, almost everything I talked about, first of all, I talk about it, and I don't really go out of my way to prove this stuff to you guys. Why? Because honestly, you know, I used to be kind of obsessed about that in the past. In my youth, I was very focused on, you know, what is the truth? How can we prove the truth? How can we justify and make sure that the truth is proved, conclusively, intuitively, actually, life is so complex, that this kind of criteria of always even proof and knowing the truth all the time, that's going to come back to bite you, what that's doing is if you set that kind of criteria for yourself in life, then you're, you might be telling yourself that you're honoring truth, and you're being very intellectually rigorous. But actually, what you're doing is you're, you're binding your hands, you kind of like, tie your hands behind your back, and then you're going and trying to live life. That way, I feel that to really understand like, you have to just kind of like get in there and sort of experiment around a teacher, right. And don't think that this is somehow anti scientific, this is very scientific, this is kind of the heart of science is to tinker around with stuff. The problem is, though, that a lot of the science that's that's kind of, that's being perpetuated, and like, kind of like the typical science that we assume is, oh, this is science, nowadays, you know, that, that means it has to be in a journal, it has to be peer reviewed, it has to be coming from some PhD has to be coming from a university, it has to be backed by some sort of, by some sort of, you know, credentialed institution. And although you know, nothing against that, that's great. There's a lot of good scientists doing a lot of amazing work out there, especially in the fields of psychology and positive psychology. Nowadays, there's a lot of good work being done there. And we can use that stuff. But we don't want to limit ourselves just to that, because academics is a very specific type of game. And make no mistake that academia is a big, big, big game. And it's happening within a big bureaucracy. And there are limitations within that in life is a lot more than what is encapsulated by this bureaucracy, by our government, or by our school systems, or by our college institutions, there's a lot more to life, and life is extremely messy. And life is very complex. And there's stuff about life that quite frankly, we don't know yet. And there's also errors that we've made in our previous analysis and judgments. And moreover, the way that science has done a lot of times in universities is dealing with individual variables. A lot of times, what a scientist will do is he'll pick a very specialized problem within the field of physics, or chemistry, or biology, or even social science or political science, whatever kind of science we're doing, and then he'll get to work studying that. But you got to understand that it's like a very small slice of a much, much, much bigger pie. And this one little cross section, even if we can get some really good information there by running a study or an experiment, or doing surveys or however we're gonna go about doing our science. That's just, that's just one facet of this much bigger thing. And what I've always been, like fascinated by and I always felt was very important. To get a much broader, more holistic picture, very few things in life can be shown and demonstrated with a double blind study. Some things can, but a lot of things can't. And the most practical stuff that you do in your day and in your life, the decisions that you make on a practical basis, the business decisions you make the relationship decisions, you make the career decisions, you make, the health and fitness decisions you make, the decisions you make about the trajectory of your life, all that kind of stuff, this is a, this is a very rich, extremely multivariate situation. There are so many there are 1000s of variables and some of these decisions and some of these strategies. So to say that you need a double blind study, to prove, for example, that, you know, one particular technique might work and help you with your depression. Or to show you that positive thinking is something that you should be doing in your life. Or to show you all the benefits and the effects of meditation, or to show you, for example, how to attract a woman in your life. Or to show you exactly what kind of food you should be eating, and it will kind of exercise you should be doing. That's, that's just a standard that we can't meet right now. Maybe in the future, maybe 500 years from now, 1000 years from now, we would have analyzed this to such a degree that we'll know exactly very scientifically, demonstrably, how some of this stuff works. But right now we're very, very, very far away from that. Science is very good at working with things that contain few variables. Science starts to break down when you're working with stuff that contains many, many, many, many variables. Because you can't track all of them. At the same time. We don't have the instruments, we don't have the time, the resources to do all that stuff. So I sometimes hear that scientific minded people will make fun of the social sciences. They'll make fun of the social sciences, they'll say stuff like, well, that's not real science. Real science is math. Real science is physics and chemistry. And it'd be biology, since it's very tangible stuff that has laws behind it. You know, political science, social science, psychology, that's not a real science, they'll say, because there's a lot of room for fudging there. It's interesting, because that's one way you could look at it. Another way you can look at it, is this way that I'm about to tell you, is that actually science, math, and physics and chemistry and biology. These are the easy sciences. Right? They're the easy ones. Why are they easy? Well, even though studying math might be difficult, and studying physics and chemistry, biology might be difficult compared to let's say, studying psychology. In a college classroom. Actually, psychology is a lot more complex. There are so many variables within psychology, that are so difficult to, to grasp to track, because they're very nebulous, you're dealing with human beings, which literally are systems comprised of trillions of cells. Your brains comprise of, you know, billions of neurons all interconnected in interesting ways. And you're dealing with so much input that's going into your brain getting analyzed and getting, like molded and remoulded. It's hard to track a system like that. Where as with simple math equation, or a physics equation, or understanding the laws of motion, or understanding some sort of chemical reaction, or some sort of biological system, that's a lot easier. Because the more like, fundamental you get in life, for example, when you're studying cells, or you're even studying molecules, or even individual atoms, or within the atoms, you're studying the subatomic particles, actually, it gets simpler and simpler and simpler. But as you go up levels in life, you start to study actual living organisms. And then even more advanced than that is social interactions, right? The emotions that organ that these organisms are having and the social interactions that they're having with one another. There are so many variables at play, that you can't have a simple formula or equation. You can maybe there is a formula behind it, but you would have hundreds of 1000s Maybe millions of variables in it is very hard for our human minds to grasp that scientific models because what they're doing is they're simplifying life, always simplifying, simplifying, simplifying, they work really well for stuff that actually is simple and only has a few variables. Once you get into a lot of variables, then it's harder and harder to get demonstrable kind of provable results. And there's less and less situations where a simple one, you know, one line formula or equation will tell you what's right or what you should be doing or how things will play out. And what's interesting is that where do we live life? As human beings, you know, your practical everyday life, where is that lived is that lived at the level of subatomic particles, or atoms, or cells, or the individual, let's say mammalian organism as a mammal, or doesn't even go beyond that, and you're living in, in a very, very rich social matrix. Right? We live in a society, we live in a government, we live in a district, we live in a state, we live in a city, we live with our family, we live in a social circle, we live in a marriage we live with, with kids. So all of this stuff is this, you know, very high level we live in at a very high level of life. And if you want to actually get good results on this high level, then you have to start thinking and working on this level, rather than trying to take principles from the low level and thinking that they're gonna apply in high level, and that they're gonna get good results in the high level just because they're true at the low level. So this is the fundamental mistake that I see people making here, though, who are very scientific minded. Is that Yes, sure. I mean, there's great science being done. And we know a lot of stuff about the fundamentals of, of our reality. And we can use that stuff to build amazing things. I mean, we can build airplanes and rockets, and computers and cell phones, and we've got the internet, we've got all this amazing technology. But in a sense, that's, that's the easy stuff. That's why we have that stuff is because it was easy to make, right? The stuff that's easy to make that comes first in human evolution, the stuff that's hard to make comes later. And what's harder to make is to actually get people to create the kind of life that they want, right? Why is it that we have internet, and we have this amazing technology, and we can send a man to the moon, but yet, there's record depression numbers, record number of people are depressed. People can't get a business going. People are stuck in codependent relationships, record numbers of overweight people, like half the country is obese. Why do we have all these psychological problems, life problems, you might say just very practical, Ordinary, ordinary, everyday problems. Yet we have such a deep understanding of quantum mechanics, we understand quantum mechanics so well, that literally we can produce computer chips that can do billions, if not trillions of calculations per second. But yet we can't solve the problem of obesity. We can't solve the problem of neurotic negative thinking. We can't get people meditating properly. We can't get people exercising properly. We can't get people having relationships. Well, we have about a 40% divorce rate. So we have all these practical, everyday problems. And yet, we're very advanced on the kind of technical geeky technological level? Well, my answer to that is that that's the easy stuff. The hard stuff is actually, you know, dealing with your mind here, because there's so many variables here. And there's no, there's no simple formula for how this works. So I think one thing that you have to do is have to start to drop your expectations for these rigorous double blind studies. Sometimes you can get them and you when you will, we can get one of those. Yeah, that's great. For example, with meditation, there's been a lot of studies done over the last 50 years about the benefits of meditation. And I don't think they even go far enough. Even though so many benefits have been studied. I think that still there's a lot that's missing there that we still haven't found, as long as you know, people are working on on that every day, I'm sure there's research being done right now about even more benefits to meditation. So we can, we can track that stuff. And that's great. And I love, you know, introducing scientific proofs and backing when it's available. But generally, I don't care about that. Because here's the approach that I take to get good results in my life. I'm actually very scientifically oriented. But I kind of take the heart in the spirit of science, which to me, is really tinkering and being able to produce the results that you want in life. One way to understand science is to say science is trying to get us an understanding of life to find out what truth is, right? Another way to understand science, is to say that really, science is about recreating predictable results. Because why do we care about science, because it allows us to have a better way to architect and manipulate life in a way that is conducive to us. So if you want something in your life, science can help you get it, right. That's kind of what technology is so great at is to helping you to get stuff. Well, if we take this idea and we apply to our own personal lives, then we can see that really, we can be scientists of our own lives. And this doesn't mean that you have to study math, or that you have to wear a lab coat to do rigorous studies or you have to be in a university with the academic. It simply means that you take an empirical approach to life. That means you're eager to go out there and try stuff, right. The scientific process is very simple. You come up with As a possible hypothesis about how something works, then you go out there and you try it. You work with it, you tinker with it, you see, does it work? Does it not work? If it does work, then you start to suspect that maybe your hypothesis was correct. And you could do a little further testing to refine it. If it doesn't work, then you can see, okay, my hypothesis was wrong. Let me repeat, work my hypothesis, and then go back and try it again. And you keep doing that again, and again and again. And as you iterate and keep going, keep going, keep going, you start to get a better and deeper understanding of what actually works. And over time, you can build up these models that will help you to create whatever kind of results you want in your life. And this is kind of the approach that I take with my own personal development. I'm not so concerned about reading a book that proves conclusively to me that meditation is good for me. I'm not too concerned about reading a book about what is the ultimate food that I should be eating, that's the healthiest. I'm not too concerned about reading a book that will tell me whether positive thinking is good or bad for me. What I'm more interested in is my feelings. How do I feel from the stuff that I'm doing in my life? If I'm advancing in my career, am I seeing the results that I want there? Is it making me feel the way that I want? If I'm doing fitness work, and I'm doing nutrition work? Is it making me feel the way that I want? Does it make me look the way that I want? And that look, is that making me feel good too? Ultimately, it all boils? It comes back down to feelings, right? Because your personal life? What do you really care about in your life? Do you honestly care about some sort of theory? Or are you what you're really after is an emotion we might give it the umbrella term of happiness, what you're really after is happiness. Maybe you're after other types of emotions, you're after love, after excitement. Because the good emotions, and you're also trying to avoid the bad emotions, anger, sadness, frustration, loneliness, depression, these kinds of emotions. So everything that you're doing in your life, all your actions are ultimately aimed at increasing your happiness. But sometimes these actions are successful, sometimes not a lot of people don't even realize that this is what they're doing in their life is every action they're taking, no matter how small or how big is aimed at increasing their happiness. But a lot of times, that doesn't work, simply because the action that you take they, they have the opposite effect. So what science to me is in my own life, is to try this stuff out and see what works for me, what doesn't work for me. Because another thing you have to realize about these double blind studies is that a lot of times these studies, they're designed to help scientists understand sort of general trends within large numbers of people. But in the end, you don't care about that. Because you might be different than the average crowd. And what's good for you, what's appropriate for you what's going to produce the best results for you might not be at all what's what's right and appropriate for the general population. So even if there is a study out there that says, well, the average person should be doing this, or for the average person who works this way. I mean, that's all well and good, that might give you that might give me kind of a hint of what maybe I want to try out next to my life. But ultimately, you have to do a very personal science here. This is the science of No, no PhD, no doctor, no, no student can do for you, you have to go do this for yourself, right, you have to try it out for yourself, and see how it fits in which everything else in your life. holistic thinking, this is a really big concept. I want to cover it more in other videos, that this idea of holistic thinking, where you're not just thinking about one little piece of your life, but you're thinking about how all the pieces fit together. And I find that this is one of the problem with studies and was kind of traditional science is that what they'll do is let's say you've got this giant jigsaw puzzle, 1000 pieces, what they'll do is they'll take four of those pieces, and they'll fit them all together and say, hey, look, we got a little piece of the picture right here. Look, it's it's nice and pristine. It's very clear. It's very, very well documented. Here it is. I mean, that's well and good. And when a scientist does that, he might win a Nobel Prize for putting those four pieces together, he might win a lot of recognition. And we get published in a journal that might go on and you know, create some sort of new business suit or a new technology might spring up from that. And that's great. But in my own life, what I'm concerned about is the very, very big picture, right? Like the 10,000 foot perspective of all these pieces fitting together. How does this piece fit together with the other 996 pieces in my 1000 piece puzzle? Because even though this little four piece, puzzle configuration might be well on its own, when I add it to everything else here, it might not make any sense, or it might fit in in a different way. Or I might have to rearrange these pieces somehow to make it fit with everything else. And that's kind of the thing with studies is that a lot of times what studies will do is that they will tell you that something is true in a very narrow, narrowly defined context. And a lot of times this context is a laboratory setting. It's not a real life setting. It's not the kind of study that you have sitting in your home, sitting in your office, running your business, in your family in your relationship. Don't get me wrong, some studies actually do go out there and try to get more of those kinds of practical situations. And, you know, positive psychology is great at doing the kind of work. But I think even there, a scientist still has to narrow stuff down stuff to put like, put his or her conclusions and discoveries into this little box, and say, okay, under these conditions, in these situations, this is what works. This is maybe what produces general happiness, this may be what causes your depression, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But that doesn't mean that it's going to really apply to you, you have to go figure out does this apply to you? How well does it apply to you? How do you have to custom tailor this thing? That's how I want to go about really doing personal development. Right? I think that the most valuable advice that you'll get in life is never going to be something that you get in a lab study. It's not something it's going to be easily observed in the laboratory. And that's because like I said, these laboratory studies are not holistic enough. They give you little technical points, and you can use them to fine tune what you're doing in your life, that's great. But they're not good for general life strategies, right? No lab study, for example, is going to tell you who you should marry. No lab study is going to tell you how much you should meditate. For some of you should meditate more than others for so you should do one type of meditation for others, you should do other other type of meditation. So even though there is a study that tells you the meditation is good, it doesn't, that's not enough for you, you have to go out there and custom tailor and apply it in your life, right kind of integrated into you know, study is going to tell you how to become a millionaire. No study is going to tell you how to succeed in your career. Your specific career, sure, you might get general advice, but how to succeed in your career. Specifically, no study is going to tell you that. This is what where wisdom comes in, right wisdom is required for this. That's why I love to read and study and listen to people from a wide variety of different sources. Because what happens is that when you look and you study all these different sources, they come together in your mind, you get a very big picture, you develop wisdom, you can then use this wisdom to make decisions to create strategies for your life. So that you can create priorities, you can set different values, right? Science is not going to help you with this kind of stuff. And quite honestly, when you expect and demand from me or from anybody else, to prove to you that you should be doing something. That's a pretty silly expectation to put out there. Because honestly, 99.9% of the stuff that you do every single day very practically, has no studies behind it has no science behind it, you just do it, you do it out of habit you do out of social convention, you do it because your parents told you to do it. You do it because of peer pressure. You do it because of your wisdom. You do it because of your intuition. You do it because of your emotions. So you're guided by all these. You might say loosey goosey type concepts. They're not very scientific. The reason they're not scientific, it's not that they're not actually scientific. I mean, you could do science on them. The problem is that there's so many variables in there, the science can't cope with that. Science copes with very simple truths, not complex truths. So that's something you got to keep in mind. You also got to keep in mind that the university system, the system of doing kind of traditional academic research, PhDs and all that kind of stuff. It's it's a flawed system. And I see this as a dangerous thing that a lot of people do is what they'll do is they say, well, where's your PhD? Leo? Did you go get a degree? Are you a licensed therapist? Have you done the research? Do you have a Harvard diploma? Who has who has the peer reviewed your work? To me this is kind of laughable, because I don't like I don't want to be in that in that home game. I mean, there's great stuff that's coming out of that system, but there's also big constraints in that system. Right that school academic system, because I said Giant bureaucracy, that academic stuff. And a lot of those studies are great. A lot of those studies are complete garbage. A lot of those studies are scientists who don't have any real world experience with starting a business or attracting a woman, or creating a great relationship. Going out there doing some research, interviewing some college kids on campus, coming up with some sort of theories been proving them under extremely narrow circumstances, extremely artificial situations. And then throwing that that study out there as though it applies to everybody in the world, as though I can now use those results to really make something of my life. So sometimes that might work. But a lot of times, that might not work. Frankly, I see a lot of studies that are just completely ridiculous. They're not real world, they can't apply. And one of the best examples of this that I can think of is with attraction and dating. So there's one thing that has really made me skeptical about the scientific academic system. Because if you read textbooks on male female attraction, they're gonna tell you something very different than what you're gonna actually experience in real life. So if, for example, like me, a few years ago, you were really concerned about how do I get a great girlfriend? How do I build sexual abundance? How do I attract a really hot, cute girl that I really want in my life? How do I practically do that? Science would tell me something like, well, we've done some research, and one of the things we found is that females are very attracted to a symmetrical face. So the more symmetrical Your face is, the more a female is likely to choose you. And we've also done some studies that females are attracted by male pheromones. So if you have more testosterone, maybe you have a certain type of pheromone that's a little more potent, that will make a female more attracted to you. And stuff along these lines. And all those might actually be true, maybe there is pheromones that females are attracted to. And maybe a female does prefer a slightly more symmetrical face. And maybe it is true that females will prefer one type of face over another type of face and one type of body over another type of body. And maybe the waist to hip ratio, when a guy has a certain number that is slightly more appealing to a woman, when she's sitting in a laboratory environment looking at photographs, and is asked to rate them under extremely artificial conditions, except the thing that I discovered is that you go out to a nightclub, you go out to a bar, and all of a sudden, all that stuff flies out the window. Because you got a totally different situation, you've got to realize situation, which has so many variables, and the variables are so different, that any truth that was in those scientific studies is completely eclipsed and blown just completely out of importance. There's no importance to it at all. Because what I discovered is that if I go out there, and I work on, for example, my personality, my charisma, on my competence on my body language, I work on my assertiveness, I simply work on very simple stuff, like knowing when to pull a girl out of the nightclub, that if I, if I studied that kind of stuff, and I go out there, I practice it. And I interact with 1000s of women, I talk to guys who have had sex with hundreds of women, I pick their brains, I see what they did, right what they're doing wrong, I see their own growth curve, I apply to my own life, I go out there and tinker with all this stuff. If I do that, then when discovered is that I can literally attract any kind of woman that I want, like the hottest woman you could imagine, I could attract. And that it doesn't matter how symmetrical or asymmetrical my faces, or how little or how much hair I have. Or my waist to hip ratio, like this stuff is absurd. When you go into the real world, and you actually like go into a nightclub, or into a bar and go try to attract a woman or even with online dating, or anything like that. So this is just like one little example, you can find a lot more examples like this, you can find examples like this with nutrition, too, I find that science right now about nutrition is very, very poor. One of the challenges with nutrition is that there's so many factors with nutrition. And what the nutrition research has been done now is again, very, very focused on just isolating individual variables. So for example, you might read a study, they'll say, oh, omega threes are good for you. And how do they find that out? Well, they take some omega three, and maybe they feed it to rats, or maybe they even take Omega three and feed it to humans. And then they track those results. And they see that, you know, certain markers in the blood are improved. Maybe cardiovascular risk goes down and stuff like that, right? But in the end, they're only tracking a couple of factors. And they're not looking at how that omega three, for example, is interacting with other stuff that you're eating, other supplements that you're taking other things that you're doing in your life. So it's very hard to say that that this stuff is is good or bad for you. I mean, certain studies are better than others. But what I find is that a lot of the nutritional biceps out there is it's just like these little individual little islands within this giant sea of what's potentially right and good, you kind of see little, like flashes of what's right and good, and what's what's wrong and bad. But right now, the state of nutritional research, I feel is very inadequate. So it's really hard to make proper nutrition decisions based on science. Because some studies will tell you that coffee is great. Some studies will tell you coffee is bad. And it's great, maybe for one thing, but it's bad for another thing. And maybe coffee is good in isolation. Or maybe it's not good in isolation, maybe it's good if you take it with other things. But when you mix it with something else, some other type of food, then all of a sudden it becomes bad. And how do you judge the quantity of it that you need. And then also, you're you have to ask yourself, they're doing a study on a large number of people. People are different people process coffee in different ways. So one person might process coffee, and it might be healthy for them. Maybe other person processes that coffee differently because he has different slightly different genetics, and it has a different effect. Right? Same thing with fats. Same thing with with meat, same thing with all the different potential supplements and vitamins that you could be taking. So it's, it's really a very gray area. And right now, I feel like we're woefully inadequately informed about this kind of stuff, just because it's very hard to track 1000s of variables that are going on in your system, you might be drinking coffee, maybe it's improving some aspect of your performance. Maybe it's hurting other aspects of your performance that you can't even track, maybe it's gonna give you cancer and 20 years, no study has been done to show whether it does or doesn't. Because it's really hard to run a study like that. If you do run a study like that, there's so many different components and variables, and that so many different individual body types and genetic factors, environmental factors, they're difficult to track. So the point here is that if you want results in your real life, everyday life, then what you got to do is you gotta go out there and tinker and experiment around with this stuff. Right? Don't be don't be too bought into one study, just because the study proves something doesn't mean it's going to work for you and your life doesn't mean it's right. Because once you take it out of the laboratory setting, and you apply it to you, once you take it out of the general population setting, you know, let's say a study was done on 10,000 people, and you apply just to you, your mileage may vary significantly vary significantly. For example, one thing I've been struggling with last few years, I've been struggling with acne, right, and I'll go to a dermatologist and I'll pay this dermatologist a lot of money to help me figure out like what's going on with acne? Why am I having acne? And one of the things I would ask a dermatologist is, hey, could it be my diet? Could it be something that I'm eating, that's giving me this acne? And if you go to a dermatologist, their standard line is no. It has been shown studies have shown that there's absolutely no correlation between diet and acne. That's what a dermatologist would tell you. And then he'll give you some medication here, but this on, this might work for you. But what I discovered through my own self experimentation by practicing elimination diet, which means I literally cut out everything but one or two types of food from my whole diet for a while. And then I see how it affects my performance and my acne. What I found, for example, is that dairy, cheese milk other dairy products have a huge impact on on acne for me, I don't know about other people. See, when you do a general study, I don't know how they did the study. But if you do a general population study on 100,000 people, let's say, or 10,000 people, then it might all come out as a wash. If you do a big study like that maybe diet doesn't affect acne for for every one of those people. Maybe it only does for few, but I only care about my acne, I honestly don't care about other people's acne. So if I need a solution for my acne, what do I need, I need to experiment on myself to figure it out. And I find that I'm I'm pretty pissed that these dermatologists are telling me this, like these stupid ideas because it really threw me off track. And now I'm like, I'm very skeptical about that kind of like the stupid like rules of thumb that your doctor will give you know, that your therapist or psychologist would give you because a lot of them what they're doing is they're just like swallowing, whatever kind of information is being fed to them from I don't know who universities or studies or their, you know, their doctors associations, or even companies that have a vested interest in selling medication or a vested interest in selling certain types of products. So it's, it's really something you have to like keep your eye on, be a little bit skeptical about that kind of stuff, right? Don't just swallow it wholesale because your doctor told you or because your therapist told you or because a professor told you or because it was published in this journal. That means very little. What actually matters? Does it work for you? Does it get you the results you want? Does it get you the money you want? Does it get you the help you want? Does it get you the relationship you want them to get you the feelings that you want it All right, you gotta remember that these doctors, these, these scientists, these researchers, they're human beings, they're under a lot of pressure. They're working in a bureaucracy, they're working in companies. Right. So a lot of times, they're doing studies that might be influenced by all sorts of stuff, who knows what it's influenced by. And just because it comes out as a study, a year later, there might be a study that shows the exact opposite effect. That also happens, you read about that kind of stuff. So, you know, you don't take a study as being some sort of conclusive proof. And then telling yourself, well, if there is no study, then it must be, it must not be worthwhile to try. I will try anything that makes reasonable sense to me, I go out there, I want to try it. And then I'll see what results are generated. That's the kind of approach that I want you to take. Don't use this science stuff as an excuse, as an ego defense mechanism. Because what I see really happening this is the core of it is that people will click the science and the studies, because either they have a pet belief of theirs, they want to entrench even deeper, but they want to protect, they have a habit that they've been running in their life that they want to protect, that they hold near and dear, they can't be objective with themselves. And really, they don't want to do the hard work to test it themselves. I'll tell a person go Do you believe that affirmations work? Go try for 90 days, the person will say, No, I need a double. A double blind study first. Okay, so you're gonna sit around, you're gonna waste your whole life not trying stuff, because there's not conclusive double blind studies on this stuff. But if you just go out there, and you actually try it in your life, you'll see the results. And some, some scientific folks might say, well, Leo, you can't be your own scientist. You're biased. Because there's a there's a placebo effect. There's also confirmation bias. There's all these different biases we have as human beings. So if we're experimenting on ourselves, how can we trust ourselves? Well, look, the fact is that there's biases and everything. There's biases in the in the research system, there's biases that your company that you're working for, if you're a researcher, there's biases at universities, there's biases in governments. All those biases still exist, you can't exist. You can't avoid biases. And when you're experimenting on yourself and your own scientists, you can certainly be your own scientists. It's a very valid way to go. Because in the end, who cares about your life, who cares about how you feel in your life? Who cares about the results that are happening in your life? You do? Only you nobody else. So if you're doing this thing, and it's working for you, it's making you feel if you feel good, it's getting the results that you are happy with, then that's something that's right for you. Is it a placebo effect, maybe there is a placebo effect in there, maybe you won't know maybe you'll get deceived. This is a very dirty system. It's not a clean system. We're not doing mathematical proofs here. That's not That's not what life is, is a mathematical proof. mathematical proofs work in a barrel, very narrow context. And life is a lot broader than that. So you have to think more holistically more outside the box, more open minded. And this is not to say that you should just be swallowing bullshit. I think there's a lot of bullshit out there. A lot of bullshit with religion, a lot of bullshit with politics, a lot of bullshit out there with some of the New Age stuff that that's out there about enlightenment, about meditation, about law of attraction about positive thinking, there's a lot of bullshit out there. So you have to weed through, and there's no one simple formula, you have to be wise, you have to be intelligent to be very well read, you also have to be very practical about this stuff, not just the building some philosophical systems in your mind about is law of attraction this way, or is it that way? A lot of try it. Just be very pragmatic about the way you do this stuff. Build your little pet theories if you want. But the final arbiter is simply go out and try it and see does it get you the result that you want. And also, instead of listening to PhDs and to researchers and to Harvard studies, try learning more from the people who actually got the result that you want. A lot of times these people, they're not traditionally credible people. They're not researchers. They're not academics. They're not Nobel Prize winners. They're just everyday people who get amazing results. For example, when I wanted to learn how to attract women, I didn't go to science books. I went to guys who have fucked LOTS OF hot WOMEN, hundreds of them, right. I literally tried to find the best guys in the world. I tried to buy their information products study from them. I tried to meet them face to face. I pay them to coach me to teach me in field. I observed them actually picking up girls at the club. I observed this up with my own eyes because I didn't believe it. I wanted to see it. I didn't see it. Sometimes I saw things that that were incredible to me. And then what I did is I went out and I tried the opposite of that, because in no way that works, I tried the exact opposite of it. And I failed. I tried again, and I fail. I tried to get on the failed and I say, maybe this works, maybe what do you do actually is actually true, I can't believe it, but I'll try it, I try it and then it works amazing. Right. And you'll find this with, with dating advice, you'll find this with business advice, too. If you want to get really good at business, one of the best things you can do is go out there, find a guy who's really good at business, find a guy who's really good at what you want to be good at, and then study him, ask him questions, see if he can be your mentor, see, if he can teach you, you'll learn so much more. And that will advance your career in your business so much more than if you just read even 20 business books, or 20 business studies. Or even if you get a whole MBA, that one person can teach you more than a whole foot now a couple of years of NBA work will teach you. So don't dismiss that kind of stuff, right? And somebody who's good at business might not even have a college degree. You know why? Because business people are intuitive to be successful business, you have to be wise, you have to put a lot of pieces of the puzzle into place in your own mind. And there are people that are really good at that they have just an intuitive understanding of business. But then they don't have that kind of like book smarts, or they don't have any kind of proofs or theories, or the kind of rigorous research that you might expect from some sort of business school. But that doesn't mean that the information is any less valuable. In fact, it might be a lot more valuable. And it will cut a lot of that theoretical bullshit out. Because in academia, there is quite frankly, a lot of theoretical bullshit, that doesn't translate into the real world. And it's just not important in the real world. A lot of it might even be true, but it's simply a low, low, low priority. And it might not need to be on your radar at all. Because there's other stuff that's much more important that you really should be focusing on. So in the end, what what I want to end on here is the fact that you can learn very accurate rules of thumb for how to create amazing results in life. But I don't think you can do that through the traditional scientific model. We'll use the scientific model when it helps us. But generally, as we're doing personal development, we're kind of going rogue, right? That's what I love about is that you know, it's very real, and you can do it yourself, you can be your own scientist is exciting to do this kind of stuff, because you have so much power. It feels good to be tinkering with the stuff and putting it together. Because you can get amazing results in business, you can get amazing results, in relationships, in health and in meditation and managing your own mood, you can get amazing results there. And you can actually learn very accurate, almost scientific like principles and laws about how to be good and get amazing results and all these different areas, but you're not going to learn them in a textbook, you're going to learn them in the real world. Alright, so this is Leo, I'm going to be signing off, this is what I have to say about how to not use science. As an ego defense mechanism. Go ahead and post your comments down below. I'd love to hear what you think. Please like this video, click the like button for me right now. Share it as well as your friends. The more this stuff is shared, the more free content I can keep releasing to you guys. And lastly, come and sign up to my newsletter right here. This is my actualized. Org newsletter, I release new exclusive videos every single week, I have a lot of cool stuff planned for my subscribers that I'm working on right now really hard. So a lot of my best materials still yet to come sign up because I want to, I want to help you put this big jigsaw puzzle into place. There's a lot of pieces. And I have a lot of work ahead of me to put all these pieces into all these different videos so that you can watch them all and if you want, I will help you to build an extremely accurate, extremely practical model of your own life of your own psychology of every aspect of your life so that you can go out there and actually achieve those amazing results that very few people achieve in life and create an amazing, extraordinary life that you've always dreamed of. But you never knew how to put together. I'm excited about putting that together for myself and then sharing with you how I do it so that you could do it too. So sign up and you'll be all set