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[Music] all right let's talk about the stupidity that is conspiracy theories this is juicy topic very controversial as well so let's crack into it right off the bat have you noticed that people who subscribe to conspiracy theories are some of the dumbest people in society maybe there's a deeper reason for that well of course there is which is what we're going to explore here today people are extremely susceptible to conspiracy theories especially now because there is a confluence of several factors which are compounding upon each other in today's day and age but of course conspiracy theories have a long history that goes back throughout human civilization but especially the problem we face right now is that number one people have almost zero understanding of epistemology or theory of knowledge therefore they fall into all of the common traps within epistemology and epistemology is not taken seriously within our education system it's not taught to anybody basically and so therefore even people who go to college and graduate college they're still basically epistemologically ignorant people and therefore conspiracy theories of course are going to be prone to happen the only way you can really avoid conspiracy theories is by having a solid grasp of how epistemology works which is advanced complicated stuff with many traps and pitfalls and potentials for delusion and self-deception and uh that's that's one of my favorite topics to talk about is the the deceptions of the human mind and epistemology and i've talked about that a lot in the past and uh we'll talk more about it here today so that's one reason a second reason is because of social media social media now is creating these echo chambers of confirmation bias where you're able to lock yourself into a bubble an ideological bubble of like-minded peers and just create this echo chamber where if you're a conservative you can just listen to conservative news if you're a liberal you can just listen to liberal news or whatever else you're into if you're into conspiracy theories you can find entire websites and radio shows and youtube channels and facebook groups that are just going to reinforce all of your suspicions and just feed you conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory and that's actually another common trait of many conspiracy theorists is they don't just buy into one or two generally if they buy into one they're going to buy into a dozen or more and that's because there's many common psychological factors which contribute to the tendency for the mind to buy into conspiracy theories and we're going to be discussing and articulating all those factors here for you today so we're going to take all the mystery out of conspiracy theories here because we're going to look at them at a deeper structural level and the social media platforms right now are still in the early stages they're not well moderated uh there's very little collective responsibility taken by the people who own these social media companies it's mostly just uh whatever gets clicks clickbait type topics whatever earns the most money whatever has the best advertising revenue and a lot of that stuff tends to be conspiracy theories because they're very psychologically enticing and alluring and addictive even so uh simply speaking you can make a lot of money peddling conspiracy theories like people like alex jones have become multi-millionaires doing this sort of stuff number three the third reason why we're so susceptible these days is because we're in late stage capitalism and there are several factors that come with this late stage capitalism which uh make conspiracy theories very uh alluring one is that we have this sort of proliferation and freeing up the old mainstream narratives that used to exist at sprouladamic stage blue if you're not familiar with brother dynamics go check out my deep series on sprout dynamics the old sort of judeo-christian or other sorts of mainstream ways of interpreting the world these have been breaking down over the last 50 years and as a result there's a sort of a democratization of of knowledge and information and even mainstream news sources are now being questioned and there's this proliferation of news and different points of view throughout social media and throughout the internet because of the rise of the internet and so there's a lot more perspectives in a sense this is great it's a democratization of the media space this is great but with it especially when you combine that with late stage capitalism it creates a problem in that uh mostly in late stage capitalism all the players in this field you know because they're treating this news as a business they're treating these the dissemination of information media is treated as a business it's not treated as some higher purpose to make people more conscious or more educated the purpose is simply making money or becoming successful or famous and so that being one of the goals of late stage capitalism you know uh this sort of uh scramble to get the most money the most clicks the most views what what this means is is that our collective education and intelligence as a society and civilization is for sale to the highest bidder and uh so in a certain sense the kind of the morality that used to be there within mainstream religious ways of interpreting reality like within christianity within islam and others this morality as problematic as it was i'm not saying it was perfect but it did serve a function this morality has been breaking down and now it's just all about the money there's no higher purpose to media or to education anymore in many cases of course there's exceptions and then another problem with late stage capitalism is that with lace age capitalism as money is distributed and funneled upwards up the pyramid that society is economically speaking majority of the resources go up to the top one percent of the pyramid everybody else the other 99 are increasingly fighting over scraps with fewer and fewer resources and as a as a result of this they are challenged to meet their survival needs and when that happens these people of course become bitter they become angry they become fearful they're struggling just to pay their bills they're stuck in wage slavery this is very frustrating it's exhausting they're working multiple jobs yet they're earning worse of a living than their parents did back in the 1950s or 60s or 70s and they're not sure how to explain this and really getting into all these complicated systemic problems with the economy and distribution of resources and political issues and governmental issues this is way over most people's heads and their intellects and so instead what they need is they need a simple way to have somebody to blame for this and of course that's uh a lot of what conspiracy theories are about they they serve as a very convenient explanatory mechanism which allows you to make sense of reality in a rather crude way but at least in some way because you got to explain this somehow to yourself see so this is where conspiracy theories become very alluring all right so uh really i'm not interested here in this episode in debating and debunking any one specific conspiracy theory that would be distraction and that's a lot of the problem with conspiracy theories is that they're extremely distracting to the mind it's very easy to go off on a tangent down some rabbit hole and you just get sucked further and further into it and in that process you're losing something you're losing perspective you're losing consciousness you're losing the ability to see the big picture so we're going to focus on the big picture here i want to make some meta remarks about the mental attitude that is conspiracy theories it's a mental attitude that people adopt what matters here in this discussion is not the content of the conspiracy theories but the structure and for this i refer you to my episode called content versus structure where i explain this distinction but basically see every conspiracy theory has a similar structure but different content the conspiracy theory might be about aliens or it might be about assassinations or murder or it might be about war or it might be about some genocide or some racist thing but the structure of all of that is very very similar so we what we want to do is we don't want to get stuck on the content we want to look at the structure this is what i mean by going meta you rise above and you look down from a higher elevation perspective to see what's really going on otherwise we get lost in the trees and we don't see the forest so to speak so the content of conspiracy theories varies wildly but it's largely irrelevant it doesn't really matter whether aliens are plotting to take over the planet or jews are plotting to take over the planet or it's uh uh you know it's the socialists and the marxists who are plotting to take over the planet or maybe they're all combined together it doesn't matter this that's not the important thing the important thing is is how your mind is thinking about reality and why you're getting drawn to these sorts of narratives and ways of explaining reality in the first place it's the structure which is very problematic epistemically and politically and that's what we'll be looking into a conspiracy theory basically is a projection of an ignorant ego mind the more ignorant the ego mind is the more proud and righteous and convinced it feels of its theories and speculations about reality and it gets lost in the labyrinths of its own mind in its own belief systems of course this isn't just exclusive to conspiracy theories this is the general problem of belief systems and paradigms and ideologies i've talked about this in many episodes in the past and so we're building upon that and we're going to be bringing in those old episodes that you've hopefully watched and connecting some of these dots related to conspiracy theories how it all comes together see uh people have a very difficult time distinguishing between their direct experience and their belief systems they tend to conflate those two and then they start to buy into these belief systems more and more and more they get so convinced of it they literally are unable to distinguish anymore between a belief system and reality itself or their direct experience of it and this becomes very problematic because this can lead into all sorts of toxic ideologies uh cult-like behavior religious fanaticism and and of course this is not just limited to religion science is also susceptible to some of this and i'll i'll point to that a little bit towards the end so conspiracy theories are basically designed for people of low intelligence who are intellectually lazy and are not interested in doing serious epistemological investigation into the nature of reality people who are not seriously interested in questioning their own worldview but nevertheless they need some explanations for how reality functions they want to understand uh and the appeal of these conspiracy theories is that they make such people who are actually ignorant feel like they're being very smart because they're simply being contrarian and rebellious and iconoclastic uh when in fact they're not really using their mind they're just subscribing to a new niche form of conformity again i've used this example in the past but it's a great one it's this example of you know in high school you have all the kids who are sort of conforming and then you always have that little group of kids that little clique of goths or punks or whoever who are off doing their own thing and they think to themselves that they're not conforming and then they have this sort of philosophy well i'm anti-conformist but in that philosophy they're all conforming together in the sort of anti-conformist way and so even though on the level of content it might seem like well they're not conformist but on the level of structure they are conformist because they're just conforming to some different content some punk content or some emo or some goth content or whatever it is so let's uh let's ground this discussion by actually articulating specifically what's what some of these conspiracy theories are so we're not just talking about abstractions so i'm going to run down a list of very common conspiracy theories you can find this on wikipedia and you can delve into them deeper but again i want to caution you not to waste your time too much going to this stuff because you could you could spend the rest of your life lost chasing down conspiracy theories you see the problem with that is that it robs you of time and energy that you could be using for other higher consciousness purposes all right so here are some examples of course the flat earthers people who believe the earth is flat and that there's some sort of government conspiracy by nasa and others to to to keep us from knowing that the earth is flat why why would nasa and others want to lie to us all these scientists in the world want to lie to us about the the roundness of the earth uh uh you know i've actually i've spent probably quite a bit of time looking into these flat earthers and what they actually believe i still don't really understand why this conspiracy theory would be of any benefit to anybody like it seems to have no practical uh import or implications but anyways they believe it you can find many videos online on youtube and so forth of these flat earthers arguing about the flat earth in fact i commonly get comments anytime i talk about the earth as being round in one of my episodes just you know off the top of my head i'll just say well the earth is round you know as i'm talking about some other topic and i'll usually always get at least one or two folks down in the comments section telling me how dumb i am for how how establishment i am for for buying into the roundness of the earth it's like leo you were talking about enlightenment you're supposed to be awake and all this but yet you think the earth is round how dumb are you so uh yeah that's funny uh the moon landing being fake that's also a very popular one the jfk assassination and then of course with that comes all sorts of various kinds of conspiracies about who did it and how they covered it up and so forth david ike is very popular uh and this sort of notion that there are these reptilian races that are secretly siphoning energy from the humans and somehow trying to enslave everybody through globalist government domination and blah blah blah blah blah anti-vaxxers i i feel like there's two version of anti-vaxxers they're sort of the left-wing and the right-wing versions the left-wing version is uh sort of opposing vaccines on the grounds that they're not organic and healthy that they contain heavy metals that they might cause autism and yeah there's probably some truth to that um i myself am pretty leery of of getting a vaccine because i'm very cautious about consuming heavy metals i'm very paranoid about that because i've felt that the toxic effects of heavy metals in my own system in my own life it really can rob you of your cognitive abilities and then there are sort of the right-wing versions of anti-vaxxers i don't really i haven't studied them that much but um uh but i i guess they think that vaccines are like some sort of plot by socialists and globalists to to mind control them or something like that of course now with covet 19 that we're going through here um in this year uh there's conspiracy theories about its origins that it was engineered in some chinese lab it was part of some weapons program or something like that uh there's even different theories about did it really come from china or someplace else then layering on top of that there's conspiracy theories about bill gates and the fact that he you know he's he's been a big proponent of vaccinations uh he in fact warned about the possibility of coronavirus in a famous ted talk some some years before it happened and uh and so so people say oh well that means you know he he he wants to put microchips into vaccines and then this is a form of mind control this is the elites trying to control us and bill gates you know he's the symbol of the elites because he's one of the richest people in the world in all of this uh the reality is that um and people will say that oh bill gates has invested you know he stands to gain billions of dollars from from from selling the coronavirus vaccine with the microchip inside of it and that's why he's doing it i always find this so silly because in fact bill gates gives away billions of dollars he's not making billions of dollars he's giving away billions of dollars and he's not profiting off of these vaccines uh that's that's not it's just absurd can you imagine when you have as much money as bill gates he has like 80 billion dollars or something like that maybe more at this point and uh he's pledged to give most of it away he's basically spending the rest of his life giving it away but can you imagine having 80 billion dollars and then being like you know what i need i need a scheme to make even more money it's like no man bill gates has enough money for uh anything he could possibly want he already has purchased right so he he doesn't need a scheme he doesn't need to race uh waste the the last 10 or 20 years of his life coming up with some microchip vaccine scheme in order to earn an extra 20 billion dollars or whatever um because it would do absolutely nothing for him he's already got all the money he wants he's just giving back to the world at this point but you know people people like to blame elites so this is how they do it of course there's the famous pizzagate conspiracy theories now these pedophile ring conspiracy theories especially with the death of jeffrey epstein this just fuels and pours fire on these theories and actually it's been getting worse and worse so i was hoping that they would be just like a fad that passes uh it really got it got started with pizzagate maybe four four years ago or so but it seems with jeffrey epstein it just kind of gets get gets worse and worse and worse and worse and of course now we have q anon which is a very toxic problematic conspiracy theory which says that there's a cabal of socialist globalist satanic blood drinking uh devil worshiping uh pedophiles who want to take over the united states government and the world and that donald trump is the one who's gonna who who's who is the heroically and valiantly defending us against this it's crazy stuff but uh hey it's popular uh then there's of course the old classic conspiracy theory of the jewish elites running the world bankers and so forth this has been popular for for centuries it's got a bit of a resurgence now with the rise of trump and trumpism but it was also popular in nazi germany with hitler and so on uh usually the jews and the communists are in league together to take over the world in some way there's the illuminati the new world order the term globalism globalists is uh is very commonly used uh very thoughtlessly mindlessly used without a thinking about what globalism really means uh george soros as being part of this another conspiracy theory george soros has been the funder of many uh progressive movements when in fact he isn't a very common conspiracy theory that right-wingers fall into of course the 911 inside job conspiracy theory uh i see it seems like it died down in recent years as we get further away from 911 but uh it used to be quite popular you can find documentaries on it and so forth chemtrails another one made popular by alex jones i believe uh false flag terrorist attacks also something that alex jones is notorious for he says that the sandy hook school shootings in america were a false flag operation and then he claims that many others were false flag operations of course he's actually been sued by the sandy hook victims the family members and the parents and so forth and he's had to retract that since but he's very shameless about how he does that any kind of other deep state conspiracy theories are very popular these days part of q anon or other you know unrelated to q anon deep state conspiracy theories you know this idea that that there there is a coup that that the deep state is planning against donald trump the fbi the cia you know they don't like donald trump because he's he's trying to out them for their pedophilia or whatever and for their satanic worship at the fbi and that this is the deep state um there's that uh obama birtherism started by trump and his lackeys and still basically continue to this day and has various other sorts of incarnations now with kamala harris as vice president there's now a birtherism movement on her basically saying that well is she really a u.s citizen and was she really born in america this sort of stuff which is of course groundless climate change denialism calling it a hoax calling climate change just something that scientists invented or globalists and socialists and marxists invented because they want to use it to you know somehow enslave your mind and enslave your children or whatever whatever the motives are cia planting drugs and you know flooding black neighborhoods with drugs and and so forth these sorts of conspiracy theories exist out there mccarthyism the red scare that existed during the cold war the origins of the iraq war often have a lot of conspiratorial thinking around them like how the bush and cheney administration how what what they really wanted was they wanted iraq's oil and that's why they went into iraq they had it all planned out and then and then you could even lump 911 uh conspiracy theories into that as well that you know 911 was just a staged attack it was a false flag attack actually done because they wanted to invade iraq and take their oil and they needed some justification for it and so on uh hillary clinton has a lot of conspiracy theories floating around her how many people she's killed her emails and the scandals involved there uh there's a lot of conspiracy theories by the right wing around the clintons the death of seth rich being a very uh uh prominent one that used to be popular uh another theory is the government is hiding ufo technology and in fact there's a whole category called technology suppression conspiracy theories where there's a various kinds of theories about how there are these advanced technologies anti-gravity technologies fusion technologies free energy technologies that are are all well known by governments and giant corporations and elites and globalists but they're hiding it because they want to make money from oil oil is just so profitable that they're hiding this anti-gravity technology from us white genocide is a conspiracy theory uh it's sort of a backlash reaction against against the sort of progressive accusations of racism um and segregation and other sorts of racist policies that have been promoted in america for the last hundred years and so white genocide is this idea that the actually now you know because the whites were you know racists and segregationists to the to the blacks and to the browns for for all this time now the blacks and the browns they want to get together with the socialists and they want to do a genocide of the white people they want to take it over that's why we got immigrants coming over the border pouring through we got hordes coming through and we've got we've got these caravans of immigrants that's because you know george soros is funding all this because he wants to create this white genocide um cultural marxism this term popularized recently by jordan peterson and his ilk and parts of the right wing um this actually even though jordan peterson talks about cultural marxism he never mentions to you that cultural marxism literally is a conspiracy theory that dates back to like the 1940s or 50s something like that i don't remember all the details off my head you can actually go to wikipedia and search type in cultural marxism you'll get a whole page describing the conspiracy theory of cultural marxism it's actually sort of a um this anti-semitic um conspiracy theory that was basically [ __ ] concocted during uh the cold war during the red scare and so forth uh which tried to comb combine like the scary elements of of of racism and anti-semiticism with uh anti-communist and anti-marxist uh sort of pro-capitalist philosophies sort of combine them together into this idea of cultural marxism this idea that they're they're trying to sneak socialism and marxism in through our universities and institutions that this is just like some sort of plot to do this another common conspiracy theory is the sort of whole second amendment they want to take your guns away obama wants to take your guns every liberal wants to take your guns and they're just looking for some excuse and that in fact the sandy hook shooting that was just a false flag operation because they needed that they need all these school shootings in order to take your guns away as justification because otherwise the people won't stand for it and this is all just the government's way of trying to defang the people so that we couldn't stand up against a tyrannical government who wants to you know take us over big brother wants to take away your guns this one's very popular amongst uh fanatics it's part of the whole gun culture they need some way to justify having guns and and why you should have a whole arsenal in your basement free masonry is another common conspiracy theory fluoridation of water water and the fluoride other chemicals that the government puts into your fluoride in order to i don't know what make you dumber make you more sheep-like make you subservient to big brother now of course there is fluoride in the water don't get me wrong government does put florida in your water but the question is why they do it did they do it because they want to control your mind or they do it simply because it it actually there's some evidence that it's helpful for for fighting tooth decay you know dentists use fluoride toothpaste has fluoride in it for those reasons uh now of course i'm not saying it's healthy i'm not saying it's good personally i use fluoride free toothpaste and i run my water through filters to remove all the fluoride and other stuff from it and if i go to the dentist i'm and he wants to put fluoride in my mouth i'll tell him no because i understand the toxic potentials of these chemicals and i'd rather use more organic natural stuff i think it's healthier you don't want fluoride in your brain and so forth but uh do i think the government is doing it on purpose because it wants to hurt people no i think it's just the government doesn't have some sort of higher consciousness conception of you know eating organic foods and eating healthy foods other conspiracy theories include recently we have we've had these fires on the west coast in california and in oregon and right wingers have been spreading these conspiracy theories that antifa has been setting these fires actually joe rogan recently got into trouble because he was spreading some of these conspiracy theories he had to actually issue a retraction and an apology it was a good heartfelt apology where he apologized for spreading the idea that antifa was causing these oregon fires this is not true but there's no factual evidence at least to back this up but anyways they're popular and uh you know if we want to go back to the old school witch trials these were also basically conspiracy theories you could think of them that way basically the whole anti-witch craze was concocted it's very actually fascinating to read the history of these witch trials and where it actually came from i don't just mean the sale of mushroom i mean the persecution of witches where did that come from it actually stems back centuries prior to the salem witch trials it goes back to european catholicism and uh you know the catholics were very territorial they didn't want anybody infringing on their monopoly on god and on religion so when pagans and witches were practicing witchcraft and other pagan rituals like taking psychedelics and doing astral projection and and consuming various kinds of herbs and so forth you know witchcraft is real it's a real practice um it's just not what it's you know portrayed by the catholic church but the catholic church started to demonize these witches there was an entire council held with the mission to demonize these witches and so they did and they went about prosecuting persecuting them and prosecuting them putting them on trials executing them condemning them and demonizing them there was a whole campaign to demonize witchcraft which is why witchcraft is still demonized and thought of negatively by most people today and in fact today if you talk about witchcraft as being a real thing many people will think you're crazy it's like leo everyone knows witchcraft is fake no that's just that's just the nonsense this catholic church cocked up uh concocted uh centuries ago witchcraft is real it's just it's not what it's been portrayed to be it's different than what you think it is so some of these conspiracy theories are left-wing theories but more of them are right-wing and that is important to notice if you're thinking well shouldn't the conspiracy theories be equally spread and distributed between left and right wing between liberals progressives and conservatives no not at all because the kind of mind that a conspiracy theory appeals to is at a certain level of cognitive moral and spiritual development for this to really appreciate what i'm saying here you need to go watch some of my series on spiral dynamics and on the nine stages of ego development these are developmental psychological models that have been developed by high quality scientists and psychologists researchers who've studied this stuff what it shows us is that the human ego mind goes through these different developmental stages and these are stages of higher development and more consciousness the more conscious the ego mind gets the less ego one has the more humane the more sophisticated ones understanding of the world the less animal-like your understanding of the world the more animal-like your mind is the more prone you will be to conspiracy theories the more intelligent you are the more wisdom you have the more consciousness you have the more spiritual you are the more moral you are uh the less you will be prone to these conspiracy theories and as i've said in my conscious politics series and other episodes where i talk about politics the left and the right wing are not just two sides of the same coin they're asymmetrical they're asymmetrical in their cognitive moral and spiritual development right-wingers and conservatives don't like to hear this but the fact is that overall and there's of course exceptions overall generally speaking very generally speaking in the big picture sense liberals and conservatives and progressives are more conscious and more cognitively and morally developed and more mature than conservatives and right-wingers and the more conservative you are the more right-wing you are the more fanatical you are about your right-wing conservative beliefs the lower your cognitive and moral and spiritual development and the more prone you are to conspiracy theories now that doesn't mean that liberals are perfect and that progressives are immune from all problems they're not and they can also fall into some conspiracy theories all right so don't misunderstand what i'm saying here i'm trying to be objective the problem in trying to explain this to a conservative or to a right-winger mindset is that if you have that kind of belief system you're so stuck in it that if you hear what i'm saying here it's gonna feel like a personal attack upon your belief systems and going to feel like leo you're just being some left-wing biased shill here you're just hiding your own biases i'm not hiding my own biases yes i have a left-wing bias in the sense that i value consciousness selflessness and truth and it's not the case that those things are equally divided between the left and the right the right values consciousness selflessness and truth less so than the left again there are many exceptions and that does not mean that the left is perfect but this is what it is uh now you might also be thinking here but leo aren't you just being a shill here for the establishment you've mentioned all these conspiracy theories but hey i thought some of these are true are you just saying we're supposed to accept the mainstream narrative of course not but here is where you have to start to make subtle distinctions of course there is corruption in the government and in the police force there is corruption in the military there's corruption within business of course the fbi the cia the nsa and the military do secret things of course there is bias and propaganda in the media this idea by noam chomsky called manufacturing consent is is a very real systemic problem within our media of course capitalism distorts the flow of information because you know money corrupts education and many other systems of course even science and history cannot be taken for granted and even they contain various kinds of delusions deceptions and corruptions so corruption is a very real problem i have a whole episode called how corruption works go check that out if you really want a deep understanding of corruption corruption is a serious problem but conspiracy theories are not a valid way to think about and understand how corruption works in fact a conspiracy theory is just adding corruption on top of corruption conspiracy theories are themselves a corruption of the mind it's a corrupt way of thinking about the corruption that you see out there corruption is a very sneaky counter-intuitive and a deeply threatening topic to talk about because if you really want to understand what corruption is ultimately what it's going to lead you to if you think about it deeply is you will realize that the corruption is not just found out in the world the corruption found in the out in the world is actually a reflection of your own inner personal corruption and this is precisely what many conspiracy theories are preventing you from realizing because they externalize the corruption and paint it onto some evil cabal of globalists out there who are trying to mind control you or whatever so by no means am i some establishment chill i'm very in a certain sense radical and progressive with my ideas i have some very visionary ideas for what i think humanity should be doing how government should be restructured i'm not at all happy with the current systemic problems and corruptions of of our government they certainly exist and with our economic system and with our policing system and with our culture in large and with our education system many of these systems are deeply deeply corrupt but we are not going to fix that by engaging in this david ike style conspiratorial thinking about reptilians and jews and cultural marxists and globalists trying to you know mind control us that's not what is really going on there all right so there's different ways of of criticizing and thinking about the problems that come with mainstream media and with the establishment in fact and i i've i've mentioned this in in other political episodes of mine you have to make a distinction between criticizing a thing or a person from above or from below see this is very very important people confuse this all too often and especially conspiracy theorists a lot of times there's a critique to be leveled at for example the government but you can critique the government from below or from above so a critique of of the government from below would be something like a libertarian critique of the government something along the lines of like well the government is illegitimate and it's just you know it's a monopoly of force and it is just uh it's taxing us in tax everyone knows taxation is just theft and so therefore we need to dis dismantle and reduce the size of the government because the government is is is stealing my taxes from me my right earned taxes and so forth uh there's that kind of critique of the government this is a critique from below someone who doesn't really understand why government is there what taxes are really for how monopoly of force works if you want more uh info on that go check out my episode called libertarianism is nonsense where i deconstruct libertarianism uh and but then a critique of government from above would be something like um a critique along the lines of that for example our government is still not fully democratic we have the electoral college for example in america here we have gerrymandering we have other kinds of arcane uh systemic processes that are holdovers from you know centuries ago during the founding of the country which have become antiquated now and need to be updated because there's still a lot of people minorities and so forth in this country who are not being properly represented in the senate in the house of representatives in the presidency on the supreme court and in local governments and elsewhere for example puerto rico doesn't have representation in the senate because it's not officially a u.s state even though it has to abide by u.s law in many cases which is determined by the senate in many cases and uh also washington d.c doesn't have representation in washington d.c kind of an ironic strange loop how that works um but so there's a case to be made for example for making washington dc a state or even making like a territory like guam a state or let them become independent if they want to right so this would be a sort of a critique of our current system from above it's from above because what we're actually recognizing here is that there's there's certain blind spots and unconscious areas selfish ways unjust ways in which we're treating people with our current system see um so yeah it's fine to be anti-established but make sure you're being anti-establishment from above and not from below i notice a lot of youtube channels and youtubers and other political commentators and pundits and so forth who are critical of the establishment but from below and not from above it's sort of a a stupid critique rather than a highly conscious systemic critique now you might be wondering but leo what about all the conspiracy theories that came true aren't you ignoring those very conveniently here what about watergate iran contra the iraq war the gulf of tonkin the cia involvement in cuba and staging coups in south america how about the caa involvement in iran and recently in um what is it venezuela uh nsa spying programs how about the project mk ultra the cia mind control program which is documented to have some legitimacy to it how about co intel pro where the us government went after communists and socialists and various kinds of radicals and hippies and blacks and and others other minorities and so forth gays and whatever else um because you know the government had a sort of conservative right wing bent to it and they perceive those as all being um a threat to established power uh famously nixon nixon famously basically started the drug war specifically in order to uh persecute his political opponents which he thought of as the blacks the hippies the gays the psychedelic users the the weed smokers and um that's why the drugstore the drug war was basically started you can actually find documented quotes i actually have i have uh posted these quotes on my blog in the past you can go look for those if you want so there's you know so it is true that sometimes people do shady or evil [ __ ] that's true sometimes the government does abuse its power and uh behaves in selfish ways but this is not the same thing as a conspiracy theory you need to distinguish between a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory these are different things and we'll get into in a minute here what that distinction really is you see um many times when you argue with conspiracy theorists they will cite some of these legitimate conspiracies that happened as evidence for the fact that you know some crazy other conspiracy theory that they believe in like reptilians or globalists or you know jews or whatever taking over the world that that that could also be true you know if the gulf of tonkin incident was true if nsa spying was true if the cia staged some sort of coup in south america if the cia did some co-intel pro thing or whatever uh and if we started the iraq war for some suspicious reasons you know there were no weapons of mass destruction that was a lie uh and and it seems like you know dick cheney knew that it was a lie or whatever um if that is true then surely some of these other ones must be true as well and that's exactly c that's exactly how sneaky the mind gets when it starts to deceive itself so really of course conspiracy theories are just a breed of self-deception i have a whole series three-part series on self-deception go check it out self-deceptions part one and two and three which explain a lot of this and we'll dovetail nicely with this material here but what you have to understand about the nature of falsehood and deception is that it's never unalloyed unabashed pure 100 falsehood the way the devil deceives you is by sprinkling falsehood into kernels of truth the best falsehoods they conflate falsehood with truth such that the two are alloyed together and very difficult to disentangle such that it becomes very convincing you see and when a naive mind that isn't very educated and isn't very sophisticated gets to hear the entire alloy here together where like for example you create some sort of documentary which will alloy together little bits and you know sprinkles of truth with a whole pile of [ __ ] and mixes them together so perfectly that your mind just completely buys into it and it can't distinguish the the truth from the falsehood this is how a conspiracy theory is is truly spread it's not just pure lies see naive people think that well if it's a lie it's just it must all be a lie no no no if it was all a lie obviously you would reject it that's the easy case the difficult case that you have to really contemplate and take seriously is that the things that you're being fed are not pure falsehoods but they aren't truth either they're somewhere in the middle they're perverted twisted partial versions of the truth that's what a conspiracy theory really is so if we take a look at something like pizzagate if i say pizzagate is a conspiracy theory and it's [ __ ] people will say who are into the theory they will say ah leo but but what about those emails that i read and what about the fact that you know there there really was this pizza parlor or whatever in washington dc and it really had some sort of symbols on its menu and it really did connect with this and with that and with this and and it's all connected together and here's how it is like you're ignoring all that evidence yeah well all of those individual pieces might have some truth to them i'm not denying that there might have been a pizza parlor i'm not denying there might have been some email about something somewhere you know in the podesta emails and the clinton emails i'm not denying that there might have been some symbol on some menu somewhere but that doesn't mean that when you connect all those things together it means what you think it means what your conspiracy theory alleges happened in that pizza parlor you see actually when you go into that pizza parlor you discover there's not a basement in there where children are supposedly held to be raped there's no basement at all right but see the way the mind works is that it cherry-picks information and it combines little bits of truth with with overly exaggerated narratives and then it comes up with this story which is very very difficult to debunk once it's been lodged into somebody's mind see because once it's in your mind it's stuck in there and then if you're a low consciousness person you don't want to really question your own mind very much and that's exactly the appeal of these conspiracy theories is that they externalize your attention such that your attention is riveted outwardly rather than turning inwardly and one of the best ways to do that is with very sensationalist and morally stimulating bits within the theory so this is why pedophilia is so popular as a conspiracy theory because see basically it's a form of demonization so what is the what is the most evil thing you can think of in the world well many people would say it's the abuse of children the sexual abuse of children right and yeah it's a very problematic thing when it happens and i'm not denying it happens of course it happens and see one of the things conspiracy theorists will say to me is something like oh leo but you're denying pedophilia no i'm not of course pedophilia happens nobody is denying that uh the problem though is the kind of narratives that you spin about pedophilia and who you call a pedophile without any kind of serious evidence you see so the appeal of the appeal of pedophilia is is especially strong with the right wing because what you can do is you can you can you can reject somebody else's world view simply by calling them a pedophile and then what that does is that that removes you of the responsibility of actually for example going and reading some karl marx or trying to actually have a conversation with a socialist to understand what the socialists ideas are are about how to restructure the economy or to maybe consider the possibility that hillary clinton is not this evil person that you think she is i mean maybe she's not the greatest person in the world but you know is she a pedophile is she a pedophile enabler i doubt it um you see so but but if you really hate hillary clinton and you need some reason to hate her or you really hate socialism and you don't want to study it or you really hate marxism or you really you know hate some person or some group of people the easiest way to smear them and to remove responsibility from trying to understand their point of view is to call them pedophiles to spin up some sort of narrative for how they're enabling pedophilia because when you do that there's an immediate gut level reaction of like oh my god that person is is so horrible that i can't even listen to them the only thing they deserve is imprisonment or death or something like this see now again that doesn't mean there aren't pedophiles of course there are but uh one of the one of the most toxic and pernicious conspiracy theories that is very popular these days is this idea that elites are somehow extra pedophiles it's like all the elites are the pedophiles and to me this is this is a very very silly idea because there's no reason why elites or millionaires or billionaires would be pedophiles any more than poor people would be so my question to you if you're buying into these pedophile conspiracy theories is why aren't you going after the poor pedophiles why aren't you going after the middle class pedophiles because after all how many millionaires and billions are billionaires are there in the world less than one percent by definition the elites are like less than one percent so by definition pedophilia is much more common in the other 99 so really if we want to get serious here if i'm going to use the same kind of logic that you've been using against the elites here with pedophiles let's say are you in are you in the lower class are you in the middle class so it's very obvious if you think about it just for a moment for a minute it's very obvious that there are way more pedophiles in the middle class than that there are in the upper class and there's probably even more pedophiles within the poorest class than there is in the middle class simply because there's more poor people than middle class people and there's more middle class people than there is um uh these one percent elite millionaires and billionaires now the harm done to children is the same it doesn't matter to a child if he or she is molested by a poor person or a middle-class person or a billionaire in fact if you wanted to choose who to get molested by you'd probably want to get molested by by a billionaire because at least he'll do it on a yacht somewhere on some fancy island rather than you know in the more ordinary conventional way in which most children get molested which is just like in some dirty motel room or even in just some you know poor house or some project or whatever in some ghetto see but it's not as appealing you see because if you're in the lower class or the middle class you've got a gripe against late stage capitalist elites you've got to gripe against late stage capitalism but you don't understand that in many cases so you need some way to demonize them and to blame it on them so rather than doing a deep systemic analysis of the problems of capitalism instead what you do is you say ah it's those it's those billionaires who are actually raping children they're the real problem if only we get rid of them then the world would be a better place see but actually it's your class it's the class that's criticizing the elites that has more pedophiles in it but you don't care about that because that doesn't serve your interest it doesn't serve your ego's agenda you also need to distinguish between conspiracy theories versus investigative journalism so many of these so-called true conspiracy theories uh you know the iraq war and watergate and nsa spying tapping and so forth a lot of these came out through high quality investigative journalism this is different than conspiracy theories there is legitimate stuff to be investigated and investigative journalism is a serious endeavor which is underfunded and we need more funding for investigative journalism which is why you should support you know high quality newspapers and investigative journalists we need more of that but investigative journalism is difficult it's rigorous you have to be careful you can't just publish whatever scandalous accusations you want and speculations about people you can't just publish random theories about people being pedophiles you need to bring the evidence you need to be careful because if you publish something that's false you're going to get sued and you're going to have you know um various severe penalties upon you but conspiracy theories you know they're not held back and conspiracy theorists are not held back by any kind of journalistic standards journalism requires serious standards of integrity which conspiracy theories utterly lack people like alex jones also you should distinguish between conspiracy theories and systems thinking so a conspiracy theory is usually trying to blame some group of elites at the top it's trying to paint people as evil and us as the good guys the ones who are holding the conspiracy whereas systems thinking go check out my episode called intro to systems thinking sees how complex parts within a larger system like an economy or within government or within culture are interconnected and play play into each other various kinds of feedback mechanisms exist where parts of the system are not blamed but it's all seen holistically in a sense what we're talking about here is sort of a systems thinking about the mind we're seeing how the mind is working with these conspiracy theories we're seeing the mind as a system we're seeing these conspiracy theories of sort of like software that gets lodged into this into into into the mind as a system and then how it gets reinforced by various social systems like in the media or by our economic system and and so forth and how it serves the larger ultimate system of the ego and it's survival you see so this is very different systems thinking is very rigorous high quality thinking conspiracy thinking is just speculation various kinds of beliefs and demonizations of of other people so let me now give you uh a sort of a more rigorous and fleshed out definition of what a conspiracy theory is and here i'll be quoting from wikipedia i have several quotes for you quote a conspiracy theory is not simply a conspiracy conspiracies are actual covert plots planned and or carried out by two or more persons a conspiracy theory on the other hand is an intellectual construct a template imposed upon the world to give the appearance of order to events positing that some small hidden group has manipulated events a conspiracy theory can be local or international focused on single events or covering multiple incidents and entire countries regions and periods of history conspiracy theorists see themselves as having privileged access to special knowledge or a special mode of thought that separates them from the masses who believe the official account end quote see that's a really really good core definition of what we're dealing with here we're distinguishing conspiracies from conspiracy thinking and conspiracy theorists and we'll be talking more about these elements as we go i want to give you some more quotes quote according to frank mitz conspiracism denotes belief in the primacy of conspiracies in the unfolding of history conspiracism serves the needs of diverse political and social groups in america and elsewhere it identifies elites blames there for economic and social catastrophes and assumes that things will be better once popular action can remove them from positions of power as such conspiracy theories do not typify any particular epoch or ideology end quote that's from frank mitz and then we have another quote here roger cohen has suggested that the popularity of conspiracy theories in the arab world is the ultimate refuge of the powerless al-munin saeed has noted the danger of such theories for they keep us not only from the truth but also from confronting our faults and problems and then we have another quote here quote conspiracism is a particular narrative form of scapegoating that frames demonized enemies as part of a vast insidious plot against the common good while it valorizes the scapegoater as a hero for sounding the alarm end quote that's by burlet and lions so this point about scapegoating and feeling like a hero is a is one of the hooks of conspiracy theories that's how they get you especially with the sort of pedophile stuff the reason these pedophile conspiracy theories are so popular is because it's an instant way to feel like a hero you see if i'm just an ordinary guy going about my ordinary life i have no sense of purpose no sense of meaning i'm going to my lame starbucks nine to five job i'm grinding it out there then i'm coming home i got nothing really to do with my life when i hear all of a sudden that these rich billionaire elites are raping and molesting children all over the place i get outraged by it of course and then i feel like i'm a hero because now i've got a crusade i'm crusading against these pedophiles and i go online i go on some forum and i gather other people who are interested in this topic and we together we form a coalition we are like the we are going to be the ones who stand up against these evil pedophiles we're doing something good for the world all of a sudden my life has a sense of meaning and purpose i feel good about myself and i don't really have to take responsibility and of course i'm really doing nothing to prevent pedophilia i mean that's that's the ultimate absurdity of these of these pedophile conspiracy theories it does nothing to prevent pedophilia in fact if anything it might it might make the problem worse because by blaming and accusing people who aren't really pedophiles of being pedophiles this waters down the accusation and when this gets thrown around too much it's the same problem as you know the boy who cried wolf you want to be careful that when you call someone a pedophile you have really solid evidence that they're a pedophile and usually the only way you can do that is through serious investigative work via the fbi via law enforcement using courts using juries and because these are such serious accusations with serious criminal penalties they must go through some sort of highly accountable process like a court system because if you're just going to use vigilante justice against pedophiles it's going to turn literally into witch trials and that's literally what has happened today in this era this sort of jeffrey epstein era is that people like alex jones have turned pedophilia into the 21st century wish trials i mean that that's that's the best way to put it who do you not like whoever you don't like whoever you suspect whoever doesn't fit into your worldview just call them a pedophile and then tar and feather him and try to get him de-platformed and try to um you know make his name so associated with pedophilia that he can't even show his face on tv anymore because of how much people hate him and all the death threats he gets and all this that's i mean it's it's a modern day witch trials the only thing that's missing is the burning people at the stake now again that doesn't mean there aren't real pedophiles out there there are but the proper way to deal with that is through classic law enforcement and if you're really concerned about catching pedophiles and preventing that then i suggest you become civilly active and you don't go out there and just demonize people but that you actually start to research the problem of pedophilia why does it exist why are people pedophiles can they be reformed how do you change them and increase funding for law enforcement pay more taxes you see the irony is that uh right wingers are the ones who who love to call people pedophiles the most but then when it comes to actually properly funding the government with taxes they want to cut taxes they don't want to fund all these government agencies which are responsible for looking after child abuse for example one of the funniest things about this q anon conspiracy theory is that they like to say well trump is the one who is saving us from the pedophiles oh yeah well then how come the trump administration has actually cut severely cut funding for government agencies that are responsible for looking after child sex trafficking how come the trump administration does not support international organizations which are interested and devoted to researching and preventing problems with child sex trafficking the trump administration has no interest in this they don't they have no interest in in serious policy solutions to any of these problems they're just using this to rile people up you see and that's that's a lot of what the right wing is engaged in with with this particular toxic form of conspiracy theory i have another quote for you here last one from wikipedia quote a conspiracy theory is an explanation for an event or a situation that involves a conspiracy by sinister and powerful groups often political and motivation when other explanations are more probable end quote so that's one of the keys here is that a proper conspiracy theory usually contains this element of sinisterness and evil there's some evil group of people planning to do something evil and what this does is this creates a separation between us versus them we are the good guys we are the guys trying to uncover the conspiracy theory and they over there are the evil guys who have plotted this conspiracy against us it sets up this dynamic it's implicit in conspiracy theories the reality though is that when your intellect becomes sophisticated when your consciousness grows what you realize is that nobody is in control of reality and nobody is in control of society society is a headless system with no single individual or group of individuals in control of anything there is no way in which an individual can control the government there is no way in which a couple of corporations can control the world or even american politics these systems are way too complex and way too distributed and there's so many countervailing forces that really every element every actor in this system that we might call the government or we might call our society or human civilization as a whole every there's there are many actors there are many agents with different survival agendas of course these survival agendas cause people to behave in selfish ways sometimes this selfishness gets expressed in very evil seeming ways uh in criminal ways and so forth and of course we should go after and prosecute those criminals and we have a whole system devoted to that of course it's been there for thousands of years but uh but nobody is inc is in control of these systems there's not one single judge or president or ceo or billionaire or millionaire or a group of jews or a group of reptilians or a group of anybody that controls this and the reason that is is because the majority of these agents are deeply unconscious they don't know what they're doing they're behaving on pure survival instincts even the millionaires and billionaires even the bankers even the elites even the presidents they're not conscious they don't really know what they're doing now can they come up with a plot here and there to do something nefarious of course they can sure the cia could come up with some plot to depose some dictator or whoever somewhere um yeah they could do that um the military could have various kinds of you know plots that they run but but this but the but the larger idea that there's some group of of elites in control of anything is laughable nobody is in control of anything that's the that's the miracle of existence of human civilization it's a completely out of control system you couldn't control it if you wanted to there's no evil bond villain that is that it's gonna dominate the world it's impossible it's it's literally impossible because no one human can do it and no small group of people could do it because every group of people you see if there was some secret cabal of reptilians and jews and globalists and communists and socialists all working together to dominate the world those people themselves would not be able to get along all of the problems that we face in in the macro scale within society at large where we can't get along with each other because we're all different actors with different survival agendas and we have different biases and different perspectives on the world such that it's impossible for us all to agree on almost anything well likewise if you had a cabal of of reptilians and so forth they would all be fighting with each other as well this idea that that they're just these it's like this evil mastermind group where they perfectly know what they're doing and and they're all in agreement about what the what the plan is it's it's just silly because if you have that group you're gonna have some other group that wants to do something else you're gonna have more and more groups you're gonna have hundreds of groups all these groups will have different agendas and want different things some groups will want money some groups will want to have sex with children some groups will want to dominate the world some group will want you know freedom and love and peace and happiness and all these groups will fight with each other and that's what society is that's not a conspiracy that's that's society that's civilization that's human history it's been that way since the very beginning for thousands of years no one's in control what we call evil does not come from truly conscious malicious intent it comes from unconsciousness selfishness and ignorance not some evil power for overlords the reason we're focusing on this topic of evil so much here is because i think one of the core functions of conspiracy theories is that they help a naive human mind understand why evil exists this is a deep and powerful question but most people most human minds don't think about evil deeply they don't want to think about evil deeply they want some sort of easy answer to the problem of evil and the way they answer that is oh it's the culture of marxists it's the jews it's the reptilians it's the the globalists or something like that when in fact the true problem of evil is that evil is within evil is a projection of your own mind for more on that go check out my episode called uh what is the devil where i explain to you how evil really works but most people don't want to admit that they're the devil which is why conspiracy theories are so useful so there's no serious risk that you should be worried about that the world will be dominated by some small secret cabal of anybody it's just not going to happen that's not how our system works so there's a general principle that i want to explain to you of the mind and this is the principle that the mind hates confusion and not knowing the ego mind wants to know the ego mind needs to make sense of its environment this is fundamental you've been doing this since you've been born you do it so effectively so seamlessly so smoothly that most of us don't even understand that we're doing it it'll take you many years to understand that your mind is spinning narratives to make sense of reality so when you're not conscious of this you go about the process willy-nilly flying by the seat of your pants and you fall into very many traps reality is so complex that most minds cannot handle the complexity of reality so instead what the mind does is the mind fabricates comfortable stories gross oversimplifications and exaggerations and perverted distortions of reality and it confuses these perverted maps and distortions for reality itself most minds are unable to explain why evil and selfishness exists in the world most minds are desperately struggling for meaning and are deathly afraid of meaninglessness of nihilism and most minds lack any kind of introspection or taking of responsibility for one's own meaning making process or one's worldview this worldview is just absorbed by osmosis from the culture you happen to grow up in and so given all of that it becomes much easier for the mind to simply concoct a conspiracy theory than to deeply question reality or its own worldview see i could admit that i don't know anything i could admit that i'm ignorant i could admit that i might be tricking myself with my own mind but that would mean i would have to spend years and decades reading books and contemplating racking my own mind introspecting inwards questioning myself doubting myself doubting my culture doubting all of the things that were taught to me in school by my by my religion my teachers by my pastors by my family by my friends i could question all that and go through that whole decade-long process but that would involve a lot of emotional labor it would be very difficult it would be very time consuming it would cause me a lot of uncertainty and inner turmoil as i reflect inwards and i discover difficult things and delusions within my own mind and i discover just how little i understand reality i could do that or i could take the easy route what's the easy route hey it's the globalists they're pedophiles they're responsible for the reason that i am stuck in this dead end job the reason i'm a wage slave and the reason that um you know i pay too much in taxes and the reason that government is so [ __ ] up wow look how simple that is i can quickly summarize that in a few minutes i can provide all sorts of evidence to to confirm that it's true if i'm not too picky about about things uh and it's it's very emotional i can get pissed off about it i can create a crusade around it like okay yeah now let's let's rally around this and let's go get those globalists and pedophiles and so forth see and i don't have to enter do any serious inner work there's no emotional labor there's no difficulty of taking responsibility i don't have to look inside to see that i'm the devil that i create evil that i myself have various kinds of shadow elements and dark sides to me and that i also have sexual perversions as many people do um and sexual repressions and things like this and i've done bad stuff in my life as well see taking responsibility for that is very challenging that takes a mature adult mind to do that that takes seriousness that takes a commitment to truth self-honesty and there's no immediate payoff for it you're not going to earn a lot of money doing that you're not gonna become famous doing that people are not gonna you know praise you for doing that you're not even gonna get much of a sense of meaning from doing that whereas if you go with this pedophile conspiracy theory bam instant sense of meaning instant purpose the world seems fully explained there's no more questions i don't have to admit that i don't know anything anymore now i know everything there's no more confusion perfect that's what the mind wanted the mind hates confusion the mind hates not knowing and so there you are it's very easy and convenient for the ego mind to trace all the evil in the world back to one source which is not itself and of course as you should expect there's only one source of evil in the world and that is yourself that's the one thing your mind is avoiding that's what all conspiracy theories are basically avoiding is the realization that the only source of evil in the world is your own self that's what you're in denial about fundamentally and that's why you come up with all these distractions and you blame all these other people out there because otherwise you'd have to get to work on all the evil that's within all the selfishness that's within all the ignorance that's within conspiracy theories also allow you to feel superior morally superior to all those other evil brainwashed people out there who are part of the conspiracy or believing in the official narrative you see once you get a hold of something like oh yeah i understand how the pedophiles are taking over the world once you get that sort of belief system in your mind you start to feel special you start to feel morally right you're like oh yeah i'm so good but that's exactly how the devil tricks you when you start to feel like you're good and that others are evil that's exactly what then will get you to not reflect on your own actions and it's the lack of reflection on your own selfish actions which literally is the cause of all the evil in the world again i explain that in a lot more detail in my episode about what is the devil spoiler alert you're the devil not some pedophile not jeffrey epstein not whoever not even donald trump you're the devil the only problem in the world is you and that's exactly the last thing that you want to hear so you're very busy denying it you've invented very sophisticated highly elaborate and intelligent mechanisms for denying it but you're not conscious of these mechanisms so these conspiracy theories become a natural outlet for an ignorant and closed mind so here's my fundamental problem with conspiracy theories i've identified six core problems problem number one they promote a fundamentally wrong view of reality and consciousness this view of duality that there is us versus them that there's a separation between my enemies and me the good guys and the bad guys and of course i'm the good guy everyone else is the bad guy between the criminals and the law-abiding people between the elites and the non-elites between the billionaires and the ordinary folk like me this is fundamentally delusional reality the ultimate truth is that reality is one reality is non-dual everything is interconnected there's no separation between anything any evil i see out in the world is really a projection of my own mind and everything i see in the world is just literally myself now this is a deep point that i can't really fully go into here to really understand what that means you're gonna have to go see my episodes about non-duality and awakening and other advanced spiritual concepts that explain this oneness but uh but yeah but this idea of separation that there are people out there that need to be punished or harmed uh who are doing bad things this whole notion of good versus bad good versus evil all of this is nonsense all of this is a fundamentally wrong view of reality and it needs to be transcended and conspiracy theories prevent this from happening because they reinforce the duality and the separation so that's a that's a very deep problem with conspiracy theories problem number two is that they lead to a general outlook of suspicion judgment and blaming of others this is a very toxic attitude to take towards life if there are problems in the world take responsibility for those problems and try to improve the world rather than sitting on the internet judging blaming criticizing and doing this sort of stuff you're not actually helping the world in this way you would be much more helpful to actually go commit yourself to doing some sort of passionate thing some sort of artistic pursuit or some sort of business that you would actually provide massive value to the world through following on your life purpose rather than just doubling down on your suspicions and building resentment that's what these conspiracy theories do problem number three conspiratorial thinking doesn't actually lead to a root solution to any of these problems nothing is solved if we really want to improve society and that's i propose what all of us really deeply want is to improve society what we need is to actually tackle the challenging root problems that haven't yet been solved they haven't been solved because they're difficult they're complex they're counter-intuitive and they require innovative creative solutions that we haven't thought of yet this requires serious intellectual effort to find solutions to these problems we need to do science we need to do research we need to read we need to study we need to test different things we need to split test different solutions and find which ones work better this is like a scientific methodical endeavor see we need real policy solutions not just blaming people all right your conspiracy theories solve nothing they solve nothing and they in fact just waste time and energy and that's the next problem is so what so what if one of these conspiracy theories is true what are you gonna do about it can you see the trick here the trick is that it's a distraction from your own inner work it's a distraction from self-actualizing it's a waste of time so what if the moon landing is fake so what if the earth is flat even what are you going to do about it how are you going to live your life what's the purpose of your life you got to work on yourself you got to improve yourself regardless of whether the earth is flat or around or whatever the [ __ ] it is see but most people are interested in working on themselves so of course when you're not interested in working on yourself what are you going to do with your time you're going to sit on youtube and just go down some conspiratorial rabbit hole this will make you feel excited titillated entertained it's not going to improve your life it's not going to improve humanity or the world it's not going to solve any of the problems that you're outraged about it's just it's a dead end the next problem i have with conspiracy theories is that they radicalize people polarize people turn people against each other to really solve the root problems of society what we need is we need to come together and work together we need to dialogue with each other we communicate on a deeper more honest level this is impossible to do with all these conspiracy theories going around these conspiracy theories generally demonize some other group of people making it possible to actually have a communication with them see there's so much demonization these days of pedophilia that the actual what's sad about is that the actual problem of pedophilia this is a challenging problem that society has not yet resolved how do we resolve this problem because you know you you understand the problem of pedophilia there's a certain percentage of of humans who are born with basically a fetish for young people a sexual fetish for young people that's what gets them excited see that's basically what pedophilia is now i'm not saying pedophilia is innocent it's not it can cause a lot of harm to to children and it's it can be very exploitative and abusive to children so it's very problematic but it's not so simple as just demonizing the pedophile right because like look think of it if you really understand pedophilia think of it this way you have some sort of sexual preferences i assume like uh you like women with big boobs or you like men with a certain kind of chest or you like uh abs or you know you like this kind of hair or you like feet or you know you like doggy style or you like missionary position or you know whatever gets you turned on whatever kind of porn you watch you enjoy that right i mean you really enjoy it you don't just enjoy a little bit you really enjoy it and it's very difficult for you to just repress your sexual cravings if i just told you you know you know what from now on all that stuff you enjoy the stuff that makes you come the hardest just uh yeah just ignore that for the rest of your life ignore it just pretend it's not real in fact your sexual preferences are evil and criminal what would you do you see you wouldn't be able to repress those cravings and desires even if you wanted to there's no way there's no way you would do it you can't do it sexual craving is too powerful of a force to simply repress it or deny it externally through some authority figure by criminalizing it for example if you criminalize anal sex people will still have anal sex now the problem with pedophilia is is uniquely challenging because it's possible to have anal sex where both parties are interested in doing it and there's no harm done to either party now it's it's it's almost impossible to have sex with a child without harming the child and to have a consensual so this is this is a deep this is a deep challenge for society you see because some percentage of humans will always be born with a preference for having sex with young humans i don't know what it is maybe half a percent of the population a quarter of a percent of my days maybe one percent of the population i don't know what it is you see and just criminalizing that behavior is not going to solve it because those you know you know from your own experience you know sexually how powerful the sex drive is imagine if you were born with a sexual craving because you don't control your sexual cravings you didn't decide one day like oh well i'm gonna be sexually attracted to women or i'm gonna be sexually attracted to feet or i'm gonna be sexually attracted to hair or to muscles or to abs or to boobs or whatever you didn't decide this imagine if one day you were born uh let's say you reincarnate you're born with a sexual preference for young people what do you do about it you didn't ask for that you might even recognize that this is bad in the sense that it harms young people to act out on this instinct but what do you do do you deny your sexual cravings for the rest of your life that doesn't seem authentic on the other hand what do you become a criminal what do you do see i'm not saying i have a solution to this problem i'm just saying the problem is much more complicated than these conspiracy theories make you believe when you just demonize the problem nothing is solved and now of course just by me opening your mind to the depth and complexity of the problem i will get called a pedophile i will get called a pedophile just for talking about the challenges of pedophiles see that's how that's how a naive mind works because it doesn't want to actually go into the root complexities of the issue i actually had a one time i had someone who was a pedophile who uh messaged me through my forum he was a young guy um i don't know the full details but he basically wrote me a a nice message and he said because you know i get messages you got to understand i get flooded with messages uh by thousands of people with their problems like i i got depression i'm suicidal i'm going crazy um i'm being abused i'm whatever you know i get that so of course one in a thousand might be a pedophile so i get one of those right um and this was interesting to me because i've never i've never had a genuine conversation with a pedophile before so uh you know i read his story he writes his story to me and he says you know i was just i was always just i had a preference for you know like young girls um and um and that's like the only thing that that gets me sexually aroused nothing else does i know that i shouldn't act out on the simple this is what he told me in the email like i know i shouldn't act out on this impulse because um you know obviously he understands that this this harms children and so forth so it's not like he's some evil uh you know pedophile plotting to rape a child no like he knows that this is a problem he knows that it has criminal consequences as well he knows that for example he can watch child porn but he knows that even that harms children because it's exploitative you know to produce child porn but but then but so he's asking me like leo what do i do what do i do in this situation do i deny my sexual desires do i find some kind of healthy outlet for what do i do and honestly i had no answer because this was news to me i've never faced this this issue before um but the reason i bring it up is because it was just it was a genuine authentic uh communication and you know i just asked some follow-up questions because i was just curious like you know uh how does it actually work um like are you not attracted to like grown mature women at all like is the only way you can you can have sex is if you're like jerking off to a to some like video of like a 10 year old how does it work i don't know um and it was just interesting it was just interesting to have this conversation in the end i couldn't really give him any solid advice because i just i didn't i didn't know how to deal with that problem it's it's a problem that our society has not solved yet so like maybe one solution to that problem might be for example virtual reality porn maybe we could create virtual child porn which doesn't involve the harming of any children which you could disseminate to to these pedophiles and then they would have a healthy outlet for for their cravings now even me just saying that people say oh leo but you're endorsing child porn now no it's it's just uh we're dealing with the complexity of the problem you see when you understand how powerful the sexual cravings are from your own personal experience you'll understand that you're not going to be able to repress those for the rest of your life you need some sort of healthy outlet for it so of course obviously we don't want to exploit children and harm children but at the same time we need to we need to somehow do something with these pedophiles other than just locking them in jail now if you say william why don't we just lock them all in jail or kill them all well is that first of all is that a compassion and humane way to go about it what if you have a daughter or a son and he becomes a pedophile again see if you're assuming pedophilia is just this this evil thing that you have gotten yourself into like almost like a gang or like like it's like you're equating pedophilia with bank robbery or something this is the wrong way to think about it that's not really how pedophilia works pedophilia is is much more like your natural sexual cravings it's more like a fetish and you don't really have much conscious control over it it's not like you can prevent yourself from robbing a bank yeah you can do that it's a lot harder to prevent yourself for example from getting aroused by looking at boobs so can you prevent yourself from ever getting aroused by looking at boobs can you promise me that you will never look at boobs ever again in your life and never desire them what if i criminalize looking at boobs you see the problem so again i'm not saying i have any concrete answers here i'm just trying to show you the complexity of these problems and just how toxic these conspiracy theories are towards finding some root solution by demonizing people this is the problem of demonization when you demonize criminals it at first it seems like well yeah they're criminals so they should be demonized but what you don't realize is that that doesn't actually solve the criminality if you really had compassion you would want to find a solution to prevent those criminals from acting out their criminal impulses in the first place which might mean changing our economic system it might mean better social safety nets so that people don't fall into poverty it might mean some sort of drug rehab programs to prevent people from becoming you know drug dealers and drug abusers and so on and getting addicted to that kind of stuff and and that even extends to pedophilia as well there are compassionate solutions and then there are just mindless demonizing solutions where you just demonize them and lock them up and throw away the key and don't think about it but see that only happens when you're separated from the other person you have to think that you're separate from the pedophile when you realize that you could have easily been born a pedophile or that your own son or daughter could be a pedophile when you realize that when you realize that your own son or daughter could be gay or could be transsexual then you get compassion for those sort of edge cases and those fringe people and you stop demonizing and criminalizing that kind of activity um now of course i'm not saying pedophilia should be decriminalized um yeah it's difficult because you have to prevent the abuse of children that's very important sex for children creates huge psychological trauma and dysfunction that will last for for lifetimes so that is a very serious concern i'm not dismissing that at all and uh we got a little off track there and uh and then the final uh my fundamental my final fundamental problem with conspiracy theories is that they decrease meaningful civil engagement so rather than actually going out there and engaging in politics in a healthy manner it just turns into like a partisan food fight and demonization of others which is not productive conspiracy theories are a subset of ideological thinking conspiracy theories correlate with hyper-nationalism religious fundamentalism and racism because all of these come from the same general levels of cognitive and moral development spiral dynamics tier one cognition the lower stages conspiracies theories exist and are found more and more at the lower levels of consciousness and these theories appeal to lower and lower caliber people folks like alex jones donald trump so why are conspiracy theories on the rise now with donald trump and trumpism why does donald trump love to promote conspiracy theorists and conspiracy theories because he has no standards for truth and because he himself is roughly spotlighting stage red he's not very high on the spiral he doesn't have a high level of moral or cognitive or spiritual development so of course conspiracy theories are so appealing to him because he can use them to manipulate large groups of people into getting his selfish needs met so of course he's going to rely on conspiracy theories and alex jones does the same stuff he's also roughly a spider-dynamic stage red and he's built an entire multi-million dollar empire uh pitching various kinds of conspiracy theories and people lap that [ __ ] up people roughly at his level lap it up and people roughly at trump's level lap it up and in america and around the world we still have a large chunk of the population not a majority but still a significant chunk of the population who is roughly at stage red or stage blue which finds uh that kind of stuff very appealing maybe 20 or 30 percent of the population will find that stuff appealing which is where trump's most hardcore uh base support comes from conspiracy theories are a survival mechanism of the ego mind they confirm the ego mind's initial paranoias and fears in previous episodes my spiritual episodes i've talked about how basically your life and reality is a tug of war between fear and love the more conscious you are the more loving you are the less conscious you are the more selfish you are the more fearful you are and these this is sort of the the axis by which your entire life gets determined is how fearful or how loving are you so the more fearful the more selfish the less consciousness you have the more you're going to be prone to conspiratorial thinking because it feeds into your paranoia conspiracy theories also involve a lot of circular reasoning they're self-justifying bubbles of belief systems they also conflate interpretation with fact a conspiracy theory isn't a theorist doesn't distinguish very well between the facts of a case and then his interpretation on it because it's not just that you're getting the raw facts you're never just getting the raw facts you're taking those facts the ego mind is interpreting those facts spinning a story and a narrative out of it and it's that narrative that you have to be very careful of it's that interpretive process which is corrupted by conspiracy theories of course conspiracy theories are our projection classic psychological projection which externalizes personally undesirable characteristics and evil onto others so whatever shadow elements you have you project that out onto the world and so in fact the irony of course with the popularity of pedophilia conspiracy theories among amongst right-wingers is that i guarantee you that if you did a full exhaustive study on whether there are more pedophiles within the left wing and the right wing you're going to find more in the right wing why is that because the right wing is lower consciousness and more fear-based and also precisely because they spend so much energy projecting this conspiracy theory outward it's a projection which means it's a shadow aspect of themselves that they're denying in the same way that a lot of right-wingers will spend a lot of time criticizing homosexuality precisely because they're insecure and that they fear their own homosexual cravings and tendencies which they are trying to suppress and to deny because it makes them feel feminine and their culture has told them that men are not supposed to feel feminine they're supposed to feel masculine see so that's projection it wouldn't surprise me at all that some of the most prominent promoters of pedophilia conspiracy theories like alex jones actually for example has child porn on his computer now i don't know that for sure i don't want to defame him by saying that um not like that he would he would extend that courtesy to to me or to anybody else but um but uh but yeah i mean the the reason i can sort of suspect that is because that's how projection works what comes to mind to me is is this saying thou doth protest too much when somebody protests too much about the evilness of of others you have to always suspect hmm might you not be guilty of that evil yourself i believe actually alex jones has been caught there there is evidence of alex jones being caught with trans porn on his phone that was a story that came out some number of years ago there's evidence of that um even though he denounces trans people i think so um so yeah i mean these sorts of contradictions are very common within right-wing ideology but again i'm not saying the left-wing is immune to this certainly there are left-wing pedophiles um but i would bet you'll find more of them in the right wing notice also that conspiracy theories are emotional attachments there's nothing factual or objective about conspiracy theories they're emotional attachments you can feel that emotional attachment within you if you are a conspiracy theorist if you're going to be introspecting and being very self-honest uh there's an emotional payoff that you get from buying into these conspiracy theories that they're very emotionally satisfying if you feel powerless they can make you feel powerful which i think is a lot of alex jones's audience people who watch alex jones and like his stuff that's because it's emotionally satisfying to watch him and to listen to him you listen to him every day it drips on your mind and then it it creates this feeling of empowerment like yeah we're in all this together against the evil globalists and the chai comms and and the pedophiles um one of the problems with conspiracy theories is that the there's a refusal there to deal with the complex reality and complex paradoxical and counterintuitive truths that you would be dealing with if you were doing like the kind of work that i advocate with actualized.org there's a refusal to take responsibility as well collective responsibility is not taken so in this example with pedophiles demonizing pedophiles when you demonize criminals and pedophiles this is actually uh a way of avoiding taking collective responsibility to take collective responsibilities to say you know what if our society has all these criminals in it what are we doing to create those criminals it's not just that those people who were born criminals somehow we structured our society such that these criminals are flourishing why is that do we need to take a look at our economic system is it the way we teach in school is it a lack of training is it a lack of social programs is it capitalism what is it see but many people don't want to take that responsibility because their mind is just so preoccupied with just their own basic survival if all you care about is personally getting sex money and fame and success then you have no more space in your in your psyche for actually caring deeply caring about fixing serious social problems and of course to fix serious social problems you need to be able to empathize with the people who are suffering from these problems not just the victims but also the perpetrators if you want to solve the problem of of murder you can't just sympathize with the murder victims you need to also sympathize with the murderers and try to understand their perspective and where they're coming from and why they're doing the murdering what's causing them what's motivating to be murderers in the first place is it the chemicals in the water is it the lack of healthy food is it the lack of proper parenting and education and health care and what kind of systems could we create to to make that less of an issue you see that's that's where the real problems are solved conspiracy theories are also a misuse of skepticism skepticism is easily weaponized by the naive ego mind i have a whole episode about this called true versus false skepticism go check that out where i talk about the way that the skepticism is often misused and abused the true function of skepticism is to turn the skepticism inwards on your own selfishness and devilry and your own worldview so the problem with the with the uh false skeptic is that the skeptic will be skeptical of all of his enemies and opponents but he will not be skeptical of his own mind and his own defense mechanisms and his own skepticism he will not realize that he's just using skepticism as a weapon to create all those enemies but he's never going to question the fact that hey maybe these enemies are just projections of my own mind maybe all the all the delusion [ __ ] i see out there in the world is just simply a projection of my own inner delusion and [ __ ] but this doesn't occur to most skeptics conspiracy theories prey on on emotional triggers like shock fear anger and other low consciousness emotions and in this way you can get people really riled up and you can build a large fan base and you can sell them a lot of stuff like alex jones does he makes millions of dollars selling to people's anger and their fear and their shock of course conspiracy theorists lack a lot of intellectual integrity and honesty they're not charitable usually and this is this is a problematic attitude when it comes to investigating the world into learning about the world and and trying to understand other people's perspectives you need a lot of intellectual integrity honesty and you need to be charitable you need to actually give people enough benefit of the doubt to see that their perspective has some validity of it you can't just deny someone's perspective just because you think they're evil or wrong you need to actually be willing to step into their shoes and look at the world from their perspective that's what grows you i've talked about the importance of perspective in past episodes uh uh a handy way to think about uh conspiracy theories is that they're basically an advanced form of gossip that's really what it is it's gossip you're gossiping that's what alex jones does he gossips he's a professional multi-million dollar gossiper uh joe rogan also does a lot of this he does um he's not nearly as bad as as alex jones i personally i like joe rogan i think he's entertaining sometimes he's he's wise but other times he says stupid stuff and a lot of what goes on on joe rogan's show is just pure gossip that's the appeal why does joe rogan have one of the most successful and popular podcasts in the world because it's fundamentally a gossip podcast and everyone [ __ ] loves gossip and he's really good at gossip he makes gossip into a gossip into an art form he makes gossip seem intelligent and wise sometimes it is but a lot of times it's just really stupid stuff um and that's i'm not saying anything bad about joe rogan here it's it's just like there is a room for gossip in the world but you just have to understand the limitations of it you can't take it too seriously of course conspiracy theories reinforce close mindedness dogma and selfishness they're used to mobilize crowds this is how trump uses these conspiracy theories so see some devil like trump will come along and will try to exploit these conspiracy theories and try to use them for his own personal power success wealth and advantage conspiracy theories also increase with decreased political efficacy so as you feel more and more disillusioned with the electoral political system and you think that democracy is failing and that your voice is not being heard and that the government isn't working properly the more you distrust the government the more you distrust corporations and elites the more you distrust fellow humans and other groups of people the more prone you are to conspiracy theories the worse your life is the more problems you have the more abused you were as a child the more trauma you have the more you struggle with money the the more you struggle with your job the more you struggle with your religion and fate faith rather the more susceptible you will be to conspiracy theories because all of that weakens your mind and then when your mind is weak it needs some you know something something to make it feel good and that's when the conspiracy theory comes in that's when a cult comes in and ensnares your mind but be careful i am noticing this trend that's very popular these days of railing against the elites whether it's through a conspiracy theory or not through a conspiracy theory see you can there's sort of like a gradual slippery slope you start by just railing at the elites hating the establishment and mainstream media questioning it and then slowly as you do that at first it's not a conspiracy theory you might have some legitimate grievances about corruption in government and so forth and maybe you see some problem with billionaires you know hoarding money okay that's legitimate but then see that takes you down the slippery slope and then you go slipperier and slipperier down towards the towards the bottom of the barrel where you get into some of this really toxic conspiratorial stuff and then you start to hate elites you start to distrust them you start to hate millionaires and billionaires and rich people and all this you develop a whole ideology around it and this becomes very toxic and problematic remember you can criticize the status quo but make sure you're criticizing it from above from a position of consciousness not from below not as an emotional reaction not as some sort of needy activity a sort of emotional attachment that you are clinging to because some other part of your life isn't going the way that you want to and because you're failing to take responsibility for improving your own life something that a lot of people don't appreciate is that one of the top functions of mainstream culture is to shield ignorant people from toxic ideologies so today it's very popular to criticize mainstream establishment media and culture as serving the elite but that doesn't mean that non-mainstream culture is going to be healthy and better than mainstream culture in fact if i had to bet i would say it's going to be worse as bad as mainstream culture is conspiracy theories are worse stuff like alex jones is worse a lot of stuff on youtube is worse it's less rigorous it's less objective it's more biased it's more cult-like one of the functions of mainstream religion is by enforcing a strong monopoly on ways in which the human mind can think on world views on values and norms on the one hand it's oppressive because it's monopolistic and you're not able to have the same kind of diversity of thought that you would be able to have like you know in the middle even in the medieval ages there wasn't a diversity of thought about reality everybody thought along the same you know if you grew up in europe you thought along the same sort of catholic lines basically in the medieval times and that created a sort of a consensus that we could all gather around and actually build a society around and you could say well leo it was toxic mostly it was healthy it was toxic in certain cases there was the spanish inquisition there was the witch trials yeah there were toxic edge cases but overall it was healthy because this christianity taught people to you know be decent people be moral don't you know don't don't be an adulterer don't be a thief don't be a murderer don't be a rapist these sorts of just basic ground rules were laid and enforced and they were enforced not just legally but also culturally there was a lot of peer pressure you know not to be some sort of devil um but today that sort of that monopoly is breaking apart uh and now this is allowing all sorts of toxic small ideologies to to come up and to you know just get really out of control and the reason that mainstream culture tends to be a little bit more healthy than some minor niche toxic ideology is because for something to be able to scale across hundreds of millions of people the way that christianity has it has to have a relative level of health to it it can't be utterly toxic and virulent and cancerous you know people you know atheists and so forth and scientists sometimes criticize christianity as being this toxic cancerous ideology sometimes it can get out of hand but overall it's not that toxic and not that cancerous the way that you think uh especially when we compare it to some of the niche cult-like ideologies that arise that are not mainstream it's a lot easier to create a very toxic death cult sort of ideology when you're only scaling it across 10 20 100 1 000 people so that's the difference between mainstream and cult hair in my eye keeps bothering me all right so what people don't realize is that we have a lot of uneducated and selfish people in society in fact the majority of society is uneducated and very selfish and completely unaware of their own lack of education and selfishness these people are extremely dangerous and heard such people have always existed but they require leadership from sages and intellectuals thought leaders and visionaries who can corral these people and get them to think and move along healthy lines otherwise they're gonna spiral out of control go down rabbit holes of of pure delusion and insanity and that has happened from time to time throughout history we need conscious leaders who will lead the vast majority of uneducated selfish people and these are the elites so be careful with criticizing the elites because if you get rid of the elites you might find yourself in this situation where you just have this horde of uneducated and selfish and ignorant um non-elites who think that they're better than elites but actually are dumber than elites and will go down one of these toxic rabbit holes of insanity and delusion and destroy themselves but that is not to say that elites don't have their own problems of course they do elites are also selfish but if i had to choose between society being run by educated elites versus a mob of uneducated selfish average people i would choose the elites now you're going to say leo that's because you are an elite and you benefit from the elites sure you could you could make that case if you want to but i would say that there's there's some value to these leads that a lot of people are overlooking so i'm not purely for elites uh i i like the idea of democracy but also you have to understand that we can only expand democracy as fast as the people who are going to be getting that democracy can wield it in a healthy mature uh intelligent selfless way if we give democracy to a bunch of devils what you're gonna do is you're gonna create hell democracy in and of itself doesn't create heaven democracy needs to be wielded by angels to create heaven and if it's wielded by devils it creates hell and why does this happen why do uneducated selfish people create these rabbit holes of pure delusion because reality is mind constructed there's no such thing as a objective reality in the way that science has taught you what we have is we have reality constructed as a culture our culture constructs reality our minds construct reality and if we let it get out of hand and we're not conscious of the fact that our mind is constructing reality our mind will construct a a nightmare some delusional bubble and if you go back and look throughout history we see cases where this has happened where mankind has created these delusional bubbles where everybody in that bubble believed that that was reality you know nazis really believed uh in hitler's time that they were going to rule the world and that was the proper way to look at the world is through the nazi worldview of course it was all just mind-constructed delusion but they were fully on board with that and that's just one example you can go back to our history and find tons of these examples and it's not just history now today right now we're still constructing reality mostly we're doing it unconsciously most people are in denial about the fact that our mind is constructing reality most people are in denial about the fact that reality is socially constructed at least much of it is that's a topic too deep to explore further here uh now you might wonder what leo so are you telling me that i i shouldn't be civically engaged now no i'm just telling you that conspiracy theories are not a valid form of civic engagement by all means be civically engaged take collective responsibility be active politically in a healthy way but not through conspiracy theories don't fool yourself thinking that that is civic engagement now you might say but leo what about theory x some theory isn't what is what if there's a chance that it's true what if ufos actually what if ufos do exist and the government is hiding the technology isn't that possible you're missing the point the point isn't that it's not possible the point is that it doesn't matter the point is that it's a red herring you must go meta and see how this is distracting you in your own life personally actually i happen to believe that ufos are real there's way too much evidence out there that i've seen i haven't personally seen you ufo but from all the anecdotal evidence that i've seen and actually even some of the videos that have been recently released by the us military and navy and so forth um i'm highly inclined to believe that ufos are actually flying out there and by which i mean actual aliens in a [ __ ] flying saucer i don't mean ufos as some unknown uh you know light in the sky i mean actual [ __ ] spacecraft i'm highly uh open to that possibility but uh the difference is that i'm not creating a whole narrative around it about how the government is trying to fool us and that there's some secret technology they're holding back from us because of whatever evil purposes and you know i'm not spending i'm not spending a lot of time thinking about this i'm spending most of my time doing inner work on myself trying to awaken and trying to understand how my own mind is tricking me and also i clearly distinguish between the fact that this is a belief that i have it's a speculation i'm not sure if it's if it's true i'm not going to go out there and say that it is true i'm open to the possibility of it being wrong um you know so i'm not i'm not attached to it there's no emotional attachment whatsoever to the possibility of there being ufos for me one way or another i'm totally open to either one being true i'll be happy either way doesn't it doesn't bother me i'm not building an entire life purpose around this i'm not building a narrative around this i'm not blaming people about this i'm very clear to distinguish that from my direct experience of reality and that's very important that's something that conspiracy theorists do not do generally speaking of course conspiracy theories can also cause a lot of direct harm think about how much harm alex jones has caused to the parents of the sandy hook shootings think about the harm caused by by pizzagate some dude from from online actually went to the pizzagate pizza shop and actually brought like a rifle in there started shooting the place up because he demanded to see the you know the the children the molested children who were locked up in the basement when there wasn't even a [ __ ] basement in that building right that dude could have easily killed somebody in that luckily he didn't shoot anybody he just like shot i think he fired off a shot in the floor or something he didn't actually kill anybody but he could have easily shot somebody you can because when you're outraged by something that makes you more likely to be violent also a lot of harm is caused simply by smearing the reputations of good people like i know anderson cooper has been dealing with with pedophilia conspiracy theories bill gates uh um uh robert mueller you know actually i think the reason alex jones got banned off of apple and youtube and other platforms twitter and so forth um it's not because the sandy hook shooting stuff um i think it might have also been because right around that time he was he was just like i listened to it he was um he was pitching like the most insane conspiracy theories about robert mueller you know who was who was investigating donald trump so his theory was that robert mueller is involved with the jeffrey epstein pedophilia child ring and that actually the reason he's going after trump is because trump is actually trying to stop the pedophiles but robert mueller because you know he and jeffrey epstein and the deep state globalists and all this they are trying to you know they're they're they're fighting trump and so that's why mueller was investigating him and so literally he accused robert mueller of of being a pedophile which you know really i don't understand why uh he wouldn't have been sued by by robert mueller for that because i mean it's just complete slander complete defamation just like completely absurd zero evidence for any of this [ __ ] and yet you know he's ruining a good man's uh name and reputation um you know nasa is a what seems like a a good decent organization that does a lot of public good you know nasa doesn't just explore the moon and other um stuff in our solar system it also launches satellites it tracks the weather it tracks climate change and many other things like this there's a lot of good people working at nasa but their name gets gets demonized by flat earthers and and other people like that um and so what you have to understand about these conspiracy theories that the way the mind works that even when one of these conspiracy theories is disproven or debunked it's always denied or ignored for example alex jones has proposed so many conspiracy theories many of them have been debunked and completely disproven even in court like with the sandy hook shooting stuff he actually had to go to court and um they they forced him to basically make a retraction he actually went on air and told his audience that he was wrong about sandy hook he had to issue a retraction but even though he does that the very next day he goes back to creating more conspiracy theories so even if a conspiracy theorist is caught peddling conspiracy theories and proven wrong it's the attitude it's the mindset he can't help himself in a sense he's just like a pedophile he's addicted to seeing the world through the lens of conspiracy theories and how do you how do you help him he's incurable now some people might say but leo aren't you a conspiracy theories after all you say that reality is just an illusion you say that everything is imaginary you criticize materialist science you say that the brain doesn't exist you talk about god you talk about mystical and paranormal and new age stuff you criticized trump leo you even promoted the russia gate conspiracy theory so what's the difference between all of that and conspiracy theories well there is a very big difference my work is grounded in direct experience my work is grounded in in deep research and a deep questioning of my own mind i'm not just up here presenting this material to you for every hour of material that i present to you i spent 10 or 20 or more hours questioning my own mind i've been doing this for decades all right so most of the work that i do on on myself internally you don't see it the part that you see is just me presenting some of my findings and conclusions to you you don't see me actually doing the work also as far as this russia gate conspiracy theory goes i don't buy that it's a conspiracy theory now of course there's different versions of russiagate um some of them can get very outlandish like if you believe that rush that putin is literally a puppet master for trump yeah i don't i don't buy that and i never have uh but this idea that there's nothing to rush a gate at all i don't buy that either i think trump has serious financial conflicts of interest and that much of his loans and his financing comes from russia and the reason that makes a lot of sense to me is first of all because his sons actually are on video saying it second of all because no one in america would lend him any money and no no decent legitimate organization would lend donald trump money only shady organizations would lend him money and i know how the russians work i'm russian i know how they work i know the culture there i know how corrupt it is so russia for trump would have been the perfect place to get his financing because they're roughly the same level of consciousness he is so it's very very likely that trump has some financial beholdings to putin or to oligarchs in russia and um this is this is really to me again i'm not saying like i i fully have evidence of this or i fully believe it or that i even care very deeply about this but to me it's just very intuitive that this would be the case um so those people who deny that and say that there is nothing to russigate i think the only reason you can get away with that right now is because all the evidence hasn't come out in the future i predict that in next five or ten years when a lot of more evidence of trump trump's shenanigans and devilry comes out we will eventually understand we will historians will eventually get to the bottom of all of trump's financial conflicts of interest all that stuff will leak out after he is out of office and uh you know people will write books about it and eventually we'll know and i think we'll see some deep deep deep and deeply troubling um conflicts even financial conflicts of interest tied to russia and that will explain trump's uh very obsequious behavior towards towards russia and towards putin uh generally though so you see when i talk about god when i talk about spiritual concepts these are not just speculations or beliefs the difference is that i'm talking about things that i've directly become conscious of or directly realized and that you yourself can realize and validate for yourself you see so the point of my work is not just to present you with all this new age beliefs that you buy into and replace your old beliefs with that's not how this work works the way this works is that you listen to me talking about this stuff and then you get interested in it and then you go and you actually do the work to validate it for yourself you experience it it's sort of like i say you know what i went to australia and i saw some cool kangaroos and koala bears and platypuses and you if you're not from australia you're like what those are some weird animals i've never seen any of those animals i want to see some of those too and then you buy yourself a ticket to australia and then you go and you pet a kangaroo and you go you know hang out with some koalas and some platypuses and you get to see them in the flesh and then you're like wow cool and that changes your life but if all you do is you just sit at your computer and you mentally masturbate yourself to pictures of kangaroos and platypuses and ideas of of koala bears and you never actually connect the dots to actually buy the plane ticket to fly and see them in person then you don't really understand what i'm talking about that's the difference so when i say that the brain does not exist that the brain is a hallucination that you're hallucinating right now there is no brain obviously in your experience there's no brain this is obvious uh the brain is purely imaginary but for you to really understand that you need to have a direct awakening to the fact that the brain is purely imaginary you can have that it's not easy but you can have it if you work towards it i'm proposing that as a possibility i'm not saying that you should believe now that brains don't exist if you believe that this is going to make you look like a fool you need to have a direct experience of it if you believe that god exists but you have never had a direct experience of god you're being a fool i would rather have you believe that god does not exist than to have a belief that it does but no direct experience of it see everything mystical and shmystical that i talk about is true only if you can validate it if you can't validate it it's not true that's the difference between the stuff that i teach and conspiracy theories and cults so here are some key insights you need to understand the mind can spin any kind of story it wants all the mind is looking for when it's spinning its stories is a basic sense of internal consistency that's it it's not concerned with any attachment to reality itself you can the mind can spin stories that are completely detached from any notion of reality or facts as long as the story is internally self-consistent the mind can spin it and it can live inside that bubble and it can feel very very real even though it's not so just keep that point in mind just because your mind can spin a really good internally consistent story does not mean that that is equivalent to reality or any kind of absolute truth see internal consistency is not evidence of truth people often confuse that another point is that literally you are imagining reality that's what's going on even physical reality is imagined and hallucinated by by consciousness this being the case you can see how easy it is for the mind to then concoct all sorts of crazy and outlandish theories and go down various kinds of intellectual rabbit holes if you can imagine physical reality if if your own body is imaginary then what hope do you have with your conspiracy theories of them being somehow true or objective not at all there's nothing objective about the stories your mind concocts you also have to understand the point that reason and logic cannot be trusted because they are always hijacked by the ego mind to serve its own selfish purposes so just because the conspiracy theory seems reasonable and logical doesn't mean it's true do not confuse reason and logic for truth all sorts of crazy deluded theories and ideas are rationalized and justified with logic you need to understand that virtually anything can be justified and rationalized there are no limits anything can be held to be true come what may by the mind as long as the mind is willing to abandon all intellectual integrity and commitment to truth if you don't care about the truth nothing can stop you from living in a completely imaginary world view divorced from reality even the stuff that just seems completely obvious and factual and objective that can't be denied it can be denied people don't understand and appreciate the significance of this and that is because all of reality is imaginary you need to start to look inwards and to notice how your mind does this notice how your mind creates narratives to suit its own survival agenda it's not just that you're imagining stuff you're imagining stuff specifically to suit your own survival it's a very selfish sophisticated mechanism it's ingenious what your mind is doing you're not just coming up with stupid things you're literally constructing reality on the fly it's so powerful that the reason it's difficult to believe it is because there's literally no distinction between reality and your imagination but this imagination process is so sophisticated most people think when i say imagination it's like oh well it's just some sort of fluffy easy thing like oh leo so if i just imagine a million dollars i'll get a million dollars it's just like that right no you fool imagination is so sophisticated the reason you can't imagine getting a million dollars right now is because you're too busy imagining not having a million dollars literally and you can't stop you're not conscious enough to stop imagining not having a million dollars and you don't know how to stop and i'm not even saying you have it in the power you have it within your power to stop imagining that you don't have a million dollars if you could stop imagining that you don't have a million dollars you could have a million dollars but you can't stop because there's something larger going on here it's not just about your ego mind being able to manipulate reality when i say reality is imaginary that your mind is constructing reality i don't mean that your personal ego mind now gets to have whatever it wants handed to it on a silver platter through a process of imagination no i mean the plan that you think you're sitting on is imaginary and you don't know how to stop imagining it so you're stuck there you're stuck within your mind and you don't know how to change it that's a deep problem or maybe it isn't if you just resign yourself to it and you stop wanting to change it after all who wants to change it the ego mind which itself is imaginary so you're lost within layers and layers and layers of imagination so how do you tell that conspiracy theory is wrong or bad as i talked about in my recent episode understanding introspection or sorry developing introspection you feel it you you can feel the dirtiness of conspiracy theories you can feel how low consciousness it is if you just practice turning inwards and self-reflecting you can feel that these conspiracy theories are fueled by fear you feel that fear you feel the paranoia you can feel the anger the bitterness the hostility the judgment the blaming the scapegoating the closed mindedness you can feel your own mind closing down you can feel the dogma within you you can feel the arrogance you can feel your mind going through mental gymnastics to justify to rationalize your belief systems you can feel the emotional reactivity you can feel the attachment you can feel the us versus them thinking and framing you can feel the sort of framing of the good guys versus the bad guys you can see your mind thinking in black and white ways you can feel and notice your own mind projecting its shadow out onto the world you can feel denial when you're in denial you can feel an unwillingness to admit i don't know when you truly don't know a thing you can feel the lack of love in these conspiracy theories all of this screams out ego ego ego ego ego warning warning warning warning warning this is not truth this is delusion this is the eco mind at work but the only way you can do that is if you remember like i said in the developing introspection episode you have to have a genuine interest in truth your mind has to be genuinely open you have to genuinely want to turn inwards to introspect and you need skill in that it's a skill you have to practice that you're not going to learn that in a few days that takes years of practice and it all begins with a genuine interest in truth you have to care about the truth more than any of your theories more than any of your personal biases more than any of your grudges against other groups of people more than any of your political attachments to any kind of president or any kind of political party or any kind of ideology you have to be willing to surrender all of that in order to get to truth and i have a lot of episodes explaining what truth is so go check those out i have an episode about what is truth i have an episode how to discover what is true and so on so what is the ultimate solution to conspiracy theories well of course introspection is one of the ultimate solutions contemplation i have episodes talking about how to do contemplation check those out open-mindedness is hugely important i have many episodes about open-mindedness go check out my episode how open-mindedness works education is an important solution just basic factual education proper history proper science this is all very lacking for many people remember most people haven't gone to college and then most people barely graduated high school even those people who did graduate high school just think about the kind of people who you hung out with in high school were they serious about school work did they actually read the books did they actually pass the tests no most of them were like c-minus students who were just [ __ ] around in school they didn't learn anything so just because someone graduated high school doesn't mean that they're intelligent and that's a majority of of people in america much less even worse in less developed countries so we need a lot better education and our education system needs to be improved significantly to teach epistemology metaphysics philosophy and various kinds of topics that i cover here in actualized.org looking for multiple diverse perspectives is a solution to conspiracy theories because in a conspiracy theory you're basically getting locked into one perspective so to free yourself of that consider various other perspectives and never get attached to any one particular perspective that's one solution serious journalism is another solution science academic rigor these are more solutions falsification is another important solution uh because generally conspiracy theories are created through confirmation bias so what's happening with the mind is is cherry-picking evidence from its environment to validate its pre-existing worldview what needs to happen you've got to force your mind to actually look for disconfirming evidence this is called falsification so confirmation is important but falsification in a sense is even more important you have to if you're holding a theory you have to look for falsifying evidence for example if you believe that elites or pedophiles look for evidence that elites are not pedophiles and i guarantee you will find a lot of evidence that they aren't more so than that they are another solution to have a sense of life purpose to be creative when you have nothing to do and you're sitting around and you're working a dead-end job and you have a bunch of free time on your hands and you're not creative in a healthy way you're going to be creative in a toxic way i talked about it in my episode the trap of the toxic life purpose people who don't have a life purpose they fall into conspiracy theories another solution is personal development and self-actualization the more time you devote to self-actualizing the less time you'll have for conspiracy theories and the more you'll be able to see through the [ __ ] of them another solution is stop judging blaming demonizing and scapegoating others period stop all judgments this is something you should be working on as part of your spiritual practice and self-actualization and while you're doing that start taking collective responsibility don't just take personal responsibility and don't just tell others to take personal responsibility also take collective responsibility for your society notice that you have an obligation as a citizen of your society to create a more healthy more conscious more loving more selfless society and that you contribute to the evil and selfless selfishness of society with your own behaviors and thinking another solution to conspiracy theories is systems thinking go see my episode intro to systems thinking another solution is to stop seeing others as separate from you treat others as though they were your own family members and even more than that as though they were your own body when you see the body of some stranger look at it in a way that you think of it as your own body too this will draw uh draw you two together and will draw you towards the truth intellectual integrity and commitment to truth is crucial as a solution to conspiracy theories another very powerful simple way is simply admitting i don't know just have the balls to admit when you don't know a thing rather than speculating about aliens and pedophiles and god knows what else just admit what's true what's true is you don't know who's a pedophile that's the truth the truth is you don't know about aliens the truth is you don't know about globalists and reptilians that's the truth isn't it the truth look look inside of you and it is what i'm saying true right now that you don't know any of these things and all you have is just ideas and speculations that's the truth so stick with that rather than going off into some fantasy land building castles in the sky and be comfortable with confusion i have a whole episode called how to deal with confusion go check that out another solution to conspiracy theories is to distinguish very clearly between beliefs and direct experience what are you believing and what is your direct experience once you make this distinction this is a game changer for you it's huge that requires some work to make that distinction go check out my episode what is actuality for a good exercise on that point of course uh a very powerful solution to conspiracy theories is to actually have some experiences of non-duality mystical experiences and god realization or awakening that's a tall order feel for most people but though that will very quickly disabuse you of many of your conspiracy theories psychedelics are helpful towards that end and the ultimate solution to conspiracy theories is consciousness selflessness truth with a capital t and love with a capital l when you truly discover love with a capital l as i've talked about in other episodes go check out my episodes what is love part one part two and self love check out that episode as well i have a lot of episodes on love uh when you really discover love that's the end of conspiracy theories love all right i'm done here but uh i wanna just uh there's a lot of this episode intersects with a lot of work i've done in the past so i just want to give you a list here of other episodes of mine that you should watch if you found what i'm talking about here interesting and productive check out my episodes called cult psychology parts 1 and part 2. check out my episode called how ideology works check out my episode the mechanics of belief check out how paradigms work check out true versus false skepticism check out self bias check out self deception parts one two and three check out understand understanding survival part one and two check out developing introspection check out the trap of toxic of the tr of the toxic life purpose and check out system intro to systems thinking that's a lot of stuff this is a very deeply epistemologically significant topic and so there's a lot of tentacles that flow out from conspiracy theories into all these other topics that you will want to study and to understand to really um free yourself of this cancer of the mind of conspiratorial thinking all right that does it for me here i'm done please click that like button for me and come check out my website actualize.org you will find exclusive content and resources there i post weekly exclusive content on my blog sometimes videos sometimes little mini articles and pictures images cool interesting stuff and memes that i find whatever i try to share over there check out my book list many of those books will help you to overcome conspiratorial thinking and get you to see some higher meta perspectives check that out check out my life purpose course if you don't have a life purpose course i mean if you don't have a life purpose defined for yourself yet that will be very helpful for you come check out the forum we have interesting discussions there all the time i'm very very active on the forum so that's a good way to get engaged with me and our little community that we've built there you can support me at patreon.com actualized that helps me to release this content and to keep myself uncorrupted by various kinds of corporate and advertising interests and the final thing that i'll tell you is this we're getting ready to talk about science we're going to go very deep on science in the next few months i will release probably a two-part or a three-part deep dive on the epistemology of science we're going to talk about how science really works we're going to explain science deeper than any scientist understands what science is now science is nice in that scientific and academic scholarship has high standards for good reason because the ego mind can be very sloppy which leads to all sorts of popular delusions like conspiracy theories and and so on but even though that is the case and even though i'm a huge fan of science overall the irony is that even scientists and academics get fooled by self-deceived thinking and by a lack of understanding of the trickeries of the mind and epistemology they get fooled into materialism into reductionism into atheism and we are going to be exploring how exactly this fooling mechanism works that's an extremely deep topic i've been planning to talk about it for years we've been building it up up to it by covering all these more minor topics i'm finally ready to talk about it so make sure you stay tuned for that that's going to be very exciting and yeah you want to know what the what the real red pill is the real the real red pill is understanding that science is imaginary and i'll show you how that is the case you