The Social Matrix - How Society Is A Mass Hallucination

[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. This is going to be a profound foundational episode in the epistemology work that we're doing here with actualized.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. Uh, 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. Cuz 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 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 and 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 co-workers, 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 we're 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, 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 or in a movie and they're a star or 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, cherry-pick. Your mind is cherry-picking. You might like some celebrity, I might hate that celebrity. I might like some other celebrity, so I'm going to listen to somebody else. And then we're going to get different worldviews based on that. You might like Fox News, I might like CNN, or whatever. And we're going to get different worldviews based on that. But see, this is just the media.

Then we have the internet, which is a more recent development, but 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, um, and, uh, you grew up in that environment, and so were your friends, they were telling you about how Jews run the world and this sort 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, we're making a very profound meta point 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 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. It's a little bit difficult to put this into a linear format. It's a web, after all, a 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 did 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 some sort of 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, what's happening is that you're offloading the, the sort of the, uh, the authority of the Wikipedia page onto these so-called academics. If you believe that academics wrote 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 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 that 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 did 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 did 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 the 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 a 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 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 will read Wikipedia pages and take that as fact and reality. And then they will use that to reinforce the university and 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 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, 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 .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, uh, 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 study, game the Google search algorithms. So, um, I have a lot of personal experience with this. I, 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. Um, 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 am not trying to lay the ground here, the groundwork here for Holocaust denial. 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, of all the billions of pages, every page gets a sort of authority number between one and 10, 10 being the highest, meaning that it's the most authoritative. So, uh, a link coming from a PageRank 10, uh, webpage is a very, very powerful link. Google actually has a list. They've seeded their algorithm, the algorithm, the way it creates this PageRank 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 sites 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 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 did they know? 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, the Google founders are from Stanford, from what I can remember. Um, 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 a sort of a circular move? What's going to 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 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, uh, are there like weapons of mass destruction in, uh, in Iraq?" And they would 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 then, 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 at like a different news outlet, The Washington Post, and say, "Hey, you know, guys, like, 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 the New York Times people, say, "Hey, are you guys writing an article about that?" And they would 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, uh, 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, 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 little article that I'm writing here." And then, you know, the C, 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 the 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 there's strong incentives to go along with the system. And there's strong disincentives not to. You also get credentials, 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 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 lesser schools, but I, there are many private schools that just 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 web page 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 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 going to take, you're going to 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 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 going to 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, um, but in general, there's a hierarchy that's developed within society about credible sources and uncredible sources.

And, uh, 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, 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 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 cost $5 rather than $500 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 it 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 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 in this Social Matrix the money is going to go flow to. And wherever the money money flows, it's almost like blood in your body. That's what, uh, Wall Street is sort of like, uh, 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, uh, 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 to 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 or ethical standards whatsoever. They don't care about truth whatsoever. They're going to 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. Cuz 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 payment scheme. Nobody sees this as 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 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 as 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 disproved, proven 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 himself. Impossible. They're too difficult, too much technical expertise is required, and 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. Five, 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 worldview?" 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 10 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 the any corruptions or errors that the scientists had, they percolate down into the university students. Then those university students percolate 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, uh, 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 of 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 nonprofit organization, or to one of these tech entrepreneurs at Google, or the guy running Wikipedia or YouTube or Facebook or whatever, you start talking to them about epistemology, they don't care at all. That word is not in their worldview. 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. 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 epistemic. 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, 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 man 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 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 where did they get it from? Well, they got it from some other source. It's here on top of hearsay, on top of hearsay. 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 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 are also many cultural elements to this, um, 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 this 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 this 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, um, 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 the 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, um, 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, and 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 product. That's all they care about. And if their product kills you, they don't care. No sweat off their back at all.

And they're marketing 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, and 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 got to take all this medication." And see, you think that that there. Where do you think that came from? A large majority of 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 then 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 going to believe in. And of course, your boss. You're probably going to 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, watched the same movies you watched, participated in the same, you know, 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 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 corpor for large corporations, I think that's immoral and unethical and illegal, even. It should be illegal." What's going to happen if you tell that to your boss? You're going to 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 boss. But, uh, but that just pushes the can down the road. Because if you're going to 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 in 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 got to engage in lobbying, you got to engage in bribery, you got to engage in capitalism because you're competing against others who also are. You got to pay the lowest wages. You got to 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 nonprofits. You might say, "Well, Leo, I'll just go into into the nonprofit 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 nonprofits 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 toxic, this excessive capitalism is that companies just can't be boldfaced, unrepentant 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." Um, you know, "We care about the starving children in Africa, so we're going to donate $10 million 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 Mobile. 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 nonprofit sector. And then those people who go into the nonprofit sector thinking they're going to avoid this giant corporate business corruption, um, but then all your funding for your nonprofits, where 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 it 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 charity. Your nonprofit. Most of this money for your charity is coming from from millionaires. And how do they get it? By participating in the 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, uh, nonprofit 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 too. So the university professor is struggling to survive. The high school teacher is struggling to survive. The guidance counselor at the elementary school, she's 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 that 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 and 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 develop is biased and corrupt.

And then that technology, you see, it feeds into 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. 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 feel.

And it seems so innocent. It's like, "Well, it's just a Facebook logo and just one ad. You know, how bad can one ad be?" And besides, this one ad, it's something I like. It's an ad for 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 would 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 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, they didn't really mention the, uh, 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 multibillion-dollar think tanks whose sole purpose is to shape public opinion about homosexuality, abortion, church in school, or prayer in school, rather, um, 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 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 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, uh, 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. Um, it doesn't get easier. It 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 into private school. I got to get security cameras. Got to hire bodyguards. Cuz 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 the 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 how the how the social matrix operates? You see, this is the perfect nexus point, the sort of incestuous nexus point between, uh, 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 will be angry that the politicians aren't doing anything about this and that they're sort of in bed with these corporations. This sorts 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, you know, 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. You, these are traditions which are being spoiled. So of course, we're going to pass a law against that. See how this works?

So notice that even though what I'm describing here, in a sense, is a sort of a conspiracy theory, the ultimate conspiracy theory, you might say. But the difference between this and, um, the dumb conspiracy theories out there is that here we're not offloading the problem onto any group of people or elites. 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 is 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. Any 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, supposedly, secular China. It's still influenced by religious ideas, spiritual ideas of the past, 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 questioned. 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 changes. Language is 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 given 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 want to upset your friends too much. You don't want to upset 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 co-workers 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. That's just epistemology. That's just, you know, be normal. Stop being weird. Stop rocking the boat."

You've noticed this if you tried 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 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 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 got to 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 co-workers think.

Any social gathering you go to is also a part of this social matrix: clubs, bars, parties, country clubs, banquets, expose, conferences, workshops, seminars. And all of the conversation happening at 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 roles, 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 this stuff yourself. You weren't born and then you said to 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 health care system, medicine, the health care 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's 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, and has come out that whole system completely brainwashed by the social matrix. 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 various kinds of new drugs. And then these doctors, they go to conventions, and they go to, uh, 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 did 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, um, perhaps we'll start to wrap it up here. Uh, the last element of this social matrix that we'll talk about is the, uh, is sort of the mental health system, therapy, psychotherapy. This is also all part of this social matrix. How do you know what is insane and 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, maybe you heard me talk about before. Um, and when you explain all this to the shrink, the shrink will say, "There's something wrong with you." Why? Because the shrink went through the whole same system. So, and the shrink, in order to maintain his shrink, 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 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 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 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 maintains 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. The 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 grows up with these disgusting, distorted, grotesque, you know, baby feet. 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 got to use the social matrix to help you break out of it. We got to turn the social matrix in on itself. Go to Google, search for Chinese foot binding or whatever it's called. Find that picture. Look at that picture. And 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 one to ten, 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, it's 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. Humans are so defensive about their belief systems, their paradigms, their ideologies.

And you see this. You see, 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're 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 nonprofit 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 among 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-duality teachings and teachers.

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 you'll feel it push back. And you'll also notice the, uh, the indifference that all these folks who are engaged in this social matrix, 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 due. They have a deadline. They have this and they have that.

Nobody is willing to stop and actually look at the epistemology of 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 don't, I can't be concerned about these big questions."

So 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, uh, 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 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 and 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 legwork, 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 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 you're 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 your, 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 going to, 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. 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 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 start to deconstruct all of science. Um, eventually your colleagues will start to feel like you have, uh, betrayed them, that that you 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 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 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, you know, hellhole 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, 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, uh, connecting everything together. Um, 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, um, 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 superorganism. 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 all sorts of stuff to make it work. Um, likewise, an ant. An ant can't survive all on its own. I can't. An ant 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.

Like with humans, so transcending the social Matrix is, is a, is a tricky proposition. Cuz 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, you got to, you got to come back, and you still got to 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. Hey, here you are on YouTube. You've been criticizing. 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 going to 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 cold 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 going to get your food? Your water? It's going to have to come from society. And if you have some illness, you're going to have to get some medication from society. Even the, the transportation you take to get to your cave, have to be a plane, a train, a car, a bicycle. It came from society. So there's this myth that you can be this rugged individual, all independent and self-made. It just, 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 the, 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 a, 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, um, 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 going to 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 sort of just a faith, a blind faith in in truth, in the, 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 obscuring your vision, then, uh, what I'm advocating is clearing that smog and then seeing what's there without the smog. 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 going to 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 it 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, uh, 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 a capital T. Maybe there's love with a capital L. Maybe there's consciousness with a 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 it 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 can intuit it, that self-deception must have a cost, falsehood must have a cost, you might figure, uh, 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, uh, we don't burn witches 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 5,000 years, what it could become with technology and with virtual reality and with brain implants and neurolinks 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. Uh, maybe you can intuit it 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 as little single-cell organisms. Then there was a quantum leap and evolution from single-cell to multicellular organisms. That was a radical change. And then from multicellular organisms to like actual animals, like a fish. That was a huge quantum leap revolution into something higher order. And then even those fish, those individual fish, they evolved into something like schools of fish working together. And 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 jailbreaking 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, well, 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'd 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 the America, I'm going to the West to the Americas. There, you didn't 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, uh, and the truth is, I mean, he could, he could tell you some story, 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 going to, what you're going to get out of it. Maybe you're going to 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: 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 XYZ and to clearly articulate it for you and to feed you a little, you know, story 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, uh, 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 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, and 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, um, 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 to live a good life, you have to plan of it 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 got to, 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, uh, 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 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 fooling myself?" "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, um, that's a very dangerous epistemic position. Because you see, we can delude 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, or 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 and 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, what 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 going to 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 to?

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 is 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. Cuz the only way you can validate whether you can trust somebody is against your knowledge of the entire universe. See, 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 the 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, uh, 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-pick 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 going to drive yourself deeper into delusion. So one of the deep connections you should start to see is that at 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. Uh, the reason I don't, 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. Um, so you are going to have to develop some sort of 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 got to validate the things that I say, cuz 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 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, uh, 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 get 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 is 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 selfish. That's what you'll quickly realize. And that's exactly the thing you don't want to realize: is 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, uh, uh, be clouded in in in in in in your own drowning in your own sea? 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 actualized. 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, um, sort of niche stuff, not mainstream stuff, which will help you on this journey. That book list is really mandatory if you're going to try to escape the social Matrix. Um, my life purpose course can also help you out to clarify your mind and your values and get a sense of direction in your life. It'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. Uh, thank you for any donations there. You can find my clips channel called Actualized Clips 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 worldview.

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, well, 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 jailbreaking 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, um, 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, uh, trapped inside your own doubt and nihilism and skepticism, and it's not going to, it's not going to 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, no, no, not at all. You can build a society, you can build a business, you can build a family, you can build a, a government. These are all necessary and 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.