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[Music] if you do enough philosophy as we do in this work eventually you reach a point after a long while of doing it after a lot of confusion and a lot of questioning and a lot of scratching your head trying to get the answers but really not being able to get clear straightforward answers you come to the point where you wonder well what's the point is there even any point to doing this work it just all seems like a mind game it all seems like mental masturbation it all seems like it doesn't have any practical purpose and that i'm just wasting my time have you gone to that point yet in your own philosophical investigations a lot of times people will leave these kinds of comments under some of my more philosophical metaphysical type of episodes where they will say okay leo so yeah you're talking about this thing here and that esoteric thing there and this abstraction here and this principle there and you're talking about how reality is not real and it's imaginary and god and whatever else but what's the point this all sounds like word games and mind games but that is the point the point of philosophy is precisely to realize that reality is just a mind game it's all a mind game but be careful because people don't appreciate what that means and what i want to communicate to you the only thing i'm trying to communicate to you in this episode is just the significance of what that means it's it's much more profound than people realize because people also use this as an excuse or as a way to hand wave away philosophical investigation a lot of people don't even begin philosophical investigation because they just short circuit it by saying oh well it's all just a mind game yes but you don't really know that you're short-circuiting the process and you have to be careful about that because the process teaches you things you wouldn't otherwise understand about how your game how your mind plays these games for example i was into philosophical questioning since i was a teen very early in my teenage years i would question everything i was very skeptical about everything which shouldn't surprise you at this point you know how did i how did i become this way i was doing this basically since i was a child now back then it wasn't clear to me where it was taking me how far i could take it and why i was doing it i was just doing it because i was just innately curious it was just curiosity but anyways my mom would always poke fun at me at this she would always say that oh he's he's she had a russian word for me um which translates into english as the unbeliever she would call me the unbeliever because all the time i was doubting everything i was doubting even things that you wouldn't normally doubt like for example i remember when i was like in third grade or i don't know third second fourth grade somewhere around there where we were learning the multiplication tables and for the life of me i couldn't understand why zero times another number is equal to zero that didn't make sense to me at the time and so you know my mom would help me with my homework and anyways you know she was just telling me to like memorize these these multiplication tables but it didn't make sense to me why 0 times 2 is equal to 0. it didn't make sense and so i i didn't believe it i was skeptical about it and she didn't have a good way of explaining it to me but you know she's like well she used to tell me that it's basically true and she just wanted me to memorize it but i don't want to memorize it because i didn't it didn't make sense to me and so she called me i remember she would call me an unbeliever the unbeliever leo is the unbeliever and i did this all across everything with everything in life um and and also the reason i'm bringing up my mom is because um when i would try to engage with her philosophically about certain things you know trying to get her to question stuff um she would very quickly dismiss it it's just like oh it's just philosophy it's just it's all just it's it's useless don't worry about it that was her attitude and that's still her attitude today anything that i explained to her that i talk about with actualize.org all the like deep metaphysical stuff anything that i explained to her she can listen to it and she's fairly open-minded she'll listen to it but she could even listen for an hour me talking about god and consciousness and reality and and metaphysics and epistemology and this and that and how things are unreal and and then at the end of that hour of conversation she'll just say yeah but that's just all philosophy and see this is it's an ingenious defense mechanism that the mind creates and so that in itself is part of the mind game so yes everything is a mind game but when i say that i mean everything is a mind game i mean everything the problem with the way that my mom my mom uses that notion and the way that many i see who leave these sort of comments under some of my episodes use that notion is that they use that notion again in a biased selective manner so when we're talking about deep philosophical stuff they might even listen to it and then at the end of it they'll just say oh yeah but it's all just a mind game but that's not what i mean when i say everything is a mind game that is not the lesson of philosophy the lesson philosophy is not just that philosophy only is a mind game it's that everything is a [ __ ] mind game that means science is a mind game that means religion is a mind game that means means business is a mind game that means relationships are a mind game that means marriage is a mind game that means sex is a mind game that means your ideas about yourself your self-esteem your self-confidence all of your limiting beliefs that's all a mind game it means motivation is a mind game it means school and university is a mind game it means government politics and society are a mind game it means health and health care is a mind game medicine is a mind game and ultimately it means that physical reality itself is a mind game and this is not a trivial realization is very significant but there's a very big difference between realizing this at the level that i'm trying to get you to realize it at versus the level that like for example my mom uses that as an excuse because it's applied very selectively only to those things which she's not interested in or which perhaps threaten her sense of reality and life but you see when i tell her yeah but your life don't you realize that means your whole life is a mind game life itself birth and death are a mind game pain and suffering are a mind game all of your problems all of your family problems your relationship problems your financial problems these are a mind game but you see no no no no she says no no no what are you talking about leo those aren't mind games my money problems are not a mind game those are real and of course that's the mind game it's an infinite mind game you see the problem is that you think the mind games are confined to some narrow finite portion of reality and usually you use that on those portions of reality that you don't like and that you're biased against or that you're threatened by so this then becomes a very big trap with serious consequences for serious people serious business people you know they take their business very seriously they don't treat it like a mind game they don't realize it is a mind game but then when they look at philosophy or spirituality they'll say oh that's all a mind game religion that's all the mind game politics that's all a mind game but they don't treat their business that way and they certainly don't treat their family and their children that way see if you're having a going through a divorce with your spouse and it's a turbulent nasty divorce and you're being sued and you're going to lose all your money and custody of the children in that divorce see in the middle of that you don't think that's a mind game even though that's exactly what it is that's all that it is it's layers and layers of of nested mind games there that you and your spouse and your lawyers are all playing and your children too you see so you make exceptions and you don't actually apply this principle of it's just a mind game when things get serious and this is how you get trapped in life and you can become a victim of life when you don't realize it you forget because you literally get mesmerized by the messiness of your problems you don't think that your deepest personal problems are a mind game whatever those are like if you struggle to get sex you don't think that's just a mind game you think that's a physical problem you think that's a real serious problem and it causes a a real serious depression for you maybe you'll even become suicidal and maybe at some point somebody will actually kill themselves over this i'm sure thousands of people every year around the world kill themselves because they're not able to have sex the kind of sex that they want and they believe that that's not a mind game they believe that's physics they believe things like that they're too short to have sex that their dick is too small to have sex that they're too ugly to have sex that they're not lovable enough that nobody would want them that nobody would commit to them that maybe somebody would have sex with them but they would that would just be just to use their body and that there wouldn't be a real genuine connection there because the person isn't lovable enough or isn't worthy enough or doesn't have the right job or doesn't have the right hair or the right physical features and all of that is not treated like a mind game go try to convince an incel for example go to an in cell forum where all the in cells hang out and try to convince these in-cells that everything they're doing on that forum where they are developing this toxic uh ideology against women this toxic world view against women and also um against attractive men where they believe that they can't get laid because they're not attractive enough and because uh women are shallow and only want to sleep around with the with the most attractive chads with the biggest jaws and the biggest muscles and the biggest cars and and the most money and all this sort of stuff like they develop this ideology go try to convince one of these incels that hey that's just all a mind game that you're playing on yourself that's that's the most that's the last thing you'll be able to convince them of is that and the reason is is precisely because if they admit that then the entire mind game would collapse like a house of cards so that's precisely the one thing they cannot admit and that's just one example how about your relationship problems your marriage problems these are all mind games you're playing mind games every single day with the people that you love with your family the problem is that you don't treat them as such you don't treat these things like mind games you're not dismissive of these problems why because it's part of your survival and of course as we've talked about in the past survival is the ultimate mind game because birth and death are themselves just mind games literally things you're imagining in your mind the importance of being alive this is a mental bias it's an arbitrary bias that you've developed the idea that you're going to die this is an arbitrary idea that you've you've picked up it's not true and you you saying no leo it is true i'm gonna die one day yeah that's the mind game that you're playing that i'm trying to point you to that you're in denial about and denial and then denial of your denial and denial of your denial of your denial is the mind game and perhaps another area an example of where this mind game is extremely convincing and virtually impossible to communicate or to demonstrate uh like with the incels is within the scientific community scientists and academics actually think that their intellectual work is not a mind game i mean it's ridiculous when you really think about it because if you just zoom out a little bit and think about what science and academia are it's obvious that these are mind games but they're such deep mind games and they have such significance that people get mesmerized by them lost inside of them doing them for years and decades they build entire careers and lifestyles out of these communities and and epistemic paradigms that it becomes their survival and it's no accident that most of the hardcore scientists and academics when you try to talk to them about the fact that science and academia and materialism for example are mind games and that let's do some philosophy to figure this out to help you to help jail break your mind out of this game that you're playing what are they going to tell you they're going to tell you oh philosophy but that's just a mind game we don't need philosophy we're serious scientists and academics here philosophy that's for that's for soft-headed people that's just a waste of time everybody knows that you can't get anything practical from metaphysics or from doing and reading philosophy it's just endless debating back and forth and mental masturbation and you know we're we're serious hard-nosed scientists and engineers over here we're physicists we're biologists we're chemists uh and you know we're building particle colliders here and battery technology and we are launching spacecraft and and exploring the outer edges of the universe through our telescopes and stuff like that you know we're doing serious astronomy here and astrophysics and developing theories that we can use to build gps systems and quantum computers and whatever else and so it's not a mind game how self-serving of you to frame it that way isn't it isn't that interesting isn't it interesting that every worldview and every paradigm frames itself in such a way that it justifies itself to itself because of course if it didn't you would stop doing it so again the problem here is the way in which skepticism is misused skepticism is weaponized i've talked about this my older episode called true versus false skepticism it's a very important episode that people don't fathom the significance of this is such a crucial thing to understand watch yourself doing this like a hawk your mind will abuse skepticism applying it in a self-serving manner weaponizing it in order to dismiss those things that threaten your worldview and threaten your mind and your life and it will completely forget about skepticism when it comes to your own pet paradigms and theories because the only reason your mind cares about skepticism is to serve itself you don't really care about truth you care about using skepticism to defend falsehood by misapplying it selectively and this is for example what many of the right wingers do when they're skeptical about like climate change they will pretend when they're debating about climate change they will act as though they're being very skeptical in a sort of uh you know philosophical almost as though they're trying to be these good philosophers and truth seekers so they apply skepticism in this manner to to climate science and the reason of course they're doing that is because a lot of these people get paid by the oil and gas industry or they have relatives that work for the oil and gas industry or because they subscribe to an ideology where they simply don't want to take responsibility collective responsibility for the environment it's difficult it's emotionally difficult to take responsibility for your footprint on the environment that takes a higher level of cognitive development and moral and spiritual development because then you're gonna have to change what you eat how you drive how much water you use how much gas you use what companies you work for if you take that stuff seriously and that that will harm your survival in many cases you see and so this air of skepticism is put on like oh yeah i'm being very skeptical and rigorous when in fact you're not being skeptical and rigorous because if you're truly being skeptical you'd be skeptical of the skepticism that exists around climate denial so notice your own mind doing this it's easy to see other people misusing skepticism in this way especially these days oh my god we have so much abusive skepticism i don't think i've ever seen this much abuse of skepticism ever in my life as we have right now in the middle of this coveted epidemic every day i turn on the news and i see people horribly mangling skepticism about masks about vaccines about various kinds of medicines and there's a there's a gen even more general skepticism um when it comes to this this this this attitude of distrust towards mainstream media and towards government in general and towards corporations and towards elites people think that they've woken up by turning against mainstream media government and the elites and corporations people think they're waking up this is a false awakening and i'm not even talking about enlightenment here i'm just talking about it it's even a false political awakening because uh yeah you're skeptical about big pharma and you're skeptical about the military industrial complex and you're skeptical about jeff bezos and bill gates and you're skeptical about the presidency and you're skeptical about the politicians and the mainstream media but then what do you do out of that foolish notion of skepticism you swing your pendulum to the other's end and you go down uh ridiculously patently false conspiracy theories and alternative media sources facebook posts and other things like that and there you don't apply the same level of skepticism that you do to mainstream media and then you think that you're being smart and that you're doing good epistemology and you think that you're now starting to understand the world that you're waking up politically but actually no you're you're completely wrapped up in delusion because the reality is no matter what kind of biases cnn has cnn is way more accurate and truthful than anything that you'll find on facebook and in many cases even stuff that you find on youtube many of the sort of new media alternative media perspectives that you get whether it's right or left-wing progressive or alt-right that you find on youtube on tick tock on facebook and other social media sources the reality is that all those sources are also deeply biased and a lot of times not only are they biased but they're also simply not factual because even though cnn has its biases of course um it has a certain kind of group think that it thinks inside of a certain box that thinks inside of a certain paradigm that it applies to how it reports on the news overall you can trust cnn to be factual in many in many cases in the majority of cases you can also trust cnn that if they say something that's not factual that they will actually correct the record in many cases they'll do that um but you will not get get that same level of um of professionalism from most of the sort of independent news reporters that you find on the internet they actually they don't have that same level of journalistic integrity because at least the people at cnn they many of them are like legit trained journalists of course not all of them some of them are just talking heads a lot of times and cnn oftentimes invites idiots to you know to discuss topics but uh still they have legitimate reporters on their payrolls legitimate journalists who actually went to school for journalism got good degrees went to great schools were taught how to be neutral and objective how to look for bias how to have integrity about reporting facts things like that whereas like somebody like alex jones you know i mean it's laughable to even bring him up in this context so you see this is a this is the danger with skepticism if you're going to be skeptical you have to be skeptical in an unbiased way and that's exactly not how most people are skeptical they're not skeptical about their own mental intellectual conclusions they give preferential treatment to their own pet theories and prejudices and then what ends up happening is just through confirmation bias you develop an entire ideology by being skeptical against the elites or the corporate people or whatever now am i saying that you shouldn't be skeptical about the elites and the corporate folk and the government no of course you should but you should also be skeptical and even more skeptical about all the conspiracy theories out there and the alternative narratives that exist and you should especially be skeptical about anybody who has built a career against the elites you see these sorts of folks on youtube and i'm sure in other places i mostly visit youtube i don't spend a lot of time on other social media but i'm sure you see this everywhere on social media is that there are entire people nowadays who have built careers and entire um brands out of [ __ ] on mainstream media and the elites and the corporations and they've gotten huge followings of millions of people and i can just see how these people follow this anti-elitist populist rhetoric and they're just getting suckered these people are getting suckered because there's a little veneer of skepticism there but but they're getting suckered into this populist ideology and that too is just an ideology but it's not recognizing itself as such you see and it's going to lead to more problems than it really fixes and so that too is a mind game so the mind game is infinite it's a mind game within a mind game within a mind game within a mind game within a mind game you think you've unraveled one mind game and actually you've just realized that that's the next mind game that you're playing that's how this works so the whole point of our work with actualize.org and really with with genuine any genuine spiritual work is to realize that everything is a mind game and then to actually live from that place and also to become so adept and artful at playing the mind game that you play it like in like a like a master guitarist will play a guitar that's the difference you see i'm not just talking about looking around and calling everyone um some kind of player and being just kind of generally vaguely skeptical about everybody and being paranoid and doubting everybody i'm not just saying that i'm saying when you truly start to suspect that everything is a mind game what's the next step what's the what's the next logical step what should you do about that well if everything is a mind game you only have two options one is to kill yourself and end the game and two is to keep playing the game but to learn to play the game artfully i guess you have a third option which is just to go back to sleep and continue playing the game artlessly the way you've been playing it which is in fact that option is the option most people take so what does it mean to play the game artfully well the way that you learn to play a game is that you study how the game is played you study the mechanics of the game you look at who plays it well and who plays it poorly you learn the rules of the game which is to say you learn the principles that are running the game you learn patterns within the game you learn patterns and meta patterns and then you actually go out and play a few of these games yourself and you make mistakes and through trial and error and then also self-reflection you play a game then you look back and analyze your own game and then you say how did i play that one how did that turn out what worked what didn't work you do a little post-mortem on it it's just the same way as learning how to play chess i mean this how does a how does somebody become a chess grand master that's what we're talking about here think of life as just a giant infinite game of chess that you're playing and unless you're going to kill yourself you're going to have to play the game there's no other option there's no option not to play the game other than killing yourself which i don't recommend you do i recommend you enjoy the game and actually see that's the thing is that if you hate the game the reason you hate the game is because you haven't actually learned how to play the game yet life as a game is is amazing it is the most amazing game that could ever be designed it beats any video game it beats chess it beats checkers it beats go it beats monopoly it's the ultimate game that's what makes it so tricky is that it is ultimate it is infinite there's nothing higher than it there's nothing more complex than the game of life and so what you have to do from an early age but i mean you can start this at any age but the earlier start the better what you can do is you can you can realize that it's all a game then you can start to learn how the game is played and you can learn principles and patterns and meta patterns and then quickly through trial and error and using a lot of intelligence you can figure out how to play the game and then the better you become at it the more confident you feel the higher your self-esteem becomes you also start to get some of the fruits and rewards that are possible by playing the game well and you avoid much of the suffering which is is the punishment for playing the game poorly and then you start to fall in love with the game and you enjoy the game and then also when you are fully you become fully conscious of how much of a game it all is this becomes very liberating and freeing because you no longer take it too seriously you can be playful and that is the ultimate end game that we might say what is the end game of life the end game of life is to become so masterful at dealing with all of the self-deception that the mind constructs that's what we're talking about when we talk about mind games we're talking about self-deception and manipulations of various kinds and the illusions that the mind spins when you become very artful and masterful at catching your own mind playing all these various kinds of tricks uh and then you master your own mind in that way then you can be playful and you can just enjoy life and it becomes a play it becomes a game and isn't that what you really want do you want life to be work or do you want life to be play do you want life to be a grind or do you want life to be play you want it to be play so how do you get it to be play by recognizing it's a game and then learning the mechanics and that's what actualize.org is is that it's my own study of how the game of life is played and all the mind games that are played by humans including myself i don't exclude myself from this i'm very much involved in playing mind games just like we all are right um it's very much about the quality of the game you play how artfully you play it you can get wildly different results depending on how you play the game and also being conscious of what it is that you're doing because most people are playing the game but they're not aware that they're playing the game and they're in denial that they're playing the game and that's when you really get yourself into a lot of trouble the reason scientists and academics get themselves into trouble and doctors and politicians and spouses and husbands and wives and lovers and children and business people they get themselves into trouble because they're denying that they're playing the game they're not aware of it religious people too i forgot that one you know religious people people who joined the new age cults that are out there some of which i've shared information about on my blog go check that out i like to share whenever i find videos of interesting cults i like to share those on my blog because you know one of the ways if you really want to get good at mind games is study how others play mind games and the best mind games are played by cults and by religion and by science oh boy those are those are really the only three fields you got to study to understand mind games really well i mean i would also include politics in there as well maybe that's the fourth the fourth key pillar of mind games and human [ __ ] is those it's cults it's religion it's science and it's politics so you study those and the way you can begin studying them is just look at videos you can look for videos i mean you can literally go into youtube and just type in cults and see what kind of interesting cults come up you'll find all sorts of interesting videos on cults or religion to type in religion you'll see all sorts of interesting religious mind games you could type in new age and see all sorts of wacky new age mind games politics of course you can type in politics and you'll see the whole zoo of political mind games uh now with science it's going to be a little trickier because if you type in science it's going to seem like what you get is serious people talking about serious things but but just just notice that their seriousness itself is the game um in many ways science is the most challenging mind game to deconstruct precisely because it's so serious and uh treats itself as so objective and so rigorous but see that is the mind game of science is the objectivity and the rigor of it um but luckily you don't need to look very far for that for help deconstructing that because i have a i have a long ass over 10 hour long series on science called deconstructing the myth of science part 1 2 3 and i'll probably release some more in the future to add to that series that will get you started that is a full deconstruction of science right there and i've deconstructed other parts of science and other episodes of mine so um i can help you with that most serious of work that's personally my deepest passion you see because you can't realize that all of reality is a mind game as long as you think physics is real so you have to deconstruct physics and to deconstruct physics you got to deconstruct all of science basically and will science help you to do this no you can't use science to deconstruct science that's preposterous that's the same as going into a mormon church or an evangelical church and expecting them to deconstruct the bible for you they're not going to they're true believers you see that's where you got to apply your skepticism you got to see that that's a bubble that's a bubble that they have a hermetically sealed ideological bubble that they've constructed the mormons the evangelicals and also the scientists and the academics which is exactly why they're all so protective the mormons are as protective as the evangelicals of their superstitions and uh and so are the scientists and the academics they're just as they're just as dogmatic and protective but in fact it's even worse because at least with the mormon and evangelical you can see how how obviously dogmatic they are but with the scientists and academic see they play a deeper game they're playing a double game they're playing a game within a game their game is to act as though they're being humble objective rigorous logical neutral and unbiased that's their game and when you see that you actually start to believe it even more than you would believe some passionate charismatic preacher yelling at you from the pulpit but anyways so if you haven't noticed what i do with my blog which i hope you've been checking out you guys are a lot of you guys are missing out on this because look look what i've been doing with my blog over the last three or four years that i've been running my blog i've been mostly sharing videos and links and other pieces of information that i find online that are designed to be like little breadcrumb trails what is that what is that old story of the the breadcrumb trails was it it wasn't goalie like it was somebody i forget exactly who it was that left the breadcrumbs anyway some some girl that left some breadcrumbs to find her way back from the evil witch's house or something like that um it was it hansel and gretel yeah maybe anyways um i need a refresher on my folktales so so yeah i'm trying to leave a breadcrumb trail for you with every blog post where i am posting little clues you know a video here about a cult a video here about some political you know nut job a video here about alex jones a video here about some scientist saying something delusional a video here about some um a new age or doing something weird with the hope that you slowly study these examples and sort of piece together and start to see that aha there's something bigger there's a bigger pattern going on here which is always all a mind game and so i'm trying to highlight for you like here look you could play the mind game this way or you could play it this way it could take the guise of a religious person it could take the guys of a scientist it could take the guys of a new ager it could take the guys of a spiritual guru it could take the guys of a of a you know a man or a woman um that's what god is god is an infinite shape shifter taking all sorts of forms at all possible forms playing with itself it's a game of self-deception it's a game of infinite self-deception and you might wonder what leo why would god be so [ __ ] twisted what's what's the game here what's the game about why does god play games why can't god just be straight well because of course you're assuming that reality could exist if god was being straight but if god was being straight there would be no reality physical reality itself is god being twisted and not straight your life the fact that you think you're alive that's the twist in god's mind if you untwist god's mind you'll stop being alive you'll stop being human you'll stop believing in an objective reality you'll stop believing in a physics you'll stop believing in science and all the things you hold dear and you'll lose all your biases for your family and for your dog and for your cat and for your spouse for your children you'll lose all these biases and then how can you play the game the game will be over and even though you love to [ __ ] and moan about how unfair the game is to you right don't you believe the game is unfair for you especially because you believe you should have more you believe you should get better results in the game you believe you should have more sex more money more love better house better car better place to live all that you believe you deserve all that and you love to [ __ ] and moan about how you're not getting it and why you're not getting it and why god's not giving it to you but uh the bottom line is you actually love you you love the drama of this game at some level you enjoy the suffering and you're addicted to playing this game in whatever way you like to play it if you're doing drugs you're you love playing the game if you're having sex you love playing the game if you're jerking off you love playing the game if you're having children and you love playing with your children you're playing the game if you love business and earning money and bossing people around you're playing the game if you love conquering your competitors you're playing the game if you love social justice and fighting for progressive ideas to improve society for the world and for the downtrodden you're playing the game if you love defending tradition and traditional values and heritage and preserving society against the crazy marxists and socialist types and the utopians you're playing the game you love playing that game you don't want to give up playing that game and to play physical physical games out in the world like with your business to play because you know doing business as a physical activity we might almost say um that's a game but that also that game necessitates that you play games in your mind you see because it's the games you play in your mind that then dictate how you're going to run your business and how successful your business is going to be likewise when you're building a physical family with children and house and cars and this and all that you also have to play games in your mind to do that to sustain that see and so the function of philosophy is not merely to read books nor is it to study what the ancient philosophers have said like plato aristotle descartes and others like them in fact the studying of the history of philosophy and the reading of philosophy books is its own mind game the purpose of that mind game is to prevent you from realizing the actual mind gain that is being played here right now in your life because you're not gonna be able to connect all that ancient knowledge to what is actually happening in your life today so that's what actualized europe is trying to do is it's it's really sort of like a philosophy 2.0 here we're trying to take academic philosophy and apply it to the actual mind game that is your life so it actually connects but if you're not careful you can turn actualize.org into its own mind game your love your life your ego mind would love nothing more than to sit eating a bucket of ice cream every night and just watching hour after hour of actualizing org videos and navel gazing about it masturbating about it and uh not changing your life not actually applying the lessons not actually doing your own investigations and contemplations into the topics that i talk about just taking me at my word or debating and arguing with me which itself is uh a very low form of the mind game here every profound thing that i say you have to derive for yourself first of all and then second of all you have to learn how to how to how it connects with your life and how you can use it to improve the artfulness with which you play the game that's the only point of actualize.org so philosophy does have a very important point philosophy in a sense you could define it as the study of the mechanics of the mind game of life and reality you really study it deeply and in fact you have a love for the study of the mind game see most people love to play the mind game but they don't love studying how the mind game is played because that's a meta function you see we talked about that in the episode called what it means to go meta so it's not enough to play the game you have to study the game the game about what does it mean to win the game what's the difference between people who are playing the game artfully and those who are not what causes suffering within the game how do people deceive themselves within the game what are all the possible ways and how am i doing that to myself see this this is true philosophy and when you frame it like this then you realize that is there anything more important within the mind game than to realize that it is a mind game and to study how the mind game is played what's more important so there's a bit of a paradox here is that when you first studying when you first start studying how the mind game is played and how it is a mind game at first it's very abstract and it's not practical and people around you will look at you like you're a little bit nuts like why are you even studying this stuff what's the point they don't see the point because they're not thinking very far they're only thinking about how do i play the next move so they're like desperate chess players just looking to to make the next right move to save their king because they're about to get checkmated that's the that's the desperate situation that most people in life find themselves in but see if you're a wise chess player you realize that it's already too late that game they're playing they're going to lose it's already too late what they're doing if you really want to play chess well you got to study long before you actually enter into any competition you got to actually study by yourself the different moves and the different opening tactics and gambits that exist within chess you got to study the history of chess and all the famous games that have been played and you gotta play test games on yourself against yourself or some other opponent who's like a teacher of yours that you're practicing with who can show you the different moves and the different tricks that exist you see and so you prepare yourself but see when you're preparing yourself and you're sitting there reading books about chess somebody who's just eager to make the next move in a chess game he's going to be like why are you why are you reading that book why are you preparing just play but if you play you're going to be a fool and you're going to get a fools mate see so when you first start start studying philosophy it's going to seem very abstract and you're going to go through a phase of what might seem like mental masturbation and a lot of confusion and you're not going to know what's up what's down you're not going to know who to trust what book to read like you're going to be confused and lost and so i went through years of that and and uh what got me through that it's just my love for the process itself so i i didn't enter into philosophy with the hope of like okay how can i quickly just get this over with so that i have all the answers i just want the answers no for me it was just an exploration i wanted to explore the mechanics of the mind and that was fascinating in and of itself for me i didn't even need it to be practical or applicable i didn't i didn't need my philosophy to get me laid i didn't need a direct path from philosophy to millions of dollars i didn't need a direct path from doing philosophy to having a great career or becoming famous or raising a family it was just for the the love of truth and understanding because there's a there was just an innate recognition intuition that truth is valuable in and of itself understanding the mechanics of the mind is valuable in and of itself it's interesting the mind is an interesting thing to study because you're using it all the time anyways but then what that ultimately led to is all sorts of practical ramifications for example one of the practical consequences of my early doing of philosophy is that i became immune to religion to religious indoctrination of every kind i became immune to it why because i studied the mechanics of self-deception so deeply that now when some religious person is talking to me i can see through all of their [ __ ] it also made me immune to cults i'm immune to cults because i can clearly see the game that the cult leader is playing and that all their followers are playing it's all also made me immune for example to the sort of corporate capitalist rat race a lot of people get lost in that they think well leo i'm not stupid i'm not a stupid religious person and i'm not stupid enough to follow fall for some sort of idiotic you know sex cult or whatever um yeah okay fine first of all you're even that you're overestimating you could easily fall prey to one of those but anyways but then you get you fall into the trap of just materialism chasing material success and money and climbing the corporate ladder and all that sort of stuff but so see i uh i saw through that game too and then if you don't fall into that trap then you'll fall into the trap of politics you'll subscribe to either a right-wing ideology or a left-wing ideology whatever or even a sort of a centrist neo-liberal maybe corporatist ideology you'll subscribe to that and then you'll you'll play that game for your life for the rest of your life because you won't see how there's self-deception and bias in all those sorts of games or maybe you'll fall into the mind game of like becoming a um an athlete you know one of the saddest things that i think almost nobody talks about is like we had the olymp olympics recently the tokyo olympics and um like when i see those young olympic gymnasts and athletes doing their you know fancy stuff in competition like to me it's like it's almost like watching a dog show have you seen those dog shows where they they uh strut out one of these silly looking dogs and it just looks like a silly dog because it's like a poodle and it's all trimmed up and stuff and it's got this weird you know sort of elitist looking aristocratic look to it because it's supposed to you know impress the judges and they they strut strut out this dog it looks ridiculous it jumps through some hoops and stuff and then it gets some award and then like i mean it's a mockery it's a mockery of life and that's exactly what these uh poor uh olympic kids have been brainwashed into i mean the olympics is basically a cult because you don't enter the olympics unless you've been brainwashed from birth into that basically you have to start training for the olympics from like five years old and your parents basically have to put you up to it and you know by the time you're 15 or 20 you've been so brainwashed into this that you actually believe that you enjoy what you're doing you actually believe that you're living a good life by training every day for five ten hours a day and jumping through all these hoops and getting awards and applause and praise from your parents from your teachers from onlookers and spectators and you actually believe that this is this is some sort of way to live a rich life i mean it's you're just a dog in a dog and pony show and it's sad because a lot of these athletes will just like break an ankle and then their whole career will be over they won't even make it to the olympics or um even they make it to the olympics and even worse is that they make it to the olympics and they they win the gold medal and then what they win five gold medals so what and then what you're you're you're 20 years old you've won five gold medals and what what are you doing with your life it was all a mind game you're gonna be depressed and miserable with your sitting at home with your five gold olympic medals around your neck crying eating a bucket of ice cream that's that's what it's going to lead to right you see so you've been brainwashed you've been in a cult and uh you know one of the biggest cults i avoided was academia you know when i was in university i was seriously considering you know like what am i gonna do with my life and i was seriously considered becoming a philosophy professor i've talked about this in the past um i was really supposed to be a professor in academia in a university somewhere and then very very quickly astutely as i started to research i actually bought a book about how to become a professor i researched that and i realized the whole thing is a [ __ ] racket becoming becoming an academic professor is a [ __ ] racket and academia is just a cult and i realized very quickly that the reason that i wanted to do philosophy was to get to the truth and i realized that i'm not going to get to the truth through academia i realized that it was just a [ __ ] it's a cult it's not about the truth at all you can't get to the truth through academia which is why no academic understands what what truth is no academic can tell you what the truth is just ask them they'll they'll mumble and stumble and they won't give you a clear answer because they don't know so so i avoided that all because i was just self introspecting reflecting and studying the mechanics of of self-deception now that doesn't mean that i've that i'm immune to self-deception again people get this so wrong i talk about self-deception a lot that doesn't mean that i'm a master of it and that i'm not capable of deceiving myself i certainly am and in fact i'm constantly aware of ways in which i'm deceiving myself that i haven't let go of yet or i haven't fully brought myself to surrender yet i'm constantly aware of that it's a never-ending process of being aware of that um and there are so many other ways that you can get tricked in life in fact i'm gonna have a whole episode coming up soon in the future where i'm gonna talk i'm gonna teach you actually how to avoid getting scammed and conned in life you want that episode it's a very practical one you'll love it um i have a lot of experience with how to avoid getting scammed and conned and tricked and i'll explain that then but um but yeah i mean um it's very easy to lose all your money in financial investment mind games investing is a whole mind game the entire investment industry house cards i've also avoided political dogma like some of you will think no leo you're you're politically dogmatic and all this you're you're such a leftist but uh but um but i i also avoided actually uh getting stuck into a political ideology um thanks to this work thanks to this philosophy uh i've avoided a lot of potential relationship problems that i could have had as well i haven't been perfect there are traps i've fallen into for sure i'd have to think about it deeply to to remember all the traps i've fallen into and [Music] but for the most part i've avoided a lot of [ __ ] that a lot of people do not avoid especially youngsters as they're growing up simply because they take these things for granted they take philosophy for granted they think it's all just fun and games and that they don't need to study philosophy well when you don't study philosophy what ends up happening is that you you become a fool and you have to learn the hard way see with philosophy you can foresee the traps and preemptively avoid them whereas when you don't study philosophy you don't see the meta patterns you the only way to discover the patterns is by hitting your face into a brick wall and then each time you're doing that you're losing five ten years of your life like you hit your face into a brick wall of some new age cult that's five years of your life right there that you just lost maybe more maybe you'll also lose your family as a result of that maybe you'll even lose your entire life savings as a result of that that's how these cults work or you hit your face into the into the wall of the brick wall of religion you get indoctrinated into that for 10 20 years you've lost half your life with that toxic ideology and even if you leave it remnants of it will remain deeply rooted in your mind for for the rest of your life you'll be suffering with that or you get into academia or you get into the corporate rat race that's 10 20 years lost right there and also your health you're gonna lose your health in that rat race too and you're probably gonna lose your wife and your husband and your children maybe even from that or you get into investing cryptocurrency what other new fad there is and ntfs or whatever they're called um nfts i don't i don't even know what they're called non-fungible tokens um so yeah like you get involved in something like that and then you lose your life savings in that why because you didn't realize that all of investing is a mind game you actually you actually were greedy and you thought you're going to get rich you weren't skeptical enough of your own greed and you know as they say pigs get slaughtered on wall street that's how investing works i actually have some interesting investment investment stories but i think i'll save them for later um i actually when i was really young my brother and i we invested in uh early internet stocks like aol stocks back in in the late 90s when the first internet bubble didn't burst yet and we we actually made like over a hundred thousand dollars um just on aol stock very interesting of course we lost it all when it burst but that was one of my first experiences with some of the you know the trickeries of investing which is why i'm still careful with it today but anyways yeah so so what's the point the point is that it is a game but it's also a serious game because it's the only game in town these mind games are all that there is that's why it's so difficult to see that it's a mind game because when all you have is an infinite mind game well you confuse it for reality some people get bummed out when they hear that reality is just a mind game everything's a mind game but don't take it that way why are you bummed out about that this should be the happiest news you've ever heard why would you want reality to be something other than a game don't you like games games are fun games are play that's what you want reality to be you don't want it to be anything else you don't want it to be real why why do you get bummed out when i tell you that reality is an illusion or a hallucination that's the best possible news don't you see then you can just play you can play in a virtual reality in a dream that's the best that's not something to be depressed about like when you realize that your dog and your cat are imaginary that's not something to bum you out that just makes your dog and your cat all the more cool how cool is it to have an imaginary cat an imaginary dog that you're hallucinating you see when it's imaginary then nothing is lost when it goes away your cat and your dog can die and it's fine it's okay they were imaginary but you could also learn to enjoy them while they're here so what i recommend is that you actually treat the game seriously especially at first later when you become very masterful at it then you can open yourself up to play more but at the beginning especially if you're young treat the game seriously see a mistake would be if you say oh well leo says it's all just a mind game so i'm gonna go do some heroin what's wrong with that it's just a game and then i'm gonna go just have sex indiscriminately and i'm just gonna like not play not not do any work or discipline myself in any way i'm just going to play video games all day and smoke weed and sit in my mouth on my mother's couch in her basement and i'm not going to go out and socialize i'm not going to i'm not going to push myself to talk to girls and to and to to develop relationship skills i'm not i'm not going to develop any career skills i'm not going to go to school i'm not going to get good grades because leo good grades that's just all a game and of course it is grades mean absolutely nothing it's all just a game but at the same time there is a difference between being an f student and an a student and even though grades are all just a game i was an a student and it still matters reading books educating yourself developing career skills building discipline all these things matter it's it's all about mastering the game when life becomes really shitty is when you don't develop mastery of the game and you think you can just bumble through it that's when your life can really suck so there's sort of a paradox here where on the one hand you have to be very pragmatic in fact i would say ruthlessly pragmatic in life you have to take things like money and business and your career and skill development and discipline and motivation and relationships to take these things seriously and you have to do what is necessary to be done to succeed in those areas of your life on the other hand you have to also be metaphysical you can't just do that which is utilitarian in life and expect to have a good life that is the trap of the rat race that is just success for successes sake you have to be metaphysical where you can stand back and you can observe and to see the true nature of why those practical things are being done and what they're being done for and you have to put them into a proper larger context if that context is missing that's the problem with most successful people is that they're very pragmatic but they're missing the metaphysical component on the other hand you have the other types of people which are the the hippie new age people who tend to be very metaphysical very spiritual but they're completely lacking in the pragmatic aspect of life they're not able to earn enough money to pay their bills or to handle other practical things and so that's one of the things that i want to really teach you with actualize.org and to demonstrate to you with actualize.org is the idea that it to live a good life you really need a synthesis a beautiful synthesis a sort of a yin-yang synthesis of the pragmatic and the metaphysical and you got to combine the two together and you got to let the metaphysical inform the pragmatic and you got to let the pragmatics also to some degrees inform the metaphysics of your life and it's by by combining these two things in a in a nuanced intelligent way that you get the best possible life and if you only go for one or for the other then it's not going to work and so what i see is that most people they either fall too much into one camp or into the other camp they're not able to even maintain a career so they just sort of want to leave society they want to go live in an ashram and just meditate or something like that and then they're they're basically helpless people they need to leech off of others in life to feed themselves and to clothe themselves and have shelter there's those types of people and then there's the sort of strictly business people business oriented people who just go out and do a bunch of business and they become very successful and all that but they're but they're gonna miss the happiness and satisfaction they're gonna miss all of the spiritual connection to reality they're gonna miss god love um truth beauty they're gonna miss out on all of that and so a lot of my content alternates back and forth sometimes i will shoot an episode that's very metaphysical other times i will shoot an episode that's very pragmatic and sometimes people look at that and say leo that's very kind of schizophrenic of you like choose one lane stay in one lane and my point is that no i'm i the whole point is that we're we're interweaving these things together like a double helix that's how it has to be because one of my missions is to make philosophy practical but while i'm trying to make philosophy practical i can't sell out its heart and soul just strictly for the purposes of your survival so a lot of people tell me like leo you know that most of your people can't fathom and access these you know deep levels of consciousness or some of these abstract metaphysical truths why don't you make a bunch of videos that are just like very practical teach us how to have better sex teach us how to make money teach us how to start a business teacher i could do all that um and that's most what most of you need but um but also there's a lot of that already on the internet you can find practical stuff practical teachings you can find that's that's most of what self-help is about what's rare is a is an intelligent synthesis of these two how do you combine these two things that's what's really tricky that's the fine tightrope walk that we're doing here with actualize.org so anyways i don't think i concluded this thread earlier i was talking about how when you first start doing philosophy it's very abstract you go through a period of a few years where you're kind of lost in theories and you're confused and all this and maybe you think it's all pointless you don't know what makes sense what's true you just keep keep going and keep pushing and also as you're doing that keep one foot in the practical side of things you can keep doing your philosophy and at the same time also building some career skills you should have some practical skills that you're building for example build some computer skills build some drawing skills build some film editing skills build some music composition skills build some writing skills build some speaking skills these like just down to earth skills this is what actually people will hire you for you need some of that for example when i was when i was in university i was studying philosophy um i wasn't just fooling myself at all i can just study philosophy and everything is going to somehow work itself out in the future i knew that i was studying philosophy but i'm not going to get paid for philosophy i knew that it doesn't take a genius to know that so i had a plan i had a backup plan while i was learning philosophy because philosophy doesn't have to take that much time to learn i was also teaching myself game design that was my practical skill set game design i was studying how to build games video games um i learned technical skills in scripting programming web development ui interface photoshop 3d studio max animation software zbrush like i learned very technical skills like very [ __ ] technical skills in addition to doing my philosophy because that's how i was going to pay my bills so make sure you have something like that going for you you need a practical plan for the material things in life and you got to take those seriously and um you know i was i was ruthlessly pragmatic when i was when i was starting my first business my first business had nothing to do with personal development i didn't even know personal development existed when i started my first business and i didn't know anything about spirituality right i was ruthlessly pragmatic and you have to be to start a business because business is about ruthless pragmatism you can't go into business with your airy fairy new age ideas god is not going to save you in business the only person that will save you in business is yourself and you got to be very careful with the finances and with how you design your product how you market your product who you market it to you got to have planning for all of that it has to be realistic it has to it has to work in the real world real strategy go watch my episode called uh old really old one i think it's called strategic thinking it's very good episode oldie but a goodie so so i was ruthlessly pragmatic and if i wasn't there was no way i would be able to make it to where i am today so that was a period of my life where i was ruthlessly pragmatic also when i got into pickup i was ruthlessly pragmatic when it came to pick up and to getting better with women with dating women and i did that for a few years and i did the business for a few years and so i swung my pendulum towards the pragmatism side and then once my business was established and i was earning some decent money earning six figures on a passive income from that and getting some success with pickup and stuff like that then more of my time was freed up because business takes a lot of time um more of my time freed up and then i was able to swing my pendulum towards the opposite direction i started reading more books more philosophy doing that thinking about deep things studying self-help and i swung the pendulum to the other end and i became more metaphysical and then after years of eve you know i started doing very kind of practical self-help at first but then eventually that practical self-help got into really metaphysical types of self-help and led to ultimately spirituality led to psychedelics and then the psychedelic sort of blew me open into the really crazy abstract very philosophical metaphysical spiritual dimensions of life and when i swung my pendulum in that direction then my business suffered because i wasn't being that practical and my results would pick up suffer too because i wasn't being very practical i stopped going out that's right and that's okay the point is that you're gonna be swinging back and forth throughout your life you're gonna have those phases and chapters in your life go check out my episode called life unfolds in chapters and phases um and then you combine the two you combine the two because most people think of philosophers as being very impractical people you want to avoid that trap you want to make sure that your philosophy is not purely academic and then some people complain like oh leo i've watched a lot of your videos and they're getting too philosophical for me and i'm not doing enough practical stuff in my life so i'm gonna drop actualize that organ i'm just gonna go away and i'm just gonna do the practical stuff okay fine you can do that but while you're doing the practical stuff you can still a little bit each day you can sprinkle in a little bit of theory and abstract and philosophical stuff right because like i've talked about in my previous episode about how you know very valuable things take a long time to develop they require development over time in that episode i talked about how you want to plan ahead and invest in things so there are certain things that you can invest a little bit into each day where you're going to regret not having done so so for example like invest 30 to 60 minutes every day reading books high quality books even if you're doing something very pragmatic like you're building a business okay fine by day build your [ __ ] business work for 10 hours on your business by day and then in the evening to relax and i used to do this when i was building my business spend 30 to 60 minutes reading something that has nothing to do with your business something philosophical something metaphysical something spiritual that doesn't mean you're gonna have to go and embody everything you read and embody that enlightenment that you're reading about right then and there no you're gonna be focused on your business for 10 hours a day for the next three four years fine but in those three four years you will also if you keep reading you know spiritual books for 60 minutes a day in those four years can you imagine how much material you're gonna process and how much deeper your foundation is gonna be then once your business is established then you can spend you know you can swing your pendulum and then you can actually go and work really hard on actualizing all that theory that you've been reading about like that see like that a lot of spiritual people struggle with with ruthless pragmatism and there is a sort of an existential trade-off here what you'll notice is that a lot of the greatest yogis and mystics and gurus that a lot of them are not so concerned with pragmatic stuff like if if you think about someone like rama maharshi you know he lived in a cave he didn't give a [ __ ] at all about pragmatic stuff he didn't care about business about money about anything just lived in a cave he was very much on this end of the purely metaphysical um and that that can work in rare cases that can work it worked for him it might work for a few of you but for the majority of you you're not you're not that radical and you're not that conscious so it's not going to work for you so for you you need some some more more middle path there um and i recommend you take on that challenge i remember when i was first starting with philosophy i had this sort of utopian idea that i would just become a pure philosopher and just study philosophy and nothing else in life i wouldn't concern myself with business with marketing with any of that so just pure philosophy and and my dad and my parents they basically sort of tried to disabuse me of that notion by telling me like you got to be practical in life like what are you actually going to be doing after all your philosophy so that that helped me to to also realize and appreciate the importance of the pragmatic um and so my first business really taught me to be ruthlessly pragmatic and that was such a valuable lesson even though it was painful in many respects and i didn't want to do it because my natural inclination is to be more metaphysical than pragmatic but um you know sometimes you gotta go into territory where you don't feel comfortable and you just gotta master it anyways and so even though business is not my forte you know i mastered or got proficient at at least certain aspects of business and marketing that i usually would be philosophically opposed to and that helped to round me out and eventually that got me to where i am now i couldn't be where i am now there couldn't be an actualized org if i wasn't ruthlessly pragmatic back then for a certain period of time and i had to be ruthlessly pragmatic even to start and to launch actualize.org it couldn't have gotten this successful without doing that so you know ultimately what you want to be is you want to be flexible enough to apply the right kind of strategy in the right kind of situation sometimes a life situation requires you to be more philosophical abstract and metaphysical and spiritual to resolve that problem and then other times a life situation actually requires you to be very ruthless and pragmatic and material to resolve a problem and one of the mistakes is when you misapply one or the other for example if you have a if you have a physical ailment like let's say you have a cancer or a broken leg or maybe a like a a viral infection or something see you can try to apply a philosophical solution to that problem or a material solution a material solution would be like going to the doctor and getting a cast for your leg a more metaphysical solution might be to say oh you know i'm just going to suffer it i'm just going to tough it out and meditate my way through it or maybe i'm going to go to some new age spiritual healer who will magically heal my bone or something and in this case the proper solution is probably to go to the doctor to get a cast not to meditate through it or to go to some new age you know healer but then there are other problems you might have where it is appropriate to use the more metaphysical philosophical new agey spiritual approach because it's it's a it's a non-material problem it's hard to fix a non-material problem with a material solution so for example you have a if you have bad self-esteem you're not going to fix that with a trophy wife or with a with having children or by earning a bunch of money or by becoming famous that's not going to solve your low self-esteem problem that's a that's a non-material problem that's going to require a non-material probably spiritual solution if you're struggling to attract women for example there's a very easy material solution to that you know what you do you start going out every night and talking to women and that's precisely what the majority of guys don't want to do they want to have some sort of theoretical solution there is no theoretical solution to the problem of sex go where the women are and then you'll have sex with some of them just by fluke luck that's the solution to that problem now you could say oh leo but isn't there a high level solution where you become so metaphysical so enlightened and so awakened that you don't even want sex anymore what about that yes interestingly enough there is such a solution although it's a very radical solution that's not going to work for most people because see most guys who are too scared and too weak to go out and talk to women at night is that guy going to reach a level of awakening where he has transcended sex no no [ __ ] way and to even plant that idea in his mind is ridiculous now can it be done yes it can be done by one in a million people it will be done but it's not appropriate advice for most guys see so sometimes there's a metaphysical solution to a problem sometimes a physical sometimes there's multiple levels of solution and sometimes you have to sort of step your way up the ladder of solutions where you do you do a little bit of a practical solution physical solution material solution and then that that increases your that makes you a little bit less desperate but it doesn't solve the problem all the way and then you're going to take another leap and swing your pendulum towards the metaphysical spiritual domain and then that will maybe help you to get to another level and even when you get there maybe there will be an even higher level where you swing it back and you go back into the physical and then maybe you have you know you get yourself a physical wife or husband on top of your awakening see so in the end it is all a mind game but it's all a mind game so treat the mind games seriously but also have fun you