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[Music] it's time to introduce you to a powerful concept that i've been developing that i call the social matrix this is going to be a very profound concept of epistemology it's going to be a profound foundational episode in the epistemology work that we're doing here with actualize.org and i should warn you that this episode may give you an existential crisis so if you're mentally unstable if you have difficulty navigating and managing basic life and reality you might want to skip this episode because i'm not kidding once you fathom what i'm going to say here this is going to corrode your entire sense of reality and how you navigate life this is going to pull back the curtain in a sense this is the ultimate conspiracy theory it is a conspiracy theory that trumps all other conspiracy theories so you've been warned so what is the social matrix the social matrix is the entire collection that we might call society of elements i'll be explaining what these elements are in a minute of various elements and institutions which are used by your mind in order to as reference points as anchors in order to construct your sense of reality and how you should live your life what most people don't appreciate is just how deeply social human beings are the human mind our psyche we like to think that our mind is just interacting with reality with an objective reality out there and that the information that we get from society like from the books that we read from the schools we go to from the people we talk to the public intellectuals we listen to and so forth that they are just giving us straight reports of what reality is what we're not noticing is we're not noticing how we as a human species are actually co-constructing reality together and are using each other in this social fabric sort of way in order to create a sort of web of reality that all of us together can participate in and do so in such an unconscious manner that we are not aware of this larger construction that we've made and then we confuse that construction for reality itself and then our society is designed in such a way as to make this process opaque to us so that we don't see what's going on and we take it as reality this is such a profound notion that it's difficult to even know where to begin unraveling it and explaining it because it's a giant intertangled tapestry and web that we have woven together and it's precisely because the web extends so far in all directions and it has no opposite or it has no alternative that you can appeal to that the web seems like reality itself this is the social matrix but now let's get very concrete what do i mean here what i really mean here is how do you know anything at all about reality about life about what it is about what's right about what's wrong about what you should do what you shouldn't do what's true what's false how do you even know where humanity came from how do you even know where your family came from how do you know where you physically came from how do you know where your body came from what your body is made out of how do you know these things if you do a sort of archaeology on your own mind you can go back and look in in your past you can excavate and try to unravel the beginnings of your own mind and your own sense of reality and knowledge where did it all come from and what you'll start to notice is that 99 of everything you know and believe came from society came from other people you didn't discover it on your own you didn't do the experiments you weren't there in the past to see human history you weren't there at your own conception in your own birth where did you get all this information you think you know what is happening here but where did you get this information you got it from other people but notice if you got it from other people this assumes something this assumes the people you got it from themselves were not self-deceived and this is the trick this is what you've taken for granted you've always assumed from the very beginning of your life that the information that you've been being fed regardless of who or where it was being fed to you from whether your parents your siblings your friends your coworkers professors teachers religious leaders whoever you were getting your information from you've always generally assumed that the information was true and that those people were not lying to you and were not themselves self-deceived so here this episode is going to explain to you how it is possible that you can be so thoroughly self-deceived about the nature of reality as to be just completely wrong about what's really going on here how is that possible in previous episodes i've talked about this notion of self-deception and i've made some radical claims about epistemology about ontology metaphysics science and other things and sometimes it's like well some of these claims are so radical how how is it possible that mankind can be so wrong how can we be so deluded together collectively as well as individually well this episode explains how that's possible the reason it's possible for us to be collectively so self-deluded i mean individually so self-deluded is because actually were individuals participating in a collective self deception and that collective part is crucial because there's actually no way that an individual could be so deluded as we are generally speaking unless we were doing it all together because when we do it all together you see this makes it seem more real together we can construct a fiction that we couldn't construct by ourselves individually it's hard to brainwash yourself individually you do it to some extent but it's difficult what really sells the self-deception is when everybody else around you is doing it too and then the peer pressure of it and the normalization of it makes you buy into it so what am i talking about here to get concrete about this look we have society society is a very broad thing with many elements that i'll be mentioning right now we have different segments of society and each of these segments present us with knowledge and information that we use to make sense of our reality and to anchor and ground ourselves literally from these different elements you are making sense of reality and developing a sense of sanity without which you might lose your mind so for example we have broad segments like we have the media which includes stuff like books the news entertainment movies video games music celebrities that you might be interested in following and listening to because you value their opinion because they're celebrities they're famous and you like them for whatever reason maybe they were in a comedy or they were in a drama in a movie and they're a rapper whatever you look up to them we have public intellectuals too you might value their minds or you might think that they are more smart than everybody else therefore you look up to these people you have people on television you have news anchors you look up to these people it doesn't matter whether you know of course you're not going to agree with every news anchor and every source of information i'm not saying that you agree with all this stuff i'm saying that you're cherry picking which of the media you agree with but generally you've been watching this media for your entire life reading newspapers or watching saturday morning cartoons or going to the movies with your friends or reading various books as homework assignments from school or just watching the same kind of stuff that your parents were watching when you were growing up then you picked up those habits see and from that you draw information you draw ideas beliefs about what reality is how life works what's good what's bad what's right what's wrong what's moral what's immoral what's true and what's false now of course each one of us individually is going to draw this doesn't mean we all believe exactly the same thing that's not what i'm saying again your chair your mind is cherry picking you might like some celebrity i might hate that celebrity i might like some other celebrity so i'm gonna listen to somebody else and then we're gonna get different world views based on that you might like fox news i might like cnn or whatever and we're going to get different world views based on that but see this is just the media then we have the internet which is a more recent development but uh now it's even more powerful in a sense than all the above uh now we have social media we have youtube we have facebook we have twitter we have tiktok we have google we have wikipedia all of these are sources of information you use all of these sources you ping these sources and get back information which you yourself judge as either valid or invalid see you yourself for example if you want to look up some fact you're not let's say you're not sure about something like did the holocaust happen you might wonder and then you might like go to google and type it in evidence for the holocaust and then maybe a wikipedia page comes up you know the holocaust page that would come up on wikipedia and then you look through that it's a long page with a bunch of historical facts and data you read through that and then uh from that you make up your mind about whether you think it happened or didn't happen but see your mind now you're not just blindly doing this your mind plays a big role because depending on other influences you got from your parents and from your friends and from other news outlets you watch and other websites you go to you know see they might have shaped how you're going to interpret this wikipedia article like for example if your parents themselves were holocaust deniers and you grew up in that environment and so were your friends they were telling about how jews run the world and this sorts of stuff then your mind was filled from an early age with these ideas and now when you go to that wikipedia page unlike a regular person who didn't have that background now you're reading that wikipedia page and now you're skeptical you're very skeptical about everything in that wikipedia page because of the kind of seeds that were planted in your mind and you might read the same wikipedia page that i might read and i might say that's evidence for the holocaust and you might say oh no that's just propaganda that's just some sort of liberal propaganda i'm not interested in arguing whether the holocaust happened or didn't happen that's irrelevant we're making a very profound metapoint here about epistemology see the problem is is how do you know what source is true or valid at all in the first place like if we really put you in in sort of a totally clueless totally ignorant position which is how you started life you knew nothing about life when you were born how did you figure out which sources to trust and which not to trust i want you to contemplate that very very deeply even after this episode is done i want you to spend the next week contemplating that very very deeply because this is the core question i want you to see that your selection of which sources to trust and not trust was actually arbitrary and was based on faith largely and that in fact you did not have any kind of method or any kind of objective standard that you used to figure that out that's the whole problem here you see and as we keep going i'm going to be we're just we're just we just began articulating some of the elements of this web or we're going to be building this web here over the next hour or two so uh hang hang in there with me because there's sort of multiple threads and multiple dimensions that we got to be talking about simultaneously a little bit difficult to put this into a linear format it's a web after all multi-dimensional web but look what i'm trying to say here is that every source that is feeding your mind with information from society itself is subject to corruption deception misinformation and delusion and each source itself notice it's being fueled by individuals like yourself who were also born at some point in life and didn't know what the hell was going on and how do they know which sources to trust so for example you might say well leo but the the people who wrote the wikipedia page about the holocaust here you know these were these were highly esteemed editors of wikipedia they went through sort of a review process they weren't just random joes these were like academics many wikipedia pages are written by academic types you might make that kind of claim okay but see now what's happening is that you're offloading the sort of the uh the authority of the wikipedia page onto these so-called academics if you believe that academics wrote that that page and i don't even know you know maybe they did maybe they didn't they didn't that itself is somewhat unknown because wikipedia itself you're like how does wikipedia vet who gets to write those articles well you see that just pushes the problem down one level can we really be sure that the people who wrote that article were truly objective what kind of biases did they have where did they go to school what kind of schooling did they get and then that takes us into school because see each time we're going to be questioning any one of these elements of the web we're always going to be pushing the can down the road kicking the can down the road down one level um and appealing to some other authority so the web the way it works is that it always appeals to something else within the web in order to justify itself and to construct this sense of truth and reality right so now we get into the education system how do you know you can trust the education system the schools the universities academia these are all elements of this social matrix that we're discussing school boards determine what kind of things are taught in school but how do we know the things taught in school are actually the things that need to be taught how do we know that that itself is not part of the deception and who's controlling these school boards well a lot of times it's parents parents get angry when something is taught in school that they think shouldn't be taught okay but then those parents where do they get their notions of what should be taught in school and what shouldn't be taught in school what's right and what's wrong to be taught in school well that again so you see that pushes the problem down one level back one level because those parents you can't just assume that those parents were omniscient they were born just like you ignorant they knew nothing when they were born and where do they get most of their information about life and reality and what's right and wrong from school from the last generation and how did that generation figure out what should be taught in school well from the previous generation you see so we have this sort of infinite regress problem we have universities we have academia we have all the grades that you get going through the school system this all influences you credentials diplomas awards peer review journals in which you publish your your research if you're uh going for a phd and you're doing serious university research you got to get published by these journals your career depends upon it so you got to write what these journals will accept what are these journals willing to accept what are their biases who's running these journals these journals of course are run by people just like you from the previous generation they're a little bit older maybe they're 30 years older than you they got their phds in a similar way you got your phd they also got their phd by writing articles and papers and doing research to be published in journals what are the standards of these journals what kind of epistemology do these journals have the editors at these journals how do we know we can trust these editors who educated these editors the same university system so you see what you're going to see here is you're going to see this sort of vicious circularity and this sort of deep profound incestuousness within human epistemology what i'm describing here is sort of a collective human mind if we take the mind of mankind as a whole as a species and the question is how do we know that this mind itself is not self-deceived what you are going to start to notice as we add more elements to this web is that every element reinforces and justifies in a circular manner every other element in a very self-serving way it's extremely self-serving when you really zoom out of this whole thing and you take a look at this massive social uh matrix it really is um quite obvious how the self-deception is created because who is there that's going to check this whole system who is there that's responsible for making sure that this whole system is not corrupt because you see the people who write the wikipedia articles are coming from the universities the people in the universities are coming from the schools the people who teach in the schools are coming from universities and the people who taught the people at universities who are going to go to teach the children in the schools they also came from universities and schools it's extremely circular and then people in universities nowadays will actually go to wikipedia and read wikipedia pages or kids in school will read wikipedia pages and take that as fact and reality and then they will use that to reinforce the university in the school system and then how do you even find a wikipedia page the only way you can find a wikipedia page is through a search engine like google how do you know you can trust google how do you know what the algorithm of google is that is serving you up these pages what if there are portions of the internet that you've never even seen in your life you don't even know they exist because google simply won't serve them up to you because what google serves up what is i mean google's a corporation what they serve up to you is the stuff that is most profitable for them to serve up to you there's no guarantee at all that what google is serving up to you is the truth google is serving up to you the stuff that it thinks is most popular their algorithm includes basically the predominant feature of the google algorithm what they serve up to you in the rankings is the highest ranked stuff is simply the stuff that gets linked to the most and who is doing the linking and how do you evaluate which links are worth more than other links for example did you know that google places way more authority on links coming from universities than it does from other sources so if if there's a dot edu domain name like harvard or stanford or oxford or something like that and it's linking to your website your website gets ranked much higher in the google search results than if you don't have those links a university link might be worth a thousand times more than a link from some random blog so the way that google actually ranks their websites i actually have a very intimate deep knowledge about this because i used to do seo for a living so i would i would actually uh study and gain the google search algorithms so um i have a lot of personal experience with this i would actually manipulate the search results to get my website to number one on the search results and i was very effective at it i earned hundreds of thousands of dollars doing that um uh it's a very technical very technical field and by the way google google search results are being manipulated constantly because it's a it's a trillion dollar business manipulating these search results so um people are manipulating google search results all the time they're earning billions of dollars doing this and the general public has no idea this is even happening you know a kid when a kid gets some school assignment he goes to google innocently he just types in you know about the holocaust or something or whatever and then he just gets some results and he just trusts the results he has no idea the amount of manipulation that went into manipulating those results now that doesn't mean that every result you get is bad or untruthful that's not what i'm trying to say you know i i'm i'm not trying to lay the ground here or the the groundwork here for holocaust and now that's not what i'm doing um i'm just saying that like you can't take this stuff for granted and you see anyways what the way that google determines um they have something called pagerank that they assign to every single page on the internet you know all the billions of pages every page gets a sort of authority number between 1 and 10 10 being the highest meaning that it's the most authoritative so a link coming from a page rank 10 web web page is a very very powerful link google actually has a list they've seeded their algorithm the algorithm the way it creates this page rank across the entire internet is that it actually has a list of thousands of what they call authoritative source websites and any link coming from one of these source websites basically seeds and creates the foundation for the authority that then gets spread out uh recursively across the entire internet through links so if you sort of think about each link as passing juice link juice passing authority one page passes an authority to another page by linking to it so if for example i own a very high authority website like harvard.edu and i link to some other page that's going to spread some of the authority that i have as harvard to some of those other pages and this is happening recursively throughout the entire internet and this in this way google determines what to serve up to you and then what you consider as valid as as true because you only look at the top like three search results you don't care about what's on page 10 of google search results right but then how did google create that list that initial seed list of a thousand top sources harvard stanford oxford cnn whatever you know they have they have a whole list of this stuff how did they create this list well this was done by humans at google so there was some sort of committee or panel sitting at google of people and they said okay we're going to determine that these are the most authoritative websites but how did they figure that out how do they know that what was the epistemology they had to determine that well of course the people at google are pretty smart most of them went to universities a lot of them went like to stanford the google founders are from stanford for what i can remember so of course they're going to have a natural bias towards putting stanford on their list and putting other universities on their list so you see any biases which are baked into the entire university academia system will automatically get baked into google search results and now influence the minds of every single human on the planet and what's worse than sort of a circular move what's going gonna happen is that then the people in the universities at stanford harvard oxford and elsewhere they themselves there are researchers and professors and academics there who they do research and when they do research what do they do they go into google and they type stuff in like if you if you're a researcher at a university and you want to know like you have some sort of research question you have the first thing you're going to do is you're going to go to google and you're going to type it and you're going to look for research papers that will pop up or something like that but what you're not going to notice is you're not going to notice that the search results that google serves up to you is already biased by what they got from universities so this is creating a question begging scenario a sort of a circular logic where the thing you're searching for is being validated by the place from which you're searching uh this reminds me of a sort of a funny circular scenario like that that happened with the like with the iraq war um when they were trying to justify you know invading iraq during the bush era uh they started sprinkling rumors of like weapons of mass destruction and so forth existing uh in iraq and then what happened was like there's some i don't remember all the details but basically what happened was like you know like dick cheney would get on the phone and call uh you know call the uh the cia and you know ask them hey you guys we need to are there like weapons of mass destruction in uh in iraq and they say well the intel is kind of murky we don't really know and he would say something like well you know get clear on the intel we need we need like clear definitive proof because this is serious this is dangerous and so you know that would put pressure on the on the intel guys to you know to conjure up some some proof they would you know do that and then meanwhile you know he would call like the new york times and talk to the reporters there and say hey you know guys uh you know the cia the cia is telling us that there's uh there's evidence of weapons of mass destruction in iraq and you know the reporters would hear that and they would say oh that sounds serious and then you know they would start writing up an article about that possibility and then dick cheney might call another reporter at like a different news outlet the washington post and say hey you know you know guys like uh have you read that article that's being written have you heard about the article that new york times is writing about potential weapons of mass destruction you know are you guys on top of that because you don't want to be like beaten by the new york times so then those people they knew the new york times people they would call new york times people say hey are you guys writing an article about that and they say oh yeah of course we are you know because they all know each other all these journalists and stuff you know it's a very incestuous industry they all know each other there's rumors there's gossip about who's writing what rumors spread through the grapevine very easily this way and so in this way you can easily sort of drum up a scenario where people start thinking like oh there's really weapons of mass destruction because all you have to do is you know place a couple of strategic phone calls and a couple of rumors and they all they all cross pollinate and then it starts to seem like it's real but where's the actual evidence for that well what happens is that you cite you know the new york times will cite you know um some anonymous intel guy in the cia and and then you know the washington post will will cite the new york times and then the new york times will recite the washington post and it's all going to be self-justifying in this way and because nobody sees the entire picture because every everything is sort of siloed and localized and everybody's just concerned about their little corner of this web of information or misinformation in this case it's like well i'm only responsible for the article i'm writing for the new york times that's what the new york times guy thinks and then the washington post guy thinks well i'm only responsible for the article that i'm writing here and then you know the ca the cia guy says well i'm only responsible for the cia stuff and nobody puts the pieces together nobody connects all the dots and sees the deception that's going on well likewise is happening for example with universities and what's really devious about about this social matrix is that at every step along the way there are incentives for you to play along and to not question the matrix so when you're going through school and you're in university and you're in academia what are the incentives there are grades that you get there's advancement that you get you get applauded for doing well in school and you get into arguments with your parents when you do bad in school they yell at you they ground you they don't give you the video games you want so very early on in your childhood you learn to do good in school and then how do you do good in school well by memorizing the they tell you if you don't memorize the things they tell you if you question things they tell you too much you're not going to have enough time to memorize the stuff they need you to memorize to get good grades so they're strong incentives to go along with the system and there's strong disincentives not to you also get credentials and awards you get diplomas you need diplomas in order to graduate and go on to the next level because of course you also need a job in the end our system is capitalistic and now we get into the next sort of giant chunk of this social matrix which is the economy you see education and media and the internet is intimately tied in with capitalism and with the economy in fact education is a giant business first and foremost the foremost aim of universities and less so schools but i'm there are many private schools that just are just for profit purely for profit but for universities i mean you would think that like harvard or stanford their number one goal would be truth and education right no of course not it's managing their giant multi-billion dollar endowments and also maintaining their authority and reputation you see the same thing that goes on in google with their search algorithms the way that the link juice and authority flows through every webpage on the internet the same thing actually happens before there was google this was happening just all across brick and mortar society every society that has ever existed from the dawn of civilization has had this dynamic of a flow of authority and reputation and status throughout the institutions of society certain elements of society are considered authority authoritative and credible and others are not so if some information is published on the nasa website you consider that authoritative if some nasa administrator gives a news conference where he's talking to journalists and reporters about you know their mission to mars or whatever um you're gonna take you're gonna generally believe that nasa guy because he's from nasa and you assume that well nasa wouldn't be lying to me because they have oversight boards and they have regulations and you know they they couldn't get away with it and likewise if if the dean of harvard tells you something you're going to take that as a fact most likely most people would if some professor with a with a with with three phds writes a book you're gonna give that book more authority than you are a book by by me for example and this is happening all across society of course there's disagreement about who's more authoritative but in general there's a hierarchy that's developed within society about credible sources and on credible sources and business plays into all this so a giant chunk of this whole thing is business right so what is researched in the universities is that which gets funded what gets funded what are the biases that go into funding something you know uh certain scientific experiments require millions and even billions of dollars of funding just to roll out a new drug a single drug might cost 50 or 100 million dollars for some company so are they going to roll out some natural drug a natural supplement or herb that they can't earn a lot of money on that they can't patent or are they going to be incentivized to only roll out the drugs that they can patent even though they might not be as cost effective and even just as effective and as healthy for you as taking an herb which costs five dollars rather than five hundred dollars for this drug you see and so these giant pharmaceutical companies which of course are billion dollar companies and all of these companies that are the big players in the economy these are companies that are worth hundreds of billions of dollars these companies have so much sway over universities academia schools they fund entire wings and departments in universities they fund entire school systems these companies do and do you think they're just doing out of the kindness of their own heart or do they have a financial incentive to maximize their profits of course they're maximizing their profits these companies have a legal fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to maximize profits so there's that and then of course we have the banking system we have money itself what is money after all but a social construction which is part of this social matrix we have the notion of money that we use to lubricate the exchange between all these different elements and institutions you're using money you know your parents are paying good money to send you to university or you're getting grants from the government to go to university creating incentives for you to go your teachers when you're young in school and your parents are already feeding you the idea that you should go to university it's going to be good for you and hey it's true if you go to university you're going to studies show that you're statistically much more likely to earn a higher salary when you're older once you graduate the higher your diploma the more money you're going to earn generally speaking so you might even take out some loans student loans your parents might take out some loans in order to help you to finance your education because they want you to get a good education then you got wall street another huge element of this social social network wall street basically determines where the money is going to flow to which element is in this social matrix the money is going to go flow to and wherever the money flows it's almost like blood in your body that's what uh wall street is sort of like in our society wall street is determining where the money is going to flow and where the money flows those parts of the social matrix are going to blossom and flower and you know grow and those parts that don't receive the money they're going to shrink and shrivel and die so if if blood doesn't flow to your left hand it's going to shrink and shrivel and die but then what about wall street is wall street concerned about the truth what is the epistemic and moral foundation of wall street it's laughable just even ask that question because all these all these uh wolves care about is just pure pure manipulation and money they have they have no moral ethical standards whatsoever they don't care about truth whatsoever they're gonna send the money wherever they can make the most money and that's what they do and that influences and skews and biases and distorts this entire social matrix you see and then as part of the economy i mean you as an individual i mean you're born into this life and then you have to like after age 18 you basically have to start to worry about well how am i going to pay my rent how am i going to buy my food how am i going to survive so there's a very strong incentive for you by the time you're 18 to start to play ball because if you don't play ball with this whole system if you start to question the system too much you're not going to be able to get a job how are you going to survive you see so what i want you to see is that this entire social matrix it's not just something that's happening frivolously this is how humanity survives collectively and individually it's a survival system it's an extremely sophisticated elaborate ingenious survival system and no element no individual element or person in this network understands or sees the network for what it is this matrix no one sees the whole picture no one sees the con game that's really going on here nobody sees this as a pyramid scheme nobody sees this as a house of cards but it gets worse we're just getting started here see we've talked about the education system we talked about universities we've talked about the economy how about science people think science leo we can turn to science as the arbiter of truth that's how we know what's really true is that it all sort of percolates down from science science is the ultimate authority source yeah well what justifies science's authority how do you know science is valid have you actually done any science in your life no all the science you know is just beliefs that you've accepted from authority figures that is the case and the majority of science that most professional scientists know so-called no uh is just also something they got from other authority figures in fact that is the that is the sort of game of science the reason scientists are so conservative and try to be so rigorous and are so fearful of pseudoscience and other sorts of woo nonsense is because their entire careers and reputations depend upon the authority and the credibility that they're able to maintain in a sense scientists are like women they have to pretend to be virgins because their survival depends upon it because no guy wants to marry a so even if a woman is a she has to pretend like she's a virgin well a scientist the same way you know so scientists play this game their entire lives where they are trying to be very very careful not to say something too outrageous because if they say something too outrageous they go too far out on a limb it's going to destroy their entire reputation if a scientist is disproven one too many times if they publish one too many research articles which gets disproven or debunked there goes their entire career so see this gives them a very conservative bias and the reason they need to do that is because deep down science is built upon because it's impossible for one individual scientist to do all of the science experiments themselves impossible they're too difficult too much technical expertise is required in too much time and too much money so what's required is that we distribute this problem over thousands of individual scientists so one scientist does one research study another scientist does another research study and then we can share the studies you know across each other and then we can both as though have knowledge of both studies without by only having done one of them that's how science fundamentally works except we're doing this thousands of times and distributing this across thousands of different individuals but you see the more you distribute it the less validation there is of every individual study so if you take any university professor or scientist and ask them how many studies have you actually personally validated in your own life it's going to be a handful 5 10 20 at most and then you ask them but how many studies do you cite and take as truth and use to build up your world view they will have to admit it's going to be thousands thousands and thousands and thousands of studies so see thousands of them are taken on faith and then five or ten are actually validated into personally by that individual and this is happening across the board and then that is getting percolated down through the the social matrix through the down the the hierarchy chain the authority the link juice sort of flows downwards and it infects the minds of every university student who then goes on because the university students they become the next generation of teachers then that any corruptions or errors that the scientists had they percolate down into the university students then those university students percolated down into the school system all the way down to the kindergarten level and then of course people who go to these universities they become the politicians they become the ceos they become the managers the business leaders they become the next generation of teachers of professors of internet entrepreneurs all these people generally they went to university all of this is constructing within the mind a sense of reality and by the way as all this is going on nobody in this system is questioning what's going on at the epistemic level the word epistemology is not even mentioned in the majority of classes books and even scientific discussions many scientists will treat questions of epistemology or metaphysics derisively as though this is some sort of frivolous armchair philosophy and speculation and that science doesn't need epistemology science doesn't need metaphysics this is the general attitude and then the attitude is even worse outside the university system if you start talking about metaphysics or epistemology to a ceo or to a business person or to a marketing person or to a politician or to a person running a non-profit organization or to one of these tech entrepreneurs at google or the guy running wikipedia or youtube or facebook or whatever you start talking about epistemology they don't care at all that word is not in their world view it is not in their lexicon much less metaphysics they don't care about metaphysics they don't care about truth all of these people are participating in a game of survival they care about their bank accounts they care about their children and their family they care about their friends their care they care about entertainment and having fun and they care about sex and they care about buying fast cars and yachts and they care about being famous and they care about making progress and breakthroughs in their technical work they don't care about truth they don't care about bismarck they don't care about metaphysics they don't even basically care about society as a whole they're not holistic thinkers they're only concerned with their business you know the people at google are only concerned about google they're not concerned about the whole world they're not concerned about the entire epistemic framework that is informing all of mankind they don't care about that the professors in their university at harvard they don't care about the the health of the entire ecosystem of the education system they don't care about that they care about harvard and even there it's probably even more local than just caring about harvard most of the professors at harvard probably only care about their little department within harvard if you're a physicist at harvard you don't care about all of harvard you only care about physics the physics department and even there you might not even care about the physics department you might only care about the uh you know like the nuclear physics department if you're a nuclear physicist you might only care about that sub sub field and you might only care about your own personal work and the research paper you're going to publish to you know next quarter and not even your little department and you certainly don't take any responsibility for the epistemic ecosystem of all of society if you're a professor scientist phd researcher ceo business owner educator teacher celebrity public intellectual entertainer artist filmmaker musician you're not taking responsibility for the entire social matrix you don't even know this is a thing you're clueless about all of this but it gets worse see how does mankind even know where mankind came from through history stories and myths that's all we basically have how do you know history is true i mean after all it is just basically a chain of humans telling other humans what happened effectively sure you can find evidence you can find evidence of like uh you know archaeological evidence of pottery and weaponry and ancient cities you can unearth those and validate some things here some things there but do you really know like how do you how do you know that julius caesar was assassinated by his senators how do you even know that's true where'd you get that information from of course you got it from some authority source that you uh trust it's hearsay it's just hearsay and who where they get it from well they got it from some other source it's here say on top of here say on top of here say it's a hierarchy of hearsay that's the majority of what human history is and most of it is taken for granted but what about the biases of the people who are relating the information what about the interpretive distortions that their minds are putting on this information because every mind that is holding these stories and myths is interpreting in a different way has different agendas that it has different biases that it has it's reporting some things correctly other things incorrectly there's distortions exaggerations many things are left out which are inconvenient those people who were killed they don't even get to report their side of the story and of course there's a constant whitewashing of history because human history is so savage and brutal and ugly and devilish that every group has to whitewash its own history because otherwise they would just be transparent devils your ancestors would look like villains so every race every ethnicity every culture has to whitewash their history to you know pretty it up polish it up put some lipstick lipstick on that pig um before you present it to the children so that your children grow up with a sense of pride in their culture and their lineage and their history and their culture and their people there's also many cultural elements to this social matrix ceremonies rituals holidays various prestiges and awards that you get as playing into this social matrix there are many norms and taboos within the social matrix taboos for what kind of sex you're allowed to have and not allowed to have what's moral what's immoral what you should do what you shouldn't do what's respectable what's not respectable what's allowed in polite society and what's not you know as you start to climb the social hierarchy you want to really become somebody in this world in the society you want to become someone rich someone famous someone powerful someone who has access to important people in the world you have to play by their rules play their game you have to subscribe to their norms you have to be polite to them you have to be nice to them you have to treat them well you have to kiss their ass you have to blow smoke up their ass and then they'll reward you otherwise they'll ostracize you and shun you and maybe they'll even do something nasty to you they might ruin your ability to have a career by gossiping about you behind your back locking you out of some industry virtually every industry is deeply incestuous whatever industry you're in people in that industry know each other gossip to each other constantly the top players in the industry all know each other they all network together they go to conferences to seminars to workshops they have mastermind groups they go to country clubs they socialize they play political games with each other they build social networks with each other these social networks then are used to advance themselves and enrich themselves giving them access to money power sex friendship and many other of the basic core needs of a human psyche also part of this social matrix is food and cuisine what kind of food you eat and this is deeply tied in with business and with the economy because the kind of food you put into your body affects then how you're able to think how conscious you're able to be but the food that is widely available is the lowest quality most toxic and poisonous food that there is the cheapest food every restaurant every fast food place that you go to from your birth till today has been feeding you poison inorganic food full of artificial additives trans fats carcinogens god knows what else pesticides heavy metals and you might think well but what does that have to do with a social matrix well but you see the restaurant industry the fast food industry the supermarket industry all the food that is marketed to you on television and on youtube and throughout ads everywhere from coca-cola to mcdonald's to whatever else this is all part of the social matrix and it's all part of business billions of dollars are earned in this way by feeding you this toxic food which then corrupts your mind's ability to make sense of reality you get hooked and addicted to this food because that's of benefit to those people who are selling you the food which brings us to the next huge part of the social matrix which is the advertising system this is huge and i've talked about it before in my episode called the deep problem of marketing go check that out um but to cover it briefly here basically the entire epistemic ecosystem that we as a species have today is deeply influenced by marketing and advertising literally trillions of dollars are spent every year around the world on marketing and advertising campaigns these marketing advertising campaigns are designed with scientific laser-like precision to trigger your limbic system and your deepest fears and anxieties in order to get you to buy that you wouldn't otherwise buy and to behave in irrational emotionally driven ways whether it's food gadgets technology sex alcohol weed nowadays in america is starting to be advertised pharmaceuticals or defense contractors or big oil companies all the ads you see everywhere think tanks do advertising political advertising all of this is influencing what you think is true what you believe what you know about the world and about reality and about what's right about what's wrong and do these marketing executives and people doing these marketing campaigns do they care about the health of the epistemic ecosystem do they care about truth do they care about consciousness do they care about love no all they care about is getting you to buy their that's all they care about and if their kills you they don't care no sweat off their back at all and their marketing and advertising to children all the time starts with toys and then food and then everything else and your children as they're growing up from age two their minds are being brainwashed with this advertising as they're watching cartoons as they're playing their video games as they're online they're seeing banner ads youtube ads for all sorts of toxic dysfunctional untruthful distorted biased stuff and this is all influencing the development of your children's minds and this is happening like a drip drip drip drip system it's happening for 20 years your children are getting brainwashed with this and hey i mean this happened to you too not just your children but it's happening to you too you're you're already you're already a slave to this whole system you see um and this has influenced your tastes your desires your values your fears your anxieties these ads in very subtle and unconscious ways in such ways that you don't even know what your authentic values are or would be without this advertising you don't even know what kind of food you would eat if not for all the food advertising that you've received over the last 30 years of your life you don't even know you don't even know what your life would feel like without eating this garbage food for the last 30 years of your life see you think that oh leo i'm depressed and my life sucks that i can't follow up on my life purpose and i can't do anything i'm demotivated and i can't meditate and i can't do spiritual work and i need to take all these medications for my adhd and my depression and my autism and all this sorts of stuff and my mental illness i gotta take all this medication and see you think that that there's so where do you think that came from a large majority that came from your lifetime of just eating shitty food most of your health problems came from eating shitty food for so long and you've been so brainwashed you don't even understand that what you're eating is poison because it's been marketed to you as great stuff healthy stuff hey it's low fat low calorie free of trans fat it's all natural it's organic it's organic so how can it be bad for you well it can still have heavy metals in it it can still have pesticides in it but leo organic food has no pesticides oh yes it does organic food can have more pesticides they just have to be organic pesticides just because it's an organic pesticide doesn't mean that it won't cause cancer in your body or it won't give you depression or it won't throw your hormones out of whack or give you an autoimmune disorder see but you see when food is being advertised to you on tv like when mcdonald's is advertising to you their big mac are they telling you what's really in the big mac are they truly informing you about what's in there are they telling you how many calories are they telling you the ingredients are they telling you the quantity of heavy metals of pesticides of other things hormones are they informing you of the effect this has on your body on the possibility of cancer on your immune system on your capacity and ability than to to fight with diseases and viruses are they telling you any of this no they're only telling you what they need to tell you to get you to buy it because if you truly were shown the full picture if you were given all the information about a big mac you would never put it in your mouth so the entire advertising system is designed to deceive you and to misinform you that is the sole function of advertising is to misinform you to such a degree that you will then buy whatever is being sold so literally you're being lied to every single day by youtube videos by tv commercials by radio ads by podcasters by celebrities by people on twitter who are doing sponsored tweets by the sponsorships from your favorite public intellectuals most of your public intellectual favorite public intellectuals probably have a podcast and on their podcast they probably do ads and sponsorships that they got paid for but of course they claim oh but leo i truly genuinely believe in the value of this product i wouldn't advertise something i didn't believe in the only kind of sponsorships i take are the ones i really believe in right that's what you tell yourself but the stuff you believe in is precisely what serves your survival again it's a self-justifying system you're going to believe in whatever is going to help you to get money fame power sex love approval all of the basic needs you have as a human that's what you're gonna believe in and of course your boss you're probably gonna have a boss your boss where did he get his worldview from your boss went through the same system you went through maybe he's a bit older than you but not that much older and he went through the same system he also got brainwashed by marketing and advertising he also went to university he also uh watched the similar youtube videos that you watched and participated watch the same movies you watch participated in the same you know it likes the same celebrities you might like and listens to them listens to the same public intellectuals so he's basically got the same worldview that you do he's participating in the same social matrix alongside you and now if you want a job if you want to survive in the world you have to please your boss you can't piss him off you can't have a worldview that's radically different from his that contradicts his because if your worldview contradicts his that's going to get him to start to question his worldview and he's not going to like that it's not going to feel too good for him besides which his worldview as a boss is completely soaked with with notions of capitalism because it serves his survival his whole business is built upon exploiting labor this is baked into his worldview so he can't have ideas put into his mind that somehow what he's doing is wrong that somehow he's too greedy or he's hurting the environment or he's polluting and corrupting the political system with his lobbying efforts if you work at facebook or google or youtube as just a programmer an employee can you go to your boss to your head executive to the ceo of your company and tell them something like hey you know what i love working here but um but the kind of lobbying that our company does in the government um to get subsidies and to get government contracts and to get special perks and bonuses and tax cuts uh for for corporate for large corporations i think that's immoral and unethical and illegal even it should be illegal what's gonna happen if you tell that to your boss you're gonna get fired the next day they don't want somebody like you around you see so just by the fact that you have to have a boss and just have to live i mean you don't have to have a boss you can be your own buzz but uh but that just pushes the can down the road because if you're gonna be your own boss you're competing against other bosses essentially like if you start your own business you think oh leo i can avoid all this i can start my own green high conscious loving business that cares about truth and epistemology and and metaphysics and i'm not going to lie to anybody i'm not going to you know deceive anybody i'm going to be totally truthful oh yeah how are you going to survive how are you going to survive this ecosystem when everybody is advertising how can you compete with that you're going to go out of business very quickly that's what you'll discover or you're going to quickly learn that you can't tell the truth you have to play by the same rules that those guys are playing by which means you gotta engage in lobbying you gotta engage in bribery you gotta engage in capitalism because you're competing against others who also are you got to pay the lowest wages you gotta evade every possible tax you can after all all your friends are doing the same thing so what's wrong with it all your country club friends all your millionaires and billionaires that you're friends with they're doing it too and they don't think there's anything wrong with it so maybe there's nothing wrong with it that's how you start to think and then there's charities and non-profits you might say well leo i'll just go into into the non-profit sector and i'll avoid all this nasty stuff that's related to business oh yeah will you really the charity sector and the nonprofit sector is perhaps even more corrupt than business businesses today giant businesses and multinational corporations are using charities and non-profits in order to launder their reputations because now what's starting to happen is that collective consciousness is rising so much we're starting to see how toxic this success of capitalism is that companies just can't be bold faced unreal pet and capitalists anymore now they have to now they have to do a little bit of a veneer of like oh we care about the animals we care about the environment we care about pollution we care about racism we care about lgbtq issues we care about uh democracy and so forth and you know we care about the starving children in africa so we're going to donate 10 million dollars to this nonprofit charity organization which is helping kids in africa and you know we're goldman sachs or we're boeing or we're lockheed martin or we're exxon mobil and look we're not we're not these selfish corporations we actually care about uh humanitarian issues we donate millions of dollars and see that money gets fed into the non-profit sector and then those people who go into the non-profit sector thinking they're going to avoid this giant corporate business corruption um but then all your funding for your non-profits where are you going to get your money you're going to get it from those from those guys who have all the money you're going to get from the millionaires and billionaires because little people who are barely you know scraping by you know wage slaves they're not going to donate a lot to your to your chair your non-profit most of this money for your charity is coming from for millionaires and how do they get it by participating in this system and of course they're going to only give you the money if you treat them nicely if you give them perks if you thank them if you kiss their ass if you blow smoke up their ass and so in this way that money will crawl into your non-profit and corrupt your nonprofit and then your nonprofit will adopt similar values to the businesses because your nonprofit has to survive too see the common denominator beneath all these actors and agents and systems and elements is survival every one of them is struggling to survive and not just the people but also the institutions do so the university professor is struggling to survive the high school teacher is struggling to survive the guidance counselor at the elementary school she starts struggling to survive the the doctor he's struggling to survive the politician is struggling for his survival the ceo is struggling for his survival the stockholders are struggling for their survival the retiree who invested his retirement savings in the stock is struggling for his survival which leads us to technology the next element of this whole matrix is technology what kind of technology is developed who develops the technology the businesses of course technology usually requires a lot of money that money comes from the giant businesses those giant businesses earn the money through massive advertising and marketing and so the technology gets developed is the kind of technology that is easiest to market and to advertise and what kind of technology is the easiest to market advertise is it the healthiest the most conscious the most truthful the most loving the most scientifically accurate no it's the one that pushes all of your emotional buttons so even the very technology we developed is biased and corrupt and then that technology you see it feeds in to the social matrix so the kind of technologies that become the most popular are not just one-off technologies but technologies that can reinforce this entire game the internet the smartphone social media twitter youtube twitch virtual reality all of this expands the depth and juiciness of the social matrix making it more difficult to see and to escape it makes the social matrix even more mesmerizing and all-encompassing when you put on those virtual reality goggles and then the first thing that comes up is the facebook logo and some advertisement thanks to facebook before you enter your virtual world you see that is already the social matrix shaping your epistemology what you know what you believe as true what you value what you desire what you fear and it seems so innocent like well it's just a facebook logo and just a one ad you know how bad can one ad be and vice besides this one ad is it's something i like it's an ad for a coke and i love coke yeah because you've been brainwashed with ads for coke for the last 30 years see that's the that's the trick with brainwashing is that once you've been brainwashed it's like stockholm syndrome you uh you start to actually love the thing you've been brainwashed with you sort of think that like well if i'm brainwashed with something it's something nasty that i don't like but no the whole point of brainwashing is that you get brainwashed enough then you start to like the thing that's actually bad for you it's like being in an abusive relationship it's bad for you but you'll love it too much to quit it's like a drug it's horrible for you it's destroying your body and your teeth and your career and everything else but you can't stop which leads us to the next big piece of the social matrix which is government of course laws courts the police the prison system the military system the intelligence system the intelligence apparatus taxation empire subsidies government contracts regulations the entire notion of a country you your epistemic worldview actually believes you're living in a country you were born in some country you actually have a national identity that you have identified yourself with you're american or you're japanese or chinese or russian or german whatever you are this infects your self-image it infects your political beliefs and ideas along with that national identity comes a a national history and a legacy of course which has all been whitewashed most of it is not even true but nevertheless you've been brainwashed with it in school they taught you if you're an american they taught you to recite the pledge of allegiance or to sing the national anthem they taught you about the founding fathers and how great they were of course didn't really mention the raping of the slaves and all that so much and then we have political parties we have lobbying we have think tanks there are entire multi-billion dollar think tanks whose sole purpose is to shape public opinion about homosexuality abortion church and school or prayer in school rather corporate lobbying the military environmental issues and many other things and they do this through advertising through youtube channels through facebook ad campaigns through articles on the internet through blogs through their own hiring their own journalists even developing their own entire news network i mean fox news is basically a a propaganda machine of the right wing it's a multi-billion dollar propaganda machine do they care about truth objective reporting metaphysics epistemology i mean it's laughable it's laughable to even ask these questions nobody there cares does anybody at cnn care about metaphysics and epistemology no they don't care you see everybody is so preoccupied with their little local corner in this matrix just struggling to survive you know even like a cnn anchor who earns 10 20 million dollars a year he's just struggling to survive at cnn i guarantee you he's struggling to survive every day he wakes up and he's just struggling to survive you might think leo that's crazy these people have so much money and success and fame they're not struggling oh yes they are it doesn't matter how much money you have the struggle is all the same in fact the more money you have the more fame you have the more responsibility you have as like a public figure as a news anchor or something you know there's a lot of pressure on these news anchors they feel it i'm sure they feel it every single day it doesn't get easier actually gets harder because the stakes are higher if you had a billion dollars you would be waking up in the morning and worrying about where do i invest my billion dollars so it's not lost how do i avoid taxes on this billion dollars how do i prevent my children from being kidnapped because i have this billion dollars now i got to put my children to a private school i got to get security cameras i got to hire bodyguards because when people find out you got a billion dollars there's a whole new set of challenges that arises you see so with the government piece see the government is completely made up of the people who are players in this social matrix all the people who vote to elect people in the government are people who have been brainwashed by this social matrix completely it's the teachers the university professors the doctors the scientists the business people the marketers the advertisers all of them were brainwashed by the system and all of them now go and vote and then not only do they vote but they participate too they volunteer or they get elected they run for office or they become the judges they become the police people they become the military people they become the intelligence people they become the tax collectors they become the regulators they become the politicians and then they govern but what place do they govern from are they governing from a place of concern about the epistemology of this whole system or the metaphysics or caring about truth or love or consciousness no they're also just barely struggling to survive as a politician or as a bureaucrat and they have been so brainwashed through the marketing system the business system and all this the school system and by science they've been so brainwashed by the culture that now the laws and policies they're going to pass are all going to be the kind that reinforces this system so they will make it such that even to question the system could be made illegal you could be put in jail just for questioning the system too much for example there are laws that have been passed in certain states i don't know exactly which states i think in most states actually that it's illegal to videotape to take a video camera into a slaughterhouse in america that's been made illegal isn't that the perfect example of the how the social matrix operates you see this is the perfect nexus point the sort of incestuous nexus point between corporations the food industry government lobbying capitalism marketing and advertising all of those things interconnect to lead to this one specific instance of this law that you can't take a video camera into a slaughterhouse why not because if that video footage gets out and it percolates through this social matrix then people are going to be horrified at where their food comes from and then that's going to be bad for business bad for stockholders bad for people who invested in those stocks you know their retirement savings and so forth might cause problems for politicians because then people who will be angry the politicians aren't doing anything about this and that they're sort of in bed with these corporations this sort of stuff um and then and then even as an individual even the individuals in the system don't want this because they're going to be disgusted because they don't want to know how the sausage is made you like your sausage and you don't want to be shown a video on your favorite tv show of how your sausage is made because you enjoy your sausage and your sausage by the way is part of your culture it's part of your cuisine you actually have a mythos the social matrix has developed a mythos in your psyche about the lineage and ancestry of these sausages and how how wonderful your ancestor ate these sausages and it's part of your culture and your heritage and every thanksgiving you eat one of these sausages and it's so good and the whole family comes around and eats the same sausage and now all that is spoiled yeah these are our traditions which are being spoiled so of course we're going to pass a law against that you see how this works so notice that even though for what i'm describing here in a sense is a sort of a conspiracy theory the ultimate conspiracy theory might say but the difference between this and the dumb conspiracy theories out there is that here we're not offloading the problem onto any group of people or elites i'm not saying that this is being done to you by some nefarious group of reptilians or something like that i am describing a force of nature like gravity and that force of nature is survival this force of nature like gravity is not exclusive to jupiter or to mars every object in the universe exerts gravity the more mass they have the more gravity they exert likewise this force of nature that i'm describing called survival it's not limited to elites or to billionaires or millionaires or greedy corrupt politicians this force of survival is in every human and it's proportional to the amount of self and ego that you have it's proportional to the amount of attachment and fear that you have and it's inversely proportional to the amount of consciousness that you have and so i'm not saying that you are an innocent bystander in this system i'm saying you're a participant in this system you're a player just like everybody else around you as a player so don't go blaming and pointing your finger at the at the billionaires they're just like you these billionaires went to the same schools i mean they went to private schools but you get the idea i mean they basically got the same cultural memes infected into their mind as you did not that not that different from you in fact they might be more evolved than you many of them are but we haven't even mentioned the piece of the matrix which is religion every nation every culture has a predominant religion that influences that culture this is true all around the world it's true even in so-called atheistic countries like uh soviet russia uh supposedly you know secular china it's still influenced by religious ideas spiritual ideas of the past um scriptures sayings these uh you know various quotations holy books this informs the morality and ethics of of the social matrix both in positive and negative ways and most of these moral norms and standards and ethics are not questioned these scriptures are not question how do you know these scriptures are true how do you know the church is true how do you know these sayings and quotations are true did you validate any of them yourself no you were just uh indoctrinated into it another further piece of this social matrix is language language itself the very grammar and lexicon and vocabulary that you use to think shapes the pathways that you're able to think down the kind of distinctions you're able to make the concepts you're able to hold the ideas you have this language is programmed into you from age one basically you learn to think in this language and of course language changes over time this entire social matrix is constantly evolving morphing and changing every generation what you're able to think language changes influenced by religion by spirituality by science by education by academia by government by politics by culture by art by entertainment all of this influences language and language in the opposite direction influences all of those so again it becomes this very incestuous sort of cycle there are certain ideas that you can't even think because you're so locked into the social matrix of your culture and your language and your society you haven't been giving the vocabulary to think these things and then we have the piece of the social matrix which is your closest relations family relatives friends and co-workers basically all the people you hang out with face to face have fun with go to parties with socialize with as you're doing all that you want to maintain all these people in your life because they're a source of happiness and love for you so you don't want to upset your family too much you don't upset your friends too much you don't want to set your co-workers too much you have to work together to maintain a family or a circle of friends so that there's peace and harmony there at work too and how do you do that by believing in the social matrix because all your friends do all your family do all your coworkers do they've completely bought into it hook line and sinker they don't question at all and as soon as you start questioning it they quickly put you in your place they tell you oh that's that's dangerous don't question that what are you doing stop wasting time that's just philosophy that's just metaphysics epistemology that's some just you know be normal stop being weird stop rocking the boat you've noticed this if you try to talk to some of your friends or family about some of the stuff that i teach here with self-actualization they quickly put you in your place and you're afraid to lose them if you start questioning the system too much how are you going to get along with your family at christmas time at thanksgiving how can you still keep your friends if you realize that you're putting poison in your mouth every single day from the food that you're being advertised and you stop eating that food how can then you go out for lunch or dinner with your friends if you realize that your job and your in the place you're working at is having a corrupt influence on government or on society on people through advertising through marketing through lobbying through technology you know bad technologies whatever you can't even share that with your co-workers because your co-workers then are going to have seeds of doubt in their mind and they're going to start to feel bad about the work they're doing they don't like that they don't want to feel nobody wants to feel bad so your co-workers are going to look down on you for you know causing trouble at work when you start to question these things because they don't want their job endangered it's like what are you doing questioning our boss you know our boss is paying our paychecks every month and i gotta pay for my kids school and lunch and medical bills i can't worry about lobbying and i can't worry about the kind of toxic that our company dumps into the rivers and i can't worry about the unethical advertising campaigns we do i got to worry about my children going to school that's what i got to worry about that's how your coworkers think any social gathering you go to is also a part of this social matrix clubs bars parties country clubs banquets expos conferences workshops seminars and all of the conversation happening these social gatherings what is it going to be it's all going to be within the social matrix if you go to one of these social gatherings and you start talking about some of this weird stuff outside the social matrix people are going to look at you like you're crazy and you're not going to be able to fit in in that environment so you got to play by their rules talk about the same shallow stuff they talk about can you talk about metaphysics and epistemology at these places no can you talk about consciousness and love no another aspect of the social matrix is etiquette dress and fashion gender role sexuality where did you get your sense of fashion from where did you get your ideas about gender and sexuality from what's polite and what's impolite you got all this from the social matrix you didn't invent the stuff yourself you weren't born and then you you said yourself you know what i'm a man so for me it's wrong to wear high heels and therefore never wore high heels that was brainwashed into you and you never questioned it see you weren't born and then said to yourself well it's wrong to have sex with animals no you have not spent a single moment of your life seriously contemplating the ethics of whether it's right or wrong to have sex with animals you just know it's wrong because that's what was brainwashed into you and anything other to that you think is weird crazy criminal evil and useless to even think about of course another huge part that we have we should have mentioned earlier really is the healthcare system medicine the healthcare system pharmaceuticals i touched upon pharmaceuticals earlier uh doctors this is a huge part of the social matrix so where do you get your ideas of what's healthy and what's not healthy of what chemicals are drugs and which ones are not drugs how do you even know what a drug is where did you get the idea that you should listen to your doctor that your doctor is not some fool giving you bad advice but you see your doctor went through this entire social matrix through 12 years of schooling through four years of you know bachelor's education through another four years of md education and then did residencies and all this other stuff has come out that whole system completely brainwashed by the social matrix and furthermore the giant pharmaceutical companies come by the doctor's office every single week with their advertising campaigns pamphlets and free samples and give them out free samples and then the of various kinds of new drugs and then these doctors they go to conventions and they go to to ski resorts and other things that are hosted by these pharmaceutical companies to advertise more drugs to them and then they sell those drugs to you is the doctor sitting there and thinking about the entire epistemic ecosystem of the medical healthcare industry please it's laughable the idea is laughable are these doctors actually themselves doing any real science no not a single doctor does serious science where do all these doctors get their information through google through books through research studies all of which are completely co-opted by the social matrix and then perhaps we'll start to wrap it up here the last element of this social matrix that we'll talk about is the sort of the mental health health system therapy psychotherapy this is also all part of the social matrix how do you know what is sane what is insane what is healthy and what is unhealthy mentally speaking also from a sort of doctor a doctor of the mind a psychologist a therapist and where did this guy or gal get his his knowledge about the mind from about what's healthy and unhealthy for the human mind he got it from the social matrix and does the social matrix actually know what's healthy and unhealthy for the human mind no in fact mostly what it considers healthy is actually deeply unhealthy for the human mind this entire social matrix does not care about health it never has it cares about survival so you might actually start to question the social matrix to the point where you start to question your own sense of reality and you might even start to get a little bit nihilistic and depressed about it and you might say well maybe i should go to a shrink and get their advice so you go to a shrink and you start talking about some of the stuff that i'm maybe you heard me talk about before [Music] and when you explain all this to the strength the shrink will say there's something wrong with you why because this shrink went through the whole same system so and the shrink in order to maintain his shrink practice has to be bought into the system therefore she or he is going to automatically defend the system because the shrink can't admit to themselves that everything they learn about human psychology is is predicated upon lies and deceptions that wouldn't feel so good to realize so what you have here now what you can see is you have this tapestry this tapestry of these fibers i've been describing these individual fibers to you and we've been sort of interweaving them together the reality is that even as much as interwoven interweaving as i've done here for you it's still not enough to really communicate how tightly woven the tapestry is like this and it all reinforces each other it's a house of cards it's a house of cards and the reason we're talking about it is because this is how you have constructed your entire sense of reality life morality values norms ethics political ideas economic ideas sexual ideas business ideas and this is why it feels so real the biggest challenge with getting people to deeply question their epistemology and their metaphysics and their worldview is that the mind cannot even imagine how it can be so self-deceived what i'm saying is that even your idea that you are a physical biological being made out of atoms and cells and molecules that you were born to a mother and a father in the 21st century that even that i'm talking about the very physics of your reality i'm saying the physics of your reality are are coming from this social matrix and the idea that it's not coming from the social matrix is itself part of the social matrix and the idea that it's dangerous to question the social matrix is coming from the social matrix and even my communication to you about the social matrix must come to you through the social matrix because the social matrix has so deeply taken hold of your mind there's no way for me to get to you but through the social matrix and my game is to show you that you can break free of the social matrix you can become conscious of the social matrix you can transcend the social matrix but it's going to be a lot harder than you think because it's so ubiquitous it's so deep it's so interconnected it's so all-encompassing what else is there one of the biggest ways in which the social matrix maintained its hold over you is that it simply doesn't allow you to see any alternative you can't even imagine it shapes and and constrains your imagination itself it's almost like they have that foot binding that old traditional foot binding in in china or in japan i forget in the asian countries they did this foot binding for for women where you know the cultural standard was to have these little feet and so they would bind the feet to the point where they would bind the feet of little girls where it was like you can find videos or pictures of this online it's pretty disgusting with a foot is just they will take like a little baby foot of a little baby girl and they will bind it up such that the foot can't even grow as the skeleton is maturing and developing such that the woman go grows up with these disgusting distorted grotesque you know baby feet um that's like what your mind is like i want you to picture that little baby foot go go actually pause right now pause this recording go to google use the social matrix see we kind of use the social matrix to help you break out of the so we got to turn the social matrix on top go to google search for chinese foot binding or whatever it's called find that picture look at that picture as you're looking at that ugly foot i want you to picture that that's your mind that's your imagination that's what the social matrix has done to you epistemically and metaphysically to your epistemic and metaphysical imagination that's what it's done to you and now start to wonder what it's going to take to undo that because that's been happening since your birth and although your mind and brain are more flexible than a foot they're not that much more flexible ideas and beliefs and worldviews and paradigms that get programmed into your mind especially from the age of 1 to 10 those are really really difficult to change they get cemented into your mind it can be changed but just appreciate the challenge here now don't get me wrong i am not saying that everything in the social matrix is and everything is wrong i'm not trying to cast doubt on literally every fact i'm not trying to make you paranoid in the sense that you can't even go to google now and or read a wikipedia page and trust anything there that itself would be a delusion if you adopted that kind of attitude that's not the point here so be careful nuance is required this is not some sort of simplistic conspiracy theory that i'm presenting to you again what i'm describing is the force of survival especially at the intellectual and conceptual level you see survival is not just a physical activity physical survival for humans is mediated by something much more important which is conceptual survival so this whole social matrix more than just being a bunch of physical institutions like physical buildings at a university or you know military bases around the world or corporate headquarters around the world more than those the social matrix is software more so than it is hardware it's the ideas it's the ideologies it's the dogmas it's the paradigms the assumptions that are held within the minds of all individuals on the whole planet the software is running the hardware but also the hardware is running the software it's a two-way street but actually the software is more fundamental than the hardware which is why humans are so defensive about their software are so defensive about their belief systems their paradigms their ideologies and you see this you see if if you just want evidence that what i'm telling you is true you might wonder like well leo how do i know i can trust you because after all you say don't trust the social matrix but you're part of the social matrix so how can i trust you well this is where you have to do a little bit of self-investigating self-validating the way you discover that what i'm telling you is true is simply by first of all looking around you very objectively and just noticing all these things but secondly it's your interactions with people when you go to people and you start to question their attachment and belief in the social matrix watch their reaction watch how they react the way they're going to react is exactly as i am telling you because this is a survival game they are going to react in a defensive manner to protect their selfish agenda and you will see this across all industries all segments of society you will see this on wall street you will see this in government you will see this in every political party you will see this in every non-profit organization you will see this in any corporation you will see this from every ceo you will see this in the military you will see this in the university system you will see this amongst scientists historians philosophers academics teachers doctors lawyers everybody your therapist your friends your co-workers your family everybody even the random strangers you meet at a club or a bar everybody your boss your religious guru or preacher or teacher rabbi or priest you'll even see it in the self-help field which is supposedly supposed to help you with this stuff you'll even see it in spiritual circles you'll even see it in non-dual teachings and teachers so so the way you test this and validate it is that you push you push against the social matrix that's try at school try pushing a little bit against the social matrix at your university with your research colleagues you know in the science department at the physics department you know push a little bit on the social matrix and and you'll feel it push back and you'll also notice the the indifference that all these folks who are engaged in this social media that all the indifference that they have towards what's really going on you try to explain this to them and they're not going to see the big picture and they're not even going to care and that's how you really know that something is deeply wrong here because they're not even going to care they're not even going to take these questions and this issue seriously they're not going to give it the time of day you see they're not going to think about epistemology or metaphysics they're not going to care they're going to have excuses they're going to tell you they're busy or they got work to do or they got articles to publish they got kids to feed or they got this to do or that to do or money to make or something else they got a project do they have a deadline they have this and that nobody is willing to stop and actually look at the epistemology and the metaphysics of the thing or this is a favorite one that they'll use is they'll say ah that's not my problem that's that's outside the scope of what i do you know i'm just a humble physicist i'm just a humble doctor i just i'm just a therapist i can't be concerned about these big questions so test go test go test don't believe me if you believe me in the same way that you've been believing everybody else in this matrix then then yeah you're going to keep being stuck in that matrix escaping the matrix can't happen at the level of the matrix escaping the matrix is not about believing more stuff the way you have been escaping the metro matrix is a meta function go see my episode called what it means to go meta it's a meta function it's a structural thing not a content thing go see my episode called content versus structure this is a structural matter you got to see the structure it's a holistic matter go see my episodes about holism and holistic thinking you got to see holistically you got to connect dots here the whole reason you got mired in this matrix in the first place is really one thing you haven't been thinking independently for yourself almost at all in your life have you you've been letting others think for you you've been going along with the herd and the reason you have is because actually thinking true thinking original thinking is difficult work and you're mentally lazy and you have been your entire life you don't actually want to do the serious contemplative work of examining and inquiring into the nature of reality in life and what's really going on in society and science and religion and spirituality and philosophy and medicine and nutrition and how to live a good life you don't actually want to do the the leg work because that involves serious labor mental labor you got to burn calories doing that you got to rack your mind doing that see you just rather have the answers given to you and as long as you take that attitude you will you will forever be stuck in the social matrix the only way to recognize and to break free of the matrix is to start to think very deeply independently methodically without any biases very truthfully very self-honestly about what's really going on and you have to think from scratch thinking from scratch means you don't take anything for granted that means you don't take for granted that you're made out of atoms you don't take for granted that you were born to parents you don't take for granted that science is true you don't take for granted that you're a man or a woman you don't even take for granted that you'll die one day because all of that came from the social matrix and you can't really know any of it for sure this is what i'm describing here this is the beginnings of true skepticism not the kind of skepticism that you see others doing where they cherry pick little things and they skepticize about that thing or that thing that they don't like this this form of skepticism the way you know you're doing real skepticism is when it when it pains you to do it because as you're doing it all of your favorite illusions are crumbling because you see the way the social matrix got created is through a set of incentives and disincentives that are tied deeply to your we might say psychological or biological needs however you want to say it as an ego your ego needs safety security shelter food love approval friendship even things like relaxation and enjoyment your ego needs these things so these are the hooks that the social matrix uses to take over your entire mind it's done through peer pressure which begins in kindergarten and preschool already the peer pressure begins there and then continues throughout your entire schooling and university days you're constantly being peer pressured to conform to the system it happens through brute force memorization indoctrination throughout your entire schooling system and vocational training system a blind acceptance of what adults say you've been blindly accepting what adults say for the majority of your life it happens through explanations and stories and myths that your parents and teachers give you as your a little kid trying to ask questions about the nature of reality they give you stories and explanations and myths that are all inadequate and you foolishly accept their their silly explanations for what's really going on it happens through the linguistic categories that are baked into the very language that you use and then of course all of this ultimately ties to the the the linchpin the linchpin of all this is your need for love and approval this is how they get you this is how they get your mind the reason it's possible to brainwash any mind is because every mind needs love and approval to survive and to be healthy and so when you're when a mind grows up in a dysfunctional environment that mind will absorb the dysfunctional environment and those values because if it doesn't it's not going to receive the love and approval that it needs to survive so it basically is forced into this bind this existential bind of like for example if you grow up with racist parents they're gonna in a sense force you to adopt their racism because if you don't they won't approve of you and they won't love you and because of this you too will become a racist you see how it works and then that's going to get exacerbated by the books media internet entertainment and art that you select to enjoy and to imbibe all of that will reinforce all of your biases that you got from your parents and your education system and furthermore you're going to have a sense of family obligation and loyalty your family will make you feel bad and guilty for not being loyal to them and so will your friends and by the way so will your co-workers for that matter and your colleagues like for example if you go into into the sciences and you become some scientist with a phd and then eventually you know you start to question the entire science system you sort of deconstruct all of science eventually your colleagues will start to feel like you have betrayed them that you've stabbed them in the back so there's going to be social obligations and loyalties placed upon you no matter where you are and people will explain expect you to play by the game of the social matrix and not to question it because the social matrix is ensuring the survival of the entire human species you see and so while it might seem frivolous or kind of silly here or there um actually this is a this is a a matter of life and death and by the way it doesn't matter what country you were raised in it doesn't matter where you're whether you're in a first world developed democracy or you're in a third world uh you know hell hole somewhere um the social matrix is there it's a different social matrix and today we're having a more globalized social matrix we have sort of a meta-social matrix which is incorporating all the smaller more localized parochial social social matrices that are found in nations all across the world and we have sort of now this new you know western overarching internet culture which is connecting everything together it's all the social matrix some of them are more healthy than others some of them are more developed i'm not saying every culture is the same some are more developed um some are more functional some are are more dysfunctional nor don't don't make this mistake nor is it possible to completely live outside the social matrix so even though i'm sort of presenting this possibility here of breaking free of the social matrix you might start to wonder well leo how do i do that first of all and second of all what would that look like to be totally free of the social matrix well that's the that's the trick is that you can't be totally free of it because you're part of a society a human being is not an individual a human being is part of a super organism in the same way that the cells in your body can't live by themselves you can't rip out one of your cells and have it live very long by itself the cell requires the whole body it requires the blood the heart the brain and also sorts of stuff to make it work likewise an ant an ant can't survive all on his own i can't can't just say you know this ant colony i'm just going to go it all by myself in the woods the ant will die very quickly likewise with humans so transcending the social matrix is a is a tricky proposition because at the same time you're transcending it but also you're in it you're always in it you're like a fish in water and you can't live outside the water you can jump outside you can see what's outside there but you gotta you gotta come back and you still gotta swim in the water and so you might say well well leo you're such a hypocrite because you're talking about overcoming the social matrix and yet here you are on youtube you've been criticizing you here you are on youtube and your videos have advertisements on them and you sell a life purpose course and you charge for money and you're a capitalist and blah blah blah blah blah look how big of a hypocrite you are um but what i'm saying here is much more nuanced and sophisticated than just something like that you're gonna have to keep playing the game of survival you can't avoid being social you got to get your food from somewhere you can't make all your own food you can't hunt all your own you know animals you can't make all your own technology you can't like so it's it's tricky because unlike certain things in life where you can just quit cold turkey you can't quit society called turkey you might say well i can go live in a cave yeah maybe but you can't really even live in that cave all on your own where are you gonna get your food your water it's gonna have to come from society and if you have some illness you're gonna have to get some medication from society even the the transportation you take to get to your cave will have to be a plane a train a car a bicycle it came from society so this myth that you can be this a rugged individual all independent and self-made it just it it just it's a fantasy it's a childish fantasy so that doesn't work uh and besides which i'm not it might also sound to you here like i'm making a case for like society being evil and bad and that we need to destroy society you know somebody might listen to this and say okay leo well then this is this is a great justification for like starting to bomb stuff like the like the oklahoma city bomber or something you know like anarchy is the way we got to destroy the government man and like no no that's complete delusion that's not what i'm saying i'm not justifying any of that generally speaking and this might sound now paradoxical it's uh i think mainstream society is the way forward there is no way forward other than through mainstream society so the way the way we solve this problem is not by avoiding it by by going deeply through it you go so deeply through it you come out the other end so you can you can start to question the social matrix and you can start to untangle your mind from it that's really what i'm talking about um i'm not advocating any kind of political action here or anything like that i'm talking about internally starting to think for yourself really what we're talking about here is independence of thought start to contemplate reality for yourself stop taking on these assumptions and this knowledge for granted start to validate things for yourself start to figure out what's actually true rather than just believing random people or authority figures become sovereign in your sense-making that's what i'm talking about here as you do that that will free you somewhat from the shackles of the social matrix at least it will free your mind it doesn't mean it will free your body and your entire life you're still probably gonna have to go to work you might still have a boss you might still have friends and family that's that's fine i'm not telling you to leave your family um you can still participate in social activities i'm not also telling you to be a recluse here where i'm saying don't socialize don't go to a bar don't go to a club don't have sex i'm not saying that i'm saying free the software of your mind first and then watch how that changes your life your life will start to change in gradual subtle ways some of them will be minor some of them will be significant don't worry so much about that worry more just about freeing your mind first learn to think straight learn to see clearly and then whatever the consequences of clear vision are just embrace those you're not going to be able to predict what the consequences are of clear vision there needs to be a sort of just a faith a blind faith in in truth in the uh in the value of truth just in the value of clear perception if we think of this entire social matrix as a as a cloud of smog clearing your vision i mean obscuring your vision then what i'm advocating is clearing that smog and then seeing what's there without the smug and then act accordingly try to live your life in such a way that you don't contribute to the smog now you can't live your life perfectly where you never contribute to the smog you're gonna contribute to it here or there it's uh it's not about perfection it's a matter of improvement just do the best you can so that you're not um in the pool so to speak this is difficult to do not very many people break free of the social matrix or even ever realize what it is it's difficult to do because it's threatening it's scary and goes against all the incentives and disincentives that are there from a purely sort of a survival physiological survival perspective the incentives for playing along with the social matrix are money approval friends love status fame and various kinds of rewards or rather awards sex luxury fun entertainment power control over others and a sense of purpose and meaning this is what the real payoff is from playing this game this is how the game hooks you and you might wonder well leo that sounds great what's wrong with that what if i just play the game like everybody else you could do that that's what most people do 99 of people do that that's exactly what the system was designed for but maybe you want something more out of life than those things maybe you can intuit that there's something more to be had from life maybe there is a higher purpose maybe there is a higher meaning a transcendental meaning maybe there is truth with the capital t maybe there's love with a capital l maybe there's consciousness with the capital c maybe there's genuine happiness with a capital h which cannot be found within the social matrix because after all if happiness if genuine happiness in any way depends upon access to genuine truth then you're never going to find in the social matrix because the social matrix is not true it's a self-constructed survival mechanism it's a house of cards it's a self-deception so you have to wonder what are the costs of self-deception do you think self-deception has no costs if you think that you're a fool and you should join your fellow fools in this game you'll be happy but if you're too wise and too intelligent to think that if you could intuit that self-deception must have a cost falsehood must have a cost you might figure maybe you don't want to pay that cost maybe that cost is too great maybe you don't want to live a false life maybe the false life is fool's gold maybe it seems like it's going to work it seems like it's going to pay you off with money and approval and status and fame and sex and luxury but maybe these things aren't all they seem maybe none of them will satisfy you maybe the only thing that will really satisfy you is the truth the real truth maybe that's what's missing amongst your family and friends and co-workers who are living their life like zombies maybe there are hidden costs to living life unconsciously maybe also humanity needs to evolve and wise up collectively and clear up this collective delusion otherwise we're going to crash and burn as a species and maybe you don't want to participate in that foolishness maybe you want to be part of the next wave the next generation the next evolutionary developmental step of mankind which recognizes all of these internal contradictions and deceptions and takes responsibility for them and starts the process of cleaning it up collectively and individually it has to start at the individual level but then once you clean yourself up a bit you can start to work on the collective level and hey maybe that's maybe that's what mankind has been doing for the last couple thousand years it's just a slow very drawn out gradual process after all we've come a pretty long way from the dark ages we no longer use leeches we we don't burn wishes at the stake anymore we don't stone homosexuals anymore we don't have slavery anymore we don't have child labor anymore we don't have uh 80 hour work weeks anymore we've removed many superstitions we used to have we're not as violent as we used to be so we've made progress and what did that progress entail maybe that progress entailed cleaning up this social matrix evolving the social matrix into something better and maybe it's not about destroying the social matrix but improving it maybe what human civilization evolution is about is about birthing a collective hive mind which is truthful selfless conscious and loving and that then this collective hive mind is what guides all the individual minds who are born into it up to its level rather than dragging them down lifting them up and then who knows what this collective hive mind could turn into in a thousand years and five thousand years what it could become with technology and with virtual reality and with brain implants and neural links and whatever else is going to happen dna and gene splicing and crazy stuff is going to happen who knows where that ultimately evolves to and leads to it certainly seems like society is not just a mistake it's not just an aberration it's not just a cancer on this planet even though it might seem that way sometimes maybe you can intuit that society is like the next stage of what evolution is doing sort of like evolution evolved first to like live in the ocean as little single cell organisms then there was a quantum leap in evolution from single cell to multi-cell organisms that was a radical change and then from multi-cell organisms to like actual animals like a fish that was a huge quantum leap for evolution into something a higher order and then even those fish those individual fish they evolved into something like schools of fish working together that was like a leap as well a social domain was evolved and then and then beyond that you know we got mammals and stuff and then beyond that we got humans and that was sort of a quantum leap above the animals and maybe there's a quantum leap that comes after humans and maybe humans are actually conscious participants in that next quantum leap and maybe you are going to be one of the major early players in that quantum leap just being able to see it with your mind already is part of that leap because most humans are such zombies they're so brainwashed that they can't even see anything beyond themselves or their petty little life they don't see something bigger going on here so this is all part of this endeavor and project that i call jail breaking the mind i've spoken about it in the past deconstructing the mind this is part of that you can't jailbreak your mind without really deconstructing this social matrix the social aspect because most people just don't appreciate how much their individual mind has been influenced by the collective mind and you might wonder what do i get out of it in the end what does it all lead to and the thing is i could tell you but i don't want to tell you because the truth is that if i told you you just believe me and that would just be more the same so see it's not enough for me to tell you what you'll get out of it you have to want to discover that you see if you're living in old europe old world europe back in the 1500s and somebody like columbus comes to you and says hey let's you know i'm going to to the america i'm going to the west to the americas there i mean you can call them americas but uh let's say the americas uh come with me and you would say well what's there you know tell me what's in it is there going to be gold is there going to be diamonds what am i going to get out of it and and the truth is i mean he could he could tell you some stories some pretty story about gold and diamonds and things but you can't really believe him the truth of the matter is is that you don't know you don't know what's gonna what you're gonna get out of it maybe you're gonna drown at sea maybe a giant octopus kraken will will devour your whole ship you don't know that's a very important aspect of this work is not knowing and discovery and exploration and the willingness to go out there and to explore consciousness and this whole attitude of some authority figure like me telling you why you should do something because you're going to get x y z and to clearly articulate it for you and to feed you a little uh you know story that that that that plays right into your ego like you're going to get sex and money and food out of it or something um that's already antithetical to the kind of attitude you need to really figure out what reality is because the whole endeavor of figuring out what reality is is to stop expecting others to give you the answer see that's what got you so locked into this matrix in the first place is you just kept asking people the answer they kept giving you answers and you just kept accepting their answers and then 20 years later your mind is completely full of all these silly answers that you haven't validated and now it prevents you from exploring the rest of reality and now you're stuck so something different is needed to transcend uh and one of these things is a stop expecting easy answers and rather than that follow some certain principles and intuitions right your intuition is actually a very powerful tool you can have an intuition about for example the value of truth the value of exploration and discovery for yourself the value of independent thinking the value of questioning deeply profoundly you can have intuitions about these things i mean honestly i don't know why most people don't it's baffling to me like when i was when i was young when i was 10 15 years old i just naturally nobody needed to convince me of the value of truth of the value of of um of understanding a thing of contemplating a thing for myself independently it was just obvious to me that these things had inherent value in them and that they would lead to something important in that if i didn't do that something would be lost and problems would arise the value of epistemology the value of metaphysics you should intuit the value of these things and if you don't it's kind of hard to help you honestly because it all starts there the value of open of radical open-mindedness you should intuit that too the value of wisdom the value of living your life by certain principles the value of integrity the value of clarity the value of of living your life beyond merely survival can you intuit some of those you're not going to know what exactly that's going to lead to per se like one of the lessons and principles of life that i've discovered is that you really to live a good life you have to plan a bit less of it and to expect less of you know what's going to come to you and just operate based on certain principles and intuitions that are very fundamental and then let life unfold from there and just trust in those principles and intuitions and don't try to micromanage your life too much in terms of like oh well but will i earn money or will this happen or will that happen i want to be exactly in this place in 20 years like no life is far too rich and mysterious and uh counterintuitive to be able to plan your life out 20 years from now in this kind of simplistic way it's much better to improvise you gotta part of learning to to live a good life is learning to improvise but the way you improvise is not just by being chaotic and just doing random dumb things throughout your life every day it's sticking to principles you stick to principles and i've shared many of those principles with you throughout my my videos and and those principles are what constitutes wisdom so that's the social matrix i hope it helps you to see to explain how a profound self-deception is possible within you because how would you even know you're self-deceived to know that you would need to have some sort of foil against which to see yourself you need a mirror to reflect it back at you otherwise you couldn't see it but what happens if there are no mirrors what happens if part of the self-deception is to break all the mirrors so that you couldn't see yourself that would be the deception within deception and that's exactly the function of the social matrix is to hide all the mirrors because if every one of your peers and friends and relatives and colleagues and celebrities and authority figures and teachers and gurus everybody you look up to everybody who loves you and who you love if all of them are doing exactly the same thing as you're doing and participate participating in the same self-deception mechanisms collectively then how would we ever know that we're doing that that's perhaps one of the biggest doubts you should have about the entire enterprise of human civilization is that you see human civilization is in a very dangerous position epistemically and what i mean by that is that we are one species we don't know any other intelligent species that we can communicate with that is more advanced than us that could teach us lessons about how to structure our civilization and about the direction our civilization is going in and about our understanding of reality right we can't go to a lion and ask the lion to help us figure out if our model of reality is correct like you can't ask the the lion am i made out of atoms or am i fooling myself do i have a brain or am i fooling myself was i born to humans or am i full am i even a human or am i fooling myself right you can't ask that of a lion um so by virtue of the fact that we're just one civilization at this point as far as we know that's a very dangerous epistemic position because you see we can ourselves to almost endless degrees collectively as a species and there would be nobody to tell us that we're wrong the only people who could tell are the only the only beings who could tell us that we're wrong is ourselves a lion is never going to tell you that you're deluded only you only us humans can tell ourselves that we're deluded that we're deluding ourselves but that assumes that we actually care about the truth if we don't care about the truth collectively then we will keep deluding ourselves forever until we start to care and if it's inconvenient for us if it's uncomfortable for us to admit that we're deluding ourselves that we have been for thousands of years then we're just going to keep doubling down on that problem see that's one of the deep epistemic quandaries of existence is that in a certain sense because existence is one reality is one consciousness is one it has no other authority it can turn to to ask it if it is deluding itself and in this way the sovereignty of consciousness and reality ends up being self-constructed and it gets itself trapped in its own imaginings and fantasies that's precisely that's not a mistake that's actually a deep feature of of oneness oneness is sovereign by definition because there's nothing constraining it and nothing else defining it so if you as oneness turn to where where are you going to turn to to get a definition of who you are and what's right and what's wrong see there's nobody to turn to but yourself the only one who can tell you what's right and what's wrong what's true and what's false what's meaningful and what's not is you but the question is are you gonna carefully contemplate through that to get to the bottom of the truth of it or are you just going to sort of accept some sort of superficial answer or are you going to construct some imaginary other an imaginary authority figure out there who you will defer that sovereignty too so it's like you say oh leo i'm not smart enough you know i want to be humble i'm not smart enough to really know what reality is i can't really figure it out you know the physicists know more than me the scientists know more than me i'll just defer to them but when you're deferring to them what that implies underneath that there's a deeper implication which is that if you're deferring to somebody else that means you already know you can trust that person but what you should recognize that you can't trust that person because you don't know if you can trust that person because if you knew that you could trust that person you would already know what's true and what's real what's deception what's not but that's begging the question because you don't know that you start life with total ignorance you don't know who you can trust that's the whole problem if you knew who could be trusted and who couldn't there'd be no problem but the only way you could know who you could trust is if you already knew everything about the universe because the only way you can validate whether you can trust somebody is against your knowledge of the entire universe like if some preacher tells me god exists i can either believe him or not how am i deciding whether to believe this this preacher well based on my own intuitions about what i think is true if i happen to lean in the direction of thinking that god exists then i'll tend to believe the preacher because what he's saying matches up with my intuitions if i lean the other direction i think that god doesn't exist and he tells me that god does then i will judge the preacher as being wrong right but this assumes that i already know whether god exists or doesn't exist which of course i don't to begin with so because i don't know that i don't know whether what he's telling me is correct or not and that is the fundamental problem of epistemology is that you don't know and you don't even know what is the right way to know and what is the wrong way to know because how would you know that and you can't even ask somebody what's the right way to know and what's wrong way to know because how would you know that what they told you is correct and so here we are now in practice what people do instead of going through all of this complicated philosophical contemplation is they just they just take everything for granted and they just they just buy whatever first idea is lodged into their mind by their culture which means they don't think deeply about anything and all i'm telling you here is just to start thinking deeply about stuff for yourself question question question but when you question make sure you question in an unbiased way because the biggest danger here is that you're going to start to question stuff but you're going to do it in a cherry-picked way where you're going to question in a way that just validates all of your pre-existing prejudices and biases that if you're going to do that don't even begin questioning because you're going to just drive yourself deeper into your delusions you're going to make yourself more convinced of your own deceptions by doing that so the questioning how you do the questioning is is crucial it has to be done selflessly if you question selfishly you're gonna drive yourself deeper into delusion so one of the deep connections you should start to see is that between truth and selflessness why might these things be connected somehow well what you'll discover if you are real serious about pursuing the truth is that the biggest obstacle to getting the truth is selfishness because as soon as you're selfish now you have attachments to things and you have biases and you have preferences you have things you like and things you don't like things you want to know and things you don't want to know well if there's things you don't want to know and it turns out some of those are true how will you ever come to know them because you have a preference not to it pains you too much see so if you're too attached to being comfortable if you're too attached to being selfish you're never going to be able to recognize the truth and so to get to truth you have to be very ruthless with yourself about all of your own personal sticking points attachments biases twisted ways of thinking preferences fears pet attachments intellectual inclinations all of those are going to skew and distort your perception of reality so the real obstacle here is not other people it's not some elites out there somewhere it is you it is yourself you are your own greatest enemy in this game of self-deception and the reason that i don't take other conspiracy theories very seriously as uh some have criticized me you know some people are like leo why don't you take some of these conspiracy theories more seriously i thought you were open-minded leo i thought you were interested in questioning stuff and then you come out with some of these positions and episodes of yours like you did with your conspiracy theory episode where you sort of dismissed all these conspiracy theories flippantly very flippantly and you weren't willing to entertain them very seriously and this this just makes me doubt everything that you're doing here epistemically well well now maybe you can understand where i'm coming from the reason i don't take all of the conspiracy theories that are popular in pop culture too seriously is because they're all part of the social matrix number one and number two is because there's only one conspiracy theory that that matters and that i care about which is the social matrix see i'm not interested in the little stupid peanuts conspiracy theories i'm interested in the mother of all conspiracy theories i'm interested in the conspiracy of selfishness which has soaked through our entire civilization from its very inception that's what i'm interested in that's the only conspiracy theory i care about the conspiracy of egotism and human selfishness and bias that distorts mankind's perception of reality that's the only thing that matters the only kind of deception i care about is self-deception everything else is a distraction everything else is a deception within the deception that is just reinforcing the singular self-deception which is the heart of your worldview that's what really matters if you can unravel that gordian knot then everything else will become clear and also in a certain sense irrelevant so in this process you have to be very very careful about distractions because very quickly as you start to question society and reality there's going to be so many different avenues and threads that your mind can go down it's going to be like a branching tree with infinite possibilities and so the problem is going to be you have finite time finite energy finite contemplative capacities you can only think for so long every day and you have only so many days to think in your life so you are going to have to develop some sort of heuristics or intuitions about how to focus your mind on the things that really matter there's a lot of things going on within the social matrix that don't matter that will seduce your mind and cause you to waste years and years pursuing that little triviality while losing sight of the big picture so for me one of my principles in life is get the big picture get the big picture nothing matters more than getting the big picture if you get the big picture right but some of the little stuff wrong you'll be okay but if you miss the big picture it doesn't matter how many of the little things you get right you will always be deluded for me this was a deep intuition from an early age that this was true and that this informed then my strategy and my approach and my priority in figuring out reality so i looked upon all the different things i could study in the world and i quickly realized that the most important thing for me to study and get right is the epistemology because if i don't get the epistemology right i can't get anything else right if my epistemology is an error if the method i use for knowing anything has any distortion in it any corruption in it that means everything i know will be corrupted i figured that out when i was like 15 years old so for me that's just obvious i don't know i hope it's obvious for you and then of course if it's obvious for you you got to act on that what are you doing about that don't just realize that and go back to playing video games what are you doing about it to realize that is to see how significant and important it is to actually do something about it and to get this right and so then that's what i spent a lot of my time doing i started reading books and studying philosophy and contemplating stuff on my own and figuring stuff out and then that's the path i recommend for you the point of these teachings is not for you to blindly believe me the point of these teachings is just to demonstrate to you the possibilities that then you go and pursue for yourself you gotta validate the things that i say because you don't know it's true don't just assume that what i'm saying is true i could be wrong i could be self-deceived for all you know i could be biased what's beautiful about the mind if you use it properly and most people don't but if you you use it properly there is the possibility of the mind clarifying itself this is a beautiful property of the mind if your mind is open if you genuinely care about the truth if you really care about clarity if you really want to get to the bottom of what's going on and you're serious about it you have that intention if the intention is there and it's genuine and you're willing to work for it and you're not just lazy there is a real possibility of using your mind to clarify your mind this is a sort of a bootstrapping process of the mind the mind can bootstrap itself this is a beautiful and amazing thing that this is even possible because you might wonder how can the mind discover what's true at all how come the mind is just not just lost amongst all these different possibilities and ideas and beliefs how is it possible that one can get to the truth well the answer is actually it's so simple it's too simple really it's too simple to believe the answer is that you all you really need to go to the truth is just the intent to do so the desire you need the desire you need to desire it more than anything else and if you have that then that desire will guide you you see that desire will will force you to be brutally honest with yourself and that really is the only obstacle to truth it's just a a lack of self-honesty and a lack of uh willingness to question all of your own assumptions and um prejudices and biases because it's painful and uncomfortable to question them because as soon as you start doing that you'll realize how selfish you are you're a selfish that's what you'll quickly realize and that's exactly the thing you don't want to realize it's how selfish and biased you are and so one of the biggest obstacles to doing this work is just the fact that as you start doing it you start to realize that you're a monster how monstrous your mind is how utterly disgusting you are how ugly your mind is how how much it's filled with the lies you tell yourself your own fantasies and illusions right so it's really just a willingness to cut through all that and and why would you want to do that because you want to get to the to the truth because you actually want to know what's true don't you want to know wouldn't you want to know or do you want to do you want to live for the rest of your life um be clouded in in in in in your own drowning in your own see and then if you think that there's no cost to living a life where you're bullshitting yourself all the time well that's that's the mother of all right there you better believe there's a cost all right that's it we're done here please click that like button for me and come check out actualize.org that's my website on the website you will find resources to help you on this journey you will find my book list over 200 of some of the best most profound books i've read many unique books that you won't hear about elsewhere sort of niche stuff not mainstream stuff which will help you on this journey that book list is really mandatory if you're gonna try to escape the social matrix uh my life purpose course can also help you out to clarify your mind and your values and your get a sense of direction your life's a little bit more practical than the things i've been talking about here less metaphysical in its nature what else can you find you can find my blog where i share resources and videos frequently every week make sure you check that out you can support me at patreon.com actualized thank you for any donations there you can find my clips channel called actualizedclips with short little snippets that you can share with your friends and family rather than these giant monsters and uh now you might be wondering but leo you didn't tell me you didn't tell me how to escape the social matrix what are the steps i should do well in a sense that's sort of what my whole channel is about um everything i talk about ultimately revolves around this uh i wanted to sort of do a big picture thing here with this episode i didn't want to get caught up in the nitty-gritty details of techniques to use and stuff like that but um i mean i have many episodes which talk about the techniques that are necessary for this so go check out my episode called um developing introspection that's huge for this purpose go check out my episode called contemplation and how to contemplate and how to contemplate using a journal so the contemplation technique is huge for this of course meditation mindfulness practices are huge for this uh what else have we got psychedelics of course will quickly bust you out of the social matrix at least for a while um and many many of the other techniques that i've shared and just in general really using your mind properly i really need to do an episode where i just teach you how to think there's especially this problem within spiritual circles where thinking is demonized uh because it's like oh it's all about shutting down the mind and reaching nirvana by shutting off the mind i mean that that can be good that's how that has its usefulness but man people just don't know how to use their minds very well and i even see this amongst so-called enlightened and awake people and spiritual people is that they still just because you're awake does not mean that you know how to use your mind well learning how to use your mind is a is really a an art and a skill set that needs to be trained up and it's not trained in school because in school they teach you how to memorize stuff they don't train you how to use your mind properly and the key to using your mind properly is you got to be able to see how your own mind is deceiving you while you're using it that's the whole devil of the mind is that it's a it's not like a hammer or a screwdriver which is like a simple thing that doesn't deceive you when you're using it it's it's a very self-deceptive sort of thing so i'll have an episode in the future about how to think properly some principles and maybe some techniques about that um but uh i hope this episode got you to take epistemology a little bit more seriously and has cast some some profound doubt on your world view so if you really understood what i was saying here the conclusion of it like you might say well what's the practical consequence of all this the practical consequence is that you should now have a sort of a foundation for doubting everything you believe and you should take that doubt very seriously and if you do then then you're going to be motivated to follow up on it and then to sort of get curious like well if everything i believe could be wrong now i want to know what's true and also i want to kind of find out which things are wrong and which things might may be right probably not everything is wrong so now this this gets you going on this journey and um of transcendence of jail breaking the mind and then um another episode that i will point you to of mine is called um how to find out what's true go watch that and then take action on these things this is not just theorizing the theory needs to connect with action action might mean reading some books busting out a journal and contemplating for an hour uh talking to some people finding some teacher advanced teachers to talk to asking some questions formulating a list of questions going on a meditation retreat you know stuff like that so get to work on that make sure you're connecting every one of my advanced metaphysical episodes to something practical something that's going to actually lead to changes in your behavior otherwise it's going to turn into mental masturbation and this will actually end up backfiring on you you need to act on the things i talk about or you're going to get very deeply paralyzed and trapped inside your own doubt and nihilism and skepticism and it's not gonna it's not gonna be constructive or productive so remember that the things i talk about need to be connected with something constructive you're doing in your life overall even though i talk about deconstruction a lot you know deconstruct this deconstruct that my approach to life is constructive very very constructive the purpose of the deconstruction is to then clear the ground so that we can do some healthy construction on top of it some conscious construction so don't get the idea that i'm against construction i'm against building a beautiful society or something no no no not at all you can build a society you can build a business you can build a family you can build a government these are all necessary and beautiful things if done correctly consciously when you know what you're doing but to really be able to construct something first you have to be able to deconstruct it you