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[Music] how socialization makes you stupid in this episode we're going to talk about the dangers of conformity and group think i deliberately gave this episode a rather flamboyant bombastic title sort of a controversial title that will trigger some people i wanted to frame it very starkly for you because this issue is much more serious than most people realize and this is what we'll be elaborating upon here so the way i came across this idea really is i've been socializing a lot over the last year i've been going out talking to lots of people in the last year i've probably approached and talked to at least 3 000 strangers maybe even more like i've socialized more in the last year than maybe i have ever in my life like a lot and i've been noticing the kind of effect it has on my mind and especially lately the last few years i've just become a lot more conscious than i ever used to be and you know i've gone through phases of lots of socialization in the past in my life but i wasn't as conscious back then as i am now and so now when i'm out socializing i'm sort of hyper meta aware of the effect that this socialization has on me and it's very interesting just to observe so i started just kind of contemplating all this and thinking about it mulling it over and what i realized which of course isn't anything new to me i knew this my whole life but i realized even more starkly that i've never been a highly social person it's just antithetical to my character structure and to my personality and i started wondering why that is why is that i've struggled with socialization in the past i used to be very shy very introverted i still am very introverted but i've trained myself to become extroverted on command when necessary but still my natural tendency is to be very introverted and i was just wondering you know why did i struggle with this for my whole life and i still struggle with it to this day and like why and what i discovered is that there's something actually deep there it's a lot deeper than i used to think of it as and what i really started to realize is that i don't really like socializing but then i wondered well but why what what's really behind that and here's what's really behind it for me is because i find that it interferes with my highest values it betrays being my authentic self it interferes with original thinking and it takes me further away from truth which is one of my highest values but it also takes me further away from other high values that i have i noticed that socialization introduces a pressure on me to conform to the values of the people i'm socializing with and to get mired in group think now you might say well leo but isn't that just like um you know a limiting belief you have does it really have to be that way is that inherent to socialization itself or is that just because you're doing it wrong and so i was thinking about that you know how do you socialize while still living up to your highest values and not betraying yourself and being an original thinker and being authentic to yourself is that possible and of course to some degree that is possible i'm not trying to instill you with this limiting belief that you can't socialize and learn to be more authentic to yourself and still maintain some of your values you certainly can get better at that the trouble is though is that it it requires energy and effort to do that you have to do it very consciously to pull that off and in most cases most people don't succeed very well at pulling that off and there are hidden pressures and trade-offs even if you're doing it all as best as possible there's still hidden costs to socializing that you're probably not aware of and so that's what i want to talk about but certainly it's possible to socialize in a way where you completely betray yourself and this would be a disastrous situation where you completely betray your authentic self completely betray your values and become a doormat and completely subscribe to groupthink and conformity that's definitely possible that's not what i'm talking about in this episode that degree of low quality socialization i'm not even talking about and a lot of people struggle with that problem i've i faced that in school and earlier in my you know experiences with socializing these days i have developed enough backbone and understanding of my own authentic values and priorities in life and my authentic self that these days when i socialize i can be pretty firm on you know maintaining my values and that and not um not sort of selling myself or whoring myself out you might say but still that still isn't the ideal situation there's still sacrifices that are being made there even if you're doing it perfectly that's the point i'm trying to make here what i find is that the more that i socialize the more i feel myself pulled into a hive mind of stupidity and again this is this is a little bit tricky i'm making some nuanced and subtle points here i'm going to underscore the nuance even more later in this episode but already i need to preface because some of you guys will misunderstand it might sound like i'm denigrating socialization and i'm telling you that you shouldn't socialize that's actually not my point socialization plays an important role in your development and in your success and even in your happiness as a human being so again listen to what i told you i spent the last year socializing with thousands of strangers right so it's not like i don't do it and i'm not being a hypocrite here for on the one hand socializing and on the other hand denouncing socialization i'm making a subtle point that there's trade-offs and costs to socialize that you need to be aware of that you're probably not aware of right now so that's what we'll be explaining here before we get to that i have a a quote here from a famous psychologist eric frum from his book the sane society here's what he writes quote what kind of men then does our society need what is the social character suited to 20th century capitalism it needs men who cooperate smoothly in large groups who want to consume more and more and whose tasks are standardized and can easily be influenced and anticipated it needs men who feel free and independent not subject to any authority or principle or conscience and yet willing to be commanded to do what is expected to fit into the social machine without friction end quote think about that my claim is that most people are dumb simply from the conformity that comes from loss of socialization and most people are highly social and as a result they tend not to think any original thoughts and their minds are rotted to the core with group think and this is true not just of socialite dumb people this is true of even very smart and successful people even they are made dumb by socialization i'm talking about scientists academics ceos entrepreneurs and even [Music] very spiritual people people that are part of the new age community the buddhist community other kinds of spiritual communities and what you find when you really analyze these people when you analyze the millionaires and the billionaires the people on tv the influencers the celebrities the public intellectuals even what you notice is that they are constantly parroting things that they have heard from elsewhere they are not actually thinking and speaking original thoughts they are creating echo chambers for themselves and they are living and succeeding within these echo chambers and these echo chambers become very seductive and it's precisely because you can become so successful by playing within these echo chambers that people get locked into them and never find their way out and this is the trap that i want to make you aware of only recently have i started to appreciate how much work original thinking involves i've done a lot of original thinking in my life so much so and i've held myself back from socializing and from group think so much in my life that i almost sort of take for granted the intellectual work that i do thinking that everybody does this kind of intellectual work and only recently am i realizing like no actually it's the opposite almost nobody does it oh but almost nobody does original intellectual work not even many intellectuals and it takes a lot of work it takes so much work that like recently by stopping doing it because i've been going out socializing a lot actually i'm noticing the relief and stress that i experience by not doing it it's almost like i've been you know going to the gym my entire life and then i stopped going to the gym for a year and i noticed like oh my god life is so much easier when you're not going to the gym because you know go to the gym you're struggling all the time now of course if you don't go to the gym for a long time then life can actually become harder than just going to the gym regularly but you get the idea and why is this topic important why am i talking about it here at such length it's really for the following reason i've discovered levels of intelligence in my own life recently i've reached levels of intelligence that very few human beings have reached and i was thinking about what enabled me what allowed me to reach these levels of intelligence and one of the conclusions i came to is that i was able to do it by avoiding socializing and group think a lot in my life and the level that i'm at right now what i'm most interested in with what i teach is really helping people to access these super human levels of consciousness and intelligence i'm finding myself more and more in love with just pure intelligence exploring the highest possibilities of the mind with pure understanding and the amount of joy and satisfaction and we might say meaning that this has added to my life this is one of the greatest gifts that i can help you to access in your life that i feel the majority of mankind is just missing out on the majority of mankind has not fallen in love with intelligence and from this a lot of joy could come that isn't coming in your life and one of my highest goals now is to help to guide others towards these superhuman levels of intelligence that i've been able to access and actually doing that is going to take many more episodes we're not even going to just we're only just scratching the surface of it here this is like the introduction in this episode for this goal that i have for the work that i'm doing going forward because conformity and group think are really the chief obstacles to achieving such levels of intelligence and so that's the first step and then there will be other steps just knowing about this is not going to be enough to reach the super human levels of intelligence that are possible after my recent batch of awakenings i've been able to access levels of intelligence that just aren't blowing my mind uh it's hard for me like i've it's hard for me to even believe that this is possible for a mind to do and the ways in which my mind is working now and the way it's completely contemplating and thinking is like a whole order of magnitude beyond the way that it functioned in the past so something about these recent awakenings has really expanded my capacity to think in very abstract and different ways than most humans think very non-linear ways which i'll be trying to explain in the future i still struggle to explain exactly what the difference is in my style of thinking but there's like a qualitative difference in how my mind is working and it's very fascinating i'm still exploring that and figuring out how do i communicate how do i talk about it but this is the beginning of that process so there is a serious cost to being social that almost nobody tells you about and the cost is that your mind as you be more social gets infected with memes values and frames frameworks ways of thinking that are of the herd and there's actually a good reason why throughout history uh the most intelligent men tended to be loners hermits ascetics recluses and virgins and i don't just use the word men accidentally but actually deliberately because and this might sound kind of sexist but it's interesting that if you observe how men socialize and how women socialize just generally speaking of course this is just generalizations these are generalizations you can certainly find women that are more intelligent than men but generally speaking if you accept the premise that socializing makes you stupid and hey many people will argue with me on that premise and reject that premise we'll get back to that so i still have to sort of demonstrate that and kind of support the case for it um but if you accept that premise and then you also understand that the majority of women are much more social than men are and the reason that is because a woman's survival and reproduction hinges much more on her being social than it does for most men and the reason that is because it's easier for a man to survive as a loner than it is for a woman to survive as a loner it's a lot more socially acceptable for a man to go to a club by himself than it is for a woman to go to a club by herself it's a lot safer for a man to walk down a dark alley by himself than for a woman to walk down a dark alley by herself these differences are real and in the past they used to be even starker than they are today because modern technology sort of evens the strength the physical strength of men and women out whereas in the past that was more of a stark difference but anyways just what i notice is that women in general are much more social creatures than men are now of course some men are ridiculously social but just you know on average and if you look at the deepest intellectuals and geniuses of history um they tended to be reclusive men i'm talking about the albert einsteins the isaac newton's uh the nikola teslas of the world now again i'm not saying there's not female geniuses of course there can be and there were um but what i'd like to suggest is that this is not an accident because socialization takes a lot of energy and not only does it take time and energy away from the intellectual work you could otherwise be doing you know the the five hours that you spend going to a nightclub you could have spent those five hours meditating contemplating doing science or being creative in some other way right so there's just that obvious trade-off but there's an even deeper trade-off than just that it's not just that you're losing time and energy it's also that when you're socializing you are becoming the average of the minds with which you are socializing and what kind of minds are you socializing with are you socializing with geniuses and mystics and sages probably not you're probably socializing with rather low consciousness people and even if you are socializing with academics in academic circles and with the world's greatest scientists my point is that you are still subscribing yourself to group think and to various frames of thinking of the herd of that tribe even if it's a very intelligent tribe and you are in a subtle way getting brainwashed and you are falling into conformity there and you are robbing yourself of truly original thought and that is a very real trade-off and real cost so what i'm saying here is that no matter how conscious of a social circle you cultivate no matter how many geniuses are in your social circle how many ceos and world-class experts and phds you socialize with fundamentally it's still making you stupid now that's a rather controversial claim that i think a lot of people will disagree with me on but just open your mind to this possibility you know don't believe me what i'm suggesting is that you just open your mind to this possibility consider that there might be some serious trade-offs to socializing and that doesn't mean that i'm saying you should never socialize it simply means understand the trade-offs and then make a conscious choice about whether you accept those trade-offs or not or really even more practically you know decide for yourself how much you want to socialize versus how much time you want to spend in solitude in intellectual pursuits and so forth and also just kind of like decide for yourself you know what are your priorities and values i'm not saying that there's one perfect balancing point for every person people are different some people are more intellectual some people are more extroverted some people get more joy from socializing other people don't you know so you're gonna have to find like your balancing point and it can be significantly different for different people and it'll also be significantly different at different points in your life maybe at this point in your life you need to socialize a lot more to achieve certain goals and then at another point in your life you'll back off from that and you'll become more of a you know of a hermit and then you'll use that to achieve certain other goals and you can you can strike those different balances at different points and chapters in your life that's all fine i'm just trying to make you aware of these trade-offs it makes sense this is not really rocket science that the more social you are the more minds you commune with through talking and proximity the more social conditioning you're going to receive and the more you start to think like those around you the less original thoughts of your own you're going to have because you're just going to have less time and less room in your mind for original thinking and also it makes sense that when you're working in teams of people whether it's a group of friends that you're all trying to like you know figure out which restaurant to go to or you're working with some you know some team at the office to accomplish some project maybe you have 10 employees working together to effectively function as part of a team you have to sacrifice yourself you know as they say there's no i in teamwork you have to surrender parts of yourself and you have to make compromises to fit and function in a team now again there are beautiful aspects to working in a team and there's important things that can be accomplished in a team that cannot be accomplished solo however there are also things that can be accomplished solo that cannot be accomplished in a team and there are costs to sacrificing yourself for the team and what kind of team are you sacrificing yourself for is that actually in your favor maybe it is maybe it isn't this is something that needs to be thought about more consciously and not just done automatically mindlessly the way that people do it and so basically there's going to be pressure on you when you're part of a team or even just a group of friends there's going to be pressure on you to conform and to give up some of your priorities and values for the team now you might even say well leo but isn't that good because it's like you have to become almost more selfless to become part of a team to be a good team player requires selflessness yes that can be a good thing however becoming a team player can also yes in a certain sense it makes you more selfless but also it can make you betray your authentic self betray your values betray what you really want in life just going along with the herd and then this herd could be walking off a cliff this herd oftentimes these teams and these herds are involved in very shallow low consciousness survival activities or even just downright devilry and evil in the case of many ideological political movements or religious organizations or certain corporations low conscious corporations certain kinds of criminal enterprises you know the mafia for example the groups that many people are part of they're not very conscious groups what are they really up to and so as you do that consider the possibility that you become less capable of deep intelligence the people you surround yourself with reinforce your worldview they create a kind of echo chamber can you see the problems that that might lead to especially if you value deep intelligence now if you don't value deep intelligence then there's no problem and a lot of people don't value deep intelligence in fact that is the problem with many groups that you will socialize with and many people you will socialize with that that they simply don't value deep intelligence but the question is do you i do for me personally it's a source of some of the greatest joy in my life i think that could be true for you as well if you're into my content in which case this is an issue for you you have to look at what's holding you back from the deepest levels of intelligence that you're capable of and maybe what that is is the people you're socializing with your mind will become the average of your friends if you socialize with them long enough and this is more dangerous than it seems because i'm willing to bet that most of your friends are not highly conscious sage-like people who are spiro dynamic stage turquoise or the like most of them are probably tier one individuals with rather low levels of cognitive moral and spiritual development and ego development on that susan greuter model that i talked about in the past and then see what happens is that you get a lot of goodies for your ability to socialize which is why people socialize why do people love to socialize so much because it gives you a lot of easy goodies these goodies then make you blind to the costs that are involved in getting these goodies the trade-offs what are these goodies well success business opportunities friendships fun parties you can go to of course sex approval validation likes status power fame money and ultimately love these are the goodies you could carve out an entire survival strategy for yourself in life and become extraordinarily successful you could become a millionaire and even a billionaire simply through your capacity to socialize if you do it really strategically and effectively and not only will you become successful but you'll you'll have a lot of friends you'll get invited to amazing parties exclusive clubs you'll have lots of sex with really attractive and famous people and people will give you lots of validation and approval your life will be easier you'll have people you can rely on that will help you when you're out of money or when you're feeling depressed you'll have status and fame you'll be somebody in your community within your tribe can you see how that becomes a trap though can you see that once you have all that how hard it is to give that up can you see that once you have all that your mind won't even want to question what the costs of getting it were because the goodies are just so juicy and so good who cares about the cost who cares if i had to sacrifice deep levels of superhuman intelligence in order to acquire all these goodies even just one of these goodies by itself can be enough to get you to surrender your interest in truth or intelligence like for example sex or friendship or business opportunities that make you millions of dollars or the fame and status that you get just just one of those can be enough never mind the entire basket of all of them combined together and they usually tend to come together you know if if you have lots of friends it's a lot easier for you to get sex and if you have a lot of friends it's a lot easier for you to get job opportunities because you know one of your friends is going to know somebody who knows somebody who has a job that's how it works traditionally this is how humans developed their massive levels of success and wealth in societies they didn't do it as loners they did it through uh through the social networks that they built and then leveraging those social networks and then those people who were unskilled at doing that those people failed they didn't become wealthy they didn't become powerful they didn't have lots of sex and um you know they died childless because nobody would date them for example that's traditionally how it worked uh our society now modern society actually makes it easier for you to be a lone wolf in less developed societies like in the middle east it's very difficult to survive as a lone wolf primitives the more primitive the society the more tribal it is the more you need to be a team player and also the more conformity and group think takes hold of you and the more those people behave like a herd of sheep what i want you to notice is the following do not make the mistake of confusing success that you get from socializing and people looking up to you as being smart and intelligent because you're good at socializing and because that makes you good at surviving do not confuse that for true intelligence that's not the intelligence i'm talking about and it's very easy to confuse those things because you know if someone's a good manipulator of social networks and is like very savvy socially very socially calibrated very political you know politically savvy so to speak and is able to parlay that into wealth and success in a family and a big house and business opportunities we say that person is very intelligent no that person is not very intelligent by my definition of intelligence so i was reflecting back and just thinking about you know what is it that allowed me to achieve the levels of intelligence that i achieved now in my life and i kind of like looked through my whole life and also i was just thinking about you know what is it that makes my work unique out of all the intellectual work that is out there in the world and uh one of the things i identified is that um i was not social in school and through most of my life and if i was i would have gotten sucked into the prevailing group thing and i would have lost my uniqueness and i would not have been able to make the intellectual achievements that i've made in my life so actualize.org is the way that it is precisely because i deliberately didn't socialize in my youth i avoided that when all the kids were hanging around in school you know talking about the same [ __ ] um brainwashing each other into conformity with their values i was at home doing my own thing i deliberately rejected the mainstream of philosophy spirituality self-help science academia business marketing i tried to really go my own way now was i perfect at this no of course i still felt prey to various kinds of fads and trends within popular culture and modes of thinking um but overall i did much better than most people in that respect and that opened the gateway for me to get to where i am today and then and then now i've reached the point where i'm like i'm so conscious of how all these social dynamics all this group think works that i'm going through a process of like shedding all the remaining remnants of that that i can find within my own mind no doubt you must have noticed you know following my work how easily people fall prey to tribalism partisanship ideologies cults fads investment schemes marketing ploys exploitative branding various cultural movements radicalization polarization and even scientific fads have you noticed this this is a theme of the epistemic work that we've been doing over the last five years or so we've talked about all the dangers and traps of this kind of stuff the dangers of ideology well so what's really going on here well fundamentally all these problems stem from group think this is what happens when you get a bunch of people together and none of them just sit and think independently for themselves and instead they just bounce ideas off each other in an echo chamber and the reason that happens is because it's difficult and stressful to sit alone in a room by yourself and just think original thoughts it's much easier just to join some herd and then just kind of like blithely obliviously go along with wherever they're going and just kind of trust in the herd or follow some leader and just trust in that person so i want you to notice that humans survive in a herd humans construct self-serving narratives together in a herd they use each other to reinforce a synthetic augmented reality that they project upon the world and by using each other they all buttress and support each other in such a way that this synthetic augmented reality becomes indistinguishable from physical reality these are themes i've discussed elsewhere go see my other episodes for example understanding survival part 1 and part 2 how survival shapes who you are collective ego and how ideology works go see those episodes for more on this idea i want you to think about how your survival is shaped by the herd or the tribe that you're surviving inside of think about the social survival pressures upon you and how they constrain and limit your mind and your intelligence and also of course consider how they enable you to so you do get benefits from the tribe and the herd for example going to school all the good aspects of education and going to school you know these you inherited from the herd the only reason you know mathematics for example is because it was part of the tribe and the herd that you grew up in otherwise you wouldn't know mathematics now is it a good thing that you know mathematics i would probably say overall yeah it's a good thing that you know mathematics even though you were indoctrinated into it it wasn't an original intellectual achievement of your own but it's still probably good that the average person knows mathematics so that's good however have you considered the cost what was the cost of that also i'd like you to think deeply about how you want to position yourself within society especially you youngsters if you're in your teens in your 20s your whole life is still ahead of you and what you should be thinking about is how do you want to strategically position yourself within society because you're basically in society without a choice you have no choice about whether you're going to be in society or not unless you're just going to be living on some remote island you're part of society so it's going to be the question of how are you going to be positioned within society and what pressures will that position exert upon you and your values is it going to be exerting a pressure that impinges on your highest values and priorities what do i mean by positioning yourself within society for example let's say that you're going to be working at starbucks for 30 years as a manager of a starbucks do you understand that working as a manager of starbucks for 30 years that this places severe constraints on your mind it has to in order for you to be able to fulfill that position and not get fired what kind of constraints is that going to place on your mind creatively artistically philosophically spiritually morally cognitively developmentally you see or if you position yourself as a professor in a university system at harvard or mit or whatever you know if you're a youngster you might have this kind of fantasy of like i want to become one of these well-known professors at one of these top universities that sounds like a good position to angle for but i want you to really consider the kind of constraints and limits this is going to place upon your mind and your development i'm not saying don't do it i'm just saying consider where you're going to be strategically if you become a professor at harvard for example maybe that's perfect for you maybe you're happy with the constraints and limits that harvard places upon you but maybe you're not think that through like what do you want for example do you care about truth do you care about god do you care about love do you care about consciousness do you care about art and creativity do you care about profound intelligence and jail breaking your mind do you care about not selling out do you care about not being um compromised by forces of capitalism and financial pressures of various kinds if you care about those things then consider how positioning yourself within a certain institution or a tribe is going to impinge upon those for example when i was in university i wanted to become an academic philosopher a professional professor basically a philosophy but then i started thinking about well but what is actually going to be my position within academia and the university system what am i going to have to do to get those positions because those positions are not easy to get they're coveted in rare positions but let's say you get a professorship with tenure at a prestigious university what's going to be the cost of that and what i realized very quickly when i was only 20 years old is that my my actual priority and value was truth that's why i was doing philosophy and that if i positioned myself in one of these universities as a professor i would not be able to live up to and honor that value and priority of truth it would impinge upon that truth would become a secondary or tertiary matter while playing by the game of academia would become the top concern and top priority in order to maintain and to attain that kind of professorship position and when i realized that i said well i don't want to position myself that way and so i didn't consider how your position in the tribe affects your intellectual sovereignty that's deep here's a key insight for you original thought is rare and precious the act of original thinking is difficult highly valuable and rare almost nobody is thinking from scratch your thinking is biased by social conditioning and your position within society how you're surviving how you're supporting your family how you're feeding yourself how you're paying your mortgage this places limits upon your mind make that connection and then sort of think backwards and kind of like reverse engineer uh what position you want to take in society based upon how free your mind you want your mind to be like what kind of position do i need to have in society in order to have the freedom of mind that i want to have think about it like that now see in order to think your mind has to frame things in certain specific ways i call these frames you might also call these paradigms socialization programs your mind with various ready-made frames that you can use now these frames can be very handy but they could also be limited because these frames lock down your mind's full freedom and true intelligence and to access this this these super human levels of intelligence i'm talking about you have to deconstruct and free your mind of these frames these frames are like ways of seeing the world and seeing situations and thinking about situations and these ways it's like a box that you think inside of that you don't really question and this frame comes with various kinds of assumptions and expectations it's like different grooves that your mind can go down to think down think of grooves on a record and the needle goes and follows the grooves that's kind of how your mind works with these frames for here's a few examples of what i mean by by these frames for example when we ask the question like what is spirituality how do you conceive of and think of what spirituality is what its importance is what its meaning is what it's about you probably have some kind of frame you were given based on which books you read or teachers you listened to or you know what your priest said in church the church you went to or maybe the spiritual tradition that you are subscribed to like let's let's say you're a buddhist right buddhism presents a very specific frame for spirituality like you might think well spirituality is about meditating or spirituality is about escaping suffering eliminating all suffering or spirituality is about liberation see just these like labels and words that you heard as part of the echo chamber of buddhism these got stuck in your mind to the point where your your average buddhist cannot think of spirituality outside of buddhism and i'm not just saying here just like that some buddhist is just like behaving like a fundamentalist christian no no the average buddhist is is much more developed than a fundamentalist christian so that's not the problem i mean fundamentalism is such a stupid and limiting constraint on the mind that i'm not even talking about it here it's so stupid i'm talking about something more subtle and more nuanced you can be a very intelligent academic buddhist for example and you think that you're being very intelligent about your spirituality because you're not a fundamentalist and maybe you're even open to other religions you're not just exclusively buddhist but you're also open to hinduism you're open to yoga you're even open to christianity and islam and you might say well yeah i'm kind of these one of these open-minded buddhists you know that is not like dogmatically militantly buddhist and therefore leo this is not a problem for me no it's a problem for you buddhism presents frames of how to think about spirituality this is a problem because actually buddhism prevents you believe it or not from accessing superhuman levels of not consciousness but intelligence or for example what is science you have certain frames about what the word science means what it is what it isn't you got these frames from school or elsewhere and you think about science in this very limited fashion based on the frames you were given you know however you define scientific method or whatever else you might have ideas of like who the ideal scientist is you know the ideal scientist you might say is albert einstein or isaac newton or whoever then you go and you try to emulate those people in your quest to become a great scientist yourself for example and these frames were all implicitly programmed into your mind as you were growing up you're not even questioning it right the average scientist at mit is going about the pursuit of being a scientist in such a conformist manner that they have no access to superhuman levels of intelligence that i'm talking about as a result of this other examples of frames might be materialism we've talked about that in the past a lot you know evolution is a frame looking at everything in terms of evolution like this is evolving that's evolving you know evolution is a huge frame that many scientifically-minded people just adopt without really questioning it seriously what does it mean what is evolution what are its limits what are alternatives to evolution right see like once you get the frame of evolution stuck in your mind like everything to you will look like evolution just you know as as the old saying goes when you have a hammer when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail that's the problem with these frames or for example you know simulation theory a lot of people these days are are just so conformist about you know they think they're doing deep philosophy by thinking about simulation theory but trace where you got the idea of simulation theory from you know the whole idea of we're in the matrix man you know a lot of people say oh we're in the matrix let's escape the matrix they're just parroting they're just parroting words you can tell they're just parodying words they heard from elsewhere they're not thinking deeply about what the matrix is or what simulation theory is or whether it's even true or whether it's even a good idea they think they're being smart when they're talking about these things but they're just parroting ideas computer analogies are very popular these days why is that you know when you're thinking about the mind or the brain you think about computers you make computer analogies and operating systems and this and that and i've done that in the past um so i'm not saying that's completely invalid but a lot of people will use these analogies without really thinking about where they're getting their analogies from they're thinking of humans in terms of computers but is that really a valid analogy where did that come from did you even think about it no you're just parroting these analogies because it's part of the zeitgeist the culture so these are some examples of frames and these need to be questioned broken down in order to truly unleash your full intelligence so one of the most important things i'm doing now for myself is identifying and deconstructing all these kinds of frames that i've imbibed over the last 10 years especially of studying all the stuff that i teach you know i've been studying psychology philosophy sociology developmental psychology spirituality non-duality buddhism christianity this blah blah blah and that science quantum mechanics evolutionary theory chaos do you write all this kind of stuff that was all good and important you know i still recommend you read those books on my book list which talk about all those things but see now to reach the the really high levels of intelligence that i'm interested in i have to deconstruct all those frames and question all those frames and go beyond all those frames and especially all the spiritual frames that i received and i noticed in myself that one of the biggest things that's holding me back from actualizing my highest intelligence is precisely all the bad framing i got from non-dual teachers and now i have to go and uproot all that from my mind it's like bad software to use the computer analogy it's like bad software that needs to be updated which means you have to first uninstall it before you can install the new version within our culture and society intelligence is improperly defined and measured this is one of the problems this is one of the meta problems i have an episode called the social matrix speaking of another analogy you know the social matrix that was an important episode um the social matrix misdefines intelligence and the reason does that is because the majority of humans are stupid if you ask a stupid person for a definition of intelligence he's going to give you a bad definition a stupid person's idea of intelligence is not going to be very intelligent so the social matrix confuses success and survival with intelligence confuses social success socialization and social approval and status with intelligence confuses academia and knowledge with intelligence confuses left brain calculation abilities and stuff like you know iq and solving logical puzzles as intelligence while of course those activities do require some degree of intelligence there are many degrees of intelligence beyond what the social matrix tells you about i want us to redefine what intelligence is to include wisdom and love in other words if it's not wise and loving it doesn't deserve to be called intelligent so for example if some shrewd business person uses his intellect to devise some sort of scheme like a pyramid scheme or a ponzi scheme that will fool a bunch of people into making this this business very successful and popular and profitable our culture would say that business person who you know this con artist type who orchestrated this scheme was very intelligent for being able to manipulate his way into this level of success and what i want to say in my redefinition of intelligence is that actually this person is not intelligent because if this person was truly intelligent there would be wisdom and love behind his actions and his thought process and of course creating this ponzi scheme and manipulating millions of people into handing you lots of money and making it very successful this is not wisdom and love this is what i mean by the social our social matrix misdefines intelligence now you might say well leo why i mean isn't wisdom distinct from intelligence why would we want to redefine intelligence as wisdom when we already have the word wisdom for for wisdom why can't we like use wisdom for this more holistic form of intelligence the more loving kind of intelligence the wise sort of intelligence and then we can preserve the old word intelligence for just like the sort of like pure calculating you know like we might say like hitler was like a evil genius you know he had a certain certain like evil intelligence you might say um even though you know he wasn't a good guy and he wasn't very wise maybe he wasn't very loving but he had sort of like evil intelligence or we might see you know we might say like donald trump you know um we might say he's very intelligent he's like he's a very intelligent marketer he's a genius marketer even though he might be using it towards some sort of nefarious selfish purposes um so leah why are you conflating these terms and these concepts uh well actually there's a very fundamental reason why because in the end we need our notion of intelligence to connect with infinite intelligence with the intelligence that runs and designs the entire universe that's what's missing in society's understanding and definition of intelligence they're not making that connection because at the highest level when you fully awaken you'll realize that god universal mind infinity is infinitely intelligent and that intelligence god's intelligence perfectly aligns with wisdom and with love that is the source of wisdom the source of all wisdom is universal infinite intelligence and the highest intelligence is love is selflessness so don't you think it's important if infinite intelligence exists and it is the organizing principle of the entire universe don't you think it's important that when we use the word intelligence that that aligns with infinite intelligence in some way and that by saying someone is intelligent we're actually we're saying that that person is approaching god literally that's what i want our new definition of intelligence to allow for you see because you know when trump is being intelligent in his sort of like con artist way and being a demagogue and fooling a bunch of people to give me a bunch of money and becoming a billionaire and behaving like a narcissist i don't want to call that intelligence because what i want to call intelligence is that which gets you closer to god because god is intelligence so whatever trump is doing it ain't intelligent in fact it's it's deeply stupid from a certain point of view even though of course we can acknowledge that in a certain sense he's a marketing genius and hitler was a sort of a you know a nazi genius but in the end nazism is stupidity so the bar is being set pretty low there i'm trying to convey the importance of intelligence within the universe as a whole everything we're doing with actualize.org everything we're doing with self-actualizing ultimately boils down to intelligence we're trying to be more intelligent we're trying to be intelligent about how we live our lives how we design our lives what we value what we prioritize how we deal with emotions how we deal with people how we deal with evil in the world how we construct a better society this is all about intelligence intelligence is the key to life the quality of your life hinges upon how intelligent you're going to be now of course when i'm talking about intelligence here i'm really talking about like intelligence with a capital i i'm not talking about book smarts the kind of intelligence i'm talking about you don't get just by reading a bunch of books although of course reading books is helpful although of course also reading books can limit your intelligence believe it or not see the sort of dumb kind of intelligence like academic intelligence tells us that the more books you read the more intelligent you become true intelligence tells us that actually after a certain point reading books actually makes you more stupid than intelligent in the end intelligence is required for understanding and understanding is the ultimate pursuit of all of life it's hard for me to explain why that is because i feel like some of you listening will say well leo yeah understanding is just something like you're interested in because you're just like an intellectual type of guy so for you maybe intelligence and understanding are important but you know for other people it's not important and here i'd have to challenge you and ask you to open your mind to the possibility that truly all of reality hinges on understanding understanding is the key to everything and that in fact there is nothing more to reality than the understanding of it if you understand all of reality you're done you've reached the end of reality you win the whole game by understanding it but you need a sufficient level of understanding of it which was way beyond the understanding you currently possess or know how to access here is a list of features of what i would call true intelligence the way that we should redefine intelligence as wisdom love context awareness construct awareness talked about that in the past especially in the nine stages of ego development series go check that out and i'll talk more about construct awareness in the future big picture thinking and understanding holism i have multiple episodes on holism and holistic thinking go check that out very important a deep grasp of relativity i have an episode understanding relativism and i'll have a few more parts to that series in the future so relativity is huge for intelligence the ability to take on new perspectives and points of view talked about that in the past radical open-mindedness we've talked about that in the past consciousness of course uh self-reflection we've talked about that in the past a deep awareness of self-deception we've talked about that in the past deep awareness of bias and the ability to be unbiased we've talked about that i have several episodes about bias facing fear that's very interesting you might wonder what does facing fear have to do with intelligence what's the connection and see the ordinary definition of intelligence the sort of like academic definition of intelligence if you ask an academic they would tell you like well facing fear that's not what does that got to do with intelligence you know on an iq test for example an iq test does not measure your courage or your capacity to face fear but really it should because fear is not intelligent because at the highest levels of infinite intelligence at god-consciousness there is no fear fear is simply a sign that you don't fully understand what's going on in reality that's literally what fear is it's a misunderstanding you cannot be infinitely intelligent and have fear fear of death is stupidity those things need to be equated but they aren't in our current definitions of intelligence you could have a high iq person with a 200 iq and he could be terrified of his own death and we would call that person intelligent when actually we should call that person stupid you see also we have a lot of intelligent scientists and academics who are very good at being intelligent about like their little narrow discipline whether they're studying quantum mechanics or something like that but then they are not deeply aware of self-deception all the self-deception mechanisms that i talk about in my series three-part series called self-deception go check that out so my most important work all those self-deception mechanisms if you're not aware of those you do not deserve to be called intelligent no matter how many nobel prizes you've won or what kind of scientific papers you're able to write you're not intelligent if you're not aware of self-deception i'm not just a little bit aware profoundly aware of self-deception and also bias another component of intelligence is the ability to surrender and to accept what is surrender is usually not thought of as a component of intelligence of course the ability to be transrational and trans logical is a important feature of deep intelligence also emotional awareness and what's called eq emotional quotient as opposed to iq a lot of academically quote unquote intelligent people people with high iqs actually have very poor emotional awareness and under my definition they don't deserve to be called intelligent because actually there's a lot of intelligence within your emotional system and if you're not conscious of your emotions and how they manipulate you and run your whole mind including your entire rational process then you're not intelligent you're gonna make stupid mistakes emotional awareness is crucial that's one of the differences between pure academic studies versus spirituality within spirituality there's a great emphasis on emotional awareness whereas in academia emotional awareness is not even like a thing for example would-be professors are taught mathematics and science but they're not taught emotional awareness that is not part of their job description when really it should be likewise for many academic philosophers you know you can be an academic philosopher with low emotional awareness but in my definition of philosophy you should not be counted as a legitimate philosopher unless you have developed extreme emotional awareness of your own inner emotional system another component of intelligence is the capacity for deep abstraction implicit thinking and what i call oblique ways of thinking i don't really have time to go into that i'm going to have a whole episode in the future about abstraction i already have an episode about explicit versus implicit understanding go check that out um but i'm going to have a episode also about what i call oblique ways of thinking basically i've sort of discovered slash invented a way of thinking a different way of thinking than the way that most people think i call it oblique thinking um it's a very implicit way of thinking uh which is different from like the sort of academic ways of thinking and i'll i'm still not quite sure how to articulate it it's very slippery uh i'll have an episode about that in the future another component of intelligence is non-linearity being able to think in non-linear ways to work with paradox i've talked about that in the past on in my paradox what is paradox episode and lastly intelligence in the way i define it must have an existential and a spiritual dimension intelligence without metaphysics and without spiritual dimensions is not actually intelligent which means materialism rationalism scientism atheism are not intelligent our culture considers these to be intelligent so you see by redefining intelligence we're setting it up such that when we call somebody oh that's an intelligent person what that means is that person is on their way towards god and the reason that is because the more intelligent you become the more godlike you become until when you become god fully you become infinitely intelligent and then your intelligence becomes identical to the intelligence of the whole universe which is what is running the entire show which is the source of all science art religion cognition emotion intuition rationality and the rest it's the true source of genius the highest intelligence only comes with selflessness and the transcending of survival and your identity limits your intelligence and your intelligence also limits your identity people can have huge egos and we could call them intelligent under our current definitions of intelligence under the new definition of intelligent that couldn't happen people with giant egos would be called stupid as they are because having a giant ego is not very intelligent by the way we also need this redefinition because once mankind begins to explore the solar system and beyond and we start to come into contact with higher intelligent life in the universe which is going to happen sooner or later we're going to discover beings out there that are way more intelligent than us and we are not going to understand them and their intelligence and why they act the way they act unless we have a proper definition of what intelligence is and so i want our human definitions of intelligence to align with the higher intelligences of beings in the entire universe that are out there so we're thinking long term here i want you to notice that going against culture and norms and your tribe threatens your survival for more on that go see my episode the social matrix also notice that thinking in new ways leads to acting in new ways leads to living in new ways so to live in new ways you gotta act in new ways to act in new ways you gotta think in new ways so it begins with thinking in new ways it begins with being more intelligent it begins with thinking about thinking how do we think better how do we be more intelligent in our thinking and there's a big difference also you should notice between original thinking high quality thinking and just shutting off your mind much of today's mainstream spirituality western buddhism and so forth what they're actually teaching you is how to shut off your mind to access various kinds of mystical states and non-dual states that's good that has its uses but that doesn't automatically teach you how to think in a high quality way it doesn't actually teach you deep intelligence it doesn't teach you how to how to understand things properly and deeply and in general i noticed that there's a sort of a denigration within buddhism on the issue of understanding this is a mistake the mind is a very powerful and dangerous tool and you can develop mastery of using the mind but almost nobody in society teaches how to do this because of course to teach it you'd have to first master your own mind which most people haven't because they're so wrapped up in self-deception bias and their inability to jail break their mind and to understand high levels of abstraction and relativity and the reason they can't do that is because they're mired in group think of their tribe and their culture and the reason they can't break out of it is because their survival hinges on it because of the way they position themselves unintelligently within the system it is possible to develop mastery of how your mind works understands and thinks this requires practice if all you do is you just shut off your mind and sit in meditation you might access some non-dual states but you are not going to develop mastery in using your mind and deep intelligence in your thinking process that requires a lot of practice which for example buddhism will not teach you that's where i come in that's why where actualizer it comes in that's that's part of the difference between how i teach and what you get from other spiritual sources so here are some practical takeaways from this episode if if you're feeling this a little bit abstract and you're not sure what to do with this information here's some things you should start to do number one notice the effect other minds and culture has on your mind literally notice how the thoughts you think are affected and influenced by the thoughts other minds around you think with whom you're socializing and communing and also with your culture number two step is catch yourself parroting phrases and ideas and thoughts which are not your own especially spiritual ideas you know there's a lot of cliches within the spiritual community all of them need to be questioned stop just parody them i should probably make a list of i'm thinking right now um i should probably make a list of like all the spiritual cliches that people pair it there's so many of them but i have to sit down and like brainstorm them for a few hours to come up with all of them maybe i'll do that in the future but you could think of some yourself you know spiritual cliches that you hear whether it's people talking about chakras or various kinds of sayings from the bible you know it's easier for a rich man um you know for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into heaven is that really true maybe it is maybe it's not but like don't just parrot it right these are not your ideas catch yourself just parroting this kind of stuff or you know people say oh we're in the matrix stop parroting that think for yourself the next point is notice how the need for social survival pressures your mind to conform to group think i want you to actually catch yourself in the moment when you're with a group of people where your authentic self or your values are being compromised and where you are falling into group think catch yourself notice that that's the cost and trade-off that i'm putting out to you that is happening it's just a question of whether you're noticing whether it's happening or not uh the the next practical takeaway here is notice how many original ideas you generate and trace where your ideas came from like sometimes it's good to do sort of a genealogy or an archaeology of your ideas just kind of like trace you know you have some sort of idea about spirituality or science or whatever for example the earth is round that's an idea you hold hopefully trace where that idea came from like actually go and actually try to trace it down in a sort of like like you're doing archaeology it's like well where did i first hear that idea was it from my mom or from my dad and then how many times have i heard it and where was it reinforced like maybe it was reinforced in first grade when the teacher showed me a picture of the globe or maybe it was reinforced in second grade when i got this homework assignment or something right and just like actually go go through and check where the idea came from and hey if you believe the earth is flat okay great so i want you to to trace where that idea came from where did you get the idea that the earth is flat who told you that good exercise and try to see how many of your ideas you actually generated and then the next practical takeaway is sit down for 60 minutes and try to generate at least one chain of original thought do that a few times and notice notice the difference between just thinking the way you're normally thinking and actually sitting down for 60 minutes and deliberately generating some new kinds of thoughts that you've never thought before that nobody else has ever thought before that right there that is gold that will change your whole life if you keep doing that and if you sit down and actually do it even once you might be shocked to realize that i've never done this before in my whole life this is the first time you know you might you might say i'm 35 years old and this is the first time in 35 years where i sat down for 60 minutes and generated some original thoughts the first time what the [ __ ] was i doing for the first 35 years of my life you might wonder and then keep doing that of course don't just do it once okay now the next point of this episode is as follows you have to realize that the state of our society is such that if you just do the bare minimum you will become a battery for the matrix powerful systems outside of your awareness will co-opt your consciousness to feed their survival and serve their low consciousness priorities and outright devilry you will become a slave without even realizing it you're not going to become a physical slave you're going to become a mental slave your intellect will become enslaved and then by enslaving your intellect you can also become physically enslaved wage enslaved and so forth enslaved in a relationship enslaved in a bad job enslaved with an abusive boss or whatever modern technology and modern society is amazing in that it allows for such creativity and freedom but only if you use it consciously with independence of thought that responsibility is on you if you don't consciously exercise this responsibility if you're not careful socialization will turn you into a zombie and you will squander your life you will lose your intellectual autonomy and sovereignty you will never tap into your full spiritual potential and you will never reach your highest levels of intelligence you have to look at how your job your family your religion your politics your friends your advertising your media your socializing how all of this is enslaving your mind and making you a battery in the matrix do not let mainstream culture and business define the meaning in your life and set your priorities for life you must direct the meaning in your life independently of culture business friends family etc the prime challenge of the modern life is to not let yourself be turned into a mindless zombie through complacency your number one job is to direct your life to be the ceo of your life and fitting in is highly overrated your job is not to fit in your job is to become uniquely authentically you you to the hilt profoundly yourself that's your job your job in life is to find yourself and then be yourself to the utmost of course that means ultimately awakening to yourself as god but even long before you reach there you have a lot of work to do understanding yourself as a character as a persona as a human so it's not just about becoming god it's also about becoming more human the more human you and really you start there that's more practical than becoming god one of the greatest joys in life is defining yourself you get to define how you want to be in life what you want to stand for how you want to express yourself how you want to be creative what you want to love how you want to express your love for life and for the world and for people what do you love in life you can think of it as on your gravestone when you're dead it should be written for every person this person loved blank and that shouldn't be a mystery that should be completely obvious by the way the person lived their life everybody who knew that person should say this person loved blank and fill in that blank and it's completely obvious and everybody would agree like this person loved cartoons this person loved making music this person loved sex this person loved family this person loved their country or whatever and another high-level goal you should have is to make your thinking process independent of all pre-existing human frames this should be a long-term goal of yours in life to become intellectually autonomous and sovereign to become original innovative and creative with your thinking process this is how you're going to transform your whole life all the big changes in your life are going to start off and really the source of them are going to be the innovative and creative ways that you're able to use your mind the requisite variety of your mind i have a very important episode that's exclusive to my blog called requisite variety you can do a google search for it very important episode the deepest intelligence has infinite requisite variety it's infinitely creative right the reason you want to be so intelligent is not just because it gives you a lot of joy and pleasure but also because it's so powerful literally infinite intelligence is infinite power the power of creation god is creation by tapping into deeper levels of intelligence you tap into deeper potential for creation you can use that to then create the kind of life you want to create all the things you struggle to create in your life that's because you lack the intelligence necessary to create it that's because you lack the requisite variety modern society gives you the freedom to think anything but creates mechanisms which hijack the impulse to think at all with all the entertainment the food the sex the socializing the porn the virtual reality the social media the news all the youtube videos all the books see you're free intellectually really you're living the greatest time ever you can buy almost any book read anything you want watch any kind of video google search for any kind of information but what's astounding is that how few people actually exercise that freedom the majority of people won't even go into youtube and type into the search box some subject that they're interested in or some question they're interested in instead all they do is they just click on the videos that the youtube algorithm serves up because they're so [ __ ] lazy they can't even be bothered to type a question into the search box and so what does youtube serve up using their default algorithm it serves up more of the sort of click bait drama-filled entertaining [ __ ] that just gets you riled up but that doesn't actually provide any substance or intelligence where whereas on youtube there are many intelligent videos but most of them you have to search for google is not going to serve them up to you on a silver platter so if you're going to be lazy and just click on the you know recommendation feed and nothing else and never do a search for example you know if you're like curious like what is consciousness or what is existence or what is spirituality or like how do i become enlightened or how do i create the good life you could type any of those prompts at any time into google or into youtube in the search box and you'll get amazing videos with all the answers many of them will be my own of course i'm not just talking about my own you can find many other good videos on these topics that are not my own although i am i am biased towards my own but um i think they're pretty good as far as answering those kinds of questions directly but basically any kind of question you have and i mean it doesn't have to be existential questions it could be a question like you know like how do i buy a house how do i get a girlfriend how do i get laid you know you know why do i struggle with socializing or why why am i a people pleaser you know why do i suffer from depression you can type any of these into the search box at any moment and you'll get answers but what's astounding is that the majority of people never will they will live their whole lives and never type those into the search box because they're so [ __ ] lazy all they do is just click on the never ending torrent of recommendations that youtube serves up to them which is click bait and [ __ ] and drama so this is what i mean when i say that modern society gives you all this freedom this infinite freedom all these powerful amazing tools and yet most people are thinking less than they've ever thought for themselves right now in the 21st century is the greatest time to be alive if you're a creator an innovator if you want to be a sage or a mystic you have more tools more freedom more opportunity than ever but here's the catch you also have more distractions and hijacking than ever it's easier than ever to become a zombie and to be complacent and to just attach yourself to the social matrix with an umbilical cord and let it feed you for the rest of your life and then you'll become a zombie so be ever vigilant against social matrix hijack watch your mind conforming like a hawk watch how your mind conforms watch how your mind follows various kinds of intellectual trends and fads whether it's within crypto investing or some latest political movement like libertarianism or marxism or some newest conspiracy theory make this key distinction for yourself on the one hand there are times when you are actually thinking deep original thoughts and then on the other hand there are times when you are just thinking what what other people have thought for you and you're just doing group think make that distinction notice when you're doing which notice how much of which you're doing and the key habit you want to develop here you know i think probably the ultimate takeaway from this whole episode the most practical takeaway is spend a lot more time sitting alone in a room thinking original thoughts from scratch that's basically it that's everything i'm telling you here it's just a long-winded way of saying sit alone in a room and think original thoughts from scratch and you can see how socialization if you're a highly social person you like to party you like to go to clubs you like to flirt with girls you like to go dating around you like to go sleeping around and having fun with your friends you can see how if you're doing that that's directly taking time away from you sitting alone in a room thinking original thoughts from scratch notice that reading deep books and watching deep videos is not the same as thinking original thoughts from scratch now that doesn't mean deep books and videos are bad it just means it's not the same as thinking original thoughts from scratch also notice that listening to a guru as great as that might be is also not the same thing as thinking original thoughts from scratch so check yourself honestly ask yourself when was the last time you sat down and did 60 minutes of original thinking answer that question for yourself right now when was the last time was it last week last month last year or not in the last decade and that basically tells you why your life isn't going the way you want it to go a high quality life requires high quality ideas requires original thinking not just ideas you got you know from somewhere else although of course it's also important to get ideas from somewhere else on occasion sometimes you want to feed your mind with external sources that's actually very important for creativity you want a lot of diverse input but sometimes you also want to guard your mind against external influence so you can think some original thoughts sometimes when i'm thinking about these topics that i do these videos on sometimes i'll do research from a book or online for these topics but sometimes i deliberately don't do research so that i can first allow myself to generate some original ideas and takes and then in addition to that you know once i generate enough my own ideas then i can maybe go and kind of add a little bit of external ideas additional perspectives but the core of what i try to teach i try to generate myself and then i can add a little bit here and there of other stuff that tends to produce my best content i've noticed so here's an exercise you can try pick a subject any subject and think through it from scratch try this do this without relying on any conventional knowledge so for example pick a question like what is happiness or what is spirituality or what is science or what makes a great film and then just sit there for an hour and brainstorm and think about it from different angles contemplate it this is the art of contemplation i have many episodes in the past that explain how to do contemplation why it's important one of them is called contemplation another one is called how to contemplate another one is called how to contemplate using a journal another one is called the power of asking questions these are all great episodes go watch them re-watch them and then apply them what we're really talking about here is contemplation the challenge here is that you need to be able to both think deeply and you also need the ability to let go of thinking and that's a bit schizophrenic of a thing to ask of you and yet that is our work when you meditate you try to let go of thinking when you contemplate you try to think more deeply and in a higher quality way both are important skills practice them both likewise the challenge here is that you need the ability to socialize but you also need the ability to retreat into serious solitude both require practice and balance and there are real trade-offs between both so it's not one or the other i'm not demonizing socialization here there is value to socialization and i'll give you one very specific example of how socialization changed my life early on back when i wasn't very social back in my early 20s um what i actually did is i went to this conference called gdc game developers conferences held in san francisco i went there when i was about 20 23 years old um it was one of the first times that i that i flew somewhere by myself without without parents so i flew to san francisco to this conference it was a conference about game development i want to become a game developer at that point and i was just and uh and at that point i had i had like zero socialization experience zero pickup experience um zero public speaking experience and zero networking experience and so when i went there i knew i had to network so i kind of just forced myself and did a little bit of just kind of like you know fly by fly by the seat of my pants networking i just sat by some tables you know during lunchtime talk to random people you know we had like at lunch time we had tables and there's thousands of people there at lunchtime we had these little tables where people would sit maybe eight people 10 people per table you bring your food there talk to your neighbor stuff like that so you know i went around i handed around some business cards that i printed because i was looking for a game design job and just you know picking the brains of people like i was like what do you do and how did you get here why are you here and so you know what is your company about what kind of job you have and so i met some interesting people and one of the guys i met there was he was just like an indie he was just like an indie game developer and this was back in 2000 what was it this was like in 2006 2007 before indie game development was a thing you know today indie game development is like a popular thing it's just part of the the zeitgeist uh back then the idea of being an indie game developer it was brand new nobody knew you could do this um it wasn't a proven way to make money or anything like that there were no successful indie games yet back then there were no indie platforms there was not steam well there was steam but it wasn't really big with indie games and um there just wasn't a market for indie games back then there wasn't mobile yet the iphone hadn't come out yet and all that so um these were the early days right pre-indie and anyways i so i found this guy and he was just working on it on a game by himself independently and to me this idea just blew my mind like what because i was there thinking like well i need to get into like a triple a studio you know i i wanted to talk to like the big studios and get hired but the idea that i could just make games on my own that was a completely foreign concept to me because i studied the whole game industry you know for years through the 90s and 2000s i studied it and there just there were no examples of that it was all done through big studios so i thought i had to be part of a big studio but talking to this guy he said yeah you know and i'm like how are you doing how are you funding yourself he says like well i'm a i'm a software consultant so i do consulting on the side and i earn enough money from consulting and i only work like you know like 10 hours a week consulting and the rest of the time i just work on my game and to me that was such a foreign cool idea um that i'm like that at that point i thought wow that would be amazing if i could set myself up if i could position myself like that you know i would have all this creative freedom to do whatever i want um but at that point i'm like well but that's it's sort of a unproven idea and uh i was still kind of dead set on you know working as part of like a triple a studio but then i got hired by aaa studio and a few years later you know i found it so miserable there that i started having fantasies and that idea came about about you know being completely creatively free and then the idea came to me of i remembered oh that guy i remember meeting that guy at gdc who had this like cushy position for himself where he could just work on his own stuff his own games he just a little bit of consulting on the side paid for himself you know gave him enough money and all that you know consulting pace pretty well and i'm like well [ __ ] i need to set myself up like that and i did within a year i set myself up like that not as a consultant but i started my own business and was able to finance myself with passive income and then i was able to work on any games i wanted to and i still could do that today if i wanted if i wanted i could just go right now and work on any game i want without anyone telling me anything um and so i'm yeah so the reason i bring that up is because that was a direct benefit from my socialization if i hadn't gone to gdc if i hadn't pushed myself to network if i just sat in the corner by myself eating my lunch didn't talk to anybody uh i would not have met that guy i would not have gotten that idea and if i didn't get that idea then i wouldn't have ultimately been where i am today and the only reason i am here today being able to put out this content is because i became financially independent through that one idea that i got from socializing so all this goes to say that socializing is not a bad thing you can certainly use socializing to to really advance yourself in your career and to even set yourself up very intelligently however here's the problem is that if i became really good at socializing and networking and i went to every single gdc and other conferences and other parties and places and i just socialize and socialize and socialize and that became my whole life and my mode of survival then i also wouldn't be here with you today teaching the stuff that i teach i would be just like everybody else doing what they're doing so that's the point now let me point out a couple of traps about this because i know people will misunderstand this and misuse this teaching so trap number one just because you are a loner does not make you highly intelligent make sure you don't make that mistake if you are too shy to talk to a stranger you are not highly intelligent you have important developmental problems that need to be addressed so go address them if you're too shy to talk to a girl if you can't get laid if you can't get a date if you can't speak in public if you can't even maintain a couple of friends these are signs of serious developmental problems within you aspects of your life that are underdeveloped that need to be worked on go work on them i worked on them don't just be a loner because nobody likes you right you see there's a difference between being a loner because you could be social you could be having sex i could be out at a club right now partying and having fun and dancing but i choose to stay home because i got more important [ __ ] to do because i got to sit and contemplate about the nature of god right that's one situation another situation is that i'm sitting at home bullshitting and masturbating about god because i'm too afraid to go out to a club to talk to a girl i have no friends and deep down i'm actually depressed and miserable do you see the difference these days i go out to the club a lot i socialize a lot but actually my favorite days are the days when the club is closed or there's no good club open and on those days i stay home and i do something you know existential like i contemplate the nature of god those are actually my favorite days not because i don't enjoy going to the club i actually do enjoy it but i enjoy contemplating god more than that there's a time to be playful and stupid and there's a time to be deeply intelligent learn to have both aspects in your life and don't use this idea of deep intelligence to judge and criticize others for being social for having fun and then for as an excuse why you don't do that and the real reason you don't do it is because actually you can't or you're afraid or you lack the skills and then you're just using you know these actualized teachings as just a way to mentally masturbate like if you're lonely if you're truly see when i'm like sitting at home contemplating god i'm not lonely if you're truly lonely and depressed and you feel like you need a friend to talk to go get that create that in your life god is not really going to solve that for you once you handle that then you can come back and you can access god and you'll have the best of both worlds here's another trap you might fall into is what i call the trap of iconoclasm being iconoclastic for the sake of being iconoclastic just being different for the sake of being different trying to be different unique or non-conformist as a facade or as a pretense so make this following key distinction distinguish between being non-conformist in a shallow way versus being non-conformist in deep ways so being non-conformist in a shallow way would be kind of stuff like you know being non-conformist as part of a group like you join some sort of cult or you become a libertarian or a goth or you're a part of a biker gang or you become emo or red pill or incel or black pill or you become a mark sister you become anti-mainstream or you become you know uh an sjw or an anti-sjw or you become some sort of new ager and really you're just doing this as part of a group you're not thinking independently when you're joining these sorts of cults and movements these are shallow forms of non-conformity deep non-conformity is when you sit at home and you contemplate your deepest values what your priorities are how you want to be creative and you work on all that the things you deeply love then you go and you pursue those things that you deeply love and then whatever you're pursuing out of a genuine deep profound love that's going to be deep non-conformity and then you don't care whether other people like what you love you don't care if they approve they don't care what your family thinks you don't care about what your friends think if if none of them like what you're doing it doesn't matter to you you still go do it that's deep non-conformity and then you don't compromise your values and your priorities when others try to seduce you away into some low consciousness activity or something that you don't value or that goes against your priorities or breaks your integrity another trap here is demonizing the mainstream be careful about that just because something is anti-mainstream doesn't make it good or intelligent there's a lot of stupid [ __ ] [ __ ] that is anti-mainstream in fact there's more stupidity in the anti-mainstream than there is in the mainstream now that doesn't mean that the mainstream is always intelligent there's plenty of stupid stuff in the mainstream but god there's so much just ridiculousness in the anti-mainstream that i see these days be careful about that and also the trap of conspiracy theories i have a whole episode about that the it's called the sneaky psychology behind conspiracy theories um subscribing to conspiracy theories does not make you deeply intellectual and it does not make you non-conformist very much the opposite a conspiracy theory as i've quoted in that episode my opening quote there is that a conspiracy theory is a is a fool's idea of intelligence and that is the case now you might say but leo isn't actualized.org itself one of these non-conformist conformist groups and the answer is that actualize.org can certainly be turned into a trap listening to actualize.org is not the same thing as original thinking from scratch so even though i consider actualize.org a deep source of intelligence and insight um that's like from my perspective from your perspective if you're just sitting there passively being programmed with all this these insights and then going around parroting them and not thinking original thoughts for yourself and deriving these insights for yourself then you're misusing actualized.org and in that sense it's going to be a problem for you you should think of my job as really to inspire you to investigate reality for yourself by showing you how much gold there is to be mined from putting your thinking cap on and doing serious contemplation one of my greatest weaknesses in this work is that i give you all the answers that is a pretty serious weakness you'll realize at some point that i have you might not understand why that's a weakness but it is however the intelligence behind this weakness is as follows it's not just an accident is that i'm trying to shower you with all these profound insights so that you are inspired to think about this stuff for yourself and to generate your own i want you to realize at some point like oh my god there's so many amazing insights that leo is sharing and he keeps pulling out new ones from his ass every week for years where all these insights coming from how is he generating them what if i cut out the middleman and start to do what he's doing for myself in my life wouldn't that be amazing and then you actually get inspired to do the work to train up your mind to do that and that's what i'm really trying to teach you by giving you all these answers there's a sort of a meta lesson that's trying to be taught to you here whether you get that or not i don't know many probably won't but for my most serious students that's what i'm trying to communicate to you you can generate all these insights for yourself not only can you but you should and you should get excited for doing so and you should be excited about customizing these insights and generating your own unique insights right you'll be able to generate insights that i haven't generated and never will that's exciting that should be exciting to you that should get you motivated to start jail breaking your mind and thinking outside the box and sitting down and contemplating generating your own original insights that's what's amazing about this work and i hope you learned that from me here are some related episodes you might want to watch if you like this episode radical open-mindedness how open-mindedness works the deep problem of marketing cult psychology part two and how modern branding exploits you that all ties ties in with this what we talked about here today in conclusion i suggest you forge your own path in life intellectually intellectually you're only going to start living the day you commit to generating your own original thoughts so get started all right that's it i'm done here please check out my website actualize.org there you will find my blog where i'm posting a lot of original stuff quotes resources videos funny memes etc go check that out i put a lot of time and effort into it come check out my book list read the books on there hundreds of books for you to read to get you started with all this work check out my life purpose course to help you get on track over 25 hours of original exclusive content that's not found on the free channel that will help you to figure out your life purpose sign up to my newsletter i'm going to be releasing more courses over the next year and or two stay tuned for that if you'd like you can support me on patreon.com slash actualized also come join the actualized forum where we have a community where you can find like-minded people to share in your insights and have some camaraderie and companionship so you're not doing all this alone all right the final thing i want to say is this that stay tuned because in the future i'm going to have specific videos on how to think how to bootstrap your thinking i'm going to have an episode on abstraction that's a really interesting one um actually i already shot that one i shot that one a few years ago so i i shot an episode on what abstraction is and how it applies to thinking it was actually such a good episode that i didn't release it i didn't want to release it because i thought it was too good sometimes i record an episode it's not good enough to release sometimes i record an episode that's too good for me to release um uh i'll i'll probably make it even better at some point and release it so i still have yet to talk about abstraction and then uh a very interesting episode that i'm working on is what i call oblique thinking so as i said uh i've sort of come up with a new way of thinking which i call oblique thinking which is ways of thinking about highly abstract and infinite type of objects in ways that normal thinking is not able to grasp and i'm still trying to articulate exactly how to talk about what this oblique thinking is because by its nature is very implicit it's not explicit so i have to make it explicit so how do you make an implicit thing explicit so anyways a bit of a paradox um so that's something to look forward to in the future as well so stay tuned for all those um i'm really gonna push with this work to show you how to become a very original thinker and how to tap into the deepest levels of intelligence basically trans humans levels of intelligence that's something i'll be working on for years in the future and maybe even create a course on that at some point that still requires a lot of research and development work for me but i'll be throwing out nuggets here and there so i'm excited about that i hope you are too stay tuned for more you