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it's Leo for actualised org and in this episode I'm going to talk about why people seem crazy [Music] you this topic here is a lot deeper and more profound than you might initially think just from hearing the title this is one of those foundational topics what I want to do here is I want to convince you to change your model of people and you do have a model of people you use this model to explain why people are the way they are you also use this model to dismiss certain people certain individuals or certain groups of people entirely and by doing so you rob yourself of some important understanding and also you agitate yourself so this is an important and quite practical matter to look into but we have to look into it at a very fundamental level there are two basic models that you can use to think about people one is that people are all the same and the other is that people are all different most people hold the first one they hold that most people are the same and this creates problems for them I used to hold this model myself for a long time and just in the last year or two I've had to make changes I had to change my model because I've studied so much diverse stuff so many diverse perspectives that it's no longer tenable for me to hold that all people are the same it just doesn't hold up to empirical facts especially when you start to study the edge cases of human beings this model sits very deeply in your mind usually you don't think about it it's there as a default position and of course our modern 21st century culture likes to tell us that everybody is equal because we have this drive towards democracy towards egalitarianism and that's a good thing we don't want to go backwards on that but one of the bad consequences of that is we start to look at everybody as though they are wired like us and this is an assumption which turns out to be false so let's explore this sameness model I'm going to call sameness model and then I'm going to call the other one the difference model throughout this episode so let's explore the sameness model and what it really entails and what its full consequences are the problem is that we don't really understand the consequences of some of these paradigms that we adopt unconsciously the sameness bottle basically says that hey I'm a person here's how reality is for me here's how I feel here's what happiness feels like here's what sadness feels like here's what anger feels like here's the stuff that angers me here's the stuff that outrages me here's the stuff that hurts me all this kind of stuff and then I basically think that everyone else must be the same way because hey we're all human beings it kind of makes sense that human beings basically all function the same after all we do communicate with each other and we're able to make that work so the famous model says that hey all those other people out there my friends my family my co-workers employees all this kind of stuff that they're all basically wired like I am and that makes sense in a sort of naive way another assumption of this famous model is we assume that we all live in the same physical reality we assume that there is one canonical physical reality and that human beings tap into that reality in the same way and so that this one reality is responsible for all our sensations and perceptions and that's why everything fits together so well we can communicate with each other and we can do stuff together we can coordinate this because we live in the same reality that's a deep assumption here it should already rings some bells for you that we'll need to make an assumption that's this grand you better have some proof to back that up because it might not be the case that reality works that way we can't take that for granted and then the famous model says so if people are wired like me but they don't act like me and they don't think like me then that means there's something wrong with those people they are misbehaving because for them to behave properly they would have to act like me you're using yourself as the measure the metric the yardstick and then what you do is when you find people who are really misbehaving you call those people crazy criminal evil stupid lazy or even animals you will put them into a separate category from yourself you're not going to give the dignity of being human to those people you'll call them savages or barbarians and of course humankind has done this for for millennia we know that from history books but also notice that we still do it today if someone acts completely out of the norm we will call them one of these dismissing labels we have to because if we hold the model that everyone is basically the same the only way that can work with empirical reality is if we deny and cut off the edge cases of human beings and this becomes a problem because these edge cases sometimes are not just merely edge cases like one or two crazy individuals sometimes this is thousands of individuals millions of individuals so we have to be very careful about that it shows us that our model is too limited for the available data set that we're trying to explain and one of the things that I'm really interested in is the biggest possible understanding that I can have of life and of course that means I have to understand human beings and why they act in some of the crazy seeming ways that they act why do human beings act this way why do human beings fight why do human beings argue and debate for hundreds of years and nothing is resolved why does this happen I'm interested in understanding this phenomenon and what I've discovered is I can't understand this phenomenon using the sameness model just does not work now what about the negative consequences of this model let's consider these the negative consequence of having this limited famous model is that it leads to a fundamental misunderstanding of people it puts us into an adversarial relationship with foreigners and by foreigners I don't just mean people from third world countries or some indigenous tribes in the rainforest somewhere of course those are foreigners to us and usually we crinkle our nose at their customs and their habits and behaviors that makes sense but as foreigners I'm talking about something more broad here I'm talking about anybody who basically isn't wired to think and behave like you you will consider that person a foreigner and you will not be able to successfully interact with that person because you're not going to be able to appreciate understand their perspective because you basically believe that all human beings have the same fundamental perspective on life with minor differences sure you allow for people to have different beliefs different opinions within reason you allow that but if someone has a radically different perspective on reality you your model doesn't allow that you see and that becomes a problem because in reality people do have radically different models of reality and perspectives than you do and a really poignant example of this that I like is even in your own family this can happen so for example if you're a father or a mother and you have a child your child most likely will come out and have a similar perspective to you and will be wired mostly like you and in that case this problem is not so obvious but it's also possible the child could be wired very differently from you for example they could have a different sexual orientation than you do they could have a mental illness they could have depression or they could have anxiety they could have physical addiction problems with alcohol with drugs and these things could be part of their actual brain wiring part of their brain chemistry they can be schizophrenic they can be [ __ ] so all of these these are just minor examples of the radically different wiring that your child could have even though they have the same genetics as you basically but the way those genetics are expressed can be very different in practice and what will happen there is that now you're going to have a problem as the parent because you're going to try to educate and teach that child the way that you were taught by your parents and the way that you think is right but see you're coming from your own perspective and you're not going to be able get along with this child because you're not going to appreciate its needs its fears its anxieties and its perspective on the world and so of course that will lead to to a very troubling relationship and cause you a lot of suffering and now that's just one point an example now take that and extrapolate that out and start to see that this could happen not only with your child but also potentially with your spouse with other members in your family with distant relatives with your boss with your employees with the students that you teach if you're a teacher with your customers with your favorite role models these people could all be wired differently than you so making the assumption that they're wired like you and that you can communicate with them in the way that you would communicate with yourself or with a peer group who is very similar to you that you've surrounded yourself with that's a dangerous mistake you can see how that can create a lot of friction and a lot of problems simply because your model doesn't accommodate for the fact that hey this student that I have or this particular family member or my boss they really are living in their own separate bubble their own reality and I need to be to a certain extent accommodating of that I don't me to live in their reality myself but I at least need to be able to step in their shoes and see life from their perspective otherwise we're going to have irreconcilable differences and this of course is where tribalism comes from so tribalism is this this idea that humans surround themselves with their little tribe of like-minded people who are all wired the same all believe the same all act the same and then they go to war with neighboring tribes who act a little bit different so this is happening of course on the collective level and it's leading to a lot of war and violence everywhere around the world so that's a problem but then also it's a problem in your personal life because what this leads to is a lack of acceptance and compassion for people who are radically different than you because fundamentally you expect everyone to be like you and if they're radically apart from you in their opinions and in their behaviors you're going to think that they are less than you or perhaps not even human or you're just going to dismiss them as just some crazy deluded person not realizing that maybe there's something of value to understanding their worldview something you could learn there so the negative consequences here are that it creates frustration for you it creates anger it creates blaming criticizing creates hostility arguing debating and ultimately violence and could leave you lead you to committing evil upon such people to mistreating these people because as soon as you label someone is crazy or criminal or an animal or lazy or deluded this now opens the door for you to treat them very poorly and we see how this has played its course throughout human history this is one of the chief causes of all of the evil that has been perpetrated by human beings upon human beings is because of this problem right here and you see that throughout history as humanity has evolved and we've become more democratic generally speaking our minds have also opened we've become more tolerant of a cosmopolitan perspective and as we do that we're able to get along better and also we feel better about ourselves because when you are no longer fighting to maintain your little sameness model of humanity and you open up to a different larger wider perspective then you no longer need to be defending your position so much because you've already seen that your original position I wasn't tenable and you've given it up and you've broaden your perspective and now your perspective fits empirical data much better so what's the alternative to the same astana it's the difference model and what this entails is recognizing that every individual is genetically unique recognizing also that there is enormous genetic variety among humans and not just between races and ethnicities but also genders but not just genders between individuals so I have an episode that I shot in the past a while ago called masculinity versus femininity where I talk about basically a similar issue that I'm talking about here but there it was confined to men and women and the whole point of that episode was to show you that there actually are physiological and neurological differences between men and women their brains are actually different physically different and that this results in different behaviors different psyches different attitudes different emotions and so forth and that this is very important to understand if you're going to have a successful relationship with the opposite sex and that a lot of couples get in trouble because they expect their opposite sex partner to be just like them and they try to turn them into a man or a woman when they need to be the opposite they need to be allowed to be themselves so that was an important episode there but now we're broadening the lessons there and now we're applying this to all of humanity to individuals on an individual level you need to start to recognize that every individual is different people have different personalities people have different body types people have different strengths and weaknesses people have different desires of versions and fears people have different abilities motivations different levels of self-discipline and pain tolerance people have different emotions and different moods people have different brain chemistry all the dopamine and serotonin and all the other stuff that's going through all your neurons that chemical soup that your brain is steeped in that's different for all people for some people it can be radically different than it is for you and you better believe that that's going to change what they think what they believe what they chase in life what they run away from in life what they fear and how they interact with people there's also big differences between spiritual attunement levels within people it is not the case that all people are equally spiritually attuned and that's actually a very important point which I'll come back to later in this episode because this is a I think this is critical to understanding the whole field of spirituality and lastly the difference model means that people actually occupy different realities than you that's the most dramatic claim of this model I'm not just saying that people have different preferences than you and different opinions that's obvious enough I want you to imagine for a moment changing your model of human beings such that you admit that rather than there being one canonical physical reality and all of us are participating in it that instead each one of us is living in our own Bob and that there is no one canonical physical reality out there rather our bubbles can be more or less aligned with each other and if they are aligned then that alignment is what we call physical reality and to the degree that they're not aligned that's the degree to which we fight and argue and don't really understand each other and the reason that that happens is because we keep trying to force this canonical physical reality to be there without maybe considering the hey maybe it's not there at all maybe what we call physical reality is just the stuff that aligns between all our different bubbles imagine that for a moment that's a pretty radical thing can you see this shift in paradigm it's a pretty big shift I'm going to keep talking you keep thinking about it as I keep talking because I'm going to present you with some evidence now for why I think the difference model is a lot more accurate because I'm making a pretty big claim here I want you to shift your paradigms but you're not going to shift your paradigms unless you're presented with the compelling evidence and personally for me that's what I required in order to start to shift my paradigm is by studying and researching especially starting to study some physiological data out there stuff from the medical fields stuff from clinical psychology stuff from from medical researchers you start to see that there's a very strong case to be made for the difference model it's just that most people don't bother looking into this with any degree of depth and so they never are forced to face the empirical facts and so they think that they are sameness model can account for them but actually once you face these facts you see that that's not the case so what is the evidence for the difference model well first we have the Big Five aspects of personality so psychologists and researchers have discovered over the last 50 years that there are basically five aspects to human personality five really big ones and these are like axes or spectrums across which we can map most human beings fairly accurately and this is a very good predictor of their behavior and the things that they pursue or avoid in life and this is very illuminating I haven't talked about this before and this warrants its own whole separate episode just on these five big aspects of personality but let me give you a quick nutshell summary edit here so what are these five aspects firstly its extraversion and that's a scale so it ranges from extremely introverted to very extroverted we call that extraversion the next one is agreeableness the next one is conscientiousness the fourth one is neuroticism and the fifth one is openness and all of these are scales now these are the five big aspects and you might be wondering well what does agreeableness mean exactly and what does conscientiousness mean and so forth let me break this down into subcomponents because actually this is what the researchers have done there's the five big aspects and then each one has like five more sub aspects to it which are also scales that you can plot yourself on and this gives you a good idea of what the original five aspects are all about so for extraversion we have friendliness gregariousness assertiveness activity level excitement-seeking and cheerfulness these are also all scales and these are the sub components that make up extraversion and you can rate yourself differently on all these scales there are actually assessments that you can take there semi-scientific like assessments you can take them online and you can map yourself and you can see what are all these different characteristics and how do you align on those and you can see how your family members and your spouse and your girlfriend and boyfriend all this align and then that becomes very eye-opening and revealing because you can see the differences there and that explains a lot of why you don't think alike why don't you behave alike so the next aspect is agreeableness and this one is broken up into the following sub components trust morality altruism cooperation modesty and sympathy next we have conscientiousness and this one breaks down into self-efficacy orderliness dutifulness achievement striving self-discipline and cautiousness then we have neuroticism and that one breaks down into anxiety anger depression self-consciousness in moderation and vulnerability and lastly we have openness which breaks down into imagination artistic interest emotionality adventurousness intellect and liberalism so those are quite a lot of factors now what you can do is you can take this assessment and I'm actually having on how to link down below to a free assessment online that which you can go take and you can rate yourself not only on the big5 aspects but also on all the minor sub components as well and that can be very illuminating to discover where you fit on that scale but the reason I'm talking about these big five aspects is because I want to present this as a piece of evidence for why the sameness model doesn't work we know from lots of testing or last 50 years that human beings map very differently on to all these different subcomponents and that this explains a lot of their behavior and you can see that these personality aspects are quite significant because a person for example who's high in neuroticism is going to see the world very differently from a person is low in neuroticism because your emotions color and filter what you see and in fact they shape your reality they constructed a person who is high in openness is going to have a very hard time cooperating with someone who is low in openness because the person high in openness is going to be daydreaming and having all sorts of flights of fancy imagination he's going to be very philosophical and artistic and emotional and adventurous and very liberal whereas the closed person is going to be very conservative very traditional oriented he's not going to want to listen to your philosophy and your crazy cockamamie schemes and ideas he just want going to want to you know obey his his religion and his belief system and how are those two people going to get along you can see that that's what creates the divide between liberals and conservatives so this explains quite a lot this doesn't quite say that we all live in completely separate realities we need some stronger evidence to make that claim but this already starts to tell you that you can't treat everybody the same chances are that your spouse has a different set of personality characteristics than you do and if you're not aware of this you and your spouse are not going to get along very well at least when you understand what the problem is what the source of the friction is then you can say oh okay let me step back for a second let me start to maybe appreciate that person not for just being a [ __ ] or an [ __ ] but for just being a different person and that that's part of what life is about is that I'm this way and she's that way or he's that way and we need to learn to get along and maybe I can learn to appreciate the differences maybe there's something about her perspective or her qualities that I've been denying and I've been trying to get her to be like me but maybe I can let that go and just say oh I can appreciate that person's neuroticism a little bit even though I don't like how crazy and emotional she is I can appreciate her neuroticism I can see where she's coming from because the interesting thing about these personality characteristics is that there's no one good one and one bad one there's no optimal set of personality characteristics where you sit down and say okay I want to be highly imaginative and non neurotic and I want to be very orderly and I'll do it and then that's going to be the perfect human being it doesn't work that way that's a way too simplistic and naive and of a notion the reason all these personality characteristics exist is because they're necessary for the successful functioning of the human race if you want to think of Humanity as a giant ant colony that would be a good metaphor in an ant colony they have worker ants they have caretaker ants they have the cui and they have the warrior ants and they all serve their own role and I think human beings are like that except we have way more diversity than ants do but most of us don't understand this and we run around trying to make other people like us and this is fundamentally the answer to why people seem to be crazy they seem to be crazy because we're not appreciating that each one of us is constructing our own reality and that we are living in our own bubbles and that there's no right or perfect one there's no one superior bubble or view of reality there's just different ones and different ones are good for different purposes you see so a person who is high in neuroticism you might think well that's a pure negative not necessarily it depends if a person is growing up in a certain place in a certain geography in a certain political climate then neuroticism might a great attribute and in another place it might be a big obstacle so it all depends and of course we know that natural selection and evolution is always optimizing organisms to find the right fit for their environment so all these characteristics are contextual you can't know which ones you're going to need which is why they exist in the first place it's nature's way of optimizing human beings to do what they need to do to survive or maybe nature will turn human beings into a dead end we don't know how that will play out but it's worked so far so we have reason to believe that there's some deeper wisdom to it so go click on the link below and take the assessment and see where you rank on all these attributes so let's move on to the next piece of evidence of course we have the myers-briggs I should mention that which is another personality like assessment and there's all kinds of different ways that we can slice and dice human personalities so the myers-briggs have you taken that before that also ranks you in several key categories and kind of defines what your personality is so that's not a piece of evidence for you there as far as personalities of course as evidence we have gender differences you cannot treat genders the same there's a quite a big substantial difference between the psyche of a man and a woman not saying that one or the other is better or worse that would be a trap but just saying that they're different and we'd to acknowledge these differences and that men are better at some things and women are better at certain other things so we each have our strengths and weaknesses personally for me recognising this was very important for me to interact successfully with the opposite sex because when I try to interact with the opposite sex before when I was unsuccessful it was because I was treating women exactly the way that I would treat a man and that of course creates problems of course another interesting piece of evidence which has come online and last 10 and 20 years or so a lot is sexual orientation we pretty much now know oh that sexual orientation is not just a personal preference it's not just sexual deviants and perverts a lot of it has to do with your wiring and a lot of it has to do with your early upbringing and even with what happened when you were still a fetus in your mom's womb the kind of chemicals that were coursing through her body the kind of drugs she was taking if she was taking any kind of drugs the kind of stress levels that she was under all of these things affect your sexual orientation they also affect other aspects of your psyche so we know that people can have a quite a wide variety of sexual orientations and it's not just straight or gay but there's a there's all sorts of weird edge cases out there that a lot of us just dismiss is like oh that's very crazy and weird it's just an edge case but then again you have to be careful about that because if your model only survives by taking hundreds of edge cases and cutting them out and saying that all they're not important then how good is your model you have to wonder I think that what sexual orientation studies and evidence is showing us is that people behave sometimes in weird ways especially with their sexuality because nature programs them that way or their upbringing early childhood upbringing does and that can be quite an eye-opening and you can see the contrast between being accepting of other people's sexual orientations or being very close-minded about it and just saying no no no no no all those people are just deviants and then all just crazy and weird and they've just been corrupted and the only right sexual orientation is my sexual orientation you see isn't it interesting how you always judge other people relative to your one correct position you never assume that your position is wrong you always assume that it's right it's very interesting rather egocentric another piece of evidence is addiction potential so through the last 50 years we have a lot of good high-quality clinical and psychological evidence and medical evidence that addiction is a is not just a you know bad moral behavior that addiction is actually wired in the brain and that different people have different potentials for addiction people have different potentials for alcohol addiction drug addiction opiates and so forth and sexual addiction and other things and that for some people drugs alcohol and sex present much bigger addictions than they do for most people and that's not because they're bad human beings or they're misbehaving it's simply because there's different wiring different chemicals in the brain that stuff matters a lot so if you have a child for example who has a drug problem rather than treating that child is like oh you're a bad child you're misbehaving that would be coming from the sameness natl right because when you're criticizing and condemning your child for doing drugs the reason you're doing that is because you're assuming without recognizing it hey you should be like me when I was a kid I didn't do any drugs and it was easy for me yeah but that's when you were a kid and you were you you have your genetics you have your wiring you have your upbringing your child don't assume your child is just like you they might have different genetics they have a different environment they had a different set of conditions when they were growing up and all that makes a big difference so from the difference model the way you would treat your child of course you might still not want them doing drugs but you look at your child and say I understand your drug problem I understand that for me drugs are not a problem but for you it seems like they're really a problem because you keep getting addicted to them over and over again and no matter you know how much your bring you're still addicted to them so clearly there's something going on there it doesn't look like you're just doing it for fun because you can see the bad consequences and yet you're still hooked so see you're taking a more broad more compassionate approach to this to this child that you have not just browbeating them and telling them to to be more like you which is a mistake that a lot of parents make and you know sexual orientation another one of these things where we like to demonize people we like to say all that person's a child molester and this person he has some weird sexual fetish and that person is an addict and this person can't stop and this person did it it uh all this kind of stuff and we cast these people as deviants or criminals and we lock them up well we have to be careful about that because like what they find with with the sexual predators and child molesters and so forth is they find that these people they really can't help themselves in a lot of cases and that their problem might not just be because they're morally bad people but their problem might be that it had abusive childhoods or their mothers when they were still in their mother's womb had high stress levels or were taking drugs and that this affected their brain chemistry you see and so in a lot of cases even when these sexual abusers when they want to stop they still can't because it's just like something that's wired into their brain and of course we we condemn these people but you got to wonder what would it be like if you were in their shoes see this is the key thing that we need to make this move we need to make this move of putting ourselves in other people's shoes people who are radically different than us if we really want to have compassion understanding for those people imagine for example if your own child was a sexual predator and he wanted to stop but he couldn't because of some past trauma or some brain dysfunction you see you would have a lot more compassion for him if you really understood his situation rather than just say oh yeah you're criminal you're a deviant and we'll lock you up and throw you away and we'll we'll morally condemn you so we're starting to see that there's a lot of variety of human beings in this Ardant starting to now explain why some human beings behave in some very weird ways well it's because we're wired differently so actually it makes a whole lot of sense why should everybody behave in the same way we're not ants after all we're a lot more diverse and complex and now I want to cite some evidence which is really mind-blowing and this is really the evidence that convinced me to change my model and this is the evidence not just a different personality characteristics but of people inhabiting different realities and to get this evidence you need to start to go look into mental illness and brain disorders so mental illness like schizophrenia and brain disorders which happen with people who have strokes and physical trauma to the brain from car accidents or mining accidents this sort of stuff this is a very interesting and rich field of study in fact I just recently added a book to my book list which explains a lot of these interesting brain disorders it was written by a by a medical doctor who has a clinical practice and he specializes in the rarest brain disorders in the world and so people come to him from all over the country and all over the world with their weird very rare brain disorders and he helps to diagnose them and to treat them and he specifically deals with a lot of head trauma from car accidents and people who have strokes where some part of their brain completely dies off like one of their hemispheres dies there's a bad wiring in there maybe cancer and they're like a tumor or just a car accident broke something in the brain and what's very interesting is him describing a lot of the ramifications of this brain trauma and when you listen to these clinical case studies it's just incredible it's incredibly fascinating and it reveals a lot of stuff about how important the brain is for your behavior ad for your thinking there are so many examples in that book that you're going to have to just go read it because I can't I don't have time to cite them all to you but I will cite a couple which completely blew my mind so one example he was talking about is he was talking about how a patient called him and this patient was there on the phone he's like okay I got a really serious problem when I'm walking down the street after I had my car accident or my brain damage after I'm walking down the street now I see dancing dwarves and a little miniature elephant circus walking down the street and it looks just as lifelike as the regular by standards walking down the street and the doctor is listening to his iCloud that's a that's a really amazing if they're really made even come into my office and we'll talk more about it so the guy comes into his office and he's sitting there with the doctor in the office the doctors ask them all sorts of questions just to better understand what's going on because he's never encountered a patient with quite this kind of situation and so the guy is describing that yeah he seen these little [ __ ] clown dwarves jumping around and juggling balls and there's like a little miniature elephant and whole circus and it's all rolling down the street and he's seeing this as though it's totally lifelike and the doctor analyzes his brain he sees that some may be visual cortex element of his brain has been damaged and so the doctor starting to suspect like oh yeah maybe this is why it is this way but then the doctor gets curious and you ask them so I'm curious how do you deal with like your friends and your girlfriend and your family members aren't they weirded out by this don't they think you're crazy and the guy says well you know doctor I know that only I'm seeing these hallucinations and that other people don't see them so I just keep my mouth shut and nobody really knows that there's anything wrong with me and the doctor is very puzzled by this like how can how can you contain something like that it seems like something like that would be so significant that you you couldn't just hide it from anybody and the patients like well you know to be honest I've had to do it since I was sitting here in this room with you and the doctors like well what do you mean and the patient's like well I didn't want to say anything but there's a monkey sitting on your lap and the doctor is like what do you mean and the patient starts describing this monkey who he sees sitting in the doctors lap right now and the doctors like is the monkey there right now and the face is like yeah it's right there what's the monkey doing oh it's just sitting there and breathing and wagging its tail and the doctor is so convinced by his descriptions of this monkey that he actually has to look down at his lap to check if there's actually a monkey there because he's not sure anymore and of course there's no monkey there but to this person it feels like there's an actual monkey there and so the doctors blown away by this and he describes this funny little example but of course it sounds funny to us but in reality for that person it's not so funny imagine putting yourself in his shoes how would you feel you see in that case that is what I mean by a totally different reality that person is living in a different reality than the rest of us and it's it goes way beyond just a mere personality difference and you can see that a person who lives in that kind of different reality will certainly have a different orientation towards life they will believe different things than you do they will behave differently perhaps in weird ways that you can not understand because you assume that everyone shares the same basic physical reality and that's not the case that's just not the case and if you want to really become convinced of that check out this book on my list it's in the brain section brain category that I have there and I'll actually be adding some more books along those same lines to that same category in the future because these examples just completely blow me away and change my whole perspective on why human beings struggle to understand each other I think we really underestimate how differently we can see here and feel physical reality we can't just assume that everyone is tapping into the same thing I'll give you one more example from this book and this is an interesting example which actually goes back I think over a hundred years a very very early example that was in the clinical history and what it is is that there was one patient who had some brain trauma and before the brain trauma he was a totally normal individual somehow he got some physical brain trauma and then he talked with the doctors and with the doctors he realized that he's experiencing this problem of seeing other people as not living beings but as Androids so this is actually a documented medical condition and they found this in not just one patient but in multiple patients where if some portion of your brain is damaged the right portion then you're not going to be able to relate to human beings and see them as living human blood and flesh beings there's actually a module in your brain which is responsible for that and if that module is deactivated then you will see a human being who looks just like a flesh-and-blood human being but you're not going to feel like they're a living human being you're going to feel like they're an impostor or a robot on the inside and so this guy became so convinced that this he thought that his father his father was taking care of him his father was helping him in dealing with with his brain but he thought that his father might be this Android and so one night when his father took him back home and they were sleeping in the same house together he was so convinced that his father was a robot that he took a hammer and he bashed in his father's skull and opened his brain to see if there were cogs and wiring inside and when the police came to arrest him for killing his father and they asked him what the hell are you doing bashing in your father's skull with a hammer he said because he was a robot and I needed to find out see now this is a case that we would often just dismiss as well that's completely insane but like I said we've documented multiple examples of this where people have these sorts of conditions and it's been traced to the fact there are certain modules in your brain which are responsible for this you have modules in your brain which are responsible for you recognizing human beings for seeing physical objects as three-dimensional objects you have modules in your brain that allow you to recognize your mother's space or your father's space and many other examples like that and if any one of these modules is damaged there's the wrong brain chemistry or whatever some neurons are severed then watch out some very weird stuff can happen now these brain disorders of course are a very radical example of something that I think is a lot more subtle in most human beings in most human beings I think that of course mostly most of us don't have brain disorders but I think we do have slight differences in brain chemistry slight differences in the genetics which are responsible for shaping the the various modules in our brain and this affects how we see the world not in always super radical ways that you're going to see a monkey but in more subtle ways and that's why it's so difficult to factor this into your model because you can never really get inside somebody else's shoes and see or feel the world through their brain you see but it actually makes a lot of sense that each of our brains is unique because we all have unique genetics and you can see how your brain affects your mental states and how your mental states are critical to how you interact with the world so it would make sense that evolution and natural selection are constantly at work optimizing our consciousnesses which are mediated by our brains for the particular environments and tasks that we are trying to navigate in order to survive and reproduce so that means that a brain living in the rain forest needs to have different wiring than a brain living in a big city like New York because these are very different environments so there are a very different tasks that the brain needs to be able to do in order to survive effectively and reproduce in these environments or maybe if a brain is born in a peaceful region of the world versus a war-torn region of the world you can see how natural selection will select different kinds of brains to cope with those very radically different types of situations in order to survive so I hope this is all starting to come together and start to make more and more sense make a more compelling case for the difference model let me give you one last example which really blows my mind and this is the example with DMT and the pineal gland there's an example that I recently learned of of an artist named Shawn Thornton who I'll have a link to down below he was a regular artist who then was diagnosed with cancer of the pineal gland this is a very rare type of cancer and of course you know that the pineal gland people talked about how the pineal gland maybe is the manufacturing center of natural DMT which is responsible for some spiritual experiences perhaps even enlightenment life experiences in the mind and this is a a theory that we have we're not quite sure how much DMT is in the brain but there's some good evidence suggesting that there probably is some natural DMT produced by the brain very interesting because DMT is a very very potent psychedelic but with this artist he had this cancer the pineal gland and as soon as he did his art completely changed and rather than just painting regular paintings he started to paint these very detailed intricate spiritually ladened paintings and you can go and take a look at some of those I want you to take a look because it'll blow your mind there are these very intricate paintings with all sorts of religious symbolism and they look like a psychedelic DMT trip that's what they look at they're very trippy looking very colorful very bright vivid colors and so his whole style of art changed he didn't do this consciously it's not like he sat down said okay I'm gonna change my art style to be more spiritual like no this is just the natural byproduct of what happened when something in his brain changed the pineal gland and maybe now started to produce more DMT which resulted in him starting to see all sorts of spiritual visions and then he just started to paint those so check out the link below to look at that and I also have I'm going to have a blog post on my blog about it so you can go check my blog post to get the link there which brings me to the very interesting example of explaining why human beings talk about spirituality in radically different ways this is something that I've been trying to explain for for a while now because this is something that I think that even most spiritual gurus don't have a very good grasp of and that's because I think that they ignore the genetic component to spirituality I think that there's a strong genetic component to spirituality I think there's a strong neuro chemical component to it and it matters how your brain is wired and this is I think you can really convince yourself if you do some psychedelics over and over again you're going to start to see that human consciousness is really a very malleable thing and that it is almost perfectly attuned by natural selection for you to be effective at survival and reproduction in whatever environment you find yourself in and that there's a lot of ways in which consciousness can be but isn't because perhaps it's not very useful to you for your survival and reproduction this is one thing you'll start to notice if you start to do a lot of psychedelics and you start to notice that a little little bit of chemical can make a massive difference in how you see the entire world massive difference the reason that I think that most spiritual people don't really understand the full scope of spirituality is because they haven't studied all the different perspectives on spirituality that are out there if you do study all the different perspectives in a very fair-minded and objective way what you realize is that there's so much diversity and variety in a way that traditions and different people talk about spirituality this cannot merely be explained by the fact that people have different personalities or different cultures that they grew up from or that they just have different ways of describing enlightenment certainly enlightenment is a common element across all the major spiritual traditions of the world certainly but there are also a lot of other what I would call edged case phenomenon that oftentimes gets ignored or ridiculed as just flights of fancy as though people are just deluding themselves what do I mean by this well I think that some people literally do see spirits demons aliens and other sorts of mystical phenomena which has been described in mr. traditions for thousands of years all across the world and that these are not just flights of fancy these are not just deluded people now certainly there are always some deluded people in fact there are usually many deluded people everywhere but I just don't think that these concepts would even exist in our cultural understanding if certain brains didn't actually manufacture these experiences I think that because there's so much variety in human brains that people actually do have some crazy experiences of reality which are so ineffable and so difficult to describe that they do the best they can but normal folks cannot understand them because they simply don't have the neurological mechanism to see what these people are seeing and this accounts for some of the weird stuff that you can read about in a new-age circles and in esoteric traditions and within various kinds of mystical traditions and that's why they're kept esoteric they're kept esoteric because really the only people who can understand these things are the people who are able to experience them and everybody else is cut out of the loop that's very interesting that's a very interesting hypothesis there I'm not saying I'm 100 cent convinced of this I'm just saying that this is the only thing the only explanation that makes sense to me given all the different stuff that I've read it does not make sense that people are just making this [ __ ] up I don't think the allure that imaginative to make this kind of [ __ ] up and some of these brain disorder case studies can point us in this direction I think that people have different capacities for consciousness and that this actually explains why most people are not spiritual and most people are not serious about enlightenment because their brains aren't really wired for it they're not interested in existential truths because and it's makes sense from an evolutionary perspective because why should they be it doesn't really help them navigate ordinary life and so their brains don't care about it and so they don't pursue it but a few rare individuals do care about it and therefore they pursue it and they pursue it very hard and they have some massive spiritual attainments and I think this explains why spiritual gurus like the Buddha or Jesus Christ are quite rare they're not common day folk because I think they had different wiring than most people had and this is something that most spiritual gurus will never admit to you the standard spiritual line is that hey everyone's the same everyone has the same spiritual potential so just go at it use these techniques and it work for you but we see that that's just not the case so few people actually get enlightened why is that if enlightenment is so easy and so simple it would be extremely common so the empirical problem we have is we need to explain why less than one percent of all human beings are enlightened and my explanation for that is that's because they're not wired for it and that's not the same as me saying they can't that they're permanently blocked from it no not at all I think that 99% of people can do it but they won't because they're just not wired to pursue it hard enough to get there and I think that this pertains not only to spiritual development but also to more ordinary self-help a lot of self-help teachers or gurus will like to convince you that hey you know everyone can be successful everyone can cure their depression everyone can be motivated everyone can go out there and do whatever they want but I think that that's a too naive to pollyannaish the reality is that some people really struggle with certain aspects of their lives some people really struggle with addiction in ways that other people can't even imagine some people really struggle with depression in ways that other people can't imagine and so on some people struggle to motivate themselves some people struggle to find their life purpose to find a something that's very compelling for them to pursue in their life and for other people it's a lot easier now that doesn't mean that you're a lost cause it simply means that you have various characteristics and you're wired for pursuing certain things in life and so everyone is a little bit different and of course it makes sense that not everyone would be super super motivated all the time or always cheerful always in a good mood it's definitely easier for some people and for others and you know sometimes you hear motivational speakers who come out there and give you a great speech about how you should be motivated and excited about life and all this and all that and then you try to do it you realize it doesn't work well the reason it doesn't work is because the motivational speaker is speaking from a different position a different view of reality than you are but you're assuming that hey he and I are basically the same well that's that's an assumption there that you might have to revisit at some point in your life generally what I find is that people who are very strong in something in life cannot appreciate or understand how this could be a weakness for somebody else like if you take Arnold Schwarzenegger for him weightlifting is natural and easy he loves it it's just a beautiful thing he can do it for six hours a day make another type of person who maybe has low energy has different brain chemistry maybe has some low energy because of a thyroid issue and for him weightlifting is even just an hour of it can be a real grind see it's a big difference and for the Arnold Schwarzenegger person he would look at the weak person say oh you're just being weak and lazy and maybe he is in certain cases of course people are weak and lazy but in other cases it's like no he's just not wired for it the way that you were and that has to be appreciated and understood otherwise you're really misunderstanding the problem you think the problem is laziness when really the problem is a lack of suitability physiologically and psychologically and I think that's the important thing to understand I'm seeing that this model of reality in a humanity explains a lot more of the facts than my old model of course the problem is that this difference model is quite threatening to people because what it really means ultimately is that rapists must be rapists criminals must be criminals terrorists must be terrorists narcissists must be narcissists unconscious people must be unconscious people perverts must be perverts alcoholics must be alcoholics lawyers must be lawyers yes even those damn lawyers have a reason for being lawyers bombs must be bombs hippies must be hippies workaholics must be workaholics and religious fanatics must be religious fanatics but you can see now that this is a very bitter pill for most people to swallow because the ego loves to take a moral high ground and to say no no no Leo and Leo Leo no you're going too far this is just complete moral relativism and this doesn't work for me all these people you're talking about they're dysfunctional they're bad they're wrong they're evil they're criminal they're crazy they're not normal people they have moral defects and they need to change and you can be more like me but is that actually the truth could it be that you're denying nature it's interesting that you're taking this position that these things about nature you're saying are wrong and it may should be different but what if nature is exactly right and that if something is it's there because nature wanted it to be there in a sense that's a lot more humble of a perspective the problem I see is that people take a very local perspective and they try to explain all of reality based on their local little egoic perspective what's good for me what I want what I believe the see nature takes the ultimate global perspective nature doesn't just care about you nature cares about everything equally and it needs to balance everything so that means if someone steps on your toes and you don't like it well maybe that's what's necessary for the optimal evolution of nature and maybe you just happen to be an evolutionary dead end maybe you're going to have to make a sacrifice for the larger hole of course you don't like hearing that because you're you and you care about you and the worst thing that can happen to you is there not being a you so of course you're going to fight tooth and nail to maintain your perspective makes sense from an evolutionary perspective for you but that's not a that's not a very good way to evaluate the big picture of what reality is doing how else do you explain human variety is it really right to explain it by saying that half of humanity is crazy deluded criminal and barbarian is that really how you can explain this that's not an explanation that's a dismissal you're not real stepping into those people's shoes I would suggest that you stop assuming that nature is wrong and rather flipped it on its head and start assuming that nature is right and that your mind might not be big enough to really understand why nature is doing everything it's doing maybe reality doesn't make mistakes maybe reality is a process of ultra-efficient self optimization and it's always at work optimizing itself and what we see right now including all the criminals rapists and terrorists and all these people that you don't like which personally offend you maybe this is all necessary as part of the optimization process and whatever nature is evolving towards that's what it's evolving towards and just because you're playing one little tiny role you're like a little ant in the middle of a rain forest right you're just a little ant in the middle of a rain forest a speck in the entire cosmos and yet you're trying to judge the entire cosmos and tell the cosmos what's right and what's wrong who should be there and who shouldn't be there based on your little ants perspective of the universe rather arrogant of you what I think is that without this understanding that I'm offering here humanity just doesn't make sense when you actually make the move and adopt this differents model that I'm talking about everything will start to make a lot more sense and you're going to be able to get along with people a lot better now let me quickly cover some traps and some misunderstandings that are easily possible when hearing what I'm saying the first trap is you might think a goleo does this mean that all my dad behavior now is justified that rapist could just keep being a rapist and I can keep doing the bad stuff I've been doing no I didn't say anything about that you know if you are acting out of integrity with yourself and that there is harming you so if you have bad behavior if you're hurting other people if you're acting unconsciously you're going to regret it yourself that's the law of karma in action so I'm not justifying anything here I'm just saying that people tend to behave the way they were programmed to behave and I'm not just saying that everything is genetic there's a very strong environmental component to your behavior as well and that has to be taken into account and I'm not saying you can't change your behavior you certainly can you can change your behavior a lot and I recommend that you start behaving in a manner which is compassionate and caring and not hurting of others because when you're hurting others you're just being egotistical you're not really understanding the bigger perspective that I'm talking about here what I'm talking about here when you really understand you start to develop a compassion for other people much more so than before so you start to tread more lightly in the world and you don't harm people as much as you did before that's generally what happens with consciousness if you're doing it right another trap people could fall into here is to misinterpret this as saying okay so Leo this means that my race is superior to all the other races I knew it I knew what those politically correct people were telling me that all races are equal but now I know the white race is the superior race no that's not what I said at all I said that there are differences and all these differences are contextual and if there is no one superior race or type of human being or personality or brain chemistry it's all relative so actually I'm taking away any sense of superiority that you can have over other people to feel superior is to not really be able to step into other people's shoes that's the only way you can feel superior to people or to another race when you step into their shoes you realize oh it's just a different way of looking at the world it has its pros and cons just like my way of looking at the world has its pros and cons another trap here might be is to interpret this as saying well Leo this means now that my dreams are impossible I had these lofty dreams of becoming a millionaire or entrepreneur following my life purpose or becoming like Arnold Schwarzenegger and now you're saying I can't do it because I don't have the right genetics and I don't have the right brain chemistry be careful about turning this into a excuse not to grow yourself you can grow yourself nothing that I've said contradicts that yes it's the case that you have certain strengths and weaknesses you have to play up to your strengths and you have to shore up and work on your weaknesses and you have to be strategic about that but that doesn't mean you shouldn't dream that doesn't mean you shouldn't have big goals if you're into that sort of thing go for it it's not impossible you're still going to have to work very hard no matter what your genetics are I'm not saying you're just going to coast to success with genetics no environment support training is important learning theory is important all of it is very important your effort is not pointless your effort is actually controlled by your genetics and by you are bringing but that doesn't mean you can just stop the effort and you're going to become some Olympic athlete or championship a weightlifter or an amazing actor or anybody like that without a ton of effort so effort is still required another way to misinterpret this is to think of it as like well leo so this means that I can't become enlightened now I wanted to become enlightened now you've shattered my hopes no wonder I struggle so much with enlightenment it's because I'm not wired for it but you see that's just an excuse what I'm actually saying is I think that 99% of human beings who are normally functioning and have a fully intact brain are capable of becoming enlightened it's just that they're not working at it hard enough you're capable of it just work towards it that's all I'm saying here will it be harder for you than for other people certainly it probably will will you become a Buddha probably not can you become a Buddha maybe I don't know if you want to go to the highest levels of spirituality possible it might be a lot harder for you than for some maybe it will be impossible for you to access certain things if you want to see some demons or some aliens you might not be able to see them because your brains just not wired for it or maybe you take a psychedelic and you do see some or whatever we need some astral projection or some lucid dreaming or whatever and you sort of tap into that stuff I don't know you have to experiment this is really a field that has not been researched very well so you have to be open don't limit yourself artificially by saying stuff like oh I can't do this down I can't do that now no the fact is that you simply don't know what you're capable of until you go out there and really really really try a lot of the stuff that you think you're not capable of doing which are part of your genetics actually is just a limiting belief like for example for most of my life I used to be overweight I was 65 pounds overweight I was very fat you wouldn't even recognize me I was so fat and I used to believe if you asked me back then when I was fat why are you fat I would say it's because of my bad genetics I was cursed with bad genetics my parents were fat so I'm fat it makes sense and that kept me stuck for for a good long time until I realized that all that is [ __ ] and then I worked really hard going to the gym and changing my diet and I lost all that weight and I've kept it off for the last ten years and it was actually quite easy to keep it off and I have no fear of falling back into that old lifestyle completely changed my attitude towards fitness and health has completely changed so that's an example for you of how it could be dangerous this idea of genetics can be dangerous because you can use it to to justify all sorts of lazy behavior and another way to misinterpret this is to think of the things I talked about here as meaning well leo does this mean now that anything goes in society that means that we should just let terrorists run free and kill people and rapists can just rape children in schools and that everything is cool I'm just supposed to sit back and accept all this no that's a whole different thing what I'm talking about is just accepting reality as it is and then what you do about it is still up to you and as a community we get to decide what kind of society we want to create so if we as a community decided hey you know we don't want murderers just running around gunning people down and we don't want rapist raping our children in schools then we make some laws and if we catch people like that we put them in jail but the difference is that we don't condemn them we don't demonize them we don't call them animals well actually we take sympathy for their situation because we understand that these people could have had very bad childhoods they could have some dysfunctional genetics or physiological problems and maybe some of those are actually curable maybe we can invent some medicines or some therapeutic techniques that we can help these people to become well functioning members of society see but we don't do it from a condemning position where it's like oh you did this and you're such an evil person that I'm going to lock you up then I'm going to put you to death and and I'm not even to bother to to step into your shoes it's a it's a compassionate approach that's the difference so let me give you quickly some takeaways some very practical takeaways from everything I talked about in this episode firstly be yourself be who you are naturally designed to be discover that you need to discover what your strengths and weaknesses are and what your authentic self is that's a big aspect of personal development secondly let other people be themselves stop trying to convert them into being just like you start to appreciate the differences thirdly learn to be open to radical new lifestyles and worldviews that doesn't mean you have to personally adopt them all but let other people have radical lifestyles just as long as they're not hurting themselves or hurting other people let them do what they want to do understanding that there's probably a reason why they're doing it it's probably something that they're driven towards by their by their genetics and by it by their psyche fourthly realize that you don't know what it's like to be another person you don't really know you're just guessing you're just assuming and it's very humbling to admit this into to just be in a state of not knowing about this also think twice before judging moralizing and condemning other people because the thing you might be condemning them for might be something that they're just a victim of themselves that you're not appreciating and that if you were in their shoes you would hate it if somebody was condemning you or if your child was in their shoes you would hate it if somebody condemned your child think twice before giving advice to people because usually when you give advice to people you do it from your own point of view it's like you're giving advice to somebody else the way you would give advice to yourself but the advice that's right for you might be totally wrong for somebody else and this is a point that I learned a lot over the last few years because I've been interacting with so many of you who have been leading me comments sending me emails on the forum posting stuff on YouTube and so I've been reading people's problems and trying to give them advice but as I give advice I realize more and more that my advice has to be very careful because it's very easy for me to give advice for myself but a lot harder to give advice that's quality advice for other people because I have to take into account their differences also seek alternative worldviews don't just be stuck in your own worldview try to go out there make friends with radically different types of people who see the world in a very different way that will grow you a lot recognize that everyone has strengths and weaknesses and that those are context dependent what's your strength right now could become your greatest weakness if you just move to a different city or a different country and vice versa what's your weakness right now could become your greatest strength if you just find a way to use it properly change the context also be careful about who you role model if you are role modeling some Olympic athlete some celebrity or actor some entrepreneur some weightlifter whoever that you really mind maybe some spiritual teacher like the Buddha or Jesus Christ or Mohammed you got to be careful because you're assuming that hey I'm the same as the Buddha I'm the same as Jesus Christ I'm the same as Muhammad know you could be wired very differently from these people exceptional people the ones in our world class you got to assume that they probably have some unique wiring which allowed them to climb the ladder all the way to the top and become so successful and so famous so use them as inspiration but also be careful because these role models have a way of distorting your own connection to your own authentic being as you're trying to go out there and become more like Arnold Schwarzenegger you might forget that hey do I even want to do why do I want to be like Arnold Schwarzenegger why am I not following my agenda and try to be more authentically me but instead going out there and trying to emulate somebody like a monkey and lastly craft your lifestyle around your personality type this is what it's all about craft is self actualization journey around you don't just take my advice blindly or any other teacher figure out what you need figure out what's going to work for you discover yourself and then craft your lifestyle around that people have different lifestyles because they need to because they have different needs different strengths and different issues that's it I'm done here please click the like button for me post your comments down below and come check out actualized org I have some great resources for you there I have my book list the life purpose course my blog which I'm posting stuff on all the time my forum so there's a lot of resources and I'll be adding more in the future and other than that just stick with me for more episodes to come you