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one of the biggest secrets to wrap it in deep learning is making distinctions and in fact this episode here is really like a part three in a miniseries that we got going on learning the first one was called an episode called learning equals behavior change and the second one was called learning equals observation so those were two distinct episodes that gave you a certain perspective on learning and I told you in those episodes these are just particular perspectives and so now here I want to give you a third perspective on learning which is that learning equals making distinctions and will elaborate upon this in great detail and give you examples and exercises to drill this home for you but as an aside before we get to that why do I cover learning so much why does the topic of learning warrant three or even more episodes there probably will be more in the future well because learning is one of the master keys to all of life if you can figure out how to learn or in other words if you can learn how to learn and you master this process this will be a meta skill one of the most valuable meta skills that you'll have throughout the rest of your life that you will use to transform every aspect of your life from your spirituality to your relationships to your business to your dating life and to your art and many other things so the point here and it's a really simple point is that to really learn something learning is not about memorization of facts like they taught you in school see one of the biggest problems with school as is structure today is that school doesn't actually teach kids and teens how to learn and so once they get at school they have filled their minds with a bunch of ideology and a bunch of paradigms and beliefs and facts that these kids have been forced to memorize and hey you know I went through this whole process myself and a certain amount of that is necessary but it's way too so they fill your mind with all of that garbage but they don't actually teach you how to teach yourself and then people go the rest of their life not really learning anything so one of the keys to learning is making distinctions and I mean it really is that simple just go into every situation making finer distinctions specifically specifically go into every situation where you want to learn something with an intention to find distinctions and to make nuanced distinctions so I'll give you some examples from my own life and then I'll give you some exercises and show you how this works so in my own life recently I went through the whole process of buying a house I just bought a house it's the first house that I've ever bought and it was a very interesting experience because I didn't just go and buy a ready-made house this house was actually built for me from the ground up so I selected a plot of land which was just barren desert basically and then and then they built the house it took them like five or six months to build it and so on anyways not to go too far afield here but what was interesting about this process was because the reason I bring this up is that when you're building a house and I was sort of involved with the design process because I get to sit down and pick out you know what all the interior features of the house were going to be it wasn't a fully custom house it was based off a model so I didn't actually like do you know work with an architect er but but I did a lot of the interior decor options and stuff like that and there was so much stuff there like you you have no idea until you buy a house and you go through the design process of picking out all the stuff like you have to make such fine distinctions and if you don't then your house is not going to come out the way you want and this is actually a little specific example of a much broader problem that we encounter in life is that anything that you want to really accomplish in life in a masterful way requires that you make really fine and nuanced and accurate and clear distinctions so with this house when I first started like I didn't know any of the terminology for any of the stuff in the house now of course I'm familiar with lights and wall sockets and all of this but there's there's like so many fine distinctions to make like which kind of wall sockets where should they be located on the wall how far apart which walls deserve a wall socket which ones don't and then you know and then like within every category there's further and further distinctions that could be made and if you're wanting your house to come out the way you want then you have to walk around and inspect everything that they're doing because as they're building it of course they're making mistakes they're placing things in the wrong areas and if you're not careful you don't have a keen eye for spotting these distinctions and differences and noticing where things are that they should be or shouldn't be you got to point those things out otherwise the house is not gonna come out the way that you want distinctions between colors distinctions between different textures different types of wood different types of marble different types of quartz and surfaces and then distinctions between different types of insulation different types of wiring different types of heating electrical systems and AC units and all of this and then plants what kind of decor do you want for your landscaping you know even distinctions between like the kind of pebbles that they're gonna use on your driveway or in your yard many different types of pebbles now how do you know which pebbles do you need and this is a challenging process sometimes you're sitting there and not only do you have to make the distinctions but then you also have to clarify for yourself what kind of preferences you have like do I prefer these kinds of pebbles or those kinds of pebbles do I prefer this shade of grey for the walls or that shade of grey for the walls how do I know that was an interesting process and then actually I started thinking about like what kind of landscaping I want and I decided that I want a palm tree but then I knew nothing about palm trees of course we've all seen palm trees our whole entire lives most of us probably have if you grow up in that kind of are the where there are palm trees a lot of them in America and the West especially and but I didn't know like what kind of palm tree should I plant so I went to a giant nursery where they have palm trees and I was walking around for hours just studying palm trees and I went to various kinds of nurseries I research stuff online but you know online is not so good because you don't actually get a feel for the size of the tree and the different variations of the trees and so forth and their costs and so forth so I actually went to a nursery walked around for hours and looked at different pumps and you'd be amazed within a few weeks of doing this I learned every fine distinction between different kinds of palm trees I learned like every different palm tree that exists Canary Island date palms Mediterranean fan palms Sabal palms Queen Peru palms King Peru palms pygmy palms and and other ones that Mexican fan palms there's like eight palms there's so many four types but you learn them and then what was so amazing about this process is that now every time I'm driving down the road just throughout a city that has palm trees I'm looking just my mind is subconsciously looking for palm trees and immediately naming them labeling them making fine distinctions between them and even assigning like dollar amounts to palm trees like I could be driving down the road or I'm just standing there at a red light near some shopping center and I see like oh there's eight palm trees oh these are date palms and they're such and such these are fully mature date palms they must be like thirty years old and each one of them must cost five thousand dollars and then I can kind of tally that whole thing up in my mind and get a price tag for what those trees are worth it it was an amazing process to go through that because I was very conscious of how I was making these distinctions so of course you and your life you've probably mastered some domain of life whether it was in school you master some subject whether it was math history there's a poetry whatever or you're good at something you're good at computer programming maybe you're good at writing maybe you're good at critiquing film maybe you're good at analyzing video game mechanics because you've played a bunch of video games your whole life and so on so what I would suggest to you is that any area in your life where you're masterful or you're skillful and and good you're an expert in something you're able to make fine distinctions and you've spent years making these or sanctions now what's different though about this episode and what I'm teaching you now is that even though in your life you have subconsciously and implicitly been using the technique of making distinctions you've done you've done this throughout school you've done this throughout University and your work and so on with your hobbies even even with your entertainment you've been doing this with music you've been doing this with sports you've been doing this and in many other domains you've been doing this but you've been doing it unconsciously and the difference now is that I'm gonna teach you how to do this explicitly so that now when you go into a new situation you're gonna have in the back of your mind this memory of this conversation that we've had this lesson that you're learning today and you're gonna remember like oh now that I'm going to the situation I can set an intention because I know this is a like a learning situation I'm going into and I want to rapidly learn this thing and to really master it consciously now not unconsciously and now you can explicitly use this technique of making distinctions so the way this technique works is that of course you've used it like I said in many areas of your life and many times in your life but the difference now is that when you go into this new situation or it could be an old situation that you're still working on mastering you go into this situation and now you actually set the intention the explicit intention of making distinctions recognizing that that is what learning is about is making these distinctions and so you actually go into the situation and you will specifically look for contrasts and differences between different elements and components of whatever field you're studying or trying to master and you will notice that now that you're doing it explicitly consciously with intention you're deliberately asking questions that try to highlight differences between the different elements and you're actively looking for those differences you will see that you learn to spot the differences much faster and the whole process will just be much more clear explicit and conscious than it ever was before and in this way you're going to be able to learn deeper and much more rapidly that's my claim and one of the techniques are going to be using to do this is you're going to be specifically trying to amplify contrasts and differences between things that you're studying or trying to learn so for example let's take the example of shopping for a car normally a person shops for a car he or she just goes to the dealership walks around looks at different models maybe asks to see the interior maybe takes one for a test drive that he likes something like that right it's sort of an unconscious lazy process but if you're gonna apply this method of making intentional distinctions doing this consciously what you're going to do is you're going to go into the dealership and your mind is going to be focused with that intention of drawing contrast between all of your different options so now every time you're looking at a car you're gonna be actually comparing you'd be asking yourself that question of like well how is that model different from this model or how are they the same both of these questions are very powerful questions how are they different and how are they the same really it's the same question just being asked sort of in the inverse because by seeing how they're the same you see how they're not different or by seeing how they're different you're seeing how they're not the same you see just inverses of each other so we're like a concave and convex so when you're talking to a dealer you can then actually consciously ask the person who's shown you the car specifically what's the difference like well what's the difference between the tires on these two cars and what's the difference between the engines and what's the difference about their interior and what's the difference in terms of their price what's the difference in terms of their financing what's the difference in terms of the warranty what's the difference in terms of the different brands that might be a toyota this might be a Mercedes or something in your comparing them and I mean you would have been doing this anyways it's just that you would have been doing it unconsciously sloppily less masterfully and therefore it simply would have taken you a lot more time to actually learn all these distinctions and therefore you would have been making poorer choices probably you would have bought a less than optimal car for you and then through that process you know if trial and error of course you you learn to make these distinctions anyways you've been doing it your whole life but here you're just making the conscious the process more conscious and and towards dissent I actually have a I'm gonna give you two exercises that I want you to try to actually do to sort of homework assignments cuz this is a very sort of hands-on and practical teaching this is not a very abstract theoretical you know metaphysical discussion this is this is pretty hands-on type of stuff the thing you have to understand about distinctions is that to actually draw a distinction first of all there are many degrees of drawing a distinction you can draw a mild distinction or you can draw a really sharp one you can have a vague notion of a distinction or a very clear notion of a distinction and it's almost like carving a groove into a stone like if we have a stone tablet and I just give you a knife and you just sort of chisel at it scrape away at it you might carve a little bit of it but you're gonna carve a very faint groove it'll be maybe a hairline groove in this in this stone but if you keep doing it over and over and over again you can chisel through through that stone a really deep groove you see and so that's sort of like what making a distinction is like inside your own mind and so when you're doing it consciously with intention deliberately asking these questions and trying to compare and contrast things then you're you're deliberately it's like taking a knife and just running it through that groove over and over and over and over and over again many times until that distinction becomes very clear in your mind and if you notice any human being who's masterful at anything whether it's art entertainment sports film video games combat martial arts military strategy business marketing relationships spirituality psychology philosophy mathematics science physics biology whatever whatever they're an expert in they are so masterful precisely because they have so much experience drawing these very fine distinctions so when a newbie comes into some situation like when a newbie starts thinking about politics or a newbie starts to learn how to cook their distinctions are so gross and so sloppy and so imprecise that like a newbie cook doesn't know the difference between boiling rice for 10 minutes or boiling it for 20 min doesn't know the difference between undercooking a piece of salmon or overcooking a piece of salmon doesn't know the difference between cooking that salmon on low heat or medium heat or high heat you see like for a master chef he's gonna have very fine degrees of distinction on that heat knob on his stove it's not just gonna be low medium high it's gonna be like 10 different shades of of heat intensity of heat and he's gonna know that like this is a piece of salmon I have to cook it for you know on number two or number three intensity of heat for X number of minutes in order for it to come out such and such so that it's it's perfectly cooked it's not undercooked it's not overcooked and so on and then of course a really fine chef will make even finer distinctions when a chef is picking out a piece of salmon at the grocery store first of all he's gonna make distinctions between which grocery store he goes to a newbie chef is just gonna go to the nearest grocery store that sells the cheapest salmon but a master chef will actually recognize that where the salmon comes from is very important so he'll start to make distinctions between different types of salmon different parts of the world the salmon comes from is this a farm raised salmon is this a wild salmon what's the difference between the two they have different tastes they come from different parts of the world they have different nutritional content different fat content right so all these fine little distinctions that you only learn through experience you have to cook salmon hundreds or thousands of times before you learn all these things and then when you're at the grocery store of course you go to the right grocery store that has the best freshest salmon then you learn how to pick out the salmon you learn how to tell whether the salmon is fresh or it's a few days old you could actually ask your you know your fishmonger like when do you get your shipments of salmon a newbie would never even think of asking that kind of question but a master chef would would know that Oh salmon comes in on Mondays and and then they don't get any deliveries over the weekend so don't buy salmon on Saturday and Sunday especially because that's old salmon it's been laying around because they only get deliveries on Mondays or something like that you see and then you can actually make distinction between different cuts of salmon is it the tail section is it the midsection is it towards the front is it the belly of course there's different flavor profiles for all those and if you were making a certain type of dish like sushi you might want a certain kind of cut of a salmon like the belly versus another kind if you were baking it or grilling it and then of course there's different species of salmon alaskan salmon atlantic salmon sockeye salmon and whatever else king salmon you see so you're making all these distinctions that a newbie wouldn't make and that's why the newbie is not so good at cooking salmon and that's why you want to go pay extra money to buy salmon cooked by a master chef and people do people go and they pay hundreds of dollars just to get one piece of salmon grilled by some master chef that's what that's how that's how chefs make their money you see so but this is just one instance this this happens everywhere this happens in computer programming this happens with movie making video game making arts and crafts sewing knitting and of course it happens in personal development and it happens in spirituality which is why it's so important because see you can apply what I'm teaching you here not only to just sort of external activities in the world materialistic pursuits like the pursuit of money in business where this will be very helpful for you or in the stock market or with investing or mastering some skill set or on your life purpose but you can also now apply to self development and to spirituality where it becomes really important because the more advanced you become in your spiritual pursuits the more flight or distinctions you're gonna have to make and then this whole notion of distinctions becomes much more existential and metaphysical and we'll get into that later but anyways let's go back to the the two homework assignments I have for you so the first homework assignment is this I want you to get a pencil and some labels and make a trip to the grocery store a nice grocery store with a lot of variety you're gonna go to the produce aisle and you're going to buy one of every Apple that they sell typical grocery store around where I live in the western part of the US they might sell 10 different varieties of apples so you're gonna buy every single one that they have you're gonna want at least five different varieties but hopefully you can find 10 different ones and as you're buying them make sure that you label them because usually apples they don't have good labels on them so that you know which Apple is which otherwise you're gonna get lost and confused once you bring them all back home so you know you buy a Fuji apple and then you put a label on it and you write Fuji and then you buy another Apple a Granny Smith and you write Granny Smith and then you buy a McIntosh and you write McIntosh you buy a Honey Crisp and you write Honey Crisp on it whatever so you get all the apples there are you're buying them all at once not separate trips all at one trip then you bring them all back home then you wash them then you slice them up and then you put them on plates you have ten different plates with all the apples sliced up and really you only need one slice or two slices from each one and then you're gonna taste each one and you're gonna have a label of the name of the Apple on every plate and you're gonna taste each one and you're gonna specifically taste them and maybe this is the first time in your life that you'll be doing this with such precision so explicitly and consciously and with such intention you're gonna be applying what I'm telling you here it's a very simple principle you're gonna be applying the intention of noticing the differences of making these distinctions such that you're going to really learn the difference between all these different types of apples and just do that and then report back in the comments section of what you learned or just maybe take notes for yourself what you learned so you're gonna learn two main things here two categories of things first you're gonna learn the actual differences between these different types of apples I bet you for most of you that of course how many times have you eaten apples in your life probably hundreds of times and how many times have you walked by the grocery store department where they sell the apples and you see all these different apples and you're kind of unsure which one should I buy should I buy the yellow ones the red ones the green ones I don't know some of them are more expensive some are less expensive how do I know which ones to buy and you kind of like because you never deliberately sat down and compared all 10 of them to each other you've never actually figured out which kind of Apple you like best and it probably never occurred to you to actually run a rigorous experiment on which Apple you like best or maybe you didn't even bother to say that there's a difference between them you say oh well I don't really care just grab some apples like mom want some apples for apple pie it doesn't matter which ones just grab some and bring him home she doesn't care something like that right this is a very kind of sloppy naive way to purchase apples so the first thing you're gonna learn is actually the actual differences between these apples you might notice that there's a lot of difference or you might notice that the difference is is very mild and subtle and maybe to you there is no difference and you might say well the Honey Crisp apple is very similar to the Fuji apple I can't even tell the difference well first of all if you're very very perceptive with your awareness I guarantee you you'll be able to tell the difference you'll tell the difference in taste in sweetness in sourness and texture in the even the the skin around the Apple how different it is so you'll be able to tell all that and you'll probably have a favorite that's the first thing you'll learn that's sort of the content of what you're learning and then you're going to learn sort of a meta lesson which is the meta lesson is going to be that you're going to learn that learning is making distinctions and that's actually the real reason why you're doing this experiment I'm not having you do this experiment cuz I care about you being able to distinguish different apples it doesn't matter it's insignificant right to our purposes here but what I do care about is that you do this exercise so that you actually get an experiential feel for the difference between approaching a situation unconsciously making distinctions versus approaching a situation and consciously deliberately explicitly with intention making distinctions and so that itself then becomes a sort of a Metis distinction you see because now you're distinguishing between making distinctions unconsciously versus now making distinctions consciously and then you'll see how much more you learn when you do it consciously with intention explicitly and then you can take that lesson and now that's that's a golden lesson because now you can apply that transfer that over to all other domains of life whether it's into dating into business into other types of food that you buy that you cook into music into film into self-improvement and ultimately into spirituality which is where it'll get really important see so that will be your first homework assignment I recommend you actually do this don't just sit there and nod your head and say oh yeah that that sounds cool and then pretend as though you did it because that's not the same as actually doing it see distinctions it's not enough to make a distinction just by believing in the difference between certain things so even though right now in theory I explained to you the difference between making distinctions consciously and unconsciously you think you understand but you don't really understand you haven't really learned the lesson until you actually do it so you have to actually do it and go through the experience of feeling and noticing and becoming aware of these differences so it's very important that you actually do this exercise and then I have a second exercise for you this one might be a little easier for you who are lazy and don't want to go out to the store but I recommend you do both the second exercise is the following I want you to open your web browser and go to youtube and find samples of music for every major category of music I'll name some of them for you I want you to find one jazz song one hip-hop song one R&B song one rap song one heavy metal song one classical rock song one just classical music like Mozart or Beethoven piece and what are their other categories I'm forgetting find some techno find some disco and open each one in a separate tab so you're gonna have like let's say 10 different tabs open with one of these songs from each category in each tab and then what I want you to do is I want you to play each one just for 30 seconds just to sample it so play the rap song for 30 seconds get a sense and listen consciously to that rap song and get sense for for what a rap song is your your sort of listening to get the essence of what rap is about so you're not so much focused on the particular song as rap in its essence and of course into this situation you're going to be bringing in the conscious explicit intention to find differences and to make distinctions so you're gonna listen to that rap song they're gonna switch over to the R&B song and you'll listen to that for 30 seconds and then you'll ask yourself what's the difference in their essence and then you'll switch over to some disco and you'll listen to that for 30 seconds and listen to the two the difference the essence the difference between their essence then maybe you'll play that jazz song and compare that then play some classical country or I mean your classical music and then you can play some country music whatever and do this and compare all of them together and again as you're doing this the first lesson you're gonna learn is sort of the the low level lesson the unimportant lesson which is simply the actual differences between these these song categories but then you'll learn the more important metal lesson of what it actually feels like to approach a situation explicitly deliberately trying to look for distinctions see and you'll see that what it gives you is it gives you a sense of clarity that you didn't have before so maybe your entire life you've been listening to all these songs maybe your entire life you've listened to country into jazz and to classical and all this and you think you know the difference between them but the thing is with distinctions remember like I said there's many degrees to drawing these distinctions so if you sit there and listen to third for 30 seconds to each song that will definitely get you a general sense of the differences but these distinctions will still be at a at a crude degree now if you were a master musician who spent five years of her life carefully playing all the different categories of music that there are analyzing them note by note chord by chord lyric by lyric melody by melody harmony by harmony and all this you would have such a deeper understanding of the differences and also the similarities between these different types of music and then of course the power that would give you is that now that you know how they're structured you know the deep distinctions that are constructing the structure of this music now you're able to jump between them now you're able to cross-pollinate them and now you're able to even come up with entirely new categories of music or interesting hybrids or you can you know you can figure out in this way what kind of music is popular what kind of music fits the kind of audience that you're trying to target so you see this is this is this is a critical skill because you can use this skill to make millions and billions of dollars just this one skill of of learning how to make fine distinctions it's just of course a matter of that learning how to apply it and then applying it in a sort of productive and consistent manner throughout your whole life so that's the second exercise I recommend you try that one as well actually do it and notice what it feels like to be consciously making a distinction maybe this is the first time in your life or you're going to be consciously making a distinction and notice that there's a difference between doing it consciously versus unconsciously a lot of people get themselves into trouble in life by either being really really sloppy with their distinctions or making misguided overly simplistic distinctions and then taking those distinctions as absolute truth or absolute reality so that's usually what is happening with a person who's a fool a person who's a fool makes overly simplistic distinctions lacking nuance and doesn't know that that's what's going on and from their perspective it seems like what they're doing is that they're being smart and that they have all of everything figured out when actually they're just using very gross distinctions and then they're mistaking those distinctions for reality so here now we need to warn you because this is a very powerful ability that your mind has to create distinctions and I want you to start to observe yourself from a sort of a meta level when you're making distinctions that you are constructing these distinctions so it's not simply that you're going out into the world and that you're tasting these different apples or you're listening to these different songs and that you're already finding the distinctions like you're just discovering them it's not simply a process of discovery and this is where we get a little bit of we go a little existential and metaphysical on you and we go a little bit spiritual on you actually your mind is playing a creative role in constructing these distinctions so in a certain sense you're sort of picking them up it feels as though you're discovering them because you know you might say well but leo you know that Apple that's like that's a red apple that's a green apple that's a yellow Apple aren't those different colors just inherent in the apples and so therefore how can you say that I'm constructing the distinction of the color red or green or yellow isn't that just found out in nature isn't it just a given it will seem that way to you at first but as you go deeper and you observe more carefully really what your mind is doing you'll discover that it's not so simple that actually your mind is is playing a constructive role in drawing these distinctions at the very least simply by the way you're assigning labels you know red green yellow and so on these labels you're assigning this is not just an innocent activity this this brings in it with it various latent meanings and values and so on maybe not with the color red or green or yellow but oftentimes when you're making distinction this is also another trap that people fall into is that they're making distinctions but at the same time as they're making the distinctions they're also subtly judging and placing value on the different categories that are being constructed by the mind you see the mind is a categorization system oisin and it creates labels that attaches labels then it strings those labels together into complex webs of meaning that's how language works and this is not just a merely a word game where we're just assigning different labels for different things because the labels take take on a charge they take on an emotional charge they have survival value they become so useful that then we actually start to operate on these labels themselves and we live in a sort of a a matrix where we're in this augmented reality where we're walking around all the time and our mind is casting and projecting various labels and meanings and values and judgments onto all of these physical objects that we're finding in the outer world so to speak see so when I tell you that well that car's a Chevy and this cars a Toyota see you might seem like well that's just a word game but it's not just a word game because your mind has associations deep associations with what it means for a car to be a Chevy versus what it means to be a Toyota because you've watched different commercials and your pinion maybe your dad drove a Chevy and it always broke down and so you got this image of a Chevy you know unreliable or maybe the opposite whatever or maybe your dad told you the old Toyota's are foreign cars you know you should buy American and then he told you to never buy a Toyota and then see that Association gets lodged into your skull really deep into your mind and then that will color how you're actually able to make distinctions and to make judgments in the future because of course now you're gonna be biased towards one category or against the other see and if you want a really clear example of this just look at how race relations work you categorize people based on race Asian Indian Somali you know Western European Eastern European Italian French whatever Japanese Chinese and you know racist people get into a lot of trouble because what they do is they have very crude distinctions that they make between different races and usually of course what they do is they place their own race up at the top and then all the other races they don't make very fine distinctions and they say oh well you know if I'm if I'm white European or if I'm American let's say then I'm probably not gonna make very fine distinctions between different types of Asians to me maybe the Koreans and Japanese I'll confuse them with Chinese and all this and I'll just love them all together see and then of course I'll have various kinds of associations about that they're smart or they're smelly or they're hard-working or they're lazy or they're trustworthy or they're sneaky or they're evil or they're whatever and then Middle Eastern people they're all you know it's a lot of terrorists or whatever you start to get into this this problem of over generalizing people and so and then and then what you do is then you try to reify these distinctions which means that you actually you don't acknowledge that it's your mind that constructed these distinctions you start to actually believe that these distinctions are out there in the real world as though it's not like just that my mind has constructed a narrative that all Asian people are hardworking and all Middle Eastern people are lazy or whatever it's not that I constructed that it's that it is that way it's genetics its biology its physics or something like that see and then people start to create ideologies around this and so on so you have to be very careful here because your mind is playing a constructive role it is projecting a lot of this stuff out into the world and you're not very conscious of how it's doing that and the less conscious of it you are the more you're gonna be trapped and mistake your own distinctions and projections for something that is inherently found out there and then this gets you into a lot of trouble I notice for example in politics this is a real big problem I study politics a lot from a sort of meta perspective because politics is really good at understanding how people delude themselves how ideology works how groupthink works house power dynamics works and so on I hope that you are a student of politics but from a mattr perspective when you're not actually getting sucked into the mud mud mm slinging in all of this that is going on especially right now because we live in a very polarized time with our politics but you look at what's happening with politics and you look at how polarization happens and you you you look at people who are very ignorant about politics who are just kind of newbies who don't actually read or study politics so deeply or think about it deeply what they do is they just take a position they identify with it then they started defending it and what you notice with these people is that fundamentally they lack the nuanced distinctions that are necessary to really be an educated voter and to vote for the right politicians and the right people and that's why we get people electing the wrong politicians because it's very easy to fool somebody who makes very sloppy distinctions so for example foxnews is a great example of this they deliberately as part of their ideology and part of their worldview what they do is they deliberately try to cast liberals and Democrats as socialists and as communists as Marxists because they're unable to actually sit down and make fine distinctions between what is a Marxist what is a socialist what is a communist and what is capitalist even for that matter so the funny thing is is that these people who claim themselves to be staunch capitalists they themselves don't really understand what capitalism is they never bothered to sit down and actually think about it deeply to contemplate it to study some literature on what it is because there's not such a clear distinction between what is socialism and what is capitalism is the military a capitalist enterprise or a socialist enterprise what about Social Security what about pensions so yes so something like FoxNews what they will do is they will deliberately conflate liberals in America left-wingers in America for socialists which they think are the same as the Socialists and communists in Venezuela which they think is the same as the Socialists and communists supposedly in in the Scandinavian countries which are the same as the Soviet communists of the Stalinist era and and the same as the Chinese Communists as of all of these are all the same when in fact Chinese communism probably has more in common with capitalism than it does with communism you see but to make these fine distinctions you would have to actually care about truthfulness and accuracy in your distinction making process which of course Fox News doesn't care about any of that all they care about is reinforcing their right-wing ideology now I'm not just blaming Fox News for this I mean liberals can also fall into a similar trap I notice a lot of liberals fail to make proper distinctions when they think about conservatives like a lot of liberals will tend to think of like oh well all conservatives are just Trump supporters and this is a very sloppy distinction because if you actually go and study different conservative law you'll see that they're not all Trump supporters there are many conservatives who are appalled by what Trump does and don't support him at all even though of course there's some overlap between perhaps Trump's policies maybe preference for tax cuts and and with a traditional conservative but but then there's a lot of divergence as well and see from a liberals perspective because the liberal is so biased by their liberal paradigm and they don't want to look at the world from any other point of view they don't make these fine distinctions between different types of conservatives they just kind of lump them all together in the same way that a white the European might lump together all all black people or all Asian people see it's the same problem and so when you think about society and government and economics and healthcare and geopolitics by using crude and sloppy distinctions this gets you into a lot of trouble you start wars with the wrong people you offend people you you wouldn't need to offend you you are fearful of people you don't need to be fearful of and then at the same time you overlook those threats that truly are the threats you should be worried about it's also the case that distinctions can be drawn across each other see um a lot of times people get themselves into trouble because like imagine if if we have a pie just like an apple pie and a distinction is just a slice through this pie and people tend to just assume that well we can slice the pie in one way like we can just slice it we can cut it this way and this way and this way and we'll just have three different lines and that will give us six pieces of the pie something like that but what a lot of times they don't realize because this requires more sophistication is that it's possible to draw a distinction in one direction sort of in one dimension and then you can draw another distinction across that distinction through another dimension see you don't always have to cut the pie through the center you can cut the pie like a cord through a side through sometimes you'll go through the center sometimes you won't go through the center you could know you can cut the pie this way then you can cut through the cut you've already made through the pie see not only that but if you want to get really multi-dimensional about it you can even cut the pie from beneath and from the side right so there's a lot of different possibilities for how you can cut a pie but most people they're very simplistic thinkers they're one dimensional thinkers and they will only adopt the distinctions that their culture has programmed them with because they don't think independently for themselves they're just operating based on dogma and ideology and culture and groupthink so whatever distinctions their culture gives them are the only distinctions they understand for example your culture you grew up in a traditional culture that tells you that there's men and there's women and there's children and that's the only distinction you understand you don't understand the distinction of a some sort of transsexual person or some sort of person who identifies with being asexual or whatever these distinctions they don't compute for you right because your culture hasn't developed these distinctions yet and so you're just operating on like women men and children that's it all right but reality is much more complicated than that and then of course you could have distinctions that cut through each other for example you could have men and women and children but then you can also have like white and black and Asian and European and then all of them can intermix in complex ways so you can have like a black transsexual gay you know whatever person and those are like multiple distinctions cutting through each other right and then even further they like she could also be a a socialist but then there's different varieties of socialist as well so that doesn't certainly mean that she's a Soviet Stalinist type of socialist she might be more of a Bernie Sanders type of socialist or a democratic socialist or a Scandinavian style socialist see so this is where things get quite complicated and you have to be very careful about disentangling all these things disaggregating them because sometimes it's really easy for your mind because your mind is always working to reinforce its own worldview and its own paradigm and its own ideology so it's very easy for for the mind to sort of look at this pie and to slice that pie in the way that is most favorable to your own mind and in fact that's exactly what your mind is doing all the time see people assume that all well we just go out into the world we find distinctions out there and then that's just what it is and then we're just talking about what's out there in the external world and then that's very factual and scientific and and it just is what it is that's not the case at all in fact what's happening is that your mind is very sneakily selecting those distinctions which are most favorable to the survival of that mind see my two-part series understanding survival part 1 and part 2 which goes into depth about how survival works but that episode that series now connects with what I'm talking about here in the sense that see now because your mind is the thing that is actually drawing these distinctions your mind is not just gonna draw neutral objective quote-unquote scientific distinctions no no your mind is going to be X we biased see my episode called self bias I believe do I have two episodes about self bias or one I don't remember I might have two if I have to go watch both of them that also interconnects here because this is this is where your mind really starts to play tricks on you because of course there's something called confirmation bias that your mind tries to reinforce what it already believes and thinks reality is so for example if you're a right winger you're only gonna acknowledge the validity of those distinctions you're only gonna see those distinctions which your mind drew which are favorable to your point of view into your worldview and you're going to overlook the other ones you're not gonna acknowledge their validity and you're probably not gonna acknowledge that your mind drew those distinctions in the first place to serve you as part of your self bias and part of your survival see just to acknowledge all of that it's already a huge huge burden and responsibility way more than than most people are willing to bear to really observe how your own mind is constructing a worldview in a selfish manner in a self biased manner that reinforces your own survival at the cost of other people creating collateral damage for others hurting others and distorting reality to admit that to notice that about your mind that's that's huge that's huge that would take you probably a decade of study and careful self analysis and a lot of self honesty and even a lot of emotional turmoil to admit all that to yourself see let alone to to stop doing it and this is where self-deception happens see my three part series on self-deception this is one of the one of the biggest self-deception mechanisms right here is how you draw your distinctions and speaking of which see there's this method that I'm teaching you of going into a situation and deliberately with intention drawing distinctions the reason is such a game-changer is because for the first time in your life now you're assuming responsibility for how your mind is drawing these distinctions whereas before even though you drew distinctions really what you were doing you were drawing them you were blindly following groupthink like a sheep and you were just assuming and adopting the distinctions that somebody else in society drew for you which got baked into your culture so really you're just acting out some conditioning or some indoctrination so even even to go into a grocery store that's what I'm telling here this is a deep point see if you can grasp the significance of this this is huge even when you grow into a grocery store and you accept the pre-made distinctions of that's a granny smith apple that's a Honey Crisp apple that's a Fuji apple just to accept those distinctions already what you're doing see you're not you're not taking responsibility for drawing them you're just adopting them from your culture after all where did a granny smith apple come from it came from your culture see this goes so deep because not only are you adopting those distinctions blindly completely oblivious see when you go to a grocery store you probably even go to a grocery store since you were a kid buying apples but it never occurred to you that you're like these these these apples are broken into four categories where do these categories come from somebody made them up it's part of your culture you're just assuming that they're true what if they're not true what if they're fabricated what if there are better distinctions that could be made between apples you see and it's not just you is doing this it's everybody around you it's the grocery store clerk who's organizing these apples and placing them into different carts and baskets he's also just blindly accepted that these apples are what his culture tells them they are the farmer who's growing these apples has also assumed these categories and these distinctions of apples he doesn't question them because he all he cares about is just growing some apples and selling him he doesn't really care about the the epistemology and ontology of apples and and how it plays to culture and ideology and spirituality no this is way beyond him right even the scientists studying the apples even they themselves aren't thinking very deeply about the distinctions of different apples which of course corrupts their science and biases their science and all of this limits how your mind is able to think about apples work with apples create new apples of course Apple itself is just a distinction what happens if we genetically modify some Apple to become some new variety is it still going to be an Apple what if we put some genes of a pear or a peach with with it now what is it gonna be a third thing see this becomes especially important when you're trying to be creative and innovative in any field because by definition creation and innovation is the process of creating new distinctions and in fact all of reality is made up of distinctions and this is a point that I won't really go into here I'll have a separate episode about what a distinction actually is because that's such a profound thing we can't get into that here here I just want to get you to start getting some experience with drawing distinctions and learning through this method and then later if you're still interested we'll we'll talk more deeply about distinctions but the bottom line is that everything including physical objects is distinctions and so if you want to be highly creative in some new field in science and physics and biology if you want to create a new type of Apple and your type of fruit a new type of dog breed or whatever you want to create a new political system a new government a new life for yourself a new way of thinking a new way of feeling you're gonna have to be creating new distinctions which means you have to take responsibility for creating distinctions because we're talking about something new that means by definition it's not part of your culture yet that means you couldn't have gotten indoctrinated with it yet you can't take it for granted so while there's millions of distinction is that you've been programmed with that you can take for granted like apples and oranges and Granny Smith and Honey Crisp and all the sorts of stuff and you can take for granted the difference between jazz music and rock music and classical music and techno music and hip-hop music and rap music and all this you take these all for granted as though they're just a given but what most people don't realize that someone had to invent these distinctions at some point someone had to sit down and say that well rap is different from R&B and R&B is different from hip-hop and hip-hop is different from rock and rock is different from something else now it seems now you know after the fact once your program with with these distinctions it seems so obvious like how could people not have known the difference between rap and rock and roll and so forth but at some point they didn't it had to be invented and created and that took a visionary that took someone who was actually exploring distinctions experientially and not just feeding off of whatever the cultural echo chamber or some ideology was telling them see so this is a crucial distinction to now we're making now see how powerful this is now we're making the distinction between distinctions which you get from your culture has indoctrination versus distinctions that you derive or draw for yourself through direct experience and exploration of reality you see that's a huge difference to be able to do this for yourself to take that responsibility and to develop the capacity to develop these new distinctions this is what makes you a visionary this is what makes you a cutting-edge leader this is what allows you to see the future that others cannot see because others are simply operating on the old distinctions that visionaries have made in the past that's why they're thinking inside the box and you're outside the box so you in this can be highly lucrative to be the first one to make a new distinction a new invention to invent something new you have to make a new distinction powerful stuff I see so many mistakes being made by many even intellectual people like folks like Jordan Pederson or Sam Harris you would think that these are highly intelligent people who say intelligent things but really what they do is they make simplistic distinctions and they make inflation's between different distinctions they draw the wrong distinctions and then the people who follow them fall into the sort of sloppy distinctions that these intellectuals make or people like Richard Dawkins for example Richard Dawkins supposedly a scientist Sam Harris is also supposed to like a scientist but then you start talking with these people about religion and spirituality for example and they start to blur the distinctions are not able to for example separate mmm pre rational dogmatic spirituality which we usually call religion versus post rational mmm spirituality which is more advanced than science but see this distinction is lost on someone like Richard Dawkins maybe Sam Harris would be able to appreciate this distinction a little bit more but still like for example you talk with Sam Harris he I bet you he's not going to be able to make a quality distinction between for example God as the bearded man in the sky that is conceived of by most Christians or Allah as conceived by many fundamentalist Muslims versus actual God actual God see that that's a super important distinction if you confuse those two you're never gonna discover actual God you're gonna say actual God doesn't exist because you're thinking when I say god you're probably thinking a beard man in the clouds that sounds ridiculous to you and then you don't understand and then you could never discover God or I might say God you might say oh well by God what Leo means is he just means some some some some sort of notion of just emptiness or no self like the Buddhists talked about that's what Leo means by God no that's not what I mean by God I mean actual God actual God says so you see it's really easy to delude yourself with drawing the wrong distinctions Jordan Peterson does it again with with with Marxists and with communists and with socialists Jordan Peterson can't understand the distinction between Stalinist style socialism which was spiral dynamics staged red and blue versus Bernie Sanders style socialism which is father damage staged green see that's a huge mistake for an intellectual to make huge mistake and it misleads millions of his followers millions and millions of people who follow him are gonna now fall into that conflation and that's why sprouted Amex is so powerful what is father damaged small dynamics if you haven't seen a go check out my multi Series multi-part series on spiral dynamics where I explain it a lot of detail but most of you should be familiar with it but what is small dynamics the reason small dynamics is so powerful if you've been using this model it's been it's been kind of opening your eyes and you've been like whoa Leo I can see the world in a totally different way now that I understand some other dynamics well why is that because spiral that AMEX is just a set of distinctions that's all it is red is the distinction blue is a distinction orange green yellow turquoise these are the distinctions we draw with spiral dynamics they're extremely power felicitations it'll change your whole life if you understand these distinctions so go watch that multi-part series and and to know how to make those distinctions because spotlight amaz is a complex and nuanced model that requires dozens of hours of study I would say it'll probably take you 50 to 100 hours of deep study to get an experiential feel for the distinctions of Spile and AMEX red versus blue versus orange green yellow and turquoise 5200 hours of research and study and that might seem like a lot that's a lot of work just to draw off what five six distinctions but at the same time distinctions are so powerful certain ones are so powerful certain distinctions are stupid and useless but certain distinctions are so powerful that they will change your whole life which is what's violent dynamics can do for you it's a very powerful model yet at the same time as powerful as it is precisely when a distinction is very very powerful that's when it becomes very dangerous because of course when something is powerful you tend to then believe that it's real it's very easy to start to use Sproul that a mix and start to see it everywhere to look through the Spile dynamic lens and everything and then to forget that it's just a single lens and that in fact we constructed it you constructed it it's not something that's found out there smiling Amex isn't found out in the world brother Amex is a projection of our own minds it just happens to be a very useful projection but at the same time it's it's got its limits you have to acknowledge the limits of your projections we can't really survive without projections but we can become much more aware of our projections and realize their limitations and be adept at manipulating our projections in a conscious way and being able to either project or the turn off the projector you see so these are sort of meta skills that we develop that's par the Namek stage yellow and above that most people don't have see most people they go through life projecting all the time they don't know how to turn it off in fact they will deny that their projections are their projections they will insist that this is just something that's found out there in the world like you know many conservatives will say well men and women this is just biology you just you just find male and female out in the world and there's no other categories but those as though that's just like baked into biology into physics into chemistry this is not the case at all if you start to deeply study the animal kingdom start to study plants and fungi and different organisms and you start to study human psychology you start to study human sexuality you start to study how humans are sometimes born with different combination of anatomical parts how they have different hormones running through their through their system some people are born with too much hormone of a certain kind or too little of a certain kind you discover just how fluid gender is and this notion of gender fluidity it is this this horrify as many conservatives and right-wingers and many traditional people because these types of people have very conformist minds and all they do is they just they just soak up the distinction that their culture gives them and of course your culture because these are new developments these are new Sciences and new fields of of research that that were taboo for hundreds of years so they're just coming online in the last 10 20 30 years you know homosexuality was extremely taboo for for centuries in many cultures so it's it's no wonder that they're there these taboos have been indoctrinated into many conservatives and right-wingers and so they're not able to really understand the fluidity of these distinctions because they just naively assume because they're running under the materialist paradigm which of course is also something that was just indoctrinated into you you just assume that there's a objective external rigid physical material reality out there beyond your own mind you just assume that because that's what your culture taught you because we're living in a materialistic Dark Age right now the Dark Age of materialism were really other possibilities aren't even considered seriously in universities and in schools and by religions for the most part even our religions are materialist which is just a complete travesty but anyways that's just the error that we're in right now and so so yeah so you just assumed this materialism and then you just assume that as part of materialism what materialism sort of tells you is that distinctions are inherent in the world we're not constructing them which is of course untrue so when we talk in a following episode about the existential nature of distinctions what I'm gonna tell you is that the entire world is actually constructed out of distinctions because consciousness itself which is what all of the world is is just consciousness there's nothing but consciousness everything you know and see right now is consciousness consciousness is a field an infinite field which creates distinctions this is the universal mind that is generating this dream that you're in right now and you're constantly drawing distinctions these distinctions are not just drawn at the mental level where you can look at an Apple you can say well that's a red one that's a green one that's a yellow one these are these are in a sense conceptual distinctions especially when you're labeling them Granny Smith Honey Crisp and so forth these are obviously conceptual now the colors you might think but the colors are inherent in the apples and that's not something my mind is doing but it is something your mind is doing on a deeper level of which you've not yet become conscious of you can become so conscious if you do spiritual practice that you will actually realize that even the distinctions between the actual colors red yellow and green and so on is something your own mind is constructing and in fact the distinction between absolutely anything is something that your own mind is constructing so the distinction you think exists between Leo and yourself is something that is your mind's construction you're imagining it and in fact that's all that reality is is imagination and imagination is nothing other than the imagination of distinctions or differences between things and if you are in a state of absolute consciousness or God consciousness what you realize is that there's no distinction between anything and everything merges into one absolute total unity and if you do that if you succeed in doing that then you realize that everything is one and everything is consciousness everything is God and everything is love that's what love is love is just the collapse of all distinctions until everything merges into one pure field of infinite consciousness which is your essential nature which is what every religion is trying to point out to you but which because they're drawing incorrect distinctions they're being sloppy about it everyone has gotten so confused that they never reach this state of realizing that all distinctions are absolutely relative and imaginary so when you become extremely conscious what I'm telling you is that you will be so conscious that there will not be a difference between me and you and a saxophone and the Sun and a man and a woman and a dog and an atom and Albert Einstein and Donald Trump and a terrorist and Hitler and a cannibal and a rapist and whatever else there literally will not be a difference so from God's point of view from absolute consciousness point of view there's no difference between you that's just a little preview of where we're going to go later on with with this notion of distinctions for now do those exercises go buy some of those apples go listen to that music and actually start to learn by making distinctions all right that's it I'm done here please click that like button for me and come check out actualize that org that's my website you will find my blog you will find my book list on there you will find the life purpose course other courses that I hope to be releasing in the years to come will be posted there and you could find the forum as well and if you'd like to support me on patreon you can go to patreon.com/scishow and that helps to keep my channel independence and keeps me from having to sell out to advertisers and so forth the final thing I'll say is this I want you to notice how many new distinctions you've made if you've been following along with me for a few years watching my content think back to where you were when you began self-improvement self-help and spirituality think about how clueless you were how few distinctions you knew how to make in this field of psychology and philosophy and metaphysics and epistemology and all this and now compare that to where you are now and now create a distinction create a distinction between where you were and where you are now between how ignorant you were how sloppy your distinctions used to be and now how much more nuanced your distinctions are see now you can distinguish between different qualities of guru you can distinguish between maybe Awakening and different degrees of awakening different facets of awakening you can distinguish between absolute love or no self or God consciousness or whatever you can distinguish between meditation and between concentration or you can distinguish between this technique and that technique or you can distinguish between this emotion and that emotion like now you can finally distinguish between anger and sadness and depression and and whatever frustration you can distinguish between happiness and suffering you can distinguish many different kinds of suffering see and this has made improvements in your life a lot of times people will leave me comments they will email me I get emails and private messages and comments basically every month every week of people saying how following along with my content for five or three years they've been following along and it's completely transformed their whole life they used to be depressed they were stuck they were they didn't know what to do with their life they didn't have a way forward and then they stumbled upon my content and they learned all this stuff and and now now they see a path forward now they have hope well why is that because new new possibilities were opened up to you new distinctions were made see and this makes you more masterful at controlling this biomechanical organism that you are or that you think you are conventionally-speaking it makes you more adept at controlling that and it's especially important to make distinctions for example between different emotions between different feelings between different states of consciousness and so if you really want to become adept at life if you want to live the good life you're gonna have to make a lot of very fine and nuanced distinctions especially in the realms of emotions psychology mind philosophy metaphysics epistemology relationships and spirituality within those domains now of course all of those domains are themselves distinctions so just to know those domains is already very helpful but you're gonna have to go way beyond that to actually create hundreds and thousands of new distinctions within each of those domains to carefully separate things out and and that's what will ultimately set you free but what's really interesting and this is sort of the paradox of it where everything goes full circle is that you're going to master life by making a bunch of distinctions very fine distinctions whatever areas you want to master including self-development and spirituality but ultimately what that's ultimately gonna lead you to in your final Awakening and final enlightenment is that you will transcend all distinctions and you will realize that all of those distinctions were construction of your own mind they were all purely imaginary everything will merge into one and literally the difference between anything will completely disappear such that there will not even be a distinction between life and death anymore and that's when you become God and that's when you discover infinite love and that will be the culmination of your whole journey but even though that happens you will still come back and you will still be able to retain all the old relative distinctions that you've made in the process so it's not like you're gonna abandon your distinctions it's not like you're gonna become God and then you're not gonna be able to know the difference between a rattlesnake and a puppy you're gonna know that you're still gonna be able to know that difference but from the absolute point of view you're gonna realize that there is actually no difference between a rattlesnake and a puppy so you're gonna you're gonna be able to do both you're gonna transcend and include as Ken Wilber says it's a very good saying what we're talking about here transcend and include so you're not just going to transcendence and leave everything you learned behind you're gonna retain the the old lessons with you which are still gonna allow you to be functional and masterful at whatever you do you can be awake and you can be a great musician you can be awake and you can be a great cook you can be awake and you can be a great software engineer you can be awake and you can be a great inventor or a great artist or whatever in the relative world but ultimately you'll know that all of these distinctions are purely imaginary and that that just is what reality is it's just infinite imagination you