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[Music] so finally we've reached the topic of interpretation this is going to be a foundational epistemic episode it's going to take you a good 10 years to fathom the significance of this episode because what i want to communicate about interpretation and how it shapes your mind's construction of reality is very very deep and we're going to use dozens and dozens of examples to start to illustrate this for you but like i'm telling you there's so much here so this is what i live for let's dig in the core point of this episode is actually very simple and uh it belies the depth of what's really here the core point is just this that every situation has multiple interpretations to it and people fall into the trap of treating situations as though they only have one or two interpretations the worst case scenario is when you fall into the trap of thinking that there's only one interpretation because if you only have one interpretation of a situation whatever the situation is and i'll be giving you a list of dozens of them in a moment then look what happens that becomes your reality that becomes fact for you that becomes absolute truth for you because you can't conceive your imagination is too limited to conceive of alternative interpretations so that then locks you into whatever your interpretation is you don't even recognize it as an interpretation at that point that's the worst case scenario that's the most unconscious way to go about it and this is what most people are doing in most situations then there's a situation of expanding your mind to seeing two interpretations really when there's only one interpretation it's not even an interpretation it's taken as fact but then when you've got two interpretations two sides of a coin two perspectives now you actually get a little bit of a taste of the fact that interpreting is going on that the mind is not just receiving raw facts it's doing a lot of interpretive work but the problem here is that now you get caught up in this tug of war this duality you see reality in a dualistic black and white way this leads to tribalism and to partisanship and so the ultimate problem here is of course is that this is all part of a larger theme of self-deception that i've talked about not being cognizant of one's interpretations and treating them as fact or only seeing two sides and two possible interpretations to a situation leads to much misunderstanding of reality via self-deception most situations have way more than one or two interpretations interpretation is core to how you make sense of the world facts just the very idea of a fact this idea that there is something that exists independent of you and your mind and how you think about it something that wasn't constructed by you this is what you call a fact and oftentimes the mind appeals to these facts which aren't really facts the mind treats it as a fact for the convenience of going about survival so you have to think very deeply about anything you just say oh that's a fact it's not really a fact but you treat it that way and that becomes your reality you need to notice that most of what people call facts are actually interpretations and of course by people i mean you facts alone have no value no meaning no sense to them and furthermore which set of facts you focus upon this is highly biased and selective so the problem is not that you're citing facts it's which facts you're cherry-picking to bolster your sense of reality see a fact alone tells you nothing about what you should do what's worthwhile what's not worthwhile what's right what's wrong what's good what's bad what you should pursue or not a fact doesn't tell you this that requires interpretation and the tricky thing here is that there's always more than one way to make sense of facts people like to act as though the way they make sense of facts is the only way or the right way or the best way and that is where the self-deception happens epistemic blunders mostly lie not in the facts themselves but in how you make sense of them and which facts you focus upon now let's get into the examples to make this very concrete for you but before i do it's very important that you understand the idea of going meta this whole episode is very meta go check out my previous episode called what it means to go meta and also check out my previous episode called content versus structure because even though i'm going to be giving you a bunch of examples here and various interpretations to situations i don't want you to get lost in the content of these examples these are just to help your mind get a little bit of traction make this concrete and to help you see some applications here but the danger here is that you're gonna start to your mind's gonna start to wonder like well which of these interpretations is the true one the correct one and in this episode i don't care that's not what i'm teaching you here i'm trying to communicate something meta to you which is not the content of these interpretations and i don't want you to get lost in thinking of like well is this interpretation right or is that one right it doesn't matter what matters is that you see that there are multiple interpretations and the need to have one right one and to falsify all the other ones that in and of itself is part of the problem that's you getting stuck in the content and failing to go meta and to see the structure right so stay meta with me here don't get lost in the content all right so the first example situation is why did the united states invade iraq interpretation number one to defend against terrorism interpretation number two because of greedy executives running giant military companies and defense contractors and oil companies for whom this was beneficial and so they conspired to do so that's interpretation number two interpretation number three dick cheney was a war criminal and george w bush was an idiot who let him manipulate him like a puppet master that was number three number four we could interpret the us invasion of iraq as a collective psychic backlash to 911 or in other words it's a fear response it's a collective fear response interpretation number five there were weapons of mass destruction or at least that's what people believed at the time regardless of whether it was true or not from their epistemic point of view if they thought there were weapons of mass destruction didn't matter whether they actually were there or not what mattered is the perception of them being there because there was a threat again that was a fear response so we can keep going for sake of brevity we'll just cut it off there that's that's five very different interpretations and you see that within politics the way that most people behave when they discuss or debate politics is they pick one interpretation and they act as if that interpretation is just the situation itself like if somebody believes that dick cheney is a war criminal and george w bush was an idiot uh that's their view of reality they don't see that as just an interpretation right they don't see deeper levels of interpretation such as what i offered for example with the with the last two of this sort of idea of a like or the last uh the fourth one rather the idea of a collective psychic backlash to 911 like see that interpretation is actually very profound and a deep one there's different levels of quality to interpretations they're not all equal some of them are very simplistic and some of them are are profound and even go to a spiritual degree of understanding so for example this idea of a collective psychic backlash to 9 11 this is a very powerful idea because see if you believe the united states invaded iraq because just of some greedy corporate executives or whatever who wanted oil or defense contracts that's that's one way of that's a whole way of seeing the world you see that it's this adversarial way of like well there's the greedy corporate executives who are separate from us normal people and they're very corrupt and they're evil and they're running the world and they're manipulating all of us it's the globalists and so forth that's a whole way of looking at the world and it leads to certain consequences and it also leads to you feeling a certain way how are you going to feel if you think the entire world is run by these cabals of globalists how does that make you feel in your life does that empower you to be constructive and creative and to follow your life purpose or does it demotivate you and make you feel like a victim like you can't do anything like you're being exploited and manipulated you see so how you interpret the world very much affects how you feel that's why it's so important and ultimately what you care about is how you feel not the facts you never care about the facts of a situation you care about how the facts relate to you and ultimately how it's going to make you feel but now with this interpretation about the collective psychic backlash to 911 see when you understand that you can empathize more with what really happened and then you're not looking at the us government as this group of evil people you're seeing it from a more compassionate understanding and conscious place where you're seeing it as uh like yeah mistakes were made and they were made because of fear and fear is such a powerful emotion especially when it happens at a collective level that it makes us blind it leads to self-deception in its own right and it makes us do stupid things that in fact fear tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy so the very thing you fear like for example if you fear terrorism going in and destabilizing the middle east with a with a poorly thought out war leading to sectarian violence and collapse of of delicately maintained orders of geopolitical balance in that region leads to a destabilization actually creates more terrorism but you can empathize with that because you yourself have acted out of fear before and fear blinds people individually and collectively now that's just one situation with multiple interpretations now again i'm not trying to suggest that one of these interpretations is true and the others are false that would be a trap in and of itself for you to to get into that debate rather what i want you to see is how people get stuck in that trap how you tend to get stuck in that trap and what the solution is to getting out of that trap which is to start to see the whole situation in a multi-perspectival multifaceted way with multiple interpretations seeing that each of these interpretations captures some element of the situation but not the total thing and that really what you want is you want a compound perspective of interconnected and intersecting interpretations and you want to see furthermore even more importantly how your mind is constructing these interpretations how many different kinds of interpretations there are of such sorts you want to start to be cognizant of maybe which interpretations you're missing maybe there's interpretations on this situation i haven't even mentioned here because we'd have to sit down and think about it for hours to come up with all of them that are even better than anything that i've said so far also i want you to see that there's different qualities of interpretation usually the interpretation that some group of people is doing evil because they're monsters or their criminals or their idiots that's one of the lowest quality kinds of interpretations but even though there are low quality interpretations and high quality interpretations that does not mean that the high quality should monopolize and squeeze out all the lower quality that itself would be too limiting we want a more expanded view that even appreciates some of the truths contained in the low quality interpretations every interpretation contains some sort of partial truth even though it might be very twisted and distorted all right let's move on to the next example so this this this first example sort of sets up how all the other examples are going to go it's basically all the same stuff but just with different content and different situations so the next situation is why does religion exist this is a question that many serious people think they have an answer to you can ask a scientist a mathematician a philosopher or an average person or a religious person for that matter you can ask an atheist and they're all going to have different ideas and different explanations so interpretation number one is that religion is just wishful thinking it's it's a holdover from superstitious ancestors from the past like our ancestors in the past you know they weren't very scientifically rigorous and because of this they had a lot of superstitious thinking we know this because if we go and we look at primitive cultures they have a lot of superstitious mystical thinking most of it is and and then we grew out of that that's interpretation number one interpretation number two is that a religion is a tool designed to control the minds of the masses and it's used in this political fashion interpretation number three is that religion even though it's not scientifically true like the stories in the bible noah's ark noah gathering all you know two of every creature that's not literally true but these are myths which contain deep psychological lessons without which you can go astray in life and for this reason religion is important this interpretation would be sort of the jordan peterson approach to religion he doesn't believe it's literally true but he believes it's very important that's an interesting one you see that's a more nuanced interpretation than just simply oh saying all religion is you see there's different qualities of interpretation and and then here's a fourth one for you religion actually points to absolute truth which is incommunicable because it's infinite and therefore it can never be articulated in a literal scientific sense do you see how different these different interpretations are and how they change your orientation to what religion is you're going to react to religious people very differently depending on whether you think that religion is literally true or it's or it's a political tool to control the minds of the masses by the elites or you believe it contains these deep psychological truths along the lines of jordan peterson or that religion actually points to some profound truths that are trans psychological and not merely mythological or allegorical but deep metaphysical truths which simply cannot be communicated with language because they transcend the finite limits of language so which of these interpretations is the right one well that's not what we're interested in here what we're interested in more is again the meta point of just seeing how many different ways there are to interpret what religion is and we want to appreciate all these different interpretations and we want to appreciate that and notice that our mind is doing this these are not facts found in the world the idea that religion is is not a fact it's not a scientific fact next situation the situation of islam people have a lot of different ideas and opinions about islam interpretation of one about islam is islam is the highest religion in truth that would be your interpretation if you're a muslim most likely a second alternative interpretation is that islam is evil barbaric and violent that would be your interpretation if you're maybe a christian if you're not very well experienced or educated about what islam is and how people practice it uh a lot of conservatives in america in red states tend to hold this interpretation of islam and notice that they don't hold that as an interpretation to them that's their reality that's their truth likewise when a muslim believes that islam is the highest religion the highest truth she also doesn't hold that as an interpretation that is her reality interpretation number three is that islam has some good parts and it has some bad parts and whether it's good or bad it's used for good or for evil depends on how you read these parts and which you pick and which ones you leave out a fourth interpretation is that islam contains profound truths that are more advanced than science but the way in which the truths are communicated are outdated and include many archaic cultural customs from the middle east from a thousand and a half years ago ago and it's taken too literally and dogmatically by most people which corrupts and distorts those advanced truths but the truths are more advanced even than science from a certain point of view notice the the the gradations in in nuance between these different perspectives again we don't really care which one is the true one that's not the issue here the next situation is with donald trump interpretation number one of trump is trump is a true patriot he's a secret genius he's a secret systems thinking a systems thinker uh who is just acting dumb and buffoonish in order to subvert the system that's his method it's a calculation he's running circles around the elitist globalist media there are people who have this view of trump that's how they interpret what trump is doing interpretation number two is that trump is actually just an opportunistic grifter and con artist interpretation number three is that trump is actually god acting out of the highest good and love from his point of view and that all his actions are the seeking of love notice how radically different that perspective is so see how you relate to trump how trump makes you feel and then how you even act and behave politically very much depends on which of these interpretations you take how about the situation of psychedelics interpretation number one is they're just drugs drugs are dangerous and bad interpretation number two they're just hallucinations in the brain so even if you experience some sort of truth or whatever you think you're experiencing their mystical experience it's all just a hallucination interpretation number three is that psychedelics expand consciousness and allowing you to see higher truths realer reality than you see in your sober life interpretation number four is that psychedelics are an immature shortcut to genuine spirituality in other words they are fake spirituality the awakenings and enlightenments you get aren't real because they're not permanent it's a common interpretation many many spiritual teachers take this interpretation without realizing what they're doing uh interpretation number five psychedelics are the future of spiritual work they just haven't caught on yet because they've been so stigmatized and demonized do you see how differently you can relate to psychedelics depending on what interpretation you take some of these interpretations completely exclude the possibility of you exploring psychedelics that entire domain ever in your life that's how powerful interpretation can be and others of them empower you to explore that domain of course they could also get you into trouble too you could explore the domain in such a way that you end up hurting yourself or killing yourself and that has to be taken into account too and psychedelics are also one of those contentious sort of almost political issues where people adopt one of these interpretations and they and they only believe that interpretation and they just can't see any of the other interpretations and that gets their mind stuck that actually limits your ability to be spiritual the next situation is actualize.org what is the status of actualized and right teachings interpretation number one it's occult interpretation number two actualize.org is not a proper cult but it's simply false it's misinformation it's self-deception interpretation number three actualize.org offers some advanced perspectives and insights about the nature of reality but it's still partial it's not a complete picture the next interpretation is that actualize.org seems like a cult because it's trying to teach you advanced things that most of mankind finds threatening and therefore the most convenient thing for the ego of mine to do is just to call it a cult anything you find threatening any information you find threatening which is not mainstream and approved of by authorities that you look up to you're gonna just simply label as a cult the next interpretation is that actualize.org is a communication from god the next interpretation is that actualize.org is your own mind your own self teaching you how to awaken it's the universe teaching itself how to awaken so which of these is true well it depends on how you want to look at it so this was the initial salvo of examples we're going to have dozens more here but before we get to that i want to interrupt the list of examples with uh an important point about this problem there's a problem within philosophy and within science and philosophy of science known as the under determination problem and that's really what we're facing here so let's explain what this is with some quotes so i'm going to read you a quote here from colin myrna that explains under determination he says quote under determination is a thesis explaining that for any scientifically based theory there will always be at least one rival theory that is also supported by the evidence given and that that theory can also be logically maintained in the face of any new evidence quine's non-uniqueness thesis says that for any theory t and any given body of evidence supporting t there is at least one rival or contrary to t that is also as well supported as t this is a result of our inability to completely understand or gain access to the whole set of empirical evidence for any one particular situation or system and therefore our acceptance that new evidence could be made available at any time this thesis maintains that since there is no method for selecting between our two or more valid solutions the validity of our conclusion is always in question end quote and then there's a further point made from wikipedia which says quote under determination refers to quine's assessment that evidence alone does not dictate the choice of a scientific theory as different theories observationally equivalent may be able to explain the same facts end quote so who is quine then you might be wondering well if you've been following my work for a while you know i love to quote klein he's actually one of my favorite uh western analytical philosophers is his his work in philosophy of science and logic uh and epistemology is is very dense and technical and but also profound um there are some profound quotations that i've read in the past and uh there's actually an example i want to give to you here which is klein's gava guy example so what is the gava guy example this explains the problem of underdetermination so imagine that someone from western culture goes and finds a remote tribe in the amazon that has not been contacted by humans ever and we try to make contact with this tribe and we try to learn their language and their customs their ways and their view of reality ordinarily we would think well this is not a problem we would just go there we would you know use some sign language and stuff to figure out how to communicate and then eventually we would get to a point where we learned their language and we'd be able to talk and understand them and all that and what kwine says is that no this problem is much deeper than you think because how would this actually work let's go through the example so let's say i'm a westerner and i'm sitting with one of these natives we're sitting around the campfire or something and then a rabbit runs across the field as we're sitting there and we're both looking at it and the native points his finger at that rabbit and says gavagay gava guy and then i look at that rabbit and i say oh rabbit and he says gav a guy and i say rabbit and then you know we keep saying that and then eventually we start to think that okay so gaba guy is there is there a word for a rabbit but when he's pointing at the rabbit what if he doesn't mean rabbit as a furry living animal but what if what he means by gava guy is god manifesting itself as a rabbit that's what gava guy means to him to me gabba gai just means lunch or and a furry animal and if if if you think well but leo i mean this is silly this is a silly problem because you know god manifesting itself as a rabbit what is what is the difference between that and a rabbit there's no there's no difference between these things that's just some sort of fluffy mystical stuff and superstition that that guy you know added in there that native added in there because you know he's primitive and he doesn't think scientifically and uh quine's point here was very deep and in fact it's beautiful coming from klein because see unlike certain other kinds of philosophers kline was like a hardcore materialist highly technical logical scientific philosopher he was not one of those french existentialists or something he did serious scientific research and uh and theorizing uh within quantum mechanics and other things right so anyways the problem here is much deeper than you think because actually there is a significant difference between seeing that rabbit as a piece of meat for you to eat or a biological creature that exists independently of you somewhere in the external physical world see that's your notion of a rabbit rabbit is a metaphysically and epistemically conceptually loaded notion because in your mind the way your mind thinks of rabbit it's not just a piece of meat and it's not just an animal that's disconnected from your your entire sense of reality how you think of that rabbit how you think it relates to you what you think you can do with it what its purpose is whether it's good or bad what its value is in the world uh whether you think it's evil or not um whether you think it's even separate from you physically and metaphysically whether you think it even exists independently of your own mind all of these are baked into your notion of rabbit so when the native points to that thing and says gav a guy what he might be saying really is not what you're saying by rabbit because when you say rabbit you say that's a discrete physical material object man of atoms that's usually what you mean but what he might mean is that that is a hallucination a construction of my mind so when he says gava guy that means my mind is constructing that image of this furry creature that's maybe what he means and that's very different from what you mean by rabbit so every concept within our language brings in it an entire metaphysics and epistemology that framework which is latent and implicit which you're not conscious of but it very much shapes how you relate to that rabbit because you see if you treat that rabbit as a manifestation of god maybe you're not going to have it for lunch tomorrow but maybe i will maybe i will butcher that rabbit because to me it's just a piece of meat but to that native it's it's consciousness and it's even a manifestation of god so he treats that rabbit very differently the mistake here is to think that the native is being is being superstitious and unscientific quine's point is that there is no such thing as scientific because what you what you've called scientific is itself part of this problem how do you interpret what science is this leads us into the topic of what is the nature of science which i've talked about in my profound three-part series deconstruction the myth of science so this is part of the deconstruction of the myth of science as you see most people treat science as though it's just an objective singular thing there's just science that's how most people think of science whereas if you watch my deconstructing the myth of science series and you start to think about the issues i bring up about science very profound ones then uh what you start to realize is that actually science is full of interpretation and what you think science is itself an interpretation creating a very strange loopy paradoxical problem within your epistemology because how do you find the right interpretation of what science is can you use science to do that you see this is a meta-scientific problem you actually can't do it with science and this is what many atheists materialists rationalists and people who subscribe to scientism don't understand they don't grasp the depth of the epistemic problem here and there's many more interpretations of what gava guy could mean it doesn't have to be related to god or to spirit when that native says gavagai what he could be talking about is he could be talking about the rabbit-ness as an abstraction not that specific rabbit so see you might think oh he meant that rabbit right there but no his view of reality might be such that he doesn't think in terms of particular animals or whatever because he doesn't place value on that he places value on the abstract forms maybe he's sort of a platonist to him rabbit is this platonic form manifested by that one particular you know instantiation of it but really when he says gava guy he's not pointing at that instance of a rabbit he's talking about the abstract category or we might say the sort of the essence of what a rabbit is the rabbitness of the rabbit and there are many more possible interpretations of what gava guy could be could be or what it could mean and quine's point is that we will never be able to fully resolve this problem within language uh because it's so infinitely entangled with our entire framework for what we think reality is and that we don't actually have any objective criteria for adjudicating between one framework and one set of ways of looking at reality and another and you might think well but leah we can just figure all this out just by having a deeper conversation with this native and klein's point is that actually you'll never figure it out you can get a little bit more accurate by having a deeper conversation but ultimately there's no way to know that when i say rabbit and you say rabbit that we really are talking about the same thing that we're holding it in the same way now of course we can point our finger at a thing and call it a rabbit but that doesn't ensure that my mind's way of holding the concept of rabbit is the same as your mind's way of holding the concept of rabbit and in fact uh we're basically guaranteed to to have different ways of holding it and quine's point the reason this is called the under determination problem is that the facts of the situation alone are under determined because our way of interpreting and seeing the facts go way beyond merely what is there in the facts and you never just work with the facts of a situation because that's not useful to your survival that's not what your mind cares about your mind doesn't really care about the facts your mind cares about the additional connections that that fact has to your entire worldview that's what's significant to your mind that's what's crucial for you to see a rabbit by itself is not important what's important is how it fits into your entire scheme what you can do with it what you can't do with it what it's value is whether it's evil or good whether you could have sex with it or whether you can eat it whether it's poisonous or not whether even it's a real object or not whether it's an illusion a hallucination a dream all of these are much more important to you than the rabbit itself as a physical material object and the notion that it is a physical material object that is already an interpretation that's not a given you see the problem with these interpretations that they're so implicit they're so unconscious they're so sneaky that you're making them all the time but you're not aware that you're making them and so the point of this episode is to make you more aware of how you're interpreting everything because then that gets you some distance and allows you to start to see how your mind is constructing many of these things rather than taking the constructions of your mind as reality itself so the lesson of the gavagai example is that most situations are in life are deeply ambiguous and this is true for science too see most people think that science just finds out the facts of reality it doesn't science finds some very minuscule amount of facts and then it does a whole bunch of interpreting and different scientists do different interpretations of those facts and they can come up with completely different theories of of reality based upon those limited sets of data and then how do you adjudicate which of these theories is the correct one you might say well we will go out and do more tests and gather more data and then that data could potentially in you know disqualify one of these theories and that's true it could but whatever data you gather is still going to be far smaller than the theory itself so maybe it could invalidate a theory but for that new data you can always come up with multiple alternative theories again and this process keeps going forever so you never reach a point within science where you have one theory that perfectly matches all the facts because every theory is underdetermined and so this creates a an open-ended problem an infinite problem for science you can always have hundreds of theories that fit the existing set of data i'm not talking about the invalidated theories you can have millions of false theories i'm talking about the ones that will still fit the data and people don't take this problem seriously enough and this gets them stuck in one paradigm or another and this is the situation for example with materialism versus idealism um and and spirituality too for that matter is that like when we're talking and debating between materialism versus idealism the facts in in the debate don't really change we all sort of agree on the facts that like i see a chair you see the seams the same chair okay fine we can agree on on that as a fact but the question still remains that as a materialist you hold that cherish like existing independently of you whereas an idealist you don't that's that's a pretty significant difference in how to view a chair but the but the actual image of that chair as it is arising in your consciousness is the same for the materialist and for the idealist so how do you adjudicate that situation well not by looking at more chairs no matter how many more chairs you look at it's not going to adjudicate that situation nor by changing up the object and changing it to trees or to cars or to people no matter how many cars trees and people and chairs you see in the world it's never going to help you to adjudicate between materialism and idealism now the mistake people make here is they say ah well if that's the case leo then it's just a word game and there's actually no difference between materialism and idealism but that's wrong because there actually are ways to adjudicate between them but not at your current level of consciousness and not using the materialistic methods see the problem is that the way you're trying to adjudicate between materialism and idealism is already biased by your attachment to materialism and therefore the only methods you're willing to use to adjudicate this problem are the ones that validate materialism you see you won't consider something like direct consciousness of truth as a possibility as a materialist to adjudicate this problem whereas an idealist does consider that possibility and is open to it a materialist is not so i want you to notice that it's not just all the word game there are real stakes and consequences here there are serious epistemic blunders that can be made here serious profound self-deceptions that can be life-threatening and could destroy civilization if we don't get this right you can destroy your life if you don't get this right so it it has serious consequences it's not just empty philosophy or just armchair speculation about stuff so the lesson here is that most situations in life are deeply ambiguous and that's something that most people have a difficult time grappling with the mind doesn't like ambiguity because it's too open-ended the mind wants a grounded reality but see even though life is deeply ambiguous survival forces you to act in the face of com of incomplete information survival forces you to interpret if you don't interpret you die basically so one of the lessons here is to increase your capacity for handling ambiguity uncertainty and multiplicity of perspectives see your mind one of the things your mind hates the most is uncertainty and ambiguity your mind wants reality to be one way this particular way that serves you and your survival and it doesn't like leaving things open-ended because that is a lot of work for the mind it's a lot easier to live life thinking that islam is the one true religion and that's it every everything else is false and evil that's a much simpler task for the mind that it is to be doing the sort of metacognitive work that we're doing here with actualize.org in this episode and many of the others thinking about epistemology metaphysics rabbits and gava guy and god and spirit and materialism idealism and all this it's complicated it's overwhelming it's stressful it can leave you feeling nihilistic it can make you start to question your sanity even you're not even sure what's true anymore is the chair real or not are other people real or not leo are you even real you might reach that point in your investigations and of course that's the whole point all right so let's pick up with our examples now so uh these next examples i'm going to go through them more quickly than the previous ones because we just don't have enough time to cover everything and i want to i want to rattle off a bunch of i just want to hammer you and pummel you with these examples so you see just how significant uh ubiquitous this problem of interpretation is and how many real world implications it has so um the situation with god what is god well god is a fiction created by irrational people who didn't know about evolution that's one interpretation or god is actually a state of higher consciousness consider that as a valid interpretation which one is true which one is more true i'm going to leave it open ended here i'm not going to give you any answers i just want you to start to see the situation from multiple perspectives another situation or interpretation is something like when it comes to mysticism what is mysticism mystics are just loose-minded fools who have succumbed to their own wishful thinking about trying to transcend death they just don't want to face death and so they've invented various kinds of silly self-deceptions that's one way of seeing mysticism or maybe mystics have figured out how to access higher dimensions of reality have you thought of that as a possibility so see when i'm presenting you with these different interpretations i want you to seriously consider this one as being possible and then i want you to seriously consider this one as being possible and if you can do that this opens your mind i've discussed this in my episode called how open mindedness works a very profound episode make sure you watch that none of my work works if you don't understand radical open-mindedness another situation science is truth a lot of people hold that or what if science is a set of mental constructions that are convenient for manipulating reality and for survival what if that's the case have you considered that possibility how seriously have you considered it how would you know the difference between the two how would you adjudicate between science being truth or science just being a set of mental instructions convenient for manipulating reality and to helping you survive after all if what you care about so much is survival and nothing else really you could easily conflate survival with truth therefore you can see science as the truth if you make the mistake of confusing truth with survival which of course you do how about this situation senator whatever his name is corrupted by the nra gun lobby and that's why he doesn't vote for gun reform or have you considered the possibility that senator what's his name actually believes in gun rights and he believes that these are really important rights guaranteed by the constitution in which case he's not voting for gun reform not because the nra bribed him or made him scared but because of genuine philosophical convictions he has i see a lot of liberals and progressives making this mistake a lot of progressives love to accuse certain senators or politicians of not supporting their policies because they've been corrupted or bribed or influenced in some way and hey that's definitely true in many situations but that's not the only possible situation a lot of conservative politicians simply believe in the in in the gun culture they grew up in the gun culture they don't need the nra to lobby them they already were on the side of the nra philosophically for their entire lifetimes so see a progressive can get the can interpret the situation improperly because from a progressives point of view the idea that someone could be a genuine believer in the right to own guns to a progressive this doesn't compute in their reality because in their reality they interpret that as being some sort of stupidity or they have to explain it somehow so the way they explain it is that the nra is influencing them but you can explain it alternatively that where does the nra get its power and its money from it gets it from people who genuinely believe in the right to own guns that's where most of the nra power came from right so it might not be that the senator is being corrupted by the nra gun lobby it might be actually sort of a reverse causality where the senator already believes in the philosophy of the nra gun lobby and actually feeds it rather than it feeding him and you might say well what's the difference but there is an important difference if you misunderstand the causal links in these kinds of situations you're going to end up straw manning that politician or whoever you're disagreeing with and then this is going to lead to discord and it's going to lead to political division part of it a polarizate partisan polarization and so forth and then we have the political situation we're in today where both sides basically don't understand each other and they mischaracterize each other straw man each other and this is a problem of failure to being able to step out of being able to step outside one's own interpretation you see so a progressive has a certain set of interpretations a conservative has a certain set of interpretations and then they get stuck in those that's the meta problem so if you want to be a good progressives you actually should care about getting this right understanding your political opponents and their true motivations now i'm not saying some of them aren't grifters i mean plenty of politicians and and conservatives are grifters or they're just uh they are influenced by the money and the gun lobby of course that also happens but it's see it's not easy it's not so black and white to distinguish between what's really happening because the way humans operate is that our financial interests are always deeply entangled with our philosophy our worldview our sense of reality our metaphysics our epistemology you never have a clean division of these two things how you earn your money is deeply intertwined with how you think reality is what you think is right wrong good bad in your entire philosophy why would it be that way because money is the distillation of survival and your world view is your world view because it helps you to survive to understand that go check out my two-part series called uh understanding survival part one and part two another situation bill gates is trying to control the population and get rich via vaccines that's a common interpretation you've heard lately or bill gates is actually trying to help mankind in the best way he knows how but maybe the way he knows how or how he thinks is the best way isn't the best way or maybe it is have you considered that interpretation after all how would you know the difference how would you tell if bill gates was doing it for the money and to manipulate others for the power or if he was actually doing it out of the kindness of his heart and genuinely just doing what he thinks is best for mankind but then again you know he's just a human and as a human he has limited knowledge of how to help mankind i mean do you know how to help mankind in the best way what if you had billions of dollars but hey you had maybe some wrong ideas about how to help mankind or maybe they they weren't even so wrong maybe you had good ideas but they just weren't perfect ideas after all it's hard to help all of mankind perfectly you're probably not going to be able to help everybody in the way that they agree with because people have different ideas of what kind of help they need and what help mankind needs mankind needs a lot of different kinds of help and the help you might need is different from the help somebody in africa might need another situation person x is insane or maybe person x understands something you don't this is in fact the situation because it's very easy to just dismiss someone as being insane but a lot of people who are considered to be insane really they're people who understand something you don't or that mainstream culture doesn't then again some people truly are insane so how do you distinguish these two things it's not so easy there's no easy answers here all of it finding truth requires work that's why it's difficult there is no simple algorithm there's no set of rules i can give you for how to distinguish these two things you have to deeply study epistemology you have to deeply study reality you have to be a student of of this work you have to do it for years and for decades and then you'll get good at distinguishing these things but without the experience of doing it without the study without the research without hours and hours of watching and listening to this material and doing contemplation for yourself you're never going to figure it out another similar situation is person x is evil that's a very common way to dismiss somebody or another alternative interpretation is that person x is doing good but from their limited point of view and their limited consciousness so hitler was evil that's this one and this one says hitler was actually doing good but his point of view and his consciousness was limited therefore his doing good actually created a lot of bad for many people how would you know which of these is the case or consider this person x is evil or person x is actually doing things for a greater good using his higher vision that you are too narrow to see that's a that's an even deeper twist on this problem of evil a lot of what ordinary normies call evil is actually people who aren't evil but are actually extra good but are operating on such a high playing field of what they're doing their vision is so broad and deep and long that the normie can't understand what the person on this higher plane is doing therefore they call him evil this has happened to mystics and sages and saints throughout the entire span of human history in all cultures the wisest and most conscious and mystical of humans the highest geniuses were often regarded as insane criminal or evil by their culture and put to death or uh jailed or burned or tortured or crucified think of christ think of socrates think of gandhi think of martin luther king uh um bruno was burned at the stake next situation is consciousness is just a product of the brain that's an interpretation that's not a scientific fact that's an interpretation or the brain is imagined by consciousness how would you tell the difference between these two just to play with you right now can you do this open your mind to the possibility that your brain is imagined by consciousness just i'm not saying to believe it i'm just saying can you open your mind to that possibility and can you see the massive repercussions of that if that's true another situation criticism of science means that the one criticizing is unscientific or there's a different interpretation you could have criticisms of science from a meta-scientific perspective where the criticism is coming from a trans scientific above science not below science means it's actually more accurate and rigorous than science is able to be how would you know the difference see a lot of people who are attached to science anytime they hear criticism of science they interpret that automatically to be oh that's just some religious nut case who doesn't want to believe in science or some conspiracy theorist or something like that and it's below science it's less rigorous than science they don't consider the possibility of somebody being critical of science from a more rigorous more epistemically rigorous perspective than science itself because science refuses oftentimes to do epistemology and metaphysics but they don't consider this as a legitimate possibility because they are so attached to science they don't think there's anything above science and in fact if i would explain this whole situation to them this is called the pre-trans fallacy by ken wilbur if i explain the situation to them they would say oh leo this this notion of meta scientific that you're using this itself is it's some notion that you invented because you have your cult that you're trying to run and you need to invent these these notions of meta scientific so that you can put yourself above science and that helps you to earn money from part of your cult maybe that's certainly a possibility or have you considered the the alternative interpretation which is that meta-scientific is actually not it actually is real there is things in reality which are meta-scientific which science cannot understand or access but which are true have you considered this possibility or are you so attached to science that you're not willing to because your interpretation that science is truth is your reality and you're not willing to see that as an interpretation next case people who talk about god are dumb ideologues they're just dogmatic and superstitious or have you considered the alternative interpretation which is that some people who talk about god are dogmatic ideologues but others who talk about god actually have direct experience of god that's a very radically different interpretation it turns the whole situation upside down on its head it leads to a radical recontextualization because you see most religious people i mean sorry most materialistic and atheistic people are not open to the interpretation that it's possible to have a direct experience of god and for it to be genuine see their interpretation of any experience of god is that oh well sure you can have all sorts of hallucinations and stuff but that's not really god it's just you hallucinating stuff but that's an interpretation so you can have an interpretation that all experiences of god are just hallucinations that would be one interpretation or you could have an alternative interpretation which is actually that some of them could be hallucinations but that is actually possible to have a direct experience of god have you considered that as a possibility you see the ultimate meta interpretation you make when you're debating these points and you're thinking about this is that since you're selfish and it serves your survival the meta interpretation is that you're right and leo is wrong or anybody who disagrees with what you consider to be right is wrong but that itself is an interpretation see so for you to start to open your mind to the possibility for example that you could have a direct experience of god which is not a hallucination but which is genuine more genuine than science is more true than science more true than mathematics to open your mind to that possibility you would first have to open your mind to the possibility that your entire interpretation of reality is wrong are you open to that interpretation probably not which is why you have the worldview that you have here's the next case a lack of proof for god means that god doesn't exist that's a very common interpretation among materialists or have you considered this possibility maybe god is a type of thing which cannot be proven because god exists prior to proof because god created the notion of proof how would you tell the difference now here the materialist will say ah leo but this is just a cop-out this is just a sort of a rhetorical trick that you're using because actually you have no proof of god because if you did you'd give it and then we'd believe you but since you don't give it then you're just bluffing and just making up stories and excuses okay i grant you that that's one interpretation of what i just communicated to you maybe that's true but have you considered the alternative interpretation that actually what i told you is not a cop-out and it's not a rhetorical trick but it's actually the case what if there is such a thing as god but it cannot be proven because the very notion of proof itself doesn't go deep enough metaphysically and epistemically in order to be able to prove itself most people haven't considered this possibility consider this case the earth is is moving around the sun that's a common interpretation see most people take that as a fact that's not a fact that's an interpretation or see to see how that's an interpretation you need an alternative but have you considered that the entire universe is moving around the earth that sure flips the situation on its head doesn't it how about this case other people exist or what about what if this is all a dream and i'm dreaming up other people to construct a sense of reality in the same way that i do when i'm sleeping at night after all when i'm dreaming people up at night i wake up and then i realize yeah they were all just imaginary but then why can't that apply to this current consciousness that i'm in right now have you considered that possibility here's another case love when it comes to the topic of love love is just a mammalian emotion produced by the brain it has no metaphysical significance whatsoever it's just a good feeling we enjoy feeling it when i talk about love a lot of people interpret what i'm saying as that or have you considered this possibility that love is a core metaphysical aspect of universal mind and consciousness see when i talk about god as love or love as being fundamental metaphysically to what reality is when i say reality is love people hear that and then they interpret that as meaning like oh well leo is just this sort of hippie guy who has a soft mind and he's sort of fantastical and he likes to talk in his flowery language and exaggerate stuff and he just he's just taking some psychedelics and he's conflated his feelings of love that he feels on psychedelics he's conflated this mammalian emotion which feels good he's just so deluded he's conflated that with genuine physical metaphysical stuff that's an interpretation an alternative interpretation is that actually you think that's what i did but i'm not stupid enough to do that and that i've actually thought one step ahead of you and i've already anticipated that problem i've thought through that i've deconstructed even that to realize that actually reality is metaphysically love actually but see most people are not open to that interpretation because to be open to this you have to admit that your previous interpretation is wrong see you could as you're listening to me everything i'm telling you you could interpret in this way you your mind can can interpret some of the radical things i say as like oh leo is leo is just wrong because he's foolish and he doesn't understand he's tricked himself or he's building a cult and in this way you can dismiss many of the things i say many of the most important things i say can be easily dismissed this way and in fact they are by most people um because their minds are not open but but there's an alternative interpretation anytime you think i'm wrong the alternative interpretation is that actually you're wrong how would you tell the difference like when you listen to me talking about trump and bad mouthing trump and saying trump is low consciousness and a bad leader and selfish and all this sort of stuff if you're concerned if you hear me say that if you're a trump supporter and and you will almost instantly your mind will instantly unconsciously just interpret that as like oh leo is wrong this is evidence of leo being wrong and in fact i'm going to use this evidence to try to discredit everything else he's taught it's like leo i like all the stuff you teach that doesn't talk about trump but when you talk about trump i don't like it and because of that it gets me to start to doubt all of your other teachings because if you're wrong about trump think of how many other things you're wrong about leo how do i even know how wrong you are if you're wrong about one thing okay that's that i grant you that that's a that's one interpretation but have you considered the alternative interpretation that when i'm talking about trump you're wrong and you say to me no no no no no no no leo leo leo you're wrong it's not i about trump who's wrong it's leo who's wrong you see and so you're gay you're the game your mind is playing is that your mind can insist on its interpretation come what may literally any interpretation your mind wants to attach itself to it will attach itself to that to its death there is no limit to the degree of denial and attachment that your mind can take towards any interpretation so if you want to interpret my teachings as proof of me being wrong me being a cult leader me being deluded me being a grifter um me being a criminal or whatever me being insane you're entitled to do that precisely because you're imagining all of reality so one of sort of the meta traps of doing this work is you have to be very careful about when your mind interprets me as being wrong i receive emails and private messages on a weekly basis of from people i've received hundreds thousands of them over the years telling me how wrong i am about this thing or that thing how long i am about trump how wrong i am about politics how wrong i am about love how wrong i am about god how wrong i am about enlightenment how wrong i am about consciousness how long wrong i am about women about sex about femininity masculinity about everything everything i talk about someone thinks i'm wrong about and these emails all read in a very similar fashion usually in that they they accuse me of being wrong in such a blind way where i can tell that the person who accuses me of being wrong hasn't even considered the possibility actually it's they who's wrong and are just projecting that onto me that hasn't even entered their mind yet that's the level of development and consciousness that they're at you can find all these sorts of people in my comment sections now now now look now look this is a very tricky situation because you might say oh leo so you're just saying all this because you know it's it's very self-serving a household serving of you to say that leo you're never wrong but that's not what i said i can certainly be wrong i can always be wrong about anything pretty much especially from your point of view um and i have been wrong about certain things in the past i've i've admitted some of them i've been admitted and others i haven't simply because uh the reality is that the human mind is wrong about so many things that you can't you don't first of all you don't know all the things you're wrong about um you're discovering new new things all the time that you've been wrong about um it would just take too long to list them all but i i've literally made blog posts in the past where i would list things that i was wrong about but i'd have to do that on a weekly basis for the rest of my life you see so this idea that that you're never going to be wrong is just silly it's silly of course i'm wrong on on on many things i've been wrong many times in my life um it's not a a question of being wrong or right it's really a question just about of accuracy what's your batting average you're never going to have 100 batting average in your life you're never gonna have a you know perf every golf game you play is never gonna be perfect um the best golfers they don't play perfect golf they just play better golf than every other golfer likewise in my teachings i'm not claiming to be perfect i'm just claiming that my epistemology is better than most other people's epistemologies that's ultimately my claim and then you could say well leo you're wrong about that well i could be i could generally be wrong but also consider the possibility that when you think i'm wrong actually i'm right that's also possible how would you know the difference actually it's it's quite dangerous for you to take a position that i'm wrong and this is arrogant it's going to sound arrogant to say but i'll say it anyways because i feel like it needs to be said um these teachings are so self-deceptive and i've literally spent so many years over a decade of my life deeply contemplating all of these metaphysical and epistemic scientific and philosophical and spiritual topics that unless you've spent decades doing this work when you assume i'm wrong on something it's a safe bet that you're actually wrong it's not it's not a good idea to bet against me on metaphysical and epistemic issues now even though i say that i don't say that from a position of sort of i'm above you it's not about me being above you or better than you it's got nothing anything to do with that it's not about ego i'm simply saying this it's a it's a function of experience how many hours have you spent meditating contemplating reading studying deeply questioning yourself life reality others your dreams metaphysics about how many hours have you done this for have you done it for thousands of hours if you haven't then how can you possibly expect to be have a more accurate view of reality than someone who has done that that's real work you know i do real work for these teachings for these episodes i don't just come up here and talk out of my ass this particular episode on interpretation i've been developing this episode for for over six months i've been contemplating it massaging it i've recorded it twice in full didn't like the recordings doing it over again contemplating thinking of all these examples thinking of ways how i could be missing things here now again this doesn't guarantee perfection in what i'm doing it's just a matter of like if you're gonna go play golf against someone who has spent literally half his life professionally playing golf and you think you're gonna beat him you think that his choice of which club to use you think he's making a bad choice when he chooses his club because you think he's an idiot you think he's overlooked something well actually it's probably you the inexperienced one who's only golfed for 100 hours in your life it's actually probably you who's missing something he's choosing that particular club that particular shot in that particular way because he sees something you don't because he has thousands of hours of more experience than you in this particular field now does that make him a perfect golfer no does that mean he can't screw up his shot no does that mean he can't make a mistake and choose the wrong club at the wrong time sometimes of course he can it's just a question of accuracy and experience and it's nothing personal next case evolution proves that god isn't real if we have evolution why do we need god it's a very common interpretation made by atheists or have you considered this possibility that evolution is the process by which god creates now see the atheist will come up with a a meta interpretation here and say ah leo but that's just a cop-out that's a common trick that religious people use in order to save their religion see religion is always playing this game of moving the goalposts so at first religion was saying that there was no evolution now that evolution is undeniable now you move the goalposts and say that oh well god you're trying to co-opt evolution and give it to god as though god is working through evolution see this is just a rhetorical trick you're using to defend your little you know silly world view of god that could be correct or an alternative interpretation is that actually evolution is the process by which god creates have you seriously consider that how about this case very common case these days cop x is a racist because he did so and so or have you considered that cop x is not a racist but his actions appear that way because he's acting under extreme pressures because it's a difficult job and really only a cop could truly appreciate the pressures of that job see that's a very different way of viewing police and excessive use of force in police then he's a racist now then again could a cop simply be a racist yes could the entire police system be corrupted with racism explicit or implicit yes how do you know which of these is the case my point is that it's a lot more difficult to know than you think if you think that it's easy to know that you lack experience and you're fooling yourself here's another case the buddha didn't talk about love so love can't be the truth because the buddha taught the truth okay that's a that's a common buddhist interpretation or have you considered this possibility that the buddha did realize love and that he realized that love is truth and that what he called truth was actually love or another interpretation is that the buddha's nirvana is actually love metaphysical existential love but you actually haven't become deeply conscious enough to reach nirvana so when you hear a buddhist say nirvana or nothingness you get some image of emptiness in your mind a blank void you might think that that nirvana is just emptiness uh but when you actually experience nirvana very deeply your ideas of what nirvana is changes you interpret it in a different way you interpret as love how about this one uh obama's drone strikes were evil and acts of war crime or have you considered this interpretation that actually drone strikes saved many lives of military troops on the ground that would have to be sent there if drones were not used and that they actually prevented many terrorist attacks and terrorist activity that's also a valid possibility how can you be so sure that the drone strikes didn't actually save more lives than they killed now you say oh leo but reports suggest that 80 to 90 of drone strikes are innocent civilian casualties okay let's say that's true let's say that's true let's say a thousand civilians were killed with drone strikes during obama's presidency okay but what if those let's say 10 percent that were not innocent civilians what if that 10 percent you know ten percent of a thousand is like a hundred what if there were a hundred serious hardcore terrorists who would have committed to you know suicide attacks and uh um uh other kind of terrorist attacks in europe in america in the middle east wherever uh they would have destabilized the region the government which would have led to the deaths of let's say five to ten thousand civilians or what if these were leaders and masterminds of terrorist cells that would have radicalized foul and recruited thousands of more terrorists who then over time would go on to kill thousands and maybe even tens or hundreds of thousands of people leading to instability in the region uh you know and the the the regional instability and civil wars that would have resulted in the middle east as a result of this geopolitical instability would have led to the lives of a loss of lives of 100 000 people so how do you weigh those two things which which is actually the right way to see these drone strikes again i'm not trying to justify the drone strikes truly i don't know i really i don't know the calculus uh if i had to be honest i would have to say that the calculus is very complicated and hairy it's so hairy that probably most people at the pentagon don't even know the answers to these questions because there's a lot of counter factuals like when you kill the mastermind of a of a serious terrorist organization um how do you quantify how many people would have died had you not killed him like let's say that osama bin laden was killed by a drone strike let's say he was still alive uh he was killed by a drone strike but it cost a hundred civilian lives would that have been worth it let's say you were very compact let's say you went and you became president and you were going to be a very loving compassionate president and you got rid of the entire drone strikes program but then what happens if you did that and then the terrorist situation got so out of hand because you had people like osama bin laden that were just rising up in the middle east and then um to the point where then it got the situation got so bad and so toxic you'd have to send in troops u.s 100 000 u.s troops to quell the situation because it gets so out of hand um is that worth it is it worth are a hundred civilian lives worth not sending in 100 000 troops see what i want you to see is that it's these are such difficult situations and even the people in charge don't really have good answers to these situations because we're dealing with uncertainty incomplete information under determination ambiguity and yet we have to act in the face of that see good leadership is not about perfectly knowing everything a good leader doesn't know a lot of stuff a good leader is someone who's able to make decisive choices and to have some sort of principle and integrity in the face of great ambiguity uncertainty and turmoil and chaos whereas most people are paralyzed by that a good leader is able to maintain a steady course and to keep people grounded in uncertain and chaotic times with integrity that's very difficult to do again i'm not justifying what obama did i don't know what the you know the net result is i just can appreciate the complexity of it so when people take this simplistic attitude of like oh it's just drone strikes are evil it's like i'm not so sure about that because you're not considering the greater evil of sending cruise missiles before we did drove strikes we used cruise missiles before that we sent troops the situation could even get so out of hand that we'd have to use a nuclear weapon how many civilians are acceptable to kill with drone strikes in order to prevent a nuclear war these are the realities that you would actually face if you were the president or a leader of any major nation there are no easy or good choices they're all uncertain ambiguous complex hairy they have trade-offs and they're all usually always choices between the lesser of two evils next case absolute truth is impossible to access even if it exists the human mind just can't access it or absolute truth is possible to access you've simply not done the work to do it how how much work have you done 10 hours 100 hours a thousand hours what if absolute truth requires ten thousand hours of work and you've only done a thousand does that mean it's inaccessible or does that mean you're lazy which is true how would you know do you see how easy it is to confuse your own personal laziness with inaccessibility another case leo when you say that absolute truth exists and that you have accessed it personally you are being arrogant and narcissistic and egotistical sure that's possible or have you considered that actually i'm simply telling you what's true that's also possible see i could be lying or i could not be i could be self-deceived or i could not be i could have accessed absolute truth or maybe i couldn't or maybe i didn't how would you know another situation witchcraft is everybody knows that witches don't exist it's just silly ancient superstitions or witches actually do exist witches are simply people born with supernatural conscious abilities that have been demonized by mainstream society because it's a threat to political power and to the established culture have you considered this possibility another case liberalism is a mental disorder i've actually seen cars with bumper stickers that say say something like that or to the person who has that kind of bumper sticker have you considered that actually liberals are more conscious than you you see don't don't ignore that possibility whenever you think you're more conscious of somebody else always consider the alternative possibility that they're more conscious than you and you're just projecting your unconsciousness onto them now this cuts both ways because we can flip the situation we can say okay so like a lot of progressives will say conservatives are racists that's one interpretation or have you considered this possibility the conservative mind is more prone to fear and survival than the progressive mind and as a result conservatives are more xenophobic because of the structure of their neurology now see as a progressive you say oh well that's just a racist leo you're just trying to whitewash racists um actually no i gave you a more nuanced interpretation that could be true um but if you insist that all conservatives are racist and you insist that that's the only right interpretation i can't i can't convince you otherwise you see your own mind is doing this if you're convinced that some interpretation is the truth god himself cannot help you you're stuck and you're gonna stay stuck until you open your mind to other possibilities how about this case capitalism exploits workers that's a very common progressive idea socialist idea okay interesting idea how about this interpretation though or whatever problems capitalism has higher systems are not yet sustainable because humans aren't selfless and conscious enough therefore the exploitation of capitalism is just a natural byproduct of our lack of self selflessness and consciousness and love do you see how different this interpretation is from that one it changes your whole orientation towards capitalism towards work towards our politics towards our economics now if you're a socialist you might say oh leo well you're just again you're creating justifications and excuses for the perpetuation of the exploitation of workers by capitalism you're the enemy you're just a shill for capitalism because it benefits you that's one interpretation maybe i am just a capitalist shill or maybe just maybe could it be possible that actually we're not yet collectively conscious enough to sustain a higher more humane system maybe that's why your socialism isn't working maybe that's why progressive politicians aren't getting elected maybe that's why you keep losing elections because there's something you misinterpreted about the situation maybe your ideas are very utopian and good in theory but in practice you don't realize that the majority of mankind is not conscious or developed enough to adopt and live by your utopian ideals maybe in a thousand years we can do that but not today have you considered that possibility how about this situation this is a very abstract and general one something is the case therefore i must do this or an alternative interpretation is something is the case and it doesn't mean for what i should do so for example let's say that we can say something like [Music] animals suffer therefore i must not eat animals that's one interpretation or another interpretation is animals suffer and it doesn't mean for what i eat how would you know the difference how would you know when you're making up the difference again be careful i'm not trying to justify any action here i'm just trying to get you to see the meta in the situation here's another case women are who only want chads with money that's a very common attitude within in-cell communities and pick-up communities or have you considered this interpretation of the situation is that your personality sucks and you're so lazy that you invented this ideology to excuse yourself from actually having to develop yourself as a man to properly attract women and that the reason women want your money is because you have nothing else to offer them but money so while you might think that women only want money actually the situation is that when you have nothing to offer but money then of course people will take money but that's because you have nothing else to offer so maybe the problem isn't that women want money the problem is you have nothing else to offer but money and you don't even have that either and then you're sitting there complaining about not having money when you could just have develop aspects of you to offer that have nothing to do with money that women actually love love more you just haven't developed those aspects of yourself along the same lines there's an interpretation that women are cheating this is a very common view within pickup the pickup community women are cheating or have you considered this interpretation is that you expect that women owe you sex and then you blame them when they act on their own agenda instead of giving you what you want and furthermore that you yourself are a when you're doing pickup and it's actually you who's projecting your own sluttiness as a man onto women because see you only look at women as how often you can have sex with them and then you expect them to also see you in the same way you wouldn't hesitate to cheat on on a woman therefore you're afraid that she will cheat on you because it's a projection of your own mind so when a pickup guy says that women are cheating have you considered the possibility that he's actually saying that he's a cheating how would you know the difference how about this case if life has no meaning then that sucks and i should kill myself or if life has no meaning i can imagine whatever meaning i want i get to construct my own meaning and this gives life paradoxically the deepest meaning you can have or another interpretation is that if life has no meaning then death has no meaning and then i'm free from death another case very common one solipsism is bad and depressing or have you considered solipsism is beautiful profoundly beautiful why haven't you opened your mind to this you're so busy ranting and denying solipsism that you're not even able to see the beauty of it assuming it's true i'm just throwing out ideas here i'm not telling you what's true i'm just throwing ideas you find out for yourself uh how about this jesus was the son of god interesting or have you considered this that jesus was a son of god because we're all sons of god because god is everything see this this encapsulates and epitomizes the under determination problem because it could be the case that jesus is the son of god or was the son of god however you want to say it um and that everyone is the son of god because you see if everyone is a son of god that includes jesus in it but it also doesn't limit god or sons of god to jesus exclusively do you see how this interpretation is actually broader and more inclusive than this one which is more exclusive and partial and it's this one is so open-ended that it actually incorporates that one into it that's why this interpretation is more powerful or more robust we might say because an interpretation or perspective that can hold and integrate other perspectives is the higher perspective that's how you distinguish higher from lower perspectives a higher perspective doesn't demonize and exclude the lower perspectives whereas the lower perspectives do how about this those who reject christianity are working for the devil that's one interpretation that many christians might have fundamentalist christians or if you're a fundamentalist christian have you considered this interpretation that christianity itself has been co-opted by the devil thousands of years ago has been completely corrupted and that now what you call christianity is literally devilry how would you know the difference how about this case i need lots of money to be happy or have you considered this you need to find a new mode for happiness think about how this changes your entire approach to life if you just start to see that your idea that you need lots of money to be happy that that is not a fact but that is an interpretation that you could change see it's a lot easier to change interpretations than facts although with how stubborn and close-minded most people are actually sometimes it can be easier to change a fact than it is to change someone's mind about one of their interpretations but it doesn't have to be that way that's the point the point is that if you want you could open yourself to have such a flexible fluid mind that you could change many of your your interpretations easily and that would be the wiser course because it is actually easier to change your mind than it is to change reality but not if you're stubborn like a mule only if you're open and you take responsibility and you actually are willing to change yourself how about this case life sucks that it's unfair or your life sucks because you haven't been living by the right principles maybe life sucking and being unfair is just a consequence of the wrong principles and the wrong ways in which you're living your life in which case life actually is fair because it's fair to those who follow the principles and it's also fair to those who don't in the sense that if you don't follow the principles there's natural consequences and suffering which is what you're experiencing and then you call that unfair but it's not unfair you know like if if you take a hammer and you and you you hit your big toe with your hammer it hurts is that unfair is life unfair or are you just doing something stupid you shouldn't be doing see when an idiot hits his toe with a hammer and then experiences excruciating pain he blames that on the hammer and he blames that on god he blames that on life and other people he doesn't take responsibility for the fact that he's the one who picked up the hammer and he's the one who got the idea to hit himself over the on the toe and then if you just stop doing that then life would seem fair and beautiful but of course if you keep living that way your life is going to keep sucking because there's principles one of the principles of life is don't pick up a hammer and hit your toe how about this case blacks have lower iq due to their genetics they have inferior genetics that's a that's a common view held by by many sort of ultra national conservative types but have you considered this possibility what if just what if what if you believe that blacks have a lower iq due to their genetics because it serves your nationalist identity not because they actually do but because it serves your worldview to believe so how about this case related similar the middle east is less developed than the west because people in the middle east are just inferior savages they have an inferior culture and they have inferior genetics or have you considered this the middle east is less developed because the middle east was a harder harsher environment to survive in had less resources from the very beginning and that people in that region historically required more time to develop then those civilizations that arose in europe and elsewhere which had certain geographical and resource benefits that those in the middle middle east didn't have and that the middle east are not um inherently doomed to be underdeveloped forever it's just that they need more time to overcome the harsher environment that they started out in they had harsher survival conditions and they just need more time to develop themselves and they will eventually develop to the standards of western culture and beyond and there's nothing really stopping them from doing that other than just more development not some inherent inferiority or some genetic defect or even some sort of cultural problem how about this case person x has the truth because because he won a debate he knows the truth because he he proved it in the debate or have you considered this possibility that winning debates has nothing to do with truth you could win a debate and be wrong you could be right and lose a debate that might be possible how about this case it's a scientific fact that women have penis that men have penises and women have vaginas that people take that as a fact that's actually an interpretation an alternative interpretation is that the idea of penises and vaginas and men and women that these are abstract categories created beyond and outside of empirical science i've discussed this in my episode called um is gender a social construct how about this case logic reveals truth or alternative interpretation logic is a rationalization mechanism co-opted by the ego mind for the purposes of your survival the mind's survival what if all of your logic is nothing other than your mind's intellectual way of surviving have you considered that how about this case you must do x because the constitution says so or how about this interpretation the constitution was written 300 years ago or 250 years ago or so and it contains outdated ideas which need to change to fit with modern times otherwise the nation will stagnate and perhaps even collapse how about this case i can't get laid because i don't have a square jaw and a big dick that's a common in-cell interpretation and they treat that as a fact they really hold it scientifically as like this is why i can't get laid and then there's this interpretation i can't get laid because i actually don't understand female attraction i have cripplingly low self-esteem and i don't socialize maybe that's why you can't get laid how would you know the difference if you've never tried to seriously socialize if you've never tried to seriously learn female attraction if you've never worked on your self-esteem issues how can you know that that's not the cause of you not being able to get laid rather than your dick and your jaw size how about this i can't get laid because of feminism that's also a common excuse that many people men who struggle to get laid take on or how about this interpretation as an alternative i can't get laid and i blame feminism because i've actually never done the hard work of approaching women and i i play hundreds of hours of video games all year long and i should talk on an insult forum all the time and i'm immersed in that ideology and that's why i can't get laid not because of feminism how would you know the difference what if feminism is just a scapegoat you invented because of your own personal irresponsibility on this matter how about this case jordan peterson is a fascist maybe or have you considered this possibility that you have such a political attachment to whatever ideology you have politically that you are unable to look at his work with nuance and that you misunderstand the conservative mind because you don't actually care about truly understanding the conservative mind because your worldview can't accommodate it because your worldview is too limited since you're attached to your limited worldview you can't understand the concern of mind and therefore the only recourse you have is to call conservatives fascists now also some conservatives could be fascists but they also could not how would you know the difference how about this one i'm poor because capitalists exploit me or alternatively i'm poor because i haven't taken responsibility for developing highly valuable skills and building mastery and expertise maybe my blaming of capitalism is just an excuse for not doing the hard labor of developing valuable skills how about this person x is a lying hypocrite grifter that's a very common attack that we see online within politics especially or how about this person x is just weak like all of us are and has failed up to live up to his own ideals and has been corrupted by money think of all the times you've been corrupted by money all of us like money all of us would like to have more money does that make us hypocrites does that make everyone a grifter how about this person x criticized me because i did something wrong and now i feel that or how about this interpretation person x is projecting their own shadow on to me and i'm feeling guilt feeling guilty because i'm failing to distinguish that or hey maybe i actually am wrong how about this person x is a crazy sociopath charlatan or he's actually trying to teach me something that i'm deeply fearful of and therefore i paint him in my mind as a crazy sociopath charlatan because the ideas he's teaching are threatening to me how about this landing a man on the moon proves that science is true or it's possible to land on the moon even with untrue science have you considered that how about this ceos are greedy capitalists or ceos have crazy pressures put upon them for survival of the company how about this slavery is evil or actually maybe slavery is evil only relative to today's cultural norms and level of development how about this walls are real because i can't walk through them and that's proof of their reality or how about this interpretation i could be imagining walls that can't be walked through how would you tell the difference this is the underdetermination problem and again it's not merely a word game again see when i tell you this you can say oh leo it's just all a word game that's one interpretation or another fly another interpretation is that it isn't only a word game it has consequences that tentacle out in many subtle ways that you just aren't conscious of yet how about this case she is not i'm sorry she is acting selfish for not giving me sex that's a common attitude women men take towards women or have you considered this actually you are the selfish one by needing her to give you sex when you want it on demand how would you know the difference how would you know that you're not projecting your own selfishness onto her how about this life the the number of stars and galaxies in the universe that we've observed means that life is very common or have you considered that it it means exactly the opposite it means that life is extremely rare do you see how significantly different that interpretation it just flips the whole thing on its head how about this ufo sightings are just diluted people and hoaxes or ufo sightings are real or ufo sightings are there's conspiracy to hide ufo sightings or another interpretation is that there is no conspiracy to hide them as simply that the government and the people studying them don't even know what they are and how to explain them properly because it doesn't fit their own worldview how about this leo you're being biased and partisan when you call trump a corrupt fool maybe i'm biased or have you considered the possibility that actually i'm describing him accurately but you don't want to hear it because you're biased how about this case if the paranormal was real science would say so but science doesn't say so therefore it can't be real or how about this possibility science can't say so because any scientist who dares to say it would be discredited at outcast from the community of science which is the case how would you know how about this god will punish you for your sins or how about this god punishes no one for their sins it's just that sins naturally produce their own suffering by disconnecting you from loving consciousness so it's not god who's punishing you for your sins it's actually just you again the situation of hitting yourself on the toe with a hammer it's not god who's punishing you in that case it's just you you're punishing yourself by not connecting the dots between the hammer and suffering and your actions and your thoughts how about this stage green socialism is dangerous or how about this stage green socialism is being conflated with stage red and blue communism which are not the same things at all soviet communism is not nordic social democracy about this government regulation is socialism or you can't have a government at all without regulations regulation is crucial for the harmonious balance of a society how about this taxation is theft or maybe just maybe everything you enjoy in life is only made possible by taxation which is needed to fund the military to fund the court system to fund the road system to fund the infrastructure the electricity and many other things how about this case this girl i was dating and texting didn't text me back and that's because she didn't like me and because i was being too needy with her or she lost her phone and lost your number this actually happened to me um when i first got into pickup and i was just learning female attraction um one of the first girls i hooked up with uh you know a beautiful um beautiful girl and we we slept together multiple times and then like i was really into her she was into me and all this but i was i was still in a place where i was very needy i was just kind of new to the whole dating market and situation i was still very needy and very insecure and trying to like figuring figuring out how to like you know keep her and all this stuff and i wasn't sure if she wanted to keep seeing me so you know i was texting her but i was worried like am i texting her too much am i coming off as too needy and then one night you know um i felt like i texted her too much and then she didn't reply and she didn't reply for like a whole day and i started just getting all in my head about it i started worrying and thinking like oh man i must have ruined everything i was being too needy and i was just preoccupied with you know not coming off as too needy because i knew that that would repel girls and um i really like this one so anyways so i got like bummed out that night and went to sleep thinking that i lost her and then the next morning i'm in the shower and i hear a knock on my door and um i open the door and it's her and she's standing there crying because she lost her phone last night at a party or someplace and it completely recontextualized the situation you see sometimes you think you have a correct interpretation and then reality shows you otherwise how about this case democrats want illegal immigration because it gives them more voters this is a very common talking point amongst conservatives what i don't see them considering though is this alternative possibility which is that have you considered that actually democrats are simply more compassionate towards the suffering of immigrants and they're less fearful of them they're not welcoming in immigrants because they want more voters for themselves to win elections but simply because they actually care about the suffering of immigrants see to most conservatives that interpretation doesn't even enter into their mind that someone could actually have compassion for the suffering of immigrants in third world countries and could want to help them and could not be afraid of them and cannot think that this will destroy our country just by welcoming some of them in a conservative mind can't compute that possibility therefore when you can't compute that possibility the only alternative is to come up with some sort of idea that democrats are doing it for their own selfish gain how about this communism was a failure or communism actually led to the greatest growth in living standards in the 20th century both in russia and in china that throws you for a loop see people who talk about communism being such a great failure if you actually look at the gdp growth and the rise in living standards percentage-wise in russia and in china over the last century it rose way more than in non-communist countries that's pretty interesting now again i'm not saying this to say that communism is good and to justify communism there are many problems with communism i'm just i'm just showing you how these interpretations are much trickier than it seems how about this guru x is a rapist and an abuser or maybe guru x actually had consensual sexual relationships with a bunch of groupies as they tend to do and then those groupies became disgruntled because he wouldn't marry them or whatever and go exclusive with them which is true this is a very common spirit common problem in spiritual communities or how about this guru x is a rapist therefore he cannot be enlightened that's proof of his lack of enlightenment or have you considered this radical crazy interpretation that enlightened people can be rapists maybe how would you know how would you know that an enlightened person can't be a rapist i mean you tell yourself that oh enlightened people are supposed to act all saintly and stuff enlightened person can't be a rapist but how do you know that you certainly want to keep your mind open to that possibility maybe enlightenment doesn't work the way you think it works how about this people voted for trump because they were racist maybe or people voted for trump because he appealed their spiral dynamic stage blue and orange value set and many people subscribe to the blue and orange value set because that's just your level of cognitive and moral development how about this when leo says that he's god he is being narcissistic and unspiritual maybe or or maybe he actually is god but you're not conscious of it yet maybe you're god and you're not conscious of it yet maybe we're all god but you're not conscious of it yet how would you know the difference what's the difference between me being god or me being narcissistic maybe god is a narcissist have you considered that after all where did narcissus come from who created narcissists how about this supernatural healing is delusion and or supernatural healing is real but it's only accessible from exceptionally high and rare states of consciousness that you haven't accessed yet how about this the miracles of jesus are just a myth and exaggeration stories to tell to children or jesus was so exceptionally conscious that he actually had those powers how about this this is a very crucial one disputes between spiritual teachers are just differences in word and style not in substance all spiritual disagreement is just a word game and miscommunication that's one possibility or how about this consider the alternative is that some teachers actually are more conscious and more awake than others which accounts for the difference in teachings and styles and wording and also it could be both remember these interpretations aren't necessarily mutually exclusive you can have a blend between the two in fact oftentimes that's the case how would you know the difference between spiritual teachings disagreeing simply because of word and style versus actual underlying substance in consciousness do you see how how tricky that epistemic problem is and people just so so often assume that oh it's just it's just a disagreement in word only and if there's no difference in levels of consciousness between teachers what if there is how would you know how about this there is no proof of paranormal phenomena because it's maybe or how about this the alternative is that the notion of proof that you are using is not appropriate for measuring paranormal phenomena the problem is not the lack of the phenomena the problem is the methods of proof that you're using are too limited after all your method determines what you're going to get back how about this being short makes me bad with women or how about this my insecurity makes me bad with women how would you know the difference do you see how easy it is to conflate your physical height with insecurity you might spend your entire life thinking you're bad with women because of your physical height and attribute that to a physical material fact but actually it's your crippling insecurity about your physical height and how you hold it in relation to yourself into women that is the cause the true cause of you being bad with women after all there are many short men who do really well with women one of the best guys i knew from pickup he was way better than me i'm six foot two he's he was five foot five imagine being five foot five he was five foot five pakistani guy he would kill it he would kill he he would do better than a white six foot tall guy at the club why because this dude had the uh the attitude of a boss this dude was the opposite of insecure he was one of the most secure and brash and confident guys that i knew in game and his results directly reflected that it wasn't it wasn't because of his height it was because of his character how about this women care about my dick size very common one or consider this crazy i know this is crazy crazy possibility only you care about your dick size how would you know the difference how about this leo stole some insight of mine and didn't give me credit for it i sometimes get accused of this people will write me and say how dare you steal this and didn't credit me or but have you considered this possibility is that it's possible to develop insights independently just because i say something that you've thought of before doesn't mean i copied you um people have the same ideas independently all the time this is common throughout history throughout human civilization there's not a single source of ideas not all ideas have one origin point there can be independent origination of ideas and people oftentimes don't don't understand that then again maybe i did steal your insight and just didn't give you credit that's also possible this is a funny example from one of my some of the some of the vlog videos that i've done or some of the videos i've shot inside my old apartment where i used to live i have this decoration on the back wall that looks like a six like six six six triple six um and before i published my first video from that apartment and read the comments section i didn't even notice that it was a 666. so some people when they watch that video for the first time they write in the comments section very common um comment is they say oh leo why do you have a 666 on your back wall what does this secretly mean about you are you part of the illuminati or whatever some something like that um that's one interpretation but what they don't consider is that the alternative interpretation is that these are just decorations that i got at pier one um they're not six six sixes really they're just swirls that happen to look that way if i rearranged them the other way they would not be sixes they would look in the opposite direction and so it's very funny to me how people accuse me of deliberately putting this 666 on my wall when the reality is you know in this case i didn't even i didn't even register that it looked like a 666 until i posted the videos and then i got all this you know all these comments and people are so what's so funny about is that people are so sure of their interpretations when they leave that comment they're just so sure that i did this on purpose when the simple explanation is that i so didn't give a that i didn't even see it the way that you see it right like i so don't give a about the symbol of 666 to me it's completely meaningless nonsense whereas to some of you it has a very deep significance see being a being a teacher and being exposed to lots of people's opinions and critiques of my work it's actually been very illuminating because what i get to experience on a daily basis for years is just projection constant projection just like people projecting their egos onto me like all the time like i i experience projection like 10 times a day every day for the last 10 years um and it has it has a certain profound psychological impact on you both negative and positive because it can be difficult when you're actually open to criticism and feedback the way that i am it can actually be difficult to distinguish that from projection because most of what most the feedback and comments i get is just pure projection but then again i don't want to close myself off to that because i do want to be open to feedback and to to valid constructive criticism and so it's a very interesting situation and what it does for me is that as i experience all this projection i start to realize like holy everybody is projecting all the time and of course i'm doing it too to others and then that makes me more aware of my own projections when i feel it so poignantly done on to me by others how about this interesting case um i'm going to go through some personal cases now from my own personal experience leo deleted my youtube comment because he doesn't like it and he's censoring me i've been accused of that in the past um but an alternative interpretation is that did you know that youtube has automatic comment filters if you say something that youtube doesn't like it filters you automatically for spam now you might interpret that as like oh well that means youtube is part of some globalist conspiracy to suppress free speech it could be that or have you considered that the internet is spammed by bots more than there are more users of the internet that are just bots spammers spammers then there are actual humans and that every major website is just inundated with spam all the time which makes uh makes the site virtually unrunnable these bots try to hack the website try to manipulate the website try to put in spam links try to do whatever and then there need to be filters against this stuff on any website whether it's facebook youtube anything otherwise your website turns to have you considered that um so a lot of times when people think that i'm deleting their comments i'm not it's just that my channel gets so many comments thousands of comments some of them are automatically filtered by youtube spam filters and then i'm too lazy to go in there and to check them all manually by hand it's too much work it's it's a full-time job to do that so if your comment gets caught by the spam filters i'm sorry but it won't be visible then again also i do actually moderate some of the most toxic comments on my channel if i see racist comments homophobic comments if i see like extreme vulgarity in language if i see spam links if i see people spreading complete you know disinformation and gossip and conspiracy theories that are toxic i do moderate some of that stuff not often maybe 100 comments i'll delete but it's usually like obnoxious toxic stuff i try not to delete something just because i disagree with somebody's opinion on something or because it's a criticism of me i do sometimes delete criticisms of me which are just what i perceive as complete slander like for example if if someone accuses me of you know child molestation or something like that um i will delete that because it's just it's like it's it's so preposterously slanderous um that i perceive it as just pure toxic disinformation or trolling so sometimes i do that um so that explains it to you okay here's another one about me leo is just parroting stuff that he ripped off from advaita vedanta and other spiritual traditions and he stole it from there and now he's co-opting it as his own and he's presenting it as his own truth or our alternative interpretation is that actually leo discovered many of these insights independently on his own again if something is true you have to figure that it's not coming from a human source because somehow the original humans discovered it for themselves if it was true it was true before they were there in which case if they discovered it why can't others so for example if you think that some yogi in india discovered enlightenment and then all other enlightened people are just disciples of that one yogi well this is nonsense because if that original yogi was able to discover it for himself which supposedly he should have been able to because he didn't get it from somebody else because you're saying he's the discoverer of it so whoever that first person was that became awakened and enlightened or whatever god realized um obviously he didn't do it by talking to a human he got it directly from the source but if he did that then why can't anybody else do that everybody can do that in theory therefore they don't need the yogi that's the beauty of truth if one man can discover the truth any man any woman can discover the truth but people get so attached their lineages their schools and their yogis and their gurus that they tend to interpret all other teachings as though they're supposed to source from from from there uh here's another one about me leo doesn't want to debate others because he's afraid of being exposed as a fraud maybe that's why i don't debate people or have you considered this possibility that leo has become too conscious to be interested in debating anyone has that possibility even entered into your mind the idea that a conscious human has no interest in debating people or proving anything to anybody and that this is actually not evidence of them avoiding or being untruthful this is actually evidence of their development and their maturity in their consciousness mature teachers don't debate have you noticed this how about this funny one about me leo is a cult leader because he's denies that he's a cult leader and that's exactly what a cult leader would do a cult leader would deny he's a cult leader that makes him a cult leader maybe or have you considered the simpler possibility which is that leo denies he's a cult leader because he's not one after all i can i can play this game on you i can play this trick on you i can call you a cult leader and you will deny it and as soon as you deny it i'll say ah but according to your logic if you deny your occult leader that's exactly what makes you a cult leader you see it's circular logic i can also do this with a scientist give me any scientist give me the most reputable scientist i can sit down with him and i can just accuse him of being a cult leader i can accuse science of being a cult and immediately he's going to deny it he's going to say no science is not a cult my university is not a cult i do serious work and as soon as he says that i say ah well but that's just that's just evidence of you being a cult leader because of course you deny it a cult denies it's a cult therefore science is a cult do you see the stupidity of this logic how about this one leo didn't respond to my email because he doesn't like me maybe maybe that's why i didn't respond or have you considered this simpler possibility that leo didn't respond to your email because he gets so much email he doesn't even look at it he didn't even see your email how about this this is a very fascinating one some spiritual teacher or guru worked really hard to become enlightened or have you considered that he was actually born with exceptional spiritual talent and consciousness already as a baseline and actually he didn't have to work that hard how about this psychedelics are bad because they're dangerous or psychedelics are demonized because they're truth revealing and people are threatened by truth because people don't care about truth because people care about survival instead how about this situation spiral dynamics actually with spider dynamics there are some very interesting interpretive problems because spiral dynamics as a model also has the under determination problem so for example when it comes to trump assessing trump on spiral dynamics model how do you know the difference between whether trump is orange stage orange with a bit of red or he's stage red with a veneer of orange could account for his behavior or for example with jordan peterson there's an interesting sort of interpretive problem with jordan peterson assessing him in that the question is is jordan peterson's stage yellow with a green shadow or is he staged orange with some yellow capacities both could explain some of the ways in which he behaves and it can be difficult to adjudicate this it takes a lot of experience and study of spiral dynamics and a lot of application of it to be able to start to distinguish between these things and and it's not easy even the developers of spiral dynamics suffer from this problem even don beck i've seen don beck i've seen ken wilbur in what is my opinion misinterpreting some of the stuff going on in politics and in our culture they are misinterpreting i think they are overestimating how developed we are for example ken wilber has this idea that you know we've already exhausted stage green and now we need to jump over green and get to yellow and that yellow is the stage that we need to be pushing towards in my opinion he seriously underestimates how much green there is the majority of society is not green green is only prevalent in advanced universities pretty much uh the majority of society is still in blue and orange even in developed countries and so that means we've got to move through green first for many years more before we can get to yellow yellow is just it's a pipe dream at this point within our politics within our economics we don't have a green economic system we don't have a green political system not yet um similar problems with with don beck too uh i won't go into all those there we're running short on time but just i wanted to make you aware of the complexity of the spiral dynamics and the interpretive problems involved there because spider dynamics is an interpretation that you're projecting on reality and it can be difficult to know which interpretation to apply which one is more accurate how about this people who believe in ufos are idiots or scientists and skeptics are simply too close-minded maybe that's the problem how about this if absolute truth was accessible everybody would know about it and talk about it and since they don't it doesn't exist or how about this absolute truth is so radical that everyone mostly everyone is in denial about it how would you know the difference how about this this is a very important one all spiritual teachings lead to the same place different roads up the same mountaintop to the same peak a very common interpretation or how about this not all teachings lead to the same place there are lower and higher places up on the mountain and it's not a single mountain it's a mountain range with many different peaks and not all paths lead to the same peaks consider that how about this immortality cannot possibly be real that's just religious wishful thinking or alternative possibility death is actually a mental construction that you're imagining how about this in a relationship you might say to the other person you're the problem in this relationship thinking that's a fact actually that's an interpretation maybe you are actually the problem not them maybe it's you who's the problem or maybe the problem in this relationship is not them and it's not you but it's simply that you two are not a good fit and so it's not a a matter of somebody being wrong or evil here or misbehaving it's just that you're not a good you're not a good match or maybe both of you are the problem how about this there's a problem with the world this is a very general there's something wrong with the world maybe but have you considered the possibility that there's nothing wrong with the world and that it's just there's a problem and something wrong with your mind and how it sees the world maybe the world is perfect but your mind is not because see when you assume that the world is imperfect you're sort of implicitly assuming that your mind is perfect because you're assuming that you're accurately seeing the world maybe you aren't how about this all men are shallow cheating pigs maybe some women take on that view if they've been burned by a man before um or have you considered though that maybe that's not the case maybe what the case is is that you're attracted to immature and narcissistic men because of low self-esteem problems that you aren't taking responsibility for correcting and as long as you have this low self-esteem you will always keep attracting men who are shallow cheating pigs and therefore it will seem to you as if all men are like that but really men are like that in your experience simply because you have low self-esteem and that's how loaf is self-esteem tends to play out in relationships how about this god is a fiction or god is a bearded man in the sky or alternative interpretation god is jesus or god is love or god is consciousness or god is nothing or god is everything or god is you which of those is correct how would you know maybe multiple of them are correct maybe all of them are correct if god exists he created an evil world and therefore god is not good therefore maybe therefore he he can't exist because if god existed he wouldn't create this evil world or consider that what you call evil is just an illusion created by your own selfish biases and actually there is no evil in the world god created a perfect world you just don't know how to see it because your vision isn't perfect not because god made it imperfect but because you're just selfish you're making it imperfect yourself because you're god how about this philosophy is impractical and it's a waste of time or have you considered that you haven't done philosophy long enough to realize its value and its consequences how about this it's impossible to know if there's anything outside of consciousness it's just impossible this is one of those questions we'll never answer or have you considered this possibility actually it's possible to know that there is nothing outside of consciousness because you are consciousness and consciousness is infinite but you don't understand that yet because you haven't become conscious of it and lastly leo is wrong because he hasn't considered whatever point i want him to consider maybe or leo has already taken that point into account and seen beyond it and has seen things and points that you have yet to consider so there you go hopefully you can see by now that the notion of raw facts is a naive myth it mostly doesn't exist and it mostly doesn't matter what the raw facts of a situation are because your mind does so much interpretive work all the time it does so much cherry picking the amount of raw facts in your world view and your relationship to reality is less than one percent the other 99 percent are your own projections interpretations assumptions metaphysical and epistemic frameworks biases attitudes beliefs fears emotions etc and even your logic and reason which you think of as factual they aren't they're they're part of the 99 that are co-opted for your survival generally speaking the problem is that people don't question their initial gut interpretations of situations refusing to consider or acknowledge alternatives therefore they are not even conscious that these are interpretations moreover it should be stated that your interpretations are not arbitrary they are deeply distorted by your survival needs and insecurities so yourself and your interpretations are hitched like this it's all entangled with your survival whatever you need to survive it's not merely that you're interpreting it's that you're interpreting in a self-serving and worldview reaffirming way your interpretations serve to reinforce whatever initial world view you have no matter how wrong and accurate or diluted it is the key point of this conversation is that i want you to start to catch when your own interpretations trick you i want you to start to notice your own interpretive process ever deeper notice yourself denying that your interpretation is an interpretation and trying to retcon it as a fact or as science or just as how things are or as obvious notice yourself treating your own interpretations as facts privileging your own interpretations over the interpretations of others so see it's very easy to see when somebody else is interpreting or misinterpreting a situation it's very hard to see it within your own self notice how rash and unconscious interpretations lead to self-deception and misunderstanding of the world and of people notice that in your own life notice how obvious and singular interpretations make a fool out of you reality is a lot less obvious than it seems admit that you are interpreting start taking alternative interpretations more seriously spiral dynamics tier 2 stage yellow cognition and above is defined by being interpretation aware and able to hold multiple perspectives at once the ability to go meta this is crucial for tier two if you're not able to be aware of interpretations you're in tier one and you will be until you become aware of that this takes cognitive development first and foremost takes consciousness be aware that most knowledge opinions and reporting that you see in culture on the internet and elsewhere that actually what you're getting is an interpretation and you're not treating it as such you unconsciously swallow these interpretations and their implicit frames and this becomes very epistemically treacherous for you and this leads you to very deep self-deception in your life the meta point here the mental lesson i want you to learn from this episode is that rather than looking for one right interpretation and defending it notice rather all possible interpretations of the situation this is much healthier it's much more powerful and much more resourceful it'll make you a better human a better creator to make you more effective in business and relationships with your health with your wealth it'll make you happier it'll make it easier to do spiritual work now here are some tips for how to apply the lessons in this episode first realize that there is always more than one or two interpretations there are dozens so if you look at a situation you can only see one or two interpretations that's your clue that you're not being creative enough and mentally flexible enough and curious enough to find other ones if you can see 10 different interpretations for a situation then you can kind of feel like you've done your job and that you're being epistemically responsible if you can only see one or two interpretations you're being epistemically irresponsible so that's a easy way to know if you're fooling yourself realize also that your first interpretation is usually the worst your initial gut interpretation of a situation unless you're extremely spiritually developed it's it's going to be very crude foolish ignorant and wrong the more experienced you become generally speaking the more contemplation you do of epistemology and metaphysics the better your interpretations will get and eventually you can reach a stage where your initial gut interpretations of situations are very accurate but that's only because you spend decades doing serious serious work and because you've studied your own mind and you've overcome many of your self-deceptions because you're too conscious to notice them happening you you're conscious of your denials your projections your scapegoating your judging you're playing victim you're playing various kinds of ego games all the mechanisms i talked about in my three-part series called self-deception which is foundational uh all those when you become deeply experienced for decades in in those mechanisms catching yourself in those mechanisms then then you can have some pretty decent gut interpretations but still you have to be careful and unless you've done that your gut interpretations are going to be very foolish and crude get in the habit of looking for alternative interpretations like a little game that you play with yourself see how many new interpretations you can come up with for a situation whether it's in politics or in business or whatever finding the best interpretations requires open-mindedly and without bias exploring multiple perspectives so radical open mindedness is crucial here understanding bias is crucial here go watch my episodes about radical open mindedness watch my episode about self bias other tips seek more and alternative interpretations just sheer quantity of interpretations is good but not just quantity also secondly seek more nuanced interpretations remember in these examples sometimes i gave you very crude interpretations and then i gave you some very nuanced ones too so notice that difference generate novel interpretations yourself you can actually sit down with a piece of paper with a notebook and generate new interpretations for all sorts of situations for your relationships for your children for um your love life for your sexuality for your views about men women the government yourself whatever you can reinterpret your own self i didn't even bring up many interpretations about yourself i mean you have tons of negative interpretations of your own capacities you might interpret yourself to be weak bad at certain things broken unlovable with bad health and many other interpretations that you consider as facts about yourself which really aren't facts for example you might interpret yourself to be unhumorous or lacking charm and wit and you might think these are genetic limitations you have but then that itself genetics itself is an interpretation uh furthermore seek more charitable and loving interpretations some interpretations are very fear-based they're sort of us versus them they're very tribalistic and polarizing i've given you plenty of those examples today and then other interpretations are more charitable they're more compassionate they're more loving they're more inclusive they don't seek to straw man the other interpretations they they understand they're able to accommodate they're able to see the partial truthfulness in different perspectives even if they're limited or toxic as you're doing that also question and discard fear-based interpretations these are killing you these are robbing you of the quality of your life and your ability to function in the world effectively and to see reality truthfully fear is the smog that clouds up your vision so if you want to reach truth give up your fear-based interpretations and fear is very sneaky it sneaks into many of your interpretations you don't even see how it's doing so yet question and discard toxic disempowering victim hood interpretations the best example this is what in cells are up to you know in cells have developed this very toxic disempowering victim interpretation of why they can't get laid and why feminism is a problem and all this sorts of stuff and this is really debilitating it becomes your reality when you start to interpret yourself as a victim you become a victim slowly over time and then it becomes true just by virtue of you constantly drilling that into your mind also an important point here is that if you want to understand the problem with conspiracy theories the problem fundamentally is that conspiracy theories hinge on a lack of interpretive awareness so this is what you'll see amongst virtually all conspiracy theorists is that their epistemology is very poor and so what they do is their mind latches on to one theory um without realizing that the under determination problem and they just start to believe that one theory and they lack awareness of the fact that that theory is just one interpretive framework and that there are many other frameworks and moreover that that framework that they're using is probably a toxic disempowering victim-based fear-based interpretive framework and the conspiracy theory is alluring precisely because it hits your reptilian brain it uses fear and hatred and judgment of others to make you feel like you're being empowered by the theory but actually you're not and you're not open to charitable loving interpretations that are not fear-based in fact the conspiracy theory dismisses those it has sneaky mechanisms that it uses to dismiss the dismiss those so this is uh this is one way how you can know when conspiracy theories are toxic and bad is when they're fear-based and when the person you're talking to lacks interpretive awareness lacks the ability to go meta lacks the ability to self-reflect uh now there's one final question you might have which is leo how is interpretation different from recontextualization i have a video called understanding recontextualization it's actually a very important uh older video of mine make sure you watch that it's closely gonna dovetail what we talked about here i would say that they're similar the difference is that really it's a difference of degree so with the recontextualization episode i talked about how the context of a situation changes what the facts are and how you perceive the facts and that is sort of what interpretation is so they're very similar um i would say that interpretation is happening on a much more fine grained level to actually have a serious recontextualization of something in your life this is this is not a you know a daily occurrence this maybe happens to you once a month once a year something like that major recontextualizations are pretty rare um and that's what that episode focused on but with interpretation your mind is always interpreting basically everything you're interpreting hundreds of times per day at a very fine grained micro level and then you're also doing it at a macro level too when your interpretation is upended at the macro level it basically leads to a recontextualization and then if it's happening at a micro level then i mean it you could still call it re-contextualization but it's just it's it's much smaller so like that example i gave about texting the girl and being too needy with her and then her losing her phone and then me realizing it later that would be an example of a sort of a recontextualization that happened um based on how i was interpreting that situation you see so a recontextualization is something that happens when your interpretation is subverted by the facts of reality so to speak you know reality pummels you with something and then you're forced to change your interpretation sometimes reality hits you so hard that your interpretation your old interpretation simply can't survive and it has to drop away and die and when that happens it can be painful or it can be funny it can be relieving too to know that you don't have to live with that old interpretation you know it can be very empowering to get rid of your negative victim toxic interpretations because it does free you up to then go out and do more in the world and to live the kind of life that you want to live so there you go i hope you are starting to see and feel the power of this idea of interpretation i spent a lot of time developing this episode because of how important and foundational that i knew it would be and here we are three hours three hours just on interpretation and even though we spent three hours on this i guarantee you it will take you a good 10 years of doing this work to really appreciate what was communicated today but for now that's it all right i'm done here please click that like button for me and come check out my website actualize.org there you will find resources that can help you change your life to upgrade your interpretive capacities especially my book review list can help you to do that really to follow my work you have to get that list and you have to read some of those books at least some of them the life purpose course can help you to find your sense of passion motivation in life really my life purpose course is the trick that i use on my own self to bring the kind of passion that i do into my work if you think i'm charismatic if you like the way that i talk if you're captivated by this content why is it captivating to you it's not just because their profound insights but really underlying all of that is the passion i bring into it i have a deep passion for this and you might wonder how did leo get it was he just born with it did it happen by accident no it was deliberately engineered and i show you the steps over 20 hours of steps holding your hand as to how i did that and how you can use those principles for yourself and you don't have to use them to start a youtube channel you can literally use them for anything to become a doctor a lawyer an engineer a programmer an artist a spiritual teacher a life coach it doesn't matter these are general principles that work for any human who wants to develop a deep passion for life other resources you can find are my blog where i post exclusive content and stuff and videos make sure you're following along on my blog i put a lot of effort into it i share a lot of profound stuff there that will expand your perspective you can come hang out on the forum ask questions i reply to quality questions on the forum frequently um you can support me on patreon.com actualized if you'd like i appreciate donations and you can check out my second channel called actualize clips with short snippets of my long videos that are more digestible that are not three hour monsters like this one so that is that and the final thing i'll conclude on is this i want to warn you to be careful about how you interpret my teachings i see a lot of people misinterpreting my teachings i go to great lengths to provide lots of examples and details and caveats and warnings and traps and pointing out all these things but no matter how much i do that my teachings will always be misinterpreted because that's just the nature of unconscious people unconscious people who need these teachings the most are the most prone to misinterpreting them so it's a tricky catch-22 how do you teach this stuff without getting it misinterpreted sometimes the misinterpretations get so bad it makes me even want to stop teaching because it makes you wonder like how many people are even going to interpret this properly how many of them are actually going to use these teachings to reach love and how many of these people are going to misinterpret them and then use these teachings towards devilry i've warned about this many many times in the past but no matter how much i warn about it it's not going to be enough to stop it it's going to happen but nevertheless i hope that you're going to be an exception and that you won't do it in your life you have to be very careful when listening to everything i say there can be double triple meanings to the words i use the sentences i say sometimes i say something you think i said something i didn't say that i said something else just like with that gava guy example i might be talking about god or love or truth or consciousness or meditation or psychedelics and you might hear those words and concepts and you might think ah okay i know what he's talking about but you don't and in fact maybe i'm saying the opposite of what you think i'm saying when i say ego death when i say death is imaginary when i say some of these radical things when i say reality is nothingness when i say god is nothingness when i say infinity what you think i said might be the opposite of what i actually intended to say these are the difficulties of communication these difficulties will never be resolved i'm always struggling and trying to be a better communicator i take so much feedback in terms of how i can communicate things better and i think i've improved a lot over the last eight years of doing this and i will continue to improve and i think i'm gonna get better in the years to come i'm gonna get a lot better but no matter how good i get just the nature of what we're talking about is so self-deceptive it's so sneaky that you have to really be careful with how you interpret it and this is not just true of my teachings there's nothing special about my teachings per se it's true of all spiritual teachings spiritual teachings since the dawn of civilization for 10 000 years since ancient egypt and even before that have been being misinterpreted by the majority of mankind the majority of christians do not understand christianity they've misinterpreted it the majority of buddhists misinterpret the buddha the majority of jews misunderstand judaism the majority of muslims misunderstand islam this is just the nature of the beast and even with modern teachers the majority of neo-evidence the the majority of eckhart tolle followers misinterpret the teachings what's the solution to that well there is no algorithmic solution this is a core struggle of life epistemology is at the core of all of your problems in life this is why i harp on epistemology so much is because how can you live a quality life when you don't have a quality perception of reality and how can you have a quality perception of reality when you don't spend time deeply contemplating the nature of knowledge and self-deception when you don't take these problems seriously and you treat them as mere philosophy and word games when you take that attitude then you misinterpret everywhere everything and the more advanced the teaching the easier it is to misinterpret because interpretation is not something that happens accidentally interpretation is done by design your mind is misinterpreting by design you are literally misinterpreting reality on purpose so that you can survive as the little finite thing that you are because the finite thing you believe you are itself is a gross misinterpretation of what you actually are you fundamentally have misinterpreted infinity as something finite you've misinterpreted consciousness as material substance you've misinterpreted mind as physical reality and body and atoms you've misinterpreted science as truth rather than a construction you've misinterpreted culture in social constructions and institutions you've misinterpreted how government and politics works you've misinterpreted your own capacities as a human and what you're capable of this is the real work the real work is correcting these misinterpretations in your mind the real work is fixing your epistemology because if we can't fix that you're rotten at the root you have no foundation and your life will reflect that in subtle ways that you can't even understand yet this is why i push for the depth in these teachings that i push for even though it doesn't seem immediately practical and you might say well leo how does this concept help me to get laid or how does this concept help me earn more money or get something tangible that i want and um it it very much will help you to do all those things but it's going to be a slow burn we're starting by reconfiguring your foundation because what i'm interested in is helping you to build a very solid structure not a house of cards what you get with most other spiritual and personal development teachings are houses of cards they're very flimsy they won't stand up to serious scrutiny and a serious collision with reality if you want to build something solid you got to start from the bottom and when you start from the bottom it's not as flashy and it doesn't give you as immediate results you know when when the foundation of a skyscraper is being laid most of the people in the city don't see anything it doesn't look fancy it doesn't look impressive but later when the highest levels of the skyscraper are built everyone can see it and it looks impressive but the highest layer the highest stories on the skyscraper can only exist thanks to the foundation that was laid that's what we're up to with actualize.org and i hope you stay with me especially for these very foundational episodes this is an investment that you are making into reconfiguring the mental software the operating system that is going to run the rest of your life it's going to pay dividends day after day week after week month after month year after year for your entire life and the only cost is just your time and interest and energy and passion for this that's the only thing that's keeping you from actualizing this your complacency your laziness your closed-mindedness too so really it's all up to you how great do you want your life to be if you want your life to be incredible if you want to live a deep rich life then get serious right now about laying a deep foundation upon which those fruits will be born this is the fundamental mistake that people make when living life is that they're not interested in the foundation they're interested in the highest stories of the skyscraper and you can't get those any other way but by building a foundation and if you try to get them some other way through fakery you're going to end up building a house of cards and it's going to collapse it's not going to be a solid skyscraper so be wary of the shortcuts you want to take many times the short easy solutions end up wasting more of your time than sitting through one of these long three-hour episodes because at least when you're done with one of my episodes it will change something about how you see the world and over time that changes your life so i hope you stay tuned for more