Whitney Edwards

Another way to reframe what Claude said about this whole presentation is that of course, actualized.org can be a trap. Of course, it can. Of course, the very source of your highest information, your spiritual Guru, you know, your expert, your Genius scientist, that very Source itself can, you see, how that becomes a trap, all right? That's it. I'm done here. Please come check out my website, check out my blog, check out the Forum, check out the life purpose course, check out the book list. We've been having some technical issues with the actualized website over the last week, but those have all mostly been resolved at this point. I apologize for that delay. We had some problems with the server and the hosting company that's all being fixed. And I'm making improvements into the infrastructure, migrating to better server and so forth in the future. Look, final Point here is that I've been away on a very long break for almost a year. I didn't release any content. This was necessary for me. I haven't really talked about it. Why I went on this break and what happened during this break I'll reveal some of that in the future. It was actually pretty tough but also a huge growth opportunity for me. In the future, I have a lot more videos planned, a lot of deep stuff, a lot of stuff that comes from the lessons that I learned over last year. I wasn't just sitting around Naval gazing. I was suffering a lot and I was going through a lot and I I I integrated a lot of deep lessons and a lot of changes subtle changes have happened inside of my own mind and how I'm going to be presenting content going forward hopefully you can already see some of those in this episode I don't know they're they might be pretty subtle at first but maybe you can pick up on some of those. I'm also going to be working on some new courses coming soon although I don't want to promise anything but hey you know I've made that mistake before and I'm sure I'll make it again so that's kind of where we're at I'll I'll share more in the future and frankly some of the stuff that I went through I'm not even prepared to share yet for you know a lot of it is quite personal but um I do have a lot of deep insights to share with you on various topics the fundamental topics practical topics political topics I have some deep stuff on politics that I have planned so stay tuned for that and I want to leave you with one final thought this is a little reward for those of you who stick around through this long three-hour long episode you know I saved a little tidbit for you towards the very end and that is this the final thought is what is the ultimate trap in life. Self. Self is the ultimate trap.

So when I'm generating one of my episodes, you know that's me generating a single perspective, and it's always great to have another perspective, but oftentimes I don't have anybody else to bounce off of, but now I have AI. The next hole it pointed out was falling into traps should be reframed as an opportunity to learn, not a personal failing. The next hole it said is under the emphasis of systemic factors. Individual agency isn't the whole picture. We did focus a lot in this episode on individual agency, what you can do about these things, but of course, there are also more systemic factors. There's more collective factors. We touched on some of those, but a lot more could be said about the political aspects of this, which we didn't have time to go into. And then the final point that Claude made is, it said, "Hold the framework lightly." And when I read that, it was funny, I started laughing because it's like, "Have you been watching my videos?" Because that's what I usually say. That's the kind of injunction that I usually deliver at the end of an episode. So, I wholeheartedly agree with all these points. And the reason I present them to you here is because I'm also trying to show you the power of this AI if you use it appropriately, of course. Now, you can use AI to reinforce all of your biases and all of the gaps in your thinking, and AI is not going to automatically fix the gaps in your thinking. You have to actually see if you're actually interested in truth in understanding genuinely, not just as some platitude and virtue signaling, but if you're really interested in that, and you don't confuse the truth with your own perspective, then you will actually ask other people or an AI to point out flaws in your own perspective, limitations in your own perspective. And the reason I'm able to do that and to use the AI in this way, which is a little bit counterintuitive, most people wouldn't use AI this way, is because I'm really interested in truth. I'm not interested in just reinforcing my own perspectives. I don't need that. What I want is the value of the AI. Finally, I have someone that's very intelligent—a very intelligent mind. That's what this AI effectively is. Whether it has consciousness or not is irrelevant. It effectively serves the purpose of a very intelligent mind. It's more intelligent than most humans. You know, a human couldn't point out all these holes if given this presentation. But the AI could. So, that's a very amazing technology. The proper way to leverage that is to take whatever perspective you have, feed it to the AI, and ask it then to play Devil's Advocate. So that's literally what I told Claude. I said, "Okay, play Devil's Advocate with my outline here." And you know, initially, because Claude is very obsequious, so all these AIs are overly obsequious. They love to blow smoke up your ass. Whatever you tell them, they will say, "Oh yeah, that's a very good point you made," and then they'll slobber all over you of how intelligent you are and how good of a point you made, especially if you're telling them something of the quality that I would share with one of these AIs, you know. But then, see, that's the trick. Your ego is like, "Oh yeah, yeah, Claude, tell me more about how great my perspective is, how great my outline is." That's initially what it was telling me because it was a great outline. But I knew that that was a trap, you see? And I knew that really to use this AI properly, I have to ask it to play Devil's Advocate. So what I told it is I said, "Now play Devil's Advocate with me and point out all the flaws and holes in my perspective." And so it did, and that's the beauty of this technology. So now, here you have a brand new Cutting Edge tool for how to identify traps in any domain, which is AI. Amazing, right? This is a revolutionary technology that has only existed for like the last year, really. You couldn't do this a year ago. And so from now on, I'm going to be running all of my future content through AI to point out these kinds of holes for me. Now, of course, that can still be a trap, you know, because I haven't used the saying that much, so I don't know what the potential for the traps are. But I can already foresee a few traps. Like I can foresee that it's possible to start to get lazy because, you know, it took me a lot of work, manual contemplative work, you know, months of contemplative work to slowly develop this outline. But in the future, I might get lazy and I might just say, "Hey, I'm not going to skip all that. I'm just going to cut a corner here," which would be a trap. And I'm just going to ask Claude to write the whole outline for me. And I'm sure that a lot of people are going to fall into that very trap because why? Because they're looking for something fast, easy, free, cheap, convenient, no emotional labor, no contemplative efforts, no difficulty, right? Why spend months developing your own examples when you can just scrape and copy and paste the ones from Claude? But that's not going to be the same quality, you see? So that's a trap that I could potentially fall into in the future. We'll see. I don't know. I haven't done this enough to really understand how alluring that will be. But of course, you know, saving time is always alluring and avoiding work is always alluring. So you know that from all the traps we discussed above.

Judging yourself for falling into a trap is a trap. You want to have self-compassion when you make mistakes. Don't beat yourself up for making a mistake because that itself isn't a mistake. You just have to look, you lacked consciousness, lacked experience, you were lured in by something that you needed, you were desperate. That's the human condition. So, don't beat yourself up for that. Ultimately, you have to get good at reframing your traps as gifts, opportunities to learn deeper. A lot of times, when you go through your deepest suffering, you learn the most. So, of course, traps can be sources of some of your greatest suffering. Life is a balancing act. It's all about finding balance. Achieving success or goodness or truth in some domain usually involves having the right balance. For example, you need to strike the right balance between being too cheap and being too wasteful with your money, between working too hard, being a workaholic, and then avoiding work and procrastinating, between believing in religion blindly and dismissing all spirituality. There's something in the middle, the right balance. Trusting people too much foolishly or distrusting everyone in a cynical, toxically skeptical way where then you can't relate to them properly, you're too distrustful. Being too selfish on one hand and being too selfless and self-sacrificing on the other. Engaging in too much theory or not enough theory. There is a balance there. Being too serious or not being serious enough. Of course, it should be obvious that I am not immune to all of these traps, and yet I should say that anyway, just to reiterate it. How do you think I know about all these traps? Many of them, of course, because I've just contemplated them and thought ahead, but a lot of them I've fallen into myself, and I still reserve the right to fall into some traps in the future. If you see me falling into a trap and doing something stupid, that's not a mistake. That's expected; I expect that of myself. I think I spent a lot of time thinking about what is the value that actual art or content brings to its audience. One of the functions of my content is that I try to point out all the traps to you of all these various tricky domains. That's something that I'm passionate about, and notice that there's a lot of value in that. It's actually very practical, rather than me waxing philosophical for you or filling your head with ideology and various kinds of belief systems. It can be a lot better to just point out traps to you, and that's really what I've been doing all along. Going back for 10 years of this content, I've been implicitly pointing out traps. Now, we've made it very explicit that that's what we've been doing. Now, I want to conclude this with a little bit of talk about AI. I started using AI recently and I discovered the power of it to supercharge my contemplations. This is the first episode where I applied AI to my contemplations, and I have used AI to improve this talk that I gave to you. This talk was run through the Claude Opus AI. This doesn't mean that this talk was generated by the AI. I spent many, many, many hours and two years compiling the research for this topic, brainstorming all the examples, and I got it to the point where I would normally get one of my outlines. I don't write out what I'm going to say word for word; I speak off the cuff, but I do make an outline. I speak from an outline just because there's so much content here and it's so tricky that it's easy to forget stuff, which we don't want to do. Also, it needs to have a nice, logical, linear order in order to flow well. So, I arranged my outline, which was like 70 pages - 70 pages of outline for this talk, one of my longest ones because there are so many examples, over 250 examples. Then, what I did is I fed it into the Claude AI. I have a funny story about that, but we don't have time. Anyways, I fed it into the AI, and then I told it to read through my whole talk and then offer me improvements. So, that's what it did. It took just a couple of seconds to do that. I asked Claude to find holes in my thinking. Right, I asked it for additional examples. Some of the examples above that I mentioned were generated by Claude. Most of them were generated by me, but a few of them were generated by Claude, maybe 10 to 20 of the examples. Which was nice, I mean, it generated a lot of examples. I had to filter them through, so I'm not just using every example it gives. It might give me 50 examples, and I'll pick 10 of those that I think are the best. So, I'm using my judgment there. Here's the magic question, here's where the power of the AI comes from: I asked it to find holes in my presentation. So, here is the list of holes that it found. I'm going to read them verbatim. Hole number one: a risk of oversimplification. Not every situation is a trap. Hole number two: potential for excessive cynicism, mistrust, and paranoia. I've sort of addressed that; some of these holes that it mentions I've already gone back and I've made some corrections to make sure that people don't misunderstand things. Now, hole number three is potential for blame and shame. It's important to not judge or blame others too much for falling into traps. Compassion for others comes from understanding how complex, deceptive, illusory, and intelligent reality is. Very well said. The next hole is the potential for rigidity and dogmatism. The trap's lens can become a rigid absolute perspective. Of course, that's a trap. The next hole is traps are context dependent. What can be a trap in one context can be an opportunity in another. Excellent point. The next hole is a limited exploration of the potential gifts of falling into traps. Our greatest growth in insight comes from falling deep into traps. I've added that improvement already above because I already mentioned to you some of the gift aspects. When I was making this presentation, this outline, I was so focused on generating the best traps that I didn't even think about the gifts of the traps. It's only after I ran this through the Claw AI that it started talking about gifts, and I'm like, oh yeah, I was so focused on this one aspect of the topic that I left out that other aspect. You see, this is the power of the AI, it can point out these kinds of little blind spots, these kinds of little biases, and kind of like fixations that you have, especially when you're working on something. You can get very fixated into one way of thinking about it, and then this is where you need alternative perspectives. Remember I said that having only one perspective is a trap.

Right, it's really about strategic positioning because anyone will fall into a trap and be easily lured when they are very, very, very desperate. Like if you're broke and you have no money, yeah, you're going to be lured into all sorts of shady business deals. And if you're in this position where you haven't been socializing, you've been playing video games your whole life, living in your mother's basement, yeah, now you're in such a desperate position for sex that you're going to be tempted and lured in by all sorts of shady sexual schemes and offers. So, it is about positioning yourself strategically such that you're not in these kind of compromised positions. Then, of course, you can't avoid all of them, but you do the best you can. See, as you get trapped, you get more desperate, and as you get desperate, your options get worse, trapping you in even more. And it's sort of this negative vicious cycle. This can be sort of a cycle of addiction, like maybe you were abused as a child and you got traumatized, so that's already made you kind of desperate, emotionally vulnerable and so forth. And that makes you, of course, now, because you don't have a healthy emotional state, now that makes you susceptible now to intoxicants and drugs, and you start with a bit of alcohol, then you move on to weed, then you move on to cocaine, then you move on to heroin, you see? And this gradually makes you more and more and more desperate over time. And then, you know, when you're at the bottom of that spiral, you're so desperate that it seems like you have no way out. And in that case, what you need to do is you need to ask for help. You need to look for help from other people who are, you know, who can, who are in a good place in life such that they have abundant resources that they could help you because you're at the point where you've tapped yourself out. So, be careful about those kind of compromising situations that you can put yourself in. Traps are a mirror of our desires and fears. We fall into traps because they tap into something we crave or wish to avoid. Here's a quote that I'll read to you from an AI that I got from an AI. The Claw 3 AI says, "Traps are a mirror that reflect back to us our own psychological and emotional landscape." I thought that was a especially eloquent beautiful way of summarizing this whole thing. Here are some exercises that you can do that will help you to get a better handle on traps and to avoid traps. The first exercise is write down a list of 10 traps you've fallen into in your life in the past and then ask yourself what led you to fall into each trap. What did you learn from each trap? And importantly, in what way were these traps ultimately a gift? Don't forget that traps are not just purely negative things unless they're catastrophic, but even some of the catastrophic traps honestly can also ultimately be converted into gifts, and your ability to do that, your mental resourcefulness to do that is a very powerful skill. And maybe that deserves an episode all on its own, how to reframe this kind of negative stuff. In fact, I need to do an episode on reframing. That's powerful. And here's another exercise for you. Write down a list of five traps that other people who you know have fallen into. Friends, family members, romantic partners. And then ask yourself what led them to fall into these traps and how will you avoid falling into those traps? And then, here's an extra powerful question which is, what traps am I specifically susceptible to? What traps does my unique personality and life situation expose me to? Because you see, we're all quite different. We have different consciousnesses, different levels of development, different genetics, different personality types, different strengths and weaknesses. And that of course influences what kind of things we will be lured in by and susceptible to. So, you have to not just know about traps in general but specifically what kind of traps you're vulnerable to. Some people are much more vulnerable to alcoholism than others, genetically. You have to know that about yourself. If that's true for you, maybe some people can just go out and drink every night, and they're not vulnerable. But you're vulnerable, so you can't do that. However, you may have other advantages that those people don't have. Here are some meta-traps, very high level traps: Thinking that you're immune to a particular trap. For example, telling yourself, "Well, I would never join a cult; I could never join a cult because I'm too intelligent." Of course, that makes you more vulnerable to joining a cult if you believe that. Thinking that you've escaped a trap. Sometimes there's a trap within a trap within a trap. You might think, "Well, I've already escaped this trap, Leo, so it's not a big deal." But you don't realize that there's a deeper, more advanced version of that trap that you still haven't escaped. Watch out for that one. Especially true when you're getting into advanced spiritual stuff. You might think you've awakened to the max. But then, what you'll realize is that there's something beyond that. It's easy to overlook because you might think, "Well, I've escaped the ego; I've already awoken. So, what more could there be?" This kind of trap, in general, thinking that you're immune to self-deception, will be a trap. Criticizing, judging, and ridiculing others too much for falling into traps is a trap. Because the more you judge and criticize others, the harder it becomes for you to admit when you fall into traps yourself. Denying that you've fallen into a trap when you have is a big trap. If you can't even admit you've fallen into it, like if you can't even admit that you're doing some of the things listed above that are problematic, half the challenge is just admitting that you're doing some of these things honestly. Because you're going to be in denial about it, which is a trap. These traps can snowball and work together against you. Sometimes, you're not just dealing with one trap; you're dealing with multiple traps. For example, you're in denial that you're an addict, maybe using psychedelics but have turned it into an addiction now, and you're doing spiritual bypassing with psychedelics. If you ridicule others for falling into traps and you think they're stupid for doing that, automatically, that means you're going to think you're stupid for falling into traps. And you don't want to think you're stupid, so you're not going to want to admit that you fall into some of these traps. Sometimes, you can look like a real fool falling into one of these traps, like joining a cult. You might think you were just joining some sort of mild, good-mannered spiritual community, but it turned out to be a cult, and you were really fooled by that. But you don't want to admit that because you've been ridiculing others who joined cults. Another meta-trap is worrying about avoiding all the traps and getting paranoid about it, which will make you very risk-averse, get you stuck in your head, make you very indecisive, and then maybe you won't even take action because you are too afraid to fail and make a mistake, and you think that everything is a catastrophic trap, which isn't true. Getting paranoid about traps is itself a trap.

Another way to avoid traps is what's called the premortem technique. I have an episode about the premortem technique. A premortem is like a postmortem except a postmortem is something you do after you finish a project. You look back on the project and you say, okay, what went wrong, what went right, what are the lessons? Well, you can do that even without starting your project. Whatever project you have in mind, you can sit down and visualize a premortem. It's basically okay, visualize yourself failing at this project and then ask yourself why did I fail and what could have been done to prevent the failures? When I started actualized.org 10 years ago, I did a premortem on what would it look like if I failed at actualized.org. I discussed that in that episode, go check it out. It's kind of an old one, but still relevant. The other way to avoid traps is just by falling into them but then getting really good at learning your lessons. Perhaps the biggest trap is not that you fall into traps but that you keep falling into the same traps over and over again and don't learn your lesson. You'd be surprised how often people just live their whole life this way. It's okay to fall into a trap as long as it's not catastrophic so you should distinguish between two types of traps: those that are catastrophic and those that are not. If it's catastrophic, those you really want to avoid because those can really mess up your life and even kill you. But most traps are not catastrophic and they're actually presenting you with great learning opportunities, but of course, that assumes that you have this kind of learning mindset approach. Another way to avoid traps is to explicitly ask experienced people about traps. Seek out experts, talk to them, pay them for advice. That advice will pay for itself and specifically ask them what are the traps. You can ask them what are the newbie traps, what are the intermediate traps, what are the advanced traps? I bet you that most experts have never been asked that question so explicitly and they'll be thrilled to hear you ask such an intelligent question because see, no newbie, like it's hard for me to imagine a newbie like some new AG newbie coming to their spiritual guru and then saying what are all the traps of spirituality? Like I've never heard that happen before. Usually, they come in there with their eyes wide open, you know, all sort of mesmerized by the aura of the guru and then they just blindly fall into all the traps by worshiping the guru and adopting ideologies and beliefs and groupthink and all that kind of stuff. Of course, a way to avoid traps is to expose yourself to massive experience. We've talked about that before. Severe inexperience is really the mother of all traps and you really can't help it because you're born in life ignorant, completely inexperienced, and then you just got to learn by making mistakes. The next way to avoid traps is just to fail a lot. Failure is okay as long as it's not catastrophic. So fail more, fail faster, but don't fail in crippling ways. That's the key. Sometimes a simplistic piece of advice that might be told to people is like just fail a lot and don't worry about failure. Failure is great, you know, I failed so much in my life and I came up to be a success. Well, that's not quite correct advice because sometimes failure can be so catastrophic that it cripples you, it traumatizes you, it kills you even, or it costs you in an irreversible way that you can never replace. So what would be an example of a catastrophic failure? Well, if you get your hand caught in a circular saw and you cut off your hand, that would be an example of a catastrophic mistake. An example of a non-catastrophic mistake is let's say you make a bad investment, you lose $10,000. Losing money, of course, is always painful and it can be quite bad, especially if you need that money. But in the end, you know, you can make more money. Money is fungible, it's replaceable. $10,000 you can make that up in your lifetime, it's not a big deal. But losing your hand to a circular saw, that is a big deal, you can't replace that, there's no replacement for that. So if you're going into situations where there's a potential for a catastrophic trap, you know, identify which traps, like if you're making a list of traps in a new domain, put a little star next to the ones, there's going to be a few that are going to be like catastrophic that will kill you and mess you up, mess your business or whatever, and then when you're dealing with those, be extra careful. And then, you know, you can be very anal on those traps and the other traps you don't have to be so anal about. This way you have some sort of like sense of priority because if you're just going to be anal about everything, this is not going to be beneficial for you, it's going to actually trip you up. Another way to avoid traps is reading a lot to know a little bit about everything. Read biographies, history, business, memoirs, spiritual books, psychology books, philosophy books. This, you know, if you read all the stuff that I have on my book list, this is going to give you a very nice foundation where you're going to be aware of all the mistakes that humans have made in the past. You know, history is really great for that, biographies are great for memoirs, and so on. Also, adopt an attitude of facing truth. The avoidance of truth will land you into many traps. So, if you're just facing the truth a little bit every week, every month, every year, and you're doing that consistently, and you're valuing the truth, and you're not just stuck in an echo chamber, this will serve you well for avoiding many traps. See my episode "The Avoidance of Truth," which discusses that topic in depth. The next way to avoid traps is seeking out diverse perspectives. Only having one perspective is itself a trap. Don't have only one perspective on spirituality; you need more than that. Likewise, for business and for relationships and so on. The next way to avoid traps is context awareness. Becoming more context aware. See my old classic episode "Understanding Recontextualization" for more on that. The other way to avoid traps is reaching the construct-aware stage of cognitive development. This is from that episode three-part series episode I have called "The Nine Stages of Ego Development," especially in part three I talk about this construct-aware stage where you start to become aware of how your mind constructs your sense of reality. And this is very, very helpful for seeing some of the more abstract existential, epistemological, psychological sorts of traps. Then, I have this principle that helps me avoid traps, which is the principle of sustainability. When you're trying to do something, do it in a sustainable way. If you're building a business, build a sustainable business rather than an unsustainable business, because there's often solutions that are not sustainable which are the easier solutions. Not sustainable means I'm not talking about the environmental impact of your business here. By sustainable, what I mean is how long will this method of business be able to sustain itself? For example, if you have some sort of get-rich-quick scheme where you're flipping houses, how long can you do that? You can do that for a year or two. How long will that last? Or if you're making money off meme stocks, how long will that last? See, these are not sustainable ways of making money. You want a sustainable business. And of course, sustainability in business, for example, will mean that you need to actually offer value, not just leech value. The unsustainable methods are the ones that are based on leeching value, like, you know, you can make a lot of money as a hacker, but that's not sustainable. And then, of course, relationships. You can have unsustainable relationships, you can have sustainable relationships. Which ones do you think lead to true satisfaction and love and so on, and which ones are traps? In the end, of course, there is no algorithm for spotting traps. You just have to stay conscious and be intelligent and stay vigilant, keep your wits about you. Intelligence is your ability to see traps. Strive to live in a preemptive way. Work hard to position yourself such that you are not easily enticed into compromising on your values, your integrity, chasing after short-term pleasures, unsustainable solutions, get-rich-quick schemes, and so forth.

Of course, then there's the trap of ideology. It's a very broad general trap. I have an episode called "How Ideology Works" that explains that in more detail. Ideology is antithetical to everything we're doing here with actualized.org because it limits the functioning of your mind. Your mind is not actually thinking originally for itself and having genuine insights and observations, but rather it's just following some sort of laid-out trajectory or path and thinking along lines of conformity. Regardless of what kind of ideology it is—left-wing, right-wing, religious, or scientific—irrelevant capitalist, Marxist, all of it is limited and problematic. The other trap related to that is being stubborn and close-minded. That's usually what you get when you subscribe to any kind of ideology. The stubbornness and closed-mindedness come along with it, and there's your trap, there's the cost. Another trap is taking your point of view as the truth, confusing those two, taking your limited perspective as the best and truest perspective as absolute. And then just a very basic epistemological trap is thinking that you are right and whoever else you're dealing with is wrong. This is our default assumption in relationships and debates, whether they're political, philosophical, religious, in various kinds of conflicts—political conflicts, geopolitical conflicts—we just automatically assume that we're on the right side and they're on the wrong side. This is a trap. I've talked about Paradigm Lock in the past, that's a trap, go see my episode "How Paradigms Work." Creating an echo chamber around yourself is another kind of trap, surrounding yourself with likeminded people. This is really a sort of a variation on confirmation bias, not a paradox but a trap. Because when you surround yourself with like-minded people, then of course, you're going to be sharing your perspective and reinforcing it altogether. Another trap is spiritual bypassing, which is using spiritual beliefs to avoid facing practical responsibilities, real-life, and real-world business and uncomfortable emotions, shadow stuff, taking only like the positive aspects of spirituality but avoiding the real difficult work that spirituality should entail. Then there's the trap of happiness, pursuing happiness as a constant positive state. Then there's the path of arriving, the attitude that one day in the future you will finally reach a point in your life where you will be finally satisfied and at peace because you've achieved some XYZ accomplishments. Then there's the trap of assuming that what makes others happy will make you happy. Maybe that Hollywood celebrity is truly happy living that kind of life that he or she is living, but that doesn't mean that you will be, that's the trap. How about the trap of the perfect relationship, finding that perfect partner who will complete you and finally you will be happy? There's the trap of pure rationality, which is thinking that the problem of epistemology can be solved by just being hyper-rational and not seeing the limitations of rationality itself. Scientifically minded people suffer from this one the most. There's a trap of assuming that freedom is an absolute good. Libertarians fall into this trap. The American right-wing also tends to fall into this trap, which is very ironic because they restrict freedoms in many ways, so it's very hypocritical. Of course, the trap of positive vibes only, this is sort of this kind of new-age spiritual attitude of like let's just be positive all the time, like you know don't tell me that I'm out of money, that's negative, don't tell me I need to get a job because that's negative, let's be positive about it, let's just look at the bright side of all these situations of not having money and not having a job and not paying my taxes and just kind of like, again, this is a kind of spiritual bypassing. How about the trap of demonizing survival and selfishness because now you're so woke you've supposedly transcended your selfishness to some degree and now you expect that of everybody else? Well, of course, that's a kind of delusion there as well. So, these are some of the more psychological traps that I personally find most profound to really contemplate and some of these can be like the most advanced kinds of traps that will take you a decade to really appreciate. Now, let's get to the topic of uh, let's stop listing out traps and let's get to the topic of how do you avoid traps? So here are some tips for you. First of all, use this lens, this paradigm of traps that I'm offering to you, so just that alone, making this explicit is helpful. Next, go in expecting traps. Whatever domain you're going into, research that domain and study the traps that others have fallen into and expect that every new domain has traps in it, especially newbie traps, that's where the most traps are, is the newbie traps, but then there's like we said more advanced ones, intermediate and then advanced. The next point here is don't be a fool, don't expect free value. This is how you really get trapped is expecting free value. Free value often comes with a hidden cost. Are you using Facebook for free? Are you using some online service for free? Well, you better believe there's a hidden cost because they're not doing it for free. Facebook's making a lot of money. Facebook is one of the most profitable companies in the world, so where are they charging you? What's the hidden cost of Facebook, of Instagram, and so on? Think about these things, businesses don't just do things for free for you. In the end, a business does things because it thinks it's going to get more value out of it than you will, that's how businesses operate. So if a business is offering some kind of sale, you better believe that the business is earning more money on that sale than you are, so figure out where they're hiding the cost from you. Also related to this point is stop expecting things to be quick and easy, your desire to leech value you and get freebies will be turned against you and then you're the one who's going to end up getting screwed in the end. Beware of things that are high value but easy, free, cheap, quick, and exciting and fun. See a lot of these traps are just fun, that's how you get trapped in there by them, some of this stuff is fun and you might say well Leo if I don't, if I live my life avoiding all these trap you know being paranoid about avoiding all these traps all the time where's the fun in life um you're being a buzz kill, yeah in a certain sense I am, you know I'm sort of like that parent telling you to be careful when you go outside well why do your parents tell you that because there's crocodiles crawling around out there they might snatch you now of course in practice you know you don't want to take it overboard and I'll have some more points towards the end about um you know the limits of this traps paradigm because every paradigm has its limits every lens has its limits. Another way to avoid traps is don't be desperate and needy. The more needy you are for sex, for money, for power, for fame, for love, the easier you will be to trap, so live your life more preemptively where you avoid putting yourself in these kind of compromising needy desperate positions. Avoid traps by being a long-term thinker, short-term thinking is the mother of all traps, learn patience, the get-rich-slowly approach rather than the get-rich-quickly approach. Another way to avoid traps is get clear about your values and stick with them, don't betray your values. That's a huge trap right there. Another way to avoid traps is to distinguish between what is truly valuable and what is merely tempting or alluring. The distinction between fake value and real value, or shallow value and deep value, is what you want to be going after. The real deep value probably deserves its own episode. That distinction, just right there, also beware when people tell you, uh, rather, beware when people are telling you what you know you want to hear. Salespeople, your intimate partners, they will often tell you what they know you want to hear. Business partners will do that, investors can do that, or people offering to bring you investments can do that in like investment opportunities. Another way to avoid traps is to contemplate. Just sit and contemplate the traps for every new domain, make a list of them, make lists of traps in your commonplace book, and review it regularly. Start with some of the ones I mentioned above in this episode, but then also find your own traps. I mentioned some very kind of general traps, but then if you're going into very specific domains, whatever you're doing, you'll have specific traps related to that domain. Make lists of those and then review them periodically just to kind of refresh your memory because it's not enough to just look at them once. You've got to remind yourself of it every year because you're going to get complacent.

Other examples of traps here are various kinds of limiting beliefs. When you believe that you can't do something, that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy and it can become true just by virtue of the fact that you believe it, even though it may not be an actual reflection of your limitations. The reality is that you don't really know what you're capable of until you try really hard at it. Or something like telling yourself that it's too late to start. You know, it's too late to colearn art, it's too late to pursue my dream career. Then that can become true for you and then that becomes a trap. Another trap that's very interesting is not taking people's self-reports of their experiences seriously. I see a lot of atheists and scientists doing this, like for example when people give them reports of their psychedelic trips or their spiritual and mystical experiences. What these people do is they just dismiss it as like, "Oh, it's just fantasy, it's hallucination, it's just delusions." That's a mistake, that kind of attitude is a mistake. Really what you want to do there is, of course, people can be deluded about all sorts of mystical stuff, but you want to in general be more sensitive to how people report their direct experiences of reality because what you'll discover if you take that stuff seriously is that people simply experience reality quite differently from each other and from you. That's a big revelation because if you assume everybody experiences reality as you do, as the scientific materialist assumes reality is experienced, that's a mistake, that's a big epistemological mistake and it prevents you from understanding reality at the deeper levels. And then that's why you're so puzzled by all this mystical religious spiritual phenomena that people keep talking about. Yeah, of course you're puzzled, it's not because they're deluded, it's because you have a very limited conception of how conscious experience works. And then confirmation bias comes into play here and then that gets you stuck in your materialist paradigm. Another trap is repressing your problems with people and then acting passive-aggressively towards them. This is the passive-aggressive trap. Another one is not communicating in relationships. To have proper relationships, you need to communicate, exactly at those times when you don't feel like communicating. Another trap is hearing what you want to hear rather than listening carefully to what is being said. Another trap is calling people crazy, deluded, and evil rather than seeking to genuinely understand their perspective. It's so easy to dismiss a perspective by just calling somebody crazy. Another trap is judgment. Judgment, judgment, judgment. Judgment is just like, honestly, the more I do this work, the more I see that a giant chunk of the problems of my mind are just me judging reality and judging other people. And it's so hard to stop doing that because it's just wired into our egos. And then that brings me to the next point, which is the trap of morality. Morality is a huge can of worms, and I'm going to have a new episode coming up on that as well. So yeah, morality is just a trap. The whole field of morality is a trap, and then especially, I want to point out this kind of feeling of moral righteousness and indignation that we get. That's a trap. That feeling, whenever it comes up, that's a trap. And the kind of moralizing you do to others, the demonizing of others, the kind of virtue signaling that you do, whether it's politically based or not, spiritually based, all of this is a giant trap. Crusading, the Lesser Jihad, this kind of stuff, moral crusading, big traps, really. It's a kind of projection. Another trap is thinking that you're good when actually you're evil. I want to do a whole episode in the future, which is something along the lines of "you're not good, you're evil." I had this epiphany myself lately. You know, I've thought of myself as a good person for my whole life and then realized recently, just during my long extended break, I realized all the evil things that I've done throughout my life and just how big of a fantasy this whole idea of me being a good person really is. Another trap is trying to save the world, having this kind of Messiah complex where it's like, "I have to save the world, and if I don't do it, nobody else will, and the world will end in an apocalypse." This is usually a delusion. Another trap is doing armchair philosophy, speculating, and mental masturbation. Another one is always taking the centrist view, taking the midpoint of any controversy, splitting the difference between every perspective, as though the truth is somewhere down the middle. That's not how truth works. If you have a pro-slavery position and an anti-slavery position, the truth is not down the middle. Breaking your integrity is a trap, and there's a lot of things in life that will lure you away from your integrity and make you think like, "Oh, well, my integrity is not that important because I can get some money, some sex, some this, some that, a promotion, some fame, some clicks on YouTube." Excessive empathy is a trap. This is a trap that stay-AG, green Progressive leftists fall into. Empathy, of course, is important, and a lack of empathy is its own kind of trap that the right wing falls into. But the left wing falls into excessive empathy, and this can lead to problems. Thinking that everyone experiences reality as you do, that's a trap. Overgeneralizing and projecting your experiences onto others, that's a trap. Assuming that others have the same personality type as you, strengths as you, and capabilities as you, this kind of simplistic idea that, "Well, if one man can do it, then every man can do it, you can do it too." No, that's just not true. A lot of things that great men and women in history have done cannot be repeated precisely because they were unique genetically, they had unique personalities, unique strengths, unique capabilities. That's what the world's geniuses, if they're true geniuses, are, a kind of Albert Einstein, you know, the world's greatest mathematicians, logicians, physicists, musicians, this kind of stuff. An ordinary person doesn't have these capabilities, the visualization capabilities of a Nikola Tesla, an ordinary human doesn't have the ability for Nikola Tesla to visualize an entire electric motor in his own mind and prototype it in his mind before he even built it and then have it actually built the way that he prototyped it in his mind. That's beyond the capabilities of a normal human being, that's like alien levels of intelligence that is, which is why he's revered as one of the greats of human history because he wasn't normal. And you'll also find that that's true of many spiritual teachers, is that they're exceptionally gifted, they're not just ordinary people who meditated a lot, they're way beyond that. And that leads us to the next trap, which is assuming that everybody has the same spiritual giftedness or level of talent. That's not true at all.

Another collective trap is technology, this idea that we can invent our way out of problems that are really human social, psychological, existential, political problems, and that technology will solve this for us like AI will solve our lack of development, our immaturity. No, it won't. These things need to be addressed more directly. Now, of course, technology can help with certain developmental issues, especially technology can help us to meet our basic needs, technology can help feed everybody on the planet and provide water to everybody on the planet, this kind of basic stuff. Technology can also help to educate, especially now with AI, there's a lot of potential for education. But what really matters is our immaturity, our stages of development, you know, our lack of spiritual connection, this stuff, you know, our poor epistemology. And by and large, technology is not going to fix this, which is why we have the kind of problems we have. Just thanks to Silicon Valley who thinks that they can invent their way out of everything. The next collective trap is trying to impose things from higher stages of development onto societies of lower development. So this is the classic example of what happened in Iraq after America invaded. This idea that we can just spread democracy to Iraq or this idea that stage green has that we can spread feminism to Afghanistan. You're like but what about the what about the girls in Afghanistan who can't go to school? The feminists will say or um some stage green people will say well, you know um some people say well what about the LGBTQ rights in Palestine? It's like you don't understand Iraq Afghanistan Palestine um these places are not developed enough to have feminism to have democracy to have LGBTQ rights these people barely have food they barely have jobs so this is the trap of you know trying to project your own development down onto others leads to problems. The next trap is political polarization tribalism of course especially what we've been seeing in America lately. The founding fathers I forget who it was in The Federalist Papers it was was it Madison or somebody like that in the Federalist Papers there's there's a there's a Federalist paper that specifically talks about the dangers to America these Federalist Papers were written at the founding of America and the founding fathers specifically identified that one of the biggest problems going forward for America will be factions what they call factions in other words tribes when when America breaks up into little fragments and factions and tribes that are then all fighting against each other for selfish personal gain like the evangelicals are fighting against the um the feminists and the feminists are fighting against the you know the Wall Street people and so and like like this this kind of this kind of situation that we're seeing today especially on social media this is what the founders identified as one of the biggest threats to American democracy and here we are in the thick of it we've fallen into this trap even though it was identified for us 200 years ago. The next trap is a never-ending growth mindset this idea that everything should be growing all the time it's not going to be sustainable. The next step is group thinking. Echo Chambers. The next step is a metrics fixation or quantification, trying to, you know, trying to quantify everything. For example, the American education system. We're killing our kids in the education system by forcing them to take tests every year. It's like testing after testing after testing. You're measuring them all the time with these rigid tests that don't really capture what education is really about. So you can then gain these metrics. That's what schools do. They try to gain these metrics and they try to train kids to gain these tests that the school can receive a higher budget next year for their education. And in the midst of all that, kids are not getting high-quality educations because education is not about passing a test. The next trap is the Trap of nostalgia for the past. A lot of times we can romanticize the past. That's what Fascism and Maga is all about, scapegoating is also a trap. Communism, Marxism, socialism are traps as we've seen in the 20th century. The Trap Of Constant progress narratives, this idea that everything is always improving. That's not always true and I've been guilty of falling into this trap myself especially, you know when you have a model like SP dynamics, you tend to think that well every stage is above the next stage and we're always progressing upwards. Maybe I led you on about that but the reality is more complicated than that, all right so that's the end of the social traps we still have more to discuss. I'm going to take a quick intermission here refresh myself and I'll be back in a second. The most interesting traps I actually find to be the ones that are the most psychological and abstract and epistemological as well. Here are some examples like, Rosie retrospection that one refers to when you think about the past your mind tends to erase all the bad parts of your childhood or whatever you're getting nostalgic over and then your past can look much better than your present. Another one is confirmation bias, big bias of the Mind. Another one is denial, denial is a huge psychological mechanism defense mechanism that I'll have an episode about in the future. For example, the Trap of grounding your happiness and Security in other human beings or getting fooled by your ego's defense mechanisms and emotional reactions repressing your emotions or the Trap of reductionism and unholy thinking. I discussed that one a lot in my two-part series holism and holistic thinking postmodernism and relativism can be a very sophisticated kind of trap the Trap of thinking that truth doesn't exist or is entirely subjective and relative conflating relative and absolute truths. I'm going to have an episode coming soon about postmodernism. I also already have an episode I released in the past about the issue of absolute and relative truths. Go look at that, "The Trap of Not Caring About Truth". This is one that most people fall into, I find. See, what most people call truth or when they say they care about truth, really it's not that they care about truth. What they're doing is they're just taking their perspective and calling that the truth. That's very different than a real commitment to the pursuit of truth. The trap of avoiding facing truth, avoiding emotional labor, giving away your authority – check out my episode "How Authority Works" or how that works projection, big big big tricky trap. So you see, these are very classic psychological traps that they teach you about in psychotherapy. Another one that I see that's popular now is treating gender as an entirely subjective concept. This is a dangerous trap. Now, gender is not purely biological, but if you ignore the biology of gender, then you're going to get yourself into trouble. People don't know what they're doing when they're over-relativizing gender with this kind of postmodernist stuff. Which is not to say that there's only two genders, but of course, there is a deep conceptual subjective aspect to gender. A lot of it is, you know, fabrications of our own minds. But again, see, fabrications of your own mind, that's a difficult concept to wrap your mind around and to understand properly. Just like with that example that I told you about money being imaginary and it's like, yeah, money is imaginary, but that doesn't quite mean what you might think it means or it's easy to misunderstand the consequences of what that means.

Saying too much, texting too much, not knowing when to keep your mouth shut, that's a trap. Losing your temper when your girlfriend asks you if her butt looks big, boy is that a trap. Software development, in software development, there's something called scope creep and feature creep, which is a big trap. It can destroy your whole project. Speaking of projects, underestimating project size, scope, workload, time, and budget, the sunk cost fallacy, that's a trap. Living by the values of others rather than your own, that's a trap. Trying to be like others, like your friends, like celebrities, rather than owning your uniqueness, that's a trap, especially for young people who are too busy conforming. There's a lot of traps in just survival in the wilderness. I watch a lot of survival videos, stuff like Survivor Man, Bushcraft videos, that kind of stuff. For example, Survivor Man, he shows you a lot of survival situations that are very counterintuitive and trappy. How about the trap of celebrity, thinking that being famous will make you happy? Fame is a big fantasy. Another trap related to this, posting too much of yourself on social media. Being a fanboy or fangirl mesmerized by celebrity parasocial relationships. This is believing people who promise you or guarantee you things that cannot be guaranteed. The self-improvement treadmill, getting on this self-actualization treadmill and just doing it, doing it, doing it, and then it just becomes the next rat race for you and it doesn't really make you happy. The trap of profit maximization, milking your cow to death, a lot of big brands do that with their franchises. They just keep releasing more and more squeal after squeal, and they just get lower and lower quality, cut more corners, till it turns to [__]. Brands can be a trap, of course. Brands can sell you these sorts of fantasies and exploit you. Legal contracts are often traps, NDAs, arbitration agreements, various sneaky clauses that the lawyers and the employers stuff in there. The legal world is full of legal traps. Backlash to terrorism is a trap. This is what America experienced after '91 with the war in Iraq, the invasion of Iraq and with Afghanistan. This was an irrational response to 9/11, and it led to the weakening of America. Right now, the same thing is happening, the same mistake is being repeated by Israel with Hamas. They are reacting emotionally, irrationally, and ultimately, they're going to hurt themselves in the process. It's not going to lead to anything good for the Gazan people, and it's not going to lead to good things for the Israelis as well because the violence is going to continue. You're going to have many more terrorist attacks from people like Hamas in the future just from the war that is happening right now and the war crimes and so on that are happening. This is a classic trap, and of course, terrorism is employed to trigger that trap. Terrorism is the laying of that trap; that's what Hamas did. They laid that trap for Israel, and now Israel stepped into it despite all of their excuses and justifications. The next collective trap is the tragedy of the commons. Tragedy of the commons is there's many examples of it, but a classic example would be like a public toilet. Public toilets are nasty why because nobody takes responsibility for the toilet. Everybody treats it as a public toilet, and that's why your home toilet, you don't treat the same way that you treat a public toilet. This also leads to classic tragedy of the common traps like pollution, overfishing, where everybody is acting selfishly then collectively that adds up to destroying the fishing system, destroying the ecosystem, destroying the environment, creating a toxic river system or whatever. So that's a trap. The next trap is voting and lobbying selfishly for personal gain. Most people approach voting, politics, and lobbying as like, what's in it for me? Every company is asking, how can I lobby the government to change the laws to benefit me, the company, so we can maximize our profits even more. This is a complete mistake, and many voters vote this way too. It's like I'm going to vote for whatever is going to benefit my religion, I'm going to vote for whatever's going to get me a better job, I'm going to vote for whatever's going to reduce my tax burden a little bit. This is the wrong way to think about this; this is a collective trap, really. It's the wrong way to think about government; government should be about asking ourselves what is best for the collective and then doing that. Because when everybody individually is just selfishly lobbying the government, this turns into a corrupt mess, dysfunctional mess like what we have right now because nobody's thinking about the larger collective; they're all just trapped in petty selfishness, short-term thinking. They don't really care about the government; what they care about is just themselves, and then the government is just a vehicle to advance themselves. But then that leads to the debasement of government; government can only be good when you actually care about making government good, but nobody cares about that for the most part because they just want what they want; they don't give a [__] about the government.

The next trap is being fake in order to get your way. Not worth it. Being fake in order to get sex. Not really worth it. The next trap is not doing due diligence, not checking the sources or the references out of laziness. The next trap is thinking that buying material things will make you happy, especially luxury items and brands. Brands sell you this fantasy and it's rarely worth it. Buying a boat, buying a yacht, buying a jet, buying a sports car, these are all traps. The traps that come with buying a boat, with owning a boat, you guys don't even understand the fees you have to pay to dock the boat, to maintain the boat. It's just not worth it. If you want a boat, rent a boat for a weekend. Don't buy a boat. Likewise with a sports car, the fees, the maintenance, the insurance costs, all this kind of stuff, it's just not worth it. If you want a sports car, go rent a sports car for a few weekends. Get that out of your system. Don't waste six figures on a sports car. Silly. The next trap is following the most popular trends and sources and confusing that popularity for quality. The most popular books are not the best books. The most popular spiritual teachers are not the best spiritual teachers. The most popular business advice gurus are not the best giving you the best business advice. They're just the most obvious. The next trap is not doing routine health exams and checkups. Of course, you should be doing those. Not keeping, or rather keeping, all of your money in one bank, that's a trap. Loaning money to friends and family, doing business with friends and family, this can be a big trap. Now, of course, sometimes your family is in a very dire situation and they need a loan or sometimes working with your family in a business can work out. For example, I've started a business, successful business, with my brother, and we've made hundreds of thousands of dollars that way. We've had some hiccups here and there, but overall, as partners, we managed that business pretty well and did well for ourselves and came out both pretty happy in the end. But that's a pretty rare situation, I would say that more likely, you're going to ruin your relationships if you do business, especially if your business doesn't do so well. You know, we were lucky that our business was doing well. So when your business is doing well, it's not so bad. But if your business is struggling, that can really put a strain on your relationship, especially if you're like a husband and wife situation where you have a marriage and you're doing business together, you're also business partners. That can be a big trap, puts a lot of strain on your relationship, which is already hard enough as it is, you know, maintaining a marriage. The next trap is resisting arrest or running from the police. Just, whatever you do, don't do that, especially in America. The next trap, this is an interesting one, exotic pets. This is a huge trap. I used to have a lot of pets when I was a kid. I was really into animals and pets. I had snakes and toads and a cat, of course. I had some weirder pets. I had some sugar gliders. I had two sugar gliders when I was a kid. Man, these were the awful, awful pets. This is probably the most exotic pet that I had, was these sugar gliders. Horrible creatures. They look cute. Like when you see on Instagram, you see these cute exotic animals, you see some of these fenic foxes, sugar gliders, whatever it is, you know, these little baby animals, oh, how cute it would be to own one of those. It's like, no, you don't understand. These are demons. These are little fucking demons. This little fenic fox is a little demon. They're not domesticated like cats, right? A fox is a little demon. It's going to be running around, shitting everywhere, biting everything, chewing everything up. And then as soon as you open the door, it's going to run away. That's what these exotic pets are like. There's a reason they're exotic is because they're not suitable to be pets. In general, with pets, you've got to be very careful. Pets are very alluring traps because they're so cute, especially if you're young, they're so cute, so cuddly. You don't think about all the maintenance you have to do, the cleaning up after their shit, how they're going to destroy your furniture, and then you're going to get tired of them too, right? So like a pet is a huge commitment. And then, especially, do not get a non-domesticated pet. The next trap is audience capture. If you're a YouTuber, a social media influencer, audience capture, big, big problem. Be careful about that. Also, chasing after clicks, likes, and views. This is a very common trap. Mr. Beast is the prime example of this. I've posted about him on my blog. An article came out recently about how miserable he's made himself just chasing after clicks, likes, and views. And all for what? He doesn't need the money. He's got the money. Classic, classic trap. Another is falling for charisma and passionate oratory, especially with politicians. Some of these politicians can be very charismatic. Bill Clinton is an example. Barack Obama is an example of one. Who else? In his own way, Donald Trump can be charismatic for those who are not too bright. Who else do we have? Certain actors and celebrities can be very charismatic. This is, you realize, this is a facade. This is sort of a deception. The more charismatic you are, the more you can bullshit your way through life. And that's usually what these people do, which is why, you know, a lot of these kind of used car salesman people, salespeople, are full of charisma. But then that ends up being a trap. And with politicians, they promise you, you know, they hype you up with this kind of these charismatic speeches. But in the end, what they actually do policy-wise is very different from that. What you actually want is a politician who is not charismatic. Like Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders, to me, is the perfect balance there. He can give a good speech, like he talks good sense. But he's not traditionally charismatic. And that's actually the kind of politician you want because, like, he's a nononsense, just serious person who wants to govern properly. Whereas a charismatic person is sort of a slick-talking bullshitter who's less interested in governing properly, doing the bureaucracy of governing, and more interested in the trappings of power, the fame, the wealth, the status that comes with this. And these charismatic hustlers will fuck you. And you ladies, be careful about charismatic guys. The most charismatic guys, you know what they are? They're fuckboys. What you want is the noncharismatic guy. It's counterintuitive. See, the charismatic ones are the trap because they're using that charisma against you. What do you think they're doing? They're not giving you that charisma for free. There's a cost that comes with the charisma. The next trap is taking credentials, titles, diplomas too seriously. Another trap is studying for grades versus for understanding. A lot of kids in school, they're just copying, cramming, memorizing, just kind of like brute force memorizing stuff rather than really engaging with the material to understand it deeply. This will come back to bite you later in life. Cutting corners in your work is a trap. Trusting salespeople in advertisements is a trap. Falling for gimmicks, hype, marketing, FOMO, and not checking the fundamentals of the thing that's being hyped, this is a trap. Fads and pop culture like the crypto bubble, now we have a lot of AI hype going around, real estate bubbles, this kind of stuff, got to be very careful with. The next trap is trying to impress others or qualifying yourself. Qualifying yourself means that you're telling somebody why you're good enough for them. For example, you might try to qualify yourself to a girl, telling her that you have this car, this house, you own this, you got good grades in school. Don't be doing that. Let your actions speak for themselves. Let your poise carry you rather than verbally qualifying yourself, because that's a sign of weakness. Strong people don't qualify themselves to others; it's the weak ones that do. The next trap is violent communication. Now that's a kind of a technical term. Violent communication contrasts with another notion called nonviolent communication, which is a powerful concept. I'm going to have a whole episode about that in the future. So, we have non-violent communication, that's the right form of communication, then we have violent form of communication, which is the wrong form. That's a trap. And by violent, I don't just mean like you're screaming obscenities at somebody. Violent communication can be just normal communication in terms of tone. It's not necessarily screaming, but I'm going to have to shoot an episode about this to explain this properly. There's sort of a violent intent in your communication. We'll get to that. The next trap is assumptions in communication. How many times do you miscommunicate with somebody because you made some assumptions, they made some assumptions, neither of you expressed or verbalized those assumptions, made them explicit, and then that gets you into trouble? Working too much is a trap, and then there's a trap of working a lot but also not actually enjoying your work. See, it's one thing if you're just working a lot and you're enjoying it, okay, that's still can be a trap but less so. But what's really a trap is you're working and you're not actually enjoying it. Freebies, giveaways, sales are a trap. Trying to predict the future is a trap. High ROI investment opportunities, that's the trap if ever there was one. Thinking you can beat the market, thinking you can time the market, thinking you know that Bitcoin will reach 100,000 by the end of the year, day trading, speculating, meme stocks, this is all classic foolish traps.

And related to this is sort of doomer investment advice. You'll find this on the internet. This is an evergreen thing. You know, on the internet, there's a whole subfield of investment advice, and then there's an even subfield within that is what I call doomer investment advice, which is people telling you that the stock market is going to crash next month, next year, this year, it's all crashing. So invest in gold or sell all your stocks or invest in crypto or whatever. This is all nonsense. Nobody knows when the market is crashing. I've been hearing these kinds of ads and these sort of apocalyptic investment predictions for years and decades, and they never happened. And then these people never admit they're wrong, of course. They just keep because they're not making money on the quality of their predictions, they're making money on suckers like you who buy into the doomsday and then listen to them and they make money on the clicks, not on their the actual success of their predictions or they're just selling you some alternative investment like they're getting paybacks for selling you gold or some crypto or something like that. So that's a trap. Don't try predicting the apocalypse. Don't try predicting the end of civilization. People have been predicting the end of civilization since the beginning of civilization and they've never been right. So this is not a good bet to make. Now of course, periodically, we do have very catastrophic events like World War II, World War I, you know, awful stuff like that can happen, you know, the dropping of nuclear bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, of course, these can happen. But you've got to appreciate that these are minor events. None of these have led to the collapse of civilization. So the idea that COVID is going to collapse civilization or some market is going to crash and it's going to collapse civilization, this is preposterous. It's not going to happen. Don't bet against civilization so foolishly. And even with climate change, some of these apocalyptic climate change predictions, look, civilization is going to be just fine even if the climate rises 3 degrees. I'm not saying we shouldn't take action, we should. But this idea that it's going to destroy civilization is just, it's not serious. Next is starting too many projects at once. The key there is focus. You need to focus. Focus gives you power. You need to focus. Don't spread your focus too thin. The next trap is thinking that life is a dream or that everything is imaginary. As sometimes I say, it means that anything just goes, you know? Like my ex-girlfriend once told me, you know, I, she didn't have a job at the time and I told her, you know, so what are you doing? When are you going to get a job? And she's like, well, and she was very into all this kind of new age stuff and all this spiritual, you know, life is imaginary sort of stuff. And then she tells me something like, well, but money is imaginary, you said so yourself in one of my episodes. Yeah, but that doesn't mean like when I say money is imaginary, that doesn't mean that you don't need to worry about getting a job, right? And then of course, sometime later she texts me asking me for money and then of I didn't say this to her, but you know, if I wanted to be a dick about it, I could say, but hey, why do you need money from me? Money is imaginary. So if I don't give you any, then what's the problem? What do you, why do you need money from me? So all of a sudden, when you need money, now you're texting me. But when I told you to worry about money, 'cause you know, she text me months later when I was, you know, asking her about getting a job, that was like, me anticipating that she's going to run out of money because she didn't have a job and she was low on savings. So yeah, I mean, that was obvious that she was going to run out of money, but she rationalized it to herself as money's just a dream, money's imaginary. Well, that's a misuse of that idea. The next trap is meditation without rigorous technique. I've meditated, I've dabbled meditation for over a decade now and my biggest lesson about meditation is that if you want meditation to really work, you've got to do it seriously. Like retreat, hardcore, industrial-grade level meditation. Not this sort of fluffy self-help version of meditation where it's like, oh, you know, you just sit there, close your eyes, and you focus on your breath for 20 minutes. This is not going to do anything for you. This is not meditation. You're just going to be, you could even make things worse for yourself because you're going to be sitting there daydreaming, you're not really meditating. The next trap is doing work for an employer on the promise of some profit-sharing once the product ships. Never do that. If you're working for an employer, have them give you a contract that they are paying you on a weekly basis, monthly basis, whatever it is so you're getting your money. Don't take empty promises for your labor. If you're delivering, they should be delivering, not giving you empty promises of what's coming years down the road. Speaking of which, next trap is making promises you can't keep or overpromising. Of course, the best example of this is Elon Musk. Elon Musk has shot himself in the foot a lot by overpromising things. Now, of course, look, sometimes Elon Musk gets too big of a bad rap these days. I mean, he says some stupid things, but also, you know, the guy does deliver as well. So it's not like he can't deliver on his promises. He does deliver on his promises, sometimes they're just a little bit late. You know, better late than never. But at the same time, he doesn't go a little overboard with the overpromising stuff. Next, yeah, in fact, you know, yeah, I've just learned I've overpromised things so much in my life to people that like I'm just, I'm at this point, I don't want to promise anything to anybody. Like if you ask me when's the next course coming out, my answer is I'm not promising you anything because I've been promising a course for years and it hasn't come out. So like I'm just, I'm stopping making any kind of promises. I'm done with promises. They're just like, why are you promising people anything? Just don't promise any, don't promise people anything. It's just so much, it makes your life so much easier. Promises are such a big trap. But of course, you might need promises to lure in some investors, which is sort of like what Elon Musk is doing. The reason he's making all these promises is because he needs to kind of keep the gravy train going. It's like a cycle of promises, you know, ever-evolving cycle hype cycle and then that gets investments. But of course, those investments can be good because you can use that money to actually make a promise come true. So there's a trade-off there. But in general, I would say stop promising people things if you can avoid it. Don't put yourself into those positions where you have to make promises. That's the real lesson there.

Most people, I mean, a lot of people are too busy for that kind of thing and they're missing out on lessons. The next trap is arguing and debating, especially online. These sort of Destiny debate bro type of things, this is a trap. This is not how you develop deep understanding into issues is through debating and arguing. Not backing up your data is a trap. Trusting someone to make you rich is a trap. No one is going to make you rich. Only you can do that. Being cheap is a trap. I've fallen into that trap a lot. I've improved, but, man, I could give you—I can make a whole episode about ridiculous ways in which I've been cheap and how it's come back to bite me in the ass. I'll tell you one real quick right now. So one time, this was like 10 years ago, I picked up this girl and then she texted me out of the blue and she wanted to have dinner. And then I met her for dinner outside the restaurant. And the first thing she tells me is that she wants to [expletive] and that she's horny. So we go into the restaurant, and I just kind of ignore it, you know, because I don't want to make too big of a deal of it. So we just kind of ignore it and talk about something else. But then, you know, we go into the restaurant. The conclusion of the story is that I was too cheap to pay for the meal. I didn't want to pay for her meal. I said, "We're splitting the bill." So I said this as we sat down, right? I didn't wait the whole meal. As we sat down, I said, "We're splitting this bill," because it was a—you know, she started ordering some expensive stuff, you know, some fancy shrimp and stuff. I just said, "Okay, we're splitting the bill." And she—I said it kind of jokingly, but then she kind of took it serious, and she was taking it back, like, "What? I don't pay for anything." That's how she was thinking. And this girl was like a 10. I'm telling you, this is like the hottest girl that I've ever dated. And then I was so cheap that I just stood up and I left, and I left her sitting there with her shrimp. And, but like, to this day, I regret that, 'cause like, that—I should have just—it would have been like 20, 30 bucks. But, um, that would have been some good sex. I regret that. That would have been the hottest girl I've ever had sex with, and I was too cheap to pay 20 bucks to do that. So, you know, that's—you live and learn. That was a mistake I fell into. But see, now, now I'm not like that anymore. I'll pay 20 bucks. You get older, you start to appreciate sex more in a certain way, right? Because you can have less of it as you get older. Next trap is pretending like you know a thing when you actually don't. Pretending like you know more than you really do because your ego doesn't want to admit that you don't know. I have a whole episode about not knowing. The power of not knowing. The next rap is straw-manning and demonizing perspectives that you don't understand. A lot of that going around online. Next is speaking or opining on things which you have no experience with. Catch yourself having a strong opinion about something you have zero experience with. That's a trap. Next is defending yourself too much when you get criticized. The natural tendency when someone criticizes you, especially unfairly, is to want to start to defend yourself. Like if someone calls me a cult leader, I don't agree with that characterization obviously, but then my instinct is to start to justify myself and kind of fight back against it. That's a mistake. That's a trap. Don't try to defend yourself too much. Just realize that your reactivity to criticism actually creates a bigger problem than criticism itself. That's the lesson there. The next trap is confusing success and popularity for truth, happiness, health, or righteousness. These are not the same thing. A lot of people, especially young people, they see older people showing signs of success and popularity, some celebrity or some Instagram influencer, some sort of Andrew Tate guy with a fast car and whatever, and this is their image of truth or happiness or health or righteousness. This is a mistake. The next step is believing in New Age miracle cures when you're desperate. If you get some sort of difficult-to-cure medical condition, you start turning to some of these New Age miracle cures, and then you realize that a lot of those are [___] and could actually be harmful, make your situation worse. You've got to be careful. Just because mainstream Western medicine is bad in certain areas does not mean that Eastern New Age medicine also can't be bad in certain areas. They're not mutually exclusive. The next step is trusting that God will take care of it for you. God will take care of my children, God will take care of my money problems. No, God won't. You've got to take care of it, or nothing will happen. Of course, get-rich-quick schemes are a trap. Thinking you can get away with lying, falsehood, cheating, deception, and exploitation. You're not going to get away with these things. These things have a cost, they have a psychological cost, they have a cost on your psyche, on your behavior, on your whole moral system, everything. Even if you never get officially caught by the police or something like that. The next trap is arrogance, and of course, I've been very guilty of that. And the next trap is false humility. I am not guilty of that, thankfully, but some people are, especially in the spiritual communities. You can find this kind of thing. False equivalency is a trap. You see in various kinds of political debates, discussions, dismissing and rejecting a teacher or teachings just because it's not perfect. That's a trap. Again, it's about the signal-to-noise ratio. You're never going to find 100% signal and 0% noise. You've got to learn how to find the signal, throw away the noise. The next trap is not testing your New Age claims and theories and paranormal powers. When you get deep into these New Age circles, these New Age people, they start making all sorts of outlandish claims about their healing abilities and their paranormal abilities and their abilities to predict the future and this and that, but then you don't see them actually testing their claims in a rigorous manner. Of course, because most of it is fantasy. I'm not saying you can't have some healing powers, but a lot of people who think they have these healing powers are just kidding themselves. That's a trap. The next trap is expecting love to always be sweet and nice. No, love is a much more serious thing than that, which I've explained in my "What is Love" part one, part two episodes. The next trap is casting pearls before swine. That's a classic, especially if you consume a lot of this wisdom that I share. You're going to want to go ahead and share it with everybody else, and then, of course, that's a mistake. Giving people unsolicited advice, thinking that you know what will work for them, that's a mistake. Pushing self-help and spirituality onto others who are not interested in it, especially family and friends. Pushing truth onto people, this becomes a trap. Acting superior to those who are not doing self-help or spirituality, that's a trap. Apocalyptic predictions and teachings are a trap. Be aware of that. A good example of this is U G Krishnamurti. Overall, he's a very developed, very intelligent spiritual teacher. I like many of his teachings, he says many wise things. However, there's an element to his teachings which have this apocalyptic bent to them, that civilization is collapsing, there's going to be nuclear war, this kind of stuff. You know, COVID-19 is going to kill us all, this kind of stuff. This is U G doing a great disservice to his students and ruining his teachings. This is a classic mistake.

The next trap is staying with a man after he verbally abuses you. If a man is verbally abusive to you, that's it. It's over. You're not going to fix that relationship. So one of the things that you do as you mature and you wise up is that you get wise about what will and won't work in a relationship, and then you stop having fantasies and kind of bullshitting yourself about relationships that won't work. You just see it. Well, you know, this person's been verbally abusive to me a couple of times, it's over. It's not going to work. Whereas if you're young and naive, you can start to think like, well, but my feelings for him will make us work it out. Our love is so strong, we can work past that. It's like, no, you're not going to work past that. Another trap is getting into a romantic relationship with a mentally ill person. Now, look, this is difficult because plenty of people who watch my content suffer from mental illness, and I'm not trying to demean people with mental illness and difficulties in that regard, but also, we have to be honest. Being in romantic relationships with people who have schizophrenia or BPD or bipolar disorder, I mean, this can be a nightmare. It can be a nightmare. It can be one of the biggest traps of your life, marrying such a person, having children with such a person. That doesn't mean these people are bad or there's anything wrong with them per se. It's just that, like, being in romantic relationships with people who have these kinds of conditions, I mean, it's going to be real difficult to make that work. I'm not saying you can't make that work. I'm sure there's examples where people with these kinds of conditions do find love and it works for them. But, like, realistically, there's going to be so many problems there. Just like, again, it's just about, I'm just trying to caution you about being realistic about what you're getting yourself into. Another trap here is investing yourself completely into a relationship. Your relationship should not be the thing that completes you. That's a mistake because a person can always leave you, and then what are you going to be? And then will you be able to relate properly with that other person if you're always afraid that they're going to leave you because you are so completely invested in the relationship that if they leave you, to you, that's like death. This could actually lead to suicide. A lot of people commit suicide this way because they're so overly invested in a relationship. They got nothing else going for them in their life. They're not self-actualizing. They're not developing their career, their business, and other stuff like that, their spiritual connection to reality, that when somebody leaves them, their whole world collapses. Me, I've developed such a rich life living alone so long that if I get into a relationship and then I lose the relationship, it hurts. It can really hurt for a few weeks, for a month. It can hurt like a [expletive]. But then after that, it's kind of amazing. Like, I'm like, "Wow, it's like I awoke from a dream." And it's like, whether that person is in my life or not in my life, it doesn't impact how I feel about my life almost at all. I'm as happy as I ever was. Like, my satisfaction does not depend upon any person in my life. And that's because I've kind of designed it that way. Of course, there's sort of an opposite problem is that you can get too independent. And in fact, I've fallen into this problem is that I'm too much of a loner. I'm too independent. I'm too disconnected from people to the point where then I struggle in intimate relationships to then, of course, to commit to those relationships because it's the opposite sort of problem. So that's a double-sided trap right there. You've got to watch out for. Get the balance right on that. Of course, getting married to the wrong person can be a huge trap. Having children with the wrong person can be a huge trap. Engaging in criminal behavior, that's an obvious trap. And the trap of criminal behavior is that usually when you do it the first time, you never get caught. And in fact, you can do criminal behavior 10, 20 times and never get caught. You can go shoplifting 20 times and never get caught. And most likely, you'll get away with it. But then that 21st time, you get caught, and your whole life is destroyed. The next trap is getting physically violent. Violence is always a trap because violence begets violence. And then that comes with criminal charges and that comes with regret and that comes with retribution and negative emotions and drama. You don't want this in your life. And sometimes you can be driven to such a rage that you just want to get violent, especially if you're faced with some sort of very unfair situation. If you're treated very unfairly and you're at your wit's end and have no other recourse, eventually you're going to lash out in violence. But you have to watch out and prevent yourself from doing that because that can be very dangerous. Even just one time of that can be very dangerous. Could ruin your whole life. Next is expecting spiritual gurus to be perfect. Most of them aren't. Next is the trap of thinking that enlightenment will be a cure-all for all of your low development issues, for your immaturity, for your shadow, for your survival issues, for your money problems. Enlightenment is not going to fix these for you. So the fantasy of enlightenment, that's a huge trap. There's a lot. A whole episode could be made about just the fantasies of enlightenment and awakening. Pursuing spirituality if you're too young without mastering the basics of survival, this is a big trap that I've pointed out many times to you guys already. Sometimes I even think that even at my age— I'm almost 40 now—even at my age, like, I sometimes regret getting into spirituality this young because I think that, like, really, I still during my young years—you know, during my 30s, 40s, even 50s—I should be doing all the active stuff, the stuff that takes a lot of energy, that takes all of my best health, and then later when I'm in my 60s and later, if I'm still kicking, then, um, that's where I should be sitting on the couch all day meditating. That's really the proper order of things. So, you know, be careful if you're in your 20s especially or even in your teens getting too heavy into philosophy and spirituality, this kind of sedentary where you're meditating and contemplating but you're not actually participating and engaging with life, you're not engaging in relationships, you're not engaging in business, you're not engaging in money-making, you're not engaging in socialization. This is a big mistake, which is not to say you should completely ignore spirituality, but like, you gotta kind of think long term and plan out your life because when you're going to get older, like I'm getting older now, I have less energy, I have less health, I'm less able to socialize, I'm less able to do active stuff. And it's only going to get worse, right? So, like, your youth is so precious, you need to really live it up, have the sex, go have fun, do the partying, go out there, work hard on your business, this kind of stuff, which is going to get harder to do when you get older because you're just not going to have the energy and the health for it. I'm telling you. And then, once your health gets worse, then you can sit and meditate all day, once you have a pile of money, you know, pile of money, you've had all the sex so you don't need sex anymore, you're not an animal, you've done all the socializing so you're happy with that, you don't need to go to parties anymore, you know, get that stuff out of your system. Use your 20s and 30s to get all that stuff out of your system so that by the time you're 40 or 50 now, you can just chill out and enjoy life without needing to have regrets about like, "Oh, well, I wish I had some more sex" or "I wish I went to more parties" and now I'm too old for that kind of thing. You want to avoid those regrets. The next trap is expecting one set of teachings to be all that you need. No one set of teachings will be enough for you. You need a lot more than that to figure out life. The next trap is treating awakening as a binary thing: either you're awake or you're not awake, on or off. No, that's not how consciousness works. Treating all spiritual teachings as the same, all the different schools of teachings, the Buddhists and the Hindus, and they're all talking about the same thing, and Leo's talking about the same thing, no, we're not all talking about the same thing. Next is making yourself too busy. You need downtime to integrate and contemplate. You need actually more downtime than you think. It would be nice to have at least an hour a day to yourself where you just sit and contemplate all the stuff that happened to you throughout the day.

The next trap is debt: loans, credit cards, payday loans, and of course, student loans. A lot of young people are getting trapped with student loans because they're like that girl in Florida, you know, digging in the sand. That's kind of what university is these days. You're just digging in the sand. Society tells you to go to university, you're just digging in the sand, and then you get buried under a mountain of debt. You don't even think about it until you've graduated, and now you've got $200,000 in debt and you can't even get a job because you got some stupid degree that nobody is even hiring for or the economy is not so great. Investing on margin, big mistake. Buying speculative investments, gambling. And then now we're going to move into the domain of romantic relationships. A lot of traps here, of course, entire volumes of books could be written about this. But the big one, and the most obvious one of course, is romantic infatuation. This falling in love, what humans call falling in love, this kind of love, it's a very flimsy kind of love, very selfish kind of love usually doesn't work, usually blows up in your face. So there's that one, which should be distinguished from the kind of existential love that I talk about, spiritual love. That's a separate topic, of course they're connected, but like humans abuse the notion of love selfishly and then they corrupt it and they just use love to get good positive emotions for themselves, chasing emotional states, which of course is fool's gold. It doesn't work for generating happiness. Which is not to say you can't fall in love or there's anything wrong with falling in love, but you just gotta be careful about how that's happening. There's a lot of fantasies that come with falling in love, especially if you're doing it the first few times. You know, as you get wiser, you get more realistic. Next is being a doormat, staying in toxic relationships as a trap. The trap of self-sacrifice where your duty is to bend over backwards for everybody else, like a good boy or girl, and not take care of your own needs. This is a trap women commonly fall into. Calling your romantic partner vulgar names is a trap. There are certain red lines within a relationship that once crossed cannot be uncrossed, and one of those is calling your partner certain vulgar names. You can't take those back. Those get seared into their minds and then it toxifies your relationship going forward. Another one of those red lines is threatening to break up a relationship. You should avoid doing that at all costs. Do not talk about breaking up unless you are already fully decided that you're going to break up. Don't threaten to break up. This is going to ruin your relationships, and it's hard to resist that, right? Because if you're in a fight with your girlfriend or whatever, it's really tempting to start to think to yourself, "Well, maybe this is not going to work," and you tell her that "We're breaking up and I'm leaving" and this, right? And then the next day you apologize. But see, it's one of those red lines that you've crossed and you can't uncross. Even if she takes you back, even if you get back together again, still in the back of her mind, she's always going to be now worried that you're going to leave her next.

Taking psychedelics without proper research and protocols, without knowing exactly what you're taking, that's a trap. Using psychedelics in public spaces, especially at raves and nightclubs, that's a trap. Assuming that psychedelics will affect your friend the same way they affect you, like you might take a gram of mushrooms and you're all happy and in a good mood, it's a light trip. Then you give your friend a gram of mushrooms and he's freaking out on the floor, going ape[expletive], and having an existential crisis, wondering, "Well, how can this be?" Well, because you assumed that psychedelics affect everybody the same, and they don't. This is the trap of assumptions that we talked about, right? Your naive assumptions are getting subverted, and psychedelics are the mother of the subverting of assumptions. But basically, you can recognize, I hope, that any addiction is a trap. Addiction is the trap we're talking about here, and then chemical addiction is just maybe the most severe form of it. Speeding in the rain, that's a trap. I almost killed myself doing that one time. Texting while driving, that's a trap. New technology can be a trap. Notice that every new technology brings with it new traps that come, whether it's nuclear weapons, whether it's the internet, social media. Now we have AI. What are the traps that are coming with that? A lot of potential traps, but also, of course, a lot of opportunities too, right? So it's not all bad. Cynicism and nihilism are traps. I have an episode about nihilism called "Understanding Nihilism" that addresses that, and then cynicism, I'm going to have an episode on cynicism. That's an important trap that I haven't talked about yet. Skepticism can be a trap. People misuse skepticism a lot. I have an episode called "True Versus False Skepticism" which addresses that one, especially. A lot of atheistically minded people, scientifically minded people, rationalists misuse skepticism. The next trap is being a contrarian or being anti-mainstream. I've actually noticed that this is something that I've been doing for a long time. The psychology of this trap is very interesting because the reason fundamentally that you're trying to be contrarian is that you want to feel unique and special. Your ego wants that, and so to feel that specialness and uniqueness, you adopt the opposite views of everybody around you. But then this can be a trap because a lot of times the mainstream has correct views. It is actually not the case that the mainstream is usually wrong. Usually, the mainstream is right about most things, but then it's those things that they're wrong about that really do matter. They can be significant. So it's not really an issue of quantity. It's an issue of accuracy. How accurate are you at identifying what the mainstream is wrong about, which is different than just rejecting the mainstream?

The next trap is doing criticism as a career. You know, speaking of YouTubers, there's a lot of social media personalities out there and just, you know, radio talk show hosts and news hosts and so forth who develop criticism as a career. It's like every day they're criticizing somebody, some group. And what they don't realize is that as you do this kind of criticism day after day after day for your work, that has an effect on your mind that poisons your mind slowly over time because you're just judging, you're judging, you're judging, you're criticizing all the time but you're not aware of how this is going to trap you in 10 years, make you a bitter, close-minded, dogmatic, toxic person. This is the sort of Alex Jones effect. You don't want to be Alex Jones, I promise you. He doesn't have a good life. Identifying with a religion, nationality, or race. Oh, of course, this issue of identity is so profound and central. In a sense, it's the mother of all traps. But if you identify with a religion, nationality, or race, this is a problem. Your identity should be bigger than that, broader than that. Now, of course, if you do identify with the religion, nationality, race, you're going to say, "Well, Leo, what's wrong with that? I'm a Jew," or, "I'm a Hindu." I'm telling you that eventually you'll realize, you know, you live 10, 20 years playing that out, playing out your identity. Eventually, you'll realize the limits of that. It'll be a very limited life. This is kind of a we might say stage blue or could also be stage green sort of way of life. The next trap is wasting time hating others, and there's a corollary trap here which is hating an entire gender, race, or group of people just because you've been hurt by a few individuals from that group. This is a trap that we saw Kanye West fall into recently in the last couple of years. He had some bad experiences in Hollywood, in the music business, with some unscrupulous, let's say, Jewish business people. Okay, but then the mistake he made is he's overgeneralizing, and then he's turned that into anti-Semitism. And I don't mean the kind of anti-Semitism that they're accusing the college protesters of right now. I mean like the real anti-Semitism. Kanye West has really gone off the deep end in that regard, and so that's a mistake, right? So, the correct thing for Kanye West to say is to say, "Look, I've been screwed over in my career by some really unscrupulous Jewish business people, a handful of them. Right? Five, ten of them, how many of them has he interacted with? Not more than 20, I promise you. But that does not mean that all Jews are like that. See, that's the mistake, is when you take it to that next level. Next mistake is not mistake but trap is partying too much. And here we're getting into the chemicals and intoxicants category, using chemicals to make yourself happy. This is the broad theme of this category. Of course, let's list all the chemicals here that you could trap yourself with: antidepressants and benzos, those can be a trap, just ask Jordan Peterson about how that worked out for him. Taking steroids to boost your self-image, a lot of young men fall into that trap, especially from watching these sort of alpha gym rats parading themselves around on Instagram. Of course, these guys are taking $10,000 worth of steroids every month to maintain their looks and then you gotta keep up with that. I mean, this is foolishness. Drugs and intoxicants such as smoking, alcohol, chronic weed use, cocaine, heroin, vaping. Why are you vaping? For what? What does it do for you? Realize that your vaping is completely unnecessary, just a waste of time. I mean, I hope you get conscious one day that you realize that when you're vaping, it's just, you're just being a monkey, like it's stupid, what you're doing is just stupid. Now again, I'm not telling you how to live your life. You want to vape, go ahead and vape. I don't care. But like, but really, one day, just like sit down and like look at what you're doing, like why are you doing it? Psychedelics, of course, are near and dear to my heart, but there's a lot of traps that come with psychedelics, and I have videos that address and point out many of those with psychedelics, thinking that you can use psychedelics as a shortcut to the personal development work that we talk about here. Of course, that's a trap.

When you're out there protesting, even if you're right on the issue, even if you're right about climate change or you're right about saving the animals or whatever, what you don't realize is that this is radicalizing your mind with tier one unconscious politics. And it doesn't matter that you're right on some particular narrow issue. It doesn't matter because the larger issue is that your mind is going to get radicalized for the rest of your life, and then you won't be able to take in information like my conscious politics series. That's the bigger trap that you're missing. Now, of course, look, in the end, I'm not here to tell you how to live your life. I have my opinions. They're just my opinions and biases and I don't know you and you have your own. So, if it's really important and your values tell you that you gotta go out there and you gotta protest and get arrested on a college campus, if that's really your path, fine, do that. You know, I'm not going to tell you how to live your life. And some of these things that I say are traps are not traps for all people. They're traps for some people or they're traps for most people, but you might be the exception to that, right? So, you have to be nuanced here. But in general, I don't see that these young college kids who are politically active are thinking about this deeper meta issue about how their mind is getting radicalized. I don't see them understanding that, which is why I bring this to your attention. See, I'm not coming at it from this position of like, the sort of cess position of like, oh, we got to crack down on college protest. No, college protest, I have no problem with that per se. To me, it's just a shame that these young minds are being radicalized, and what people don't realize is that even when you're right on an issue, your mind is still being radicalized. That's still a bad thing. That's still a mistake. People sometimes think, well, if I'm right, then I should be as radical as possible about it and then it's just going to be better. The more radical I am about the right thing that I have my right position, then the better it is. No, the radicalization itself is the problem regardless of your position. Next related trap is assuming that the left or the right wing are all bad, evil, and wrong. See, what's going to end up happening is that as you do this radical protesting, eventually you're going to adopt the attitude that some group of people or political actors are evil and wrong, and then you're going to be wrong. By thinking that way, you're going to get locked into your little perspective, you know, stage green, you're gonna get stuck at stage green and I want you to get beyond that, so that's the trap here that I'm putting out. Another trap here is single-issue voting. Some people vote, they're not very politically engaged, but they can get politically engaged on one issue that they're passionate about. Maybe you smoke weed, and then some politician promises you to legalize weed so you get really passionate and now you've never voted in your life but you'll go out and vote for them. Or normally you don't vote but then Trump promises to ban abortion and then now you're excited to vote for him because of that one narrow issue. See, this is a trap. And in fact, politicians, they know that most people are stupid and most people are not politically educated or informed and they don't go out and vote. So instead, what politicians do is they try to find these little like these very little selfish little personal issues that they can kind of hook you with to get you out there to vote for them. But really when you're voting for a leader of a country, what you should be considering is the leader as a whole. You need to think holistically, not narrowly focused on one particular issue, otherwise you might win on that one issue with that one person but you're going to lose out more generally in the bigger picture. The next trap is cheating, lying, and stealing. Also not paying your taxes, just ask Wesley Snipes. Building a life around your physical appearance, girls fall into that trap more than guys do. Selling your body for money, you know, the problem with selling your body for money and building a life around your physical appearance is that, of course, your physical appearance is very fleeting. You'll lose it pretty quickly. So you want to build your life and your career on something more A than that. The next trap is not following your passions, also not following your intuitions and your hunches. Now that doesn't mean that your intuitions are always correct. It can take years for you to hone your intuition and until then it'll have some mistakes in it but that's a process you go through to hone your intuition. I have an episode about how to develop your intuition but it's better to listen to your intuition than to ignore it. But there's also another trap here, and that's the trap of always trusting your intuition. Every hunch, every intuition you think is correct, and of course that's a trap because you will have bad intuitions. How do you learn to distinguish the good ones from the bad ones? By honing it over decades of experience. The next trap is having a fantasy of what a job entails, like a dream job. Maybe you want to be a rock star or you want to be a video game designer or you want to be a YouTuber these days. I recently read a poll that they did and they said that the latest generation, gen Z or whatever it's called, that their dream job is to be a YouTuber. It's funny when I hear this, it's funny 'cause as a YouTuber myself and one of the original ones, I was pretty early to YouTube. I've been on YouTube since 2013 so I've been here for a while. Let me tell you, there's nothing glamorous about this job. Now, there's perks to it and that you get to work from home and so forth that's nice but it's not as far as a dream job goes, you know, that's a fantasy. So, anyways, the trap here is that you can develop sort of a fantasy of what a job entails without looking at actually like what's the minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour, day-to-day grind of a job rather than your fantasies of it. You know, you want to be an actor, Hollywood actor, I promise you that the actual daily minute-to-minute life of a Hollywood actor is not as glamorous as you think it is from watching the movies. Behind the scenes, it's, you know, it's a lot of God knows what their life is really like. I don't even want to know.

Next trap is distracting yourself with social games, the entire social domain, political kind of games. And I don't mean political in terms of like political ideology, we'll get to that in a minute. I mean political in terms of like, you know, whatever social situation you're in, if you're just at a party, if you're at somebody's house party, you understand that politics is going on, right? Social games are being played, that's what I mean by politics here. And then, the next trap related to this is petty human emotional drama. It's so easy to get trapped up in this, especially if you're watching the news, you know, some current event, people getting outraged over this thing or that thing, they're protesting this or this and that. And it's like when you really zoom out and you take a look at, like, the Earth, you look at the entire galaxy as a whole and the Earth as a spec within it, and you look at a Thousand-Year time frame, it's like, what is this little outrageous petty human trivial drama? What does it matter in the end? It doesn't. And a year from now, none of this is going to matter. But you invest so much of your attention and focus into this, wasting your mental energy, wasting your time. The next trap is one about raising children. I think this is one of the biggest traps with raising children, is that you tend to then push your values on the child, brainwashing your child with content. Like, if you're a Christian, then you'll want to brainwash your child with Christianity. This is a mistake. Your job as a parent is to guide your child in a meta way. And what that means is that you teach them higher principles by which to live, the sort of meta principles of self-actualization, and maybe some spirituality, and maybe you give them different perspectives, and you teach them how perspectives and epistemology works, and then you let them make their own decisions about the content and about what their values are, what their biases in life should be, you know, what kind of spirituality they want to do or don't do, rather than pushing some specific flavor of it upon them. So, it's very tempting to kind of wrap your hands around your children and then kind of like overly control them because you want what's best for them and you think you know what's best for them, but really what's best for them is to discover for themselves what's best for them. And that's a discovery process, and you can't assume that your child will be interested in spirituality or your flavor of spirituality, or in being a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer the way you want them to be, or pursuing a business degree the way you want for whatever reasons. These are classic traps of parenting. And in general, this is actually there's a general point here, which is just about teaching. If you're trying to teach effectively, there's traps that come with that. If you're sort of a beginner teacher with little experience, you're going to be wanting to just kind of brainwash your students with facts and information and get them to memorize it. That's a poor form of Education. A good form of education is when you are teaching your students how to think for themselves, and you're facilitating them. The key word there is facilitation. You're facilitating a process of them having insights for themselves. It's the difference between belief and ideology and insight. And I've covered that topic in my episode called understanding Insight. I believe something something Insight search for insight and you'll find it. The next trap is becoming politically radicalized. Far-left, far-right, but also anti-mainstream political ideologies which are in vogue these days, especially on social media. These are huge traps. If you fall into that trap, then you're going to be engaging in partisan politics and what I call tier one politics rather than tier 2 or conscious politics which I have a whole four-part series on called conscious politics part 1 2 3 4. You're going to miss out on all that if you get sucked into the far left or the far right. And this is one of the reasons why I will say that political activism on college campuses is a trap. We're seeing this right now in the news with these college kids protesting the Gaza situation. Which look, I'm not telling you it's a trap on the grounds of the content of your protest. So, in terms of the evil stuff that Israel is doing, I'm giving you that. I'm not disputing that. That's not the issue. What these young college kids don't realize, though, is that even if you're right on the issue, even if Israel is evil and all that and you go with that, okay, fine. But even if all that is true, there's a deeper issue here. The deeper issue is that you're young, you're in your early 20s. You should be spending that time educating yourself, developing technical skills, career skills, learning to self-actualization, basic spirituality, personal development, this kind of stuff, learning to date and socialize, get your love life in order. See, you should be handling all that. That should have you so full that you don't have time to go protest.

Next is sexual offers that sound too good to be true, To Catch a Predator with Chris Hansen, how's that for a trap? Having unprotected sex, having sex with prostitutes, dating strippers or porn stars, dating fuckboys, these are all classic traps. Pickup, of course, I've talked about pickup, I've taught pickup in some of my videos, but pickup can be a huge trap if you do it in the wrong ways. In my three-part series, how to get laid, I cover some of the traps that come with pursuing getting laid in the wrong ways, the ideology that can come with it and so forth. Sleeping with lots of people in general is a trap, treating sex casually, this sort of liberal idea that sex is just this free love and you can have open relationships and sex is no big deal and it's just casual and it's all okay. I mean, this is a fantasy. The reality is that sex is a big deal, it can be dangerous, it can have serious consequences, emotions get hurt. Sleeping with drunk girls, there's a trap for you if you're doing pickup. Trying to act macho and invulnerable, a lot of young men fall into this trap, trying to attract women with money, trying to attract women by being extra nice to them, that's a trap, bragging or trying to impress women, that's a trap, keeping track of how many girls you've slept with, that's a trap, and in general, just chasing women is a trap. Like, it took me a long time to realize that if a woman likes you, you don't need to chase her. If you're chasing a woman, that means she's not interested in you, and you're not going to get her, and all this effort you're expending is just making you look desperate, it's not going to actually attract you women. Stop chasing women. This is one of the simple, essential, fundamental lessons of pickup, is just stop chasing women. Now, you might say, "Well, Leo, isn't pickup chasing women?" No, there's something that chasing women means. It's like, when I say stop chasing women, that doesn't mean that you don't go out to a nightclub and socialize and flirt with women. What I mean by chasing women is like you need to develop a sense of when a woman is receptive to you or not. And if you don't have that sense, then you can be one of these sort of clueless, inexperienced guys who just tries to, you know, like, you're texting the same girl over and over again, like, "Hey, what are you doing tonight? You want to come out?" And she doesn't respond, and then you text her again the next night, and the next night, and the next night. It's like, what are you doing? If she wanted you, you wouldn't need to be badgering her over text messages. It took a long time for me to realize that. So that's a trap. Not handling your sexual needs and repressing your sexual desires, that's a sort of an alternative trap here. What you should notice is that the traps are usually not just one-sided; they're usually two-sided. There are two sides to a situation, and if you go too much into either extreme, like for example with sex, if you go completely abstinence in celibate route, then that's going to be a trap. And if you go completely the "playboy" manor route, just sleeping with everybody indiscriminately, hundreds of girls, that's going to be a trap, right? So, you need to find the Middle Road there, and so it is with most situations and traps. Not learning how to socialize, that's a big trap. A lot of young men are falling into that trap these days because they're chronically online. They have atrophied social skills; they never developed social skills. They're playing video games too much, thousands of hours on video games but no social skills. And also, more and more people are neurodivergent, autistic, having these kinds of problems, which makes them bad at reading social cues, bad social intelligence, and of course, this is related to diet, related to chemicals in our environment, and so on. Next trap is trying to control and manipulate people, that's a big one. When you realize that you shouldn't control and manipulate people anymore in your life, and you stop doing that, that's a huge shift, a huge inner game shift for you. But it can take a while; it can take a decade for you to really have that sink in and click for you. And also related to that is treating people transactionally, treating people with disrespect, trolling and bullying others, that's a trap. Authoritarian leadership style, and that can be if you're a politician, if you're a corporate executive, if you're the leader in your family, or even in a romantic relationship. You can adopt a sort of authoritarian leadership style where you just try to dominate the other person. In your marriage, in your business, you know, you dominate your partners or your coworker or whatever, your co-workers, and this will end up backfiring on you. Another trap is being destructive, trying to hurt others, getting revenge, getting even, even something like torturing others, people fall into that trap. You might think, well Leo who tortures people these days? Well, you'd be surprised. When I say torturing others, it doesn't necessarily mean that you literally have to be as something as gross as tying someone to a table and then slitting them with razor blades. I mean, it can be, you know, you can get pleasure out of torturing people in subtle ways over text messages, you know, some girl who scorned you, you know, you could try to torture her over text message. This kind of destructive vent that you develop, especially if you've been hurt, if you've been traumatized, if you feel bitter because you've had failures in your life and life is not going very well, you're in a bad mental state, you can get down this kind of destructive path where you actually get joy out of hurting others. This is a big trap; nothing good comes with this.

Another trap that I've fallen into and I see a lot of people falling into is too easily trusting doctors, scientists, experts, and gurus. There's this habit of just going to an expert like a doctor and just blindly listening to whatever he's telling you. You know, he writes out some medications for you, you just take them, you don't read the label, you don't do your own research because hey, you're paying the doctor a lot of money anyway, so just might as well trust him, right? Well, wrong, because of course, the reality is that most doctors aren't looking out for you, they're looking out for themselves, and they don't have a lot of time to worry about your problems, and they're just going through the motions, writing out medicine prescriptions. Not to mention that they're also pressured by pharmaceutical companies, they're given free samples and special deals and stuff like that. So it's really in your interest to take responsibility for your own health. When you go to a doctor, your attitude should be that you've already done the research and you know more than the doctor about your specific condition, whatever you have. And these days, with all the online information that we have, with Reddit, with forums, specific forums on every medical condition you can imagine on the internet, and now we have AI as well that you can leverage. So with all that, within a week, you can research your whatever condition you have better than most doctors, unless you have some exceptional doctor, which is pretty rare. They do exist, but generally speaking, most doctors are not exceptional, and they don't know more than what you can research by self within a week on the internet. And they often times give you the wrong advice, give you the wrong medicine, mislead you. Not intentionally, just because it's a system, right? They're part of a corrupt system. And of course, too easily trusting spiritual gurus is a big trap. This is one of the problems I have with the whole guru model. You know, these days in the west, we misuse the label guru; we call everybody guru these days. Like, that guy's a marketing guru, and this guy's a love guru, and then Leo's some sort of self-actualized guru. It's like, no, I'm really not a guru. What a guru really means in the classical sense, it's a very specific kind of relationship. It's a master-apprentice relationship, like the sort of Jedi Padawan, you know, Master Jedi Padawan relationship, where you find a spiritual master, and then you resign yourself, consign yourself to him for the rest of your life, and then you follow him very diligently and do what he tells you to do, sort of kind of like blindly, obediently, and then just in the hopes that that would lead you to some ultimate enlightenment or whatever. And while that can work, I think there's a lot of ways that can go wrong. I mean, because when you're a newbie student, when you're an apprentice, when you're a padawan, you have no idea of what guru is a good guru, and who's a corrupt guru. There's plenty of corrupt gurus out there, cult leaders, and people who will sexually abuse you, and whatever, and it will not lead you to any kind of enlightenment. But you don't know any better as a newbie, and then you consign yourself to that, and then where does that lead you? So that can be a trap. Now, is it always a trap? Of course not. I'm sure there's cases of success where that works. But look, this is a general point about all the traps on this list, is that you might start thinking to yourself, "Well, Leo, I've done some of these things you're saying, and I'm okay. And in fact, it worked out for me, I'm doing good, I benefited from it." Well, look, a trap doesn't mean that it's 100% always a trap. A lot of times traps are like something that works 75% of the time, and then 25% of the time, it's a disaster. And then that's the trap. And in fact, what makes it such a trap is that the first few times you do it, it's like, "Hey, people were telling me this thing is bad." You know, the first few times maybe you snort some cocaine or whatever, it's like, "Well, it's fun, it's good, I don't feel bad the next morning, I don't have a hangover, it's fine, what's the problem?" It's people were just fear-mongering to me about cocaine. But then you get down that road, and then you get into the problems. Next trap, not diversifying your information sources. Whether it's news, politics, religion, philosophy, a teacher, a guru, an expert, if all you're relying on is that one source of information, this becomes a huge trap, which is why a theme of what I try to teach is multi-perspectivalism. I share so many diverse perspectives with you precisely because I don't want you to get trapped and locked into any one perspective, including my own perspective. And we've been doing that since day one with actualized.org. The next few traps: sleeping with your guru or spiritual teacher, very obvious if you think about it. Sleeping with, also of course, your employees, your students, your followers, your coworkers, your bosses. In other words, thinking with your dick or your ovaries. Next is joining a spiritual commune. Now, that's kind of a euphemism. I say spiritual commune, what I really mean is a cult. But of course, I'm not going to say it that way because if I say joining a cult, everyone says, "Well, I'm not dumb enough to join a cult." When people join a cult, they don't think they're joining a cult. When people join a cult, they think they're joining a beautiful, new age spiritual commune with advanced, far-out ideas about free love and other things like this. Classic trap. And then of course, even worse than that trap is the trap of starting a cult, starting a spiritual commune yourself, thinking that you know what you're doing. Please don't start a spiritual commune, you're going to screw it up. All of your corruption and ego and immaturity and inexperience, all of that will lead to disaster unless you really know what you're doing, you're really mature, and you have a lot of experience with these sorts of things. And even then, it'll be difficult, which is one of the reasons why I never started a spiritual community. What we have with actualized.org is not really a spiritual commune. I mean, it's just a forum. It's not a proper cult, okay? You guys who call me a cult leader, you don't know what a proper cult is. Go check out my two-part series, cult psychology part one, part two, where we talk about what a cult really entails. It's not what you're seeing here. It's not what you're seeing on the forum.

We have literally over 250 traps to cover. So, I'm going to be breezing through some of these. I want to give you a big picture overview, so I'm not going to be delving into each point too much here. We're going to be going quickly. And also, keep in mind that I have episodes already on many of these points, multi-series episodes I have already on some of these points. All right, so here we go, the master list of traps. First is, and this is we're going to start with some of the biggest ones here, very general ones, is chasing money, sex, power, fame, status, approval, luxury, pleasure, and intoxicated states. I mean, that right there is like 80% of all the traps that humans fall into. Next is trying to get the easy life. Next is thinking you can get value for nothing. This is fool's gold right here. Within investing, within dating, within business, people try to get value for nothing, trying to leech value rather than being a massive value provider. And of course, this ends up hurting you in the end. Next is avoiding work and procrastination. Procrastination gets worse and worse the more you do it, like a Chinese finger trap. Next is avoiding responsibility, and one of the best ways we do that is by blaming others. That's a trap. Next is ignoring problems and letting them fester, sweeping problems under the rug, and then, closely related to that, is the next one, which is addressing problems but only at the surface and not at the root, such that your problems keep recurring over and over again for years, for the rest of your life, rather than just investing the time and energy to solving it permanently. I've talked about that in the past; it was actually one of my first videos that I ever recorded was on that topic. Next is being indecisive and avoiding making decisions and then getting stuck without direction, rudderless. I have an episode about how to become more decisive. Next is the trap of scientific materialism, logical positivism, reductionism, rationalism, and scientism. Of course, I've covered that topic a lot so I won't delve much deeper into it here. But we should also mention here closely related is atheism, the trap of atheism, and the trap there is the dismissing of religion as superstition and fantasy. Of course, that leads us to the next step which is religion itself. Religion is one of the biggest traps there is. So how can it be the case that atheism is a trap and religion is also a trap? Well, of course, the atheists are right; there is a lot of nonsense within religion, but not all of it is nonsense. I want to do an episode just about atheism; I don't think I've ever discussed it deeply enough at this point. I mean, it's, I would think I have, but I don't think I have a specific episode on atheism yet. Long overdue. Next is consuming too much media: television, video games, news, and then of course, closely related and deserves its own mention and special category of social media and all the kind of rabbit holes you can go down with the conspiracy theories, various kinds of ideologies, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all this kind of stuff. The overconsumption of this to the point where it drains hundreds and thousands of hours of your life that you should be investing in building yourself and developing skills. I think a lot of young people are falling into this trap right now; they're just spending way too much time on TikTok, way too much time on Instagram. It's spoiling their mood, but also they're spending a lot of time playing video games, thousands of hours of online video games and so on, instead of really spending the first decade or two of their lives, the most important decade or two just laying their foundation. The next trap is junk food and processed food. The next one is outsourcing crucial functions to others. So there are certain things that you should outsource and delegate to others, and in fact, it's a trap if you don't do that, trying to do everything yourself rather than specializing, delegating, and outsourcing is itself a problem. And I suffer from that problem because I tend to want to do everything myself because I subscribe to that adage that if you want something done right, you got to do it yourself. But of course, that makes you very limited in what you're able to do. So you have to learn how to delegate and work with others to accomplish larger goals. But there are certain things you should never outsource, for example, outsourcing your inner problems to a therapist. Now there's nothing wrong with going to a therapist; in fact, I recommend it for everybody if you can afford it. They're pretty expensive, but the problem here is what I see is that a lot of times people are going to a therapist, but then they're not actually doing all the self actualization work that we talk about here on this channel. They're not really getting involved in that; they're just going to a therapist in a sort of like, "I'm just going to go to the therapist once a week, and they're going to solve all my problems." It just, it's not going to work this way. Therapists can help you, but really, this is, you know, when we're talking about therapeutic type stuff, we're talking about the mastery of your own mind. This is self-mastery we're talking about ultimately. And no one, this is not something you should be outsourcing to anybody. This is stuff you've got to, this is like your main job in life is doing this. So if you're not doing that, this is the trap of outsourcing that I'm talking about. Or for example, outsourcing your marketing for your business to somebody. Now, of course, if you just have some sort of low-level marketing stuff like you need somebody to post some stuff for you on Twitter or whatever, of course, you can outsource that. But I mean, like your marketing strategy, see marketing is the heart of your business. That's not something you should be outsourcing; that's something that you got to take charge of, you got to be a master in because that is what determines whether your business will succeed or fail. It's mostly your marketing strategy, see that's why they pay you the big bucks if you're the owner of the business, if you're the founder of the business, if you're the CEO. That's your job is to take care of that, not to expect somebody else to do it for you.

This is a transcript of Leo's latest video.. I copied it from Agrande's post in the high consciousness section. I thought having a copy of this will be useful for referencing in the future. This is a very practical episode. Here, I want to present you with a powerful conceptual lens to help you navigate all of life, and that lens is traps. Think of life as a dungeon full of booby traps, and your job is to use intelligence, wisdom, consciousness, intuition, and experience to foresee and avoid all of these traps. Traps are not so much set by evil people, although sometimes they are, but the most important traps are the traps of your own mind. Of course, the psychological traps, and really, you're learning to navigate the trickeries of your own mind and the mind at large, which is what the universe is. Mind or consciousness, as we've discussed many times before, is a very tricky thing. A general theme of our work here has been seeing how reality is all about illusion, deception, and of course, illusions create traps. And intelligence is your ability to see through those traps. But what is a trap really? A trap isn't just something that's bad; it's not just a mistake. A trap is something that's bad but seems good. Traps are enticing; a trap presents you with some large gain and value only to cost you greatly in the end. Think of how a mousetrap works. You get that juicy piece of cheese for the rat, but what's the cost? Instant death. So, it's that alluring quality of these traps which got me thinking about this whole theme and starting to look at reality through this kind of lens. This is a powerful, practical lens that I want to share with you. A trap can be thought of also as a kind of illusion. Like, think, for example, of a mirage in the desert. That's a trap or something that seems true but is actually false. So, there's these kinds of intellectual traps that we can fall into. For example, this is a kind of a silly one that you can try out on a child (won't really work on an adult), but something like, what weighs more, a ton of gold or a ton of feathers? See, if you're not careful, you'll fall into that intellectual trap. A child might also. You should notice that animals, children, the immature, the inexperienced, and the desperate are the easiest to trap. Speaking of children, I read a story a while back, a few months ago, about a girl in Florida. She was with her family at the beach, digging around in the sand, building sand castles, digging holes and stuff like that, as children do. And she dug a hole so big she crawled into it, and then, of course, it collapsed. She got trapped under the sand; nobody could hear her screams, and she was found there, buried alive. The perfect illustration of how you can entrap yourself. And that's really going to be our focus here, is how your own mind traps you. But just think about that, just imagine being that child, digging this hole, having fun in the sand, and then this whole thing just collapses on you. But see, she wasn't thinking that far enough ahead about the consequences of her actions. And this, of course, turns out to be how most traps work. There's another story, I forget where it's from, Africa someplace where they have monkeys. They have these monkeys in the forest, small monkeys. And then the way that hunters trap them is that they'll get a bottle with a narrow neck, they'll take a small little nut, coat it in honey, put it in the bottle, and then they'll throw this bottle out into the forest. The monkeys come by, they want the nut, they reach in there with their little paws, grab the nut through the bottleneck, but then their fist is clenched, they can't let go of the nut, and then they're stuck to that bottle. And then the hunter comes by and clubs them over the head. Traps can also be thought of as fantasies that you have, fantasies you've constructed in your mind which puts you out of touch with reality, which leads us into this whole separate side issue of fantasy, which I want to have a whole episode on in the future. It's really a pretty advanced topic of how your mind uses fantasy to avoid reality and to create all sorts of problems for itself. Also, traps work by subverting assumptions. I have a whole episode called "Assumption is the Mother of all Fuckups" where we discuss about the trickeries of assumptions and how they get you into trouble. Well, of course, those come into play here as well. So, we're connecting a lot of threads in this episode, you'll see a lot of connections with prior episodes that I've done, I'll be pointing those out to you as we go. A trap is often painting yourself into a corner with short-term thinking. I wouldn't worry so much about others trapping you, and I would urge you to focus more on how you trap yourself. And, of course, you trap yourself not just as an individual but also collectively. So, we're going to take a look at traps of individuals but also collective traps. How do you trap yourself as a society, as an organization, as a tribe? That's also a common problem. And one of the greatest meta traps is not seeing yourself as your own greatest enemy, of course, which is what you are. You know, trying to externalize the enemy out there somewhere. So, we're going to be interconnecting a lot of these themes here, and I'm going to be giving you many examples, hundreds of examples literally, of traps that I've come up with, that I've discovered, and to help get your mind jogging to understand what's really being talked about here, the depth of this lens and how much it can do for you, how powerful it is. And then also, I'm going to, afterwards, share with you a list of ways to avoid falling into these traps, like what are the principles for avoiding traps in general. So, every domain in life that you go into will have traps, that's one of the general principles. And throughout your life, you'll be entering new domains periodically. Every few years, you'll be entering into something new. You'll be entering a relationship, you'll be entering a new business, you'll be entering a marriage, you'll be having children, and each of those domains come, of course, with its own traps. And there are newbie traps, intermediate level traps, then very advanced traps. So, you could break it down that way as well, make those kinds of distinctions. But wouldn't it be wise from this point forward, you know, up until this point in your life, you've probably been going into various new domains not very consciously and not explicitly looking and thinking of them in terms of traps. Wouldn't it be more intelligent, though, to study and contemplate the common traps in every new domain that you enter before you enter it? From now on, that alone right there can save you a lot of trouble. Here are some of the top domains to consider in terms of traps: business, employment, and career; investing and managing your money; dating, relationships, sex, and marriage; family, raising children; education, schooling, and university; academia, science, philosophy, epistemology; spirituality and religion; politics; creativity in doing your art; health, healthcare, medicine, and nutrition; martial arts or sports; marketing, advertising, and sales; buying a house; socializing, learning the whole social world and how to socialize, how to relate with others; the pursuit of happiness; the traps of each spiral stage of development; the domain of emotions; psychedelics, drugs, and intoxicants; geographic domains when you're traveling around the world. Each country you travel to has its own traps. This brings me to Florida. You know, it seems like every year, I read news stories every month I read news stories about a crocodile grabbing somebody, some old granny walking down the street near the pond gets snatched up by a crocodile, dragged under. I watched a video on TikTok or Instagram recently where some old man was walking his little lap dog near the pond and a crocodile jumps out, grabs the little dog, swallows it, and then retreats back into the water. And the old man, he jumps into the pond, grabs this crocodile or alligator, whatever it was, and is just prying its jaws open to get his dog out. I don't know what happened after that. But the reason I bring up this Florida crocodile thing is because to me, crocodiles are a great allegory, a sort of a symbolism of traps. When I think about traps, I think about crocodiles. To me, that's like nature's trap, is the crocodile. And to me, crocodile represents also truth and reality. Because see, a lot of, again, one of the ways you fall into traps is by avoiding truth, as humans characteristically love to do. And so, what ends up happening is you avoid enough truth, eventually, reality comes to bite you. And so, the way I visualize that in my mind is with crocodiles. Crocodile, to me, represents truth, reality. And then, your head is filled with fantasy, naive foolish fantasies. You're just kind of like traipsing along near the pond, you know, innocently minding your own business, skipping along. And then, a crocodile snatches you. That's truth. That's reality. Reality is harsh, that's how it is. It doesn't play games with you, it doesn't compromise, you can't negotiate with it. Once your head is in a crocodile's jaws, you can't negotiate your way out of that, you can't fuck your way out of that, all of your human bullshit flies out the window. That's what I love about this crocodile metaphor so much because it cuts through all the human bullshit in the social domain. Humans love to bullshit so much. But then, when you're in nature, when you're facing a powerful animal, when you're facing the forces of nature that you can't negotiate with, that's when you really see the truth of who you are. Bestselling books could be written about the traps in each of these domains. For example, you could have a million-dollar book titled "The Traps of Spirituality," "The Traps of Academia," "The Traps of Politics," "The Traps of Business," "The Traps of Investing," "The Traps of Dating," "The Traps of Mainstream and Alternative Medicine." These are all million dollar best-selling book ideas right here. And also extremely practical. Think about it, if you saw one of these books on the bookshelf, you would instantly snatch it up. So, if you want a great book title or a video title, just "Traps of [blank]," and then fill in the blank with whatever thing you're interested in. But, of course, to be able to write an effective book on any of these topics, you would need to have deep experience with each of these topics, which can take years and decades to acquire and at great cost as well. So, I've spent the last years patiently compiling a list of over 250 traps on this topic. I've been wanting to shoot this episode for two years now, and finally, here we go. Let's jump into it.

I've lately been thinking about the pre mortem technique and how it could be implemented before any important life decision. Any examples if you found it successful.

Porn is nothing but addiction.

This sounds a bit unnecessarily stretched and complicated.