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How To Think Like A Strategic Genius (5-Dimensional Thinking)

Dan Koe34:45Added Aug 31, 2026

How to think better: notice when you think stupidly and stop it.Research, write, and schedule content with your AI strategist (gives you daily ideas to run w...

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  1. Intelligence doesn't equal success

  2. 00:00Some of the smartest people I know are incredibly stupid. And some of the dumbest people that I know are
  3. 00:05incredibly successful by today's standards. They're happy. They're healthy. They're wealthy. So, what's
  4. 00:10actually going on here? Why are smart, intelligent people who tend to overanalyze a lot of things not achieve
  5. 00:17the life they want? Because in this video, I'm trying to prove to you that thinking is one of the most important
  6. 00:23things that you can practice in today's world. Thinking is the one thing that determines the outcome of your life. And
  7. 00:31that's massive. The outcome of your life. That's literally everything. So if you learn how to think, which is what
  8. 00:36we're going to learn here, but we're not going to do it in a way where we talk about first principles thinking or
  9. 00:42systems thinking or metacognition or anything else that you can ask chat GPT about because that's why you're here.
  10. 00:47You're here for a unique take. Now, I've spent multiple years studying different
  11. 00:52thinkers, and I've spent a lot of time dissecting how they think and trying to
  12. 00:57integrate that into my own way of thinking. So, what we're going to do in this video is we're going to start very
  13. 01:03shallow and build our way up. We're going to start at one-dimensional thinking, then two-dimensional, then
  14. 01:08three-dimensional, then four-dimensional, and finally we're going to go we're going to tap into the fifth dimension. So thinking tip number
  15. 01:14one, if you want to understand what something is like thinking or genius thinking, it helps to understand the
  16. 01:21opposite to understand what stupid thinking is. And when I say stupid thinking here, I'm not calling you
  17. 01:27stupid. I'm not calling you low IQ. I'm simply observing a pattern. Everyone thinks stupidly at times. Everyone
  18. 01:34thinks stupidly every single day. And that's what we're trying to avoid. That's what we're trying to move in the
  19. 01:39direction away from. I can't think right now. So if we observe people who display this characteristic of stupid thinking,
  20. 01:46we come away with a few insights. First is that stupid thinking is one-dimensional. People try to jam
  21. 01:52everything into their own perspective and have difficulty seeing outside of it. Second, stupid thinking is
  22. 01:57reductionistic. So experts in one domain like business try to reduce everything to a strategy problem as one example.
  23. 02:05Third, stupid thinking is tribal. So you only trust your group, your political party, your tribe, your religious people
  24. 02:12who adopt your same religious beliefs and you consider everyone else wrong because they don't conform. And fourth,
  25. 02:18stupid thinking does not question. Your justification for most things is that's
  26. 02:24just how it's done. So as a whole, stupid thinking is about closing your mind off once you've reached the limits
  27. 02:30of what you know. Stupid thinking is when you stop thinking too early. You
  28. 02:36can still think within your own little bubble, but you never break out of that bubble. What tends to happen is you
  29. 02:43think for a bit, but then you reach a point where you're at your limits of how
  30. 02:48far you can think, and then you tend to collapse in on what you know, and then that's when you just become this person
  31. 02:55who just spews out pre-programmed thoughts or what they've been told or what other people believe is right. They
  32. 03:02don't push the boundaries of their own mind. So with that as an explanation of stupid thinking, we can start to grasp
  33. 03:10at what genius thinking could be. In this case, genius thinking as a definition would be the ability to hold
  34. 03:17threatening ideas in the realm of possibility paired with the intention to understand rather than just know. The
  35. 03:23mark of genius thinking is illustrated by the width, depth, and height at which you can think without being cut off from
  36. 03:30venturing further. often due to holding an idea as absolute. It's your ability to traverse the full universal web of
  37. 03:38ideas, reality or all potential knowledge and pull them together into something coherent or useful, if not
  38. 03:44something entirely new. But this also helps us see what this smart but dumb phenomenon is where someone very smart
  39. 03:51in a domain like business will see someone who is depressed and just attribute that to being a productivity
  40. 03:56issue or dude, you just need to sit down and do the work. You you see this everywhere on social media. If you're
  41. 04:02depressed, just do the work. If you're sad, just do the work. And in some cases, that helps, but in it doesn't
  42. 04:07help in every case. It's like you're a little kid and you're trying to take the circle shape and you're trying to like
  43. 04:14mash it into the square shape in the little board. And the same holds true for the other side, right? There's like
  44. 04:20business person who's very practical and then there's a spiritual person who's very abstract. and the spiritual person
  45. 04:27would attribute business failure to just not having the right vibration. And the
  46. 04:32thing here is is that they're both not wrong. They're both correct in their own ways. But we have to understand how to
  47. 04:40apply those ways of thinking to different situations so that we can get the most out of it. Because wouldn't it
  48. 04:45help as a business person if you had a problem that you couldn't see because it's best solved through something
  49. 04:52spiritual to be able to tap into that lens so that you can actually solve the problem. So you've met these people.
  50. 04:58You've met these business people who just prescribe their way of doing things as the only way of doing things. You've
  51. 05:03met the hippies and the spiritual people who do the same thing. And you probably do the same thing without noticing it.
  52. 05:09And that's what I'm trying to get at here is if if you just notice that, if you simply notice it and don't allow
  53. 05:15your thinking to stop there, then you unlock this new power. So, how do we actually start navigating out of stupid
  54. 05:23thinking? The first thing that will help here is just knowing the difference between knowing and understanding. Now,
  55. 05:29this isn't an explicit definition. I'm just trying to get you to understand here, which is kind of ironic, but
  56. 05:36knowing, we can think of that as horizontal development. It's domain expertise. You're accumulating facts.
  57. 05:42You're memorizing insights. You're studying the textbook. You know things. And understanding is vertical. It's it
  58. 05:48has more to do with the sophistication of your cognitive operating system. So,
  59. 05:54you can know a lot and understand very little. You can also understand deeply and know relatively little. But if you
  60. 06:01understand more than you know, you can still act more effectively than the person who thinks they know everything.
  61. 06:07And that's exactly why smart people are stuck is they read books, they collect knowledge, they develop themselves this
  62. 06:13way, but they can't see anything above that. They can't see into other domains. It's like they're installing new apps
  63. 06:20onto their operating system without upgrading the operating system itself. Right? When you have an old iPhone and
  64. 06:26you download a new app, that app is probably going to be very slow. It's not going to work very well. A lot of the
  65. 06:32features are developed for the newer operating system. So, when it comes to your own mind, you have to do the same.
  66. 06:38So, a few more examples of the smart but dumb phenomenon is like think of a businessman, very successful in
  67. 06:43business, but he still finds himself unhappy, right? he makes $100 million, then he sells the company and now he's
  68. 06:50depressed and he doesn't know how to solve that problem because he's not in business anymore and that's all he
  69. 06:55knows. Or, and I'm sure many of you can relate with this, is a creative who has
  70. 07:00very beautiful work. They dedicated their lives to their craft, but when it comes time to make an income, they can't
  71. 07:07because they don't understand anything in the business domain or even in the psychological domain and how humans
  72. 07:13perceive value because they're not creating something that other people want. And that's not inherently a
  73. 07:19problem, but it can create problems because if you want to do that thing full-time and you're working a job or
  74. 07:24you're trying to scrape by time to actually work on your creative craft, that's kind of a problem. You want to
  75. 07:30spend all of your time doing the creative thing, but you're not willing to learn what's going to allow you to do
  76. 07:36that because you think everything just boils down to, "Oh, I just want to be able to create art all day. Why can't I
  77. 07:42create art all day?" And then another example is like a meatthead who is very fit or goes to the gym, but their
  78. 07:48relationship is in shambles because they don't understand social dynamics. They haven't studied masculine feminine
  79. 07:54dynamics. They don't understand any of that. So they got buff for the sake of attracting a girl, but then they can't
  80. 07:59keep it and they don't know how to solve it because all they understand is, "Oh, if I get buff, girls like me." So that's
  81. 08:05why learning how to think is so important because your mind is how you interact with reality. You process
  82. 08:12information, you make sense of it, which is thinking. You make a choice, then you receive information as feedback. So you
  83. 08:19have to think again, and you respond to that feedback and repeat the cycle. So you get information, you think, make a
  84. 08:25choice. You get information back from the choice. You think, you make another choice. You do the same thing. Think,
  85. 08:31information, choice, repeat, repeat, repeat. Thinking determines the outcome of your life. That's it. So every moment
  86. 08:39where you engage in stupid thinking creates a compounding effect. You dig
  87. 08:44yourself into this rut so deep that it's it becomes impossible to even see the
  88. 08:50thing that will get you out. So the more you double down on what you know as the one true way and you fail to learn,
  89. 08:56learning is kind of like an expansion pack for your thinking, right? So if you continue to learn, and I'm not talking
  90. 09:02about studying or memorizing facts, I'm talking about how to actually learn, which is by building projects, failing,
  91. 09:08getting feedback, repeating, iterating, doing it in the real world. That's how you make your life better. So let's

  92. Altitudes, levels, and lines of thinking

  93. 09:13break this down into an actual framework. And we're going to call this lines, levels, and altitudes, right? So
  94. 09:20first dimension, second dimension, third dimension of thinking and we'll just move up the ladder. So we'll start with
  95. 09:26lines of thinking. So here's a graphic of how this will start to look. You can think of uh the width of this the novice
  96. 09:33to advanced as one line of thinking, right? You can think of this entire thing as you learning let's say
  97. 09:39marketing or astrophysics or politics or social dynamics or uh religion. Literally learning anything. It's when
  98. 09:45you attempt to learn domain specific knowledge. This graph applies to one domain and you are increasing the width
  99. 09:52of that line of thinking. It's like you're gaining experience in a video game. Now levels on the other hand, how
  100. 09:58these are stacked is how you think about each line. And we've talked about how cognitive development evolves over time
  101. 10:05many times before. Cen Wilbur, see Susan Cooker, C spiral dynamics, so on and so
  102. 10:10forth. But we can extract those patterns and apply them to thinking itself about specific domains and multiple domains.
  103. 10:16So at level zero of thinking, it's instinctual. So you're just born, right? When you're born, you just act out of
  104. 10:22pure survival. You react to stimulus without thinking at all. You don't even have the ability to think. And then
  105. 10:28level one is conformist. So this is black and white thinking. You follow rules and obey authority without
  106. 10:33questioning. You adopt others perspective. So when you're born, you adopt your parents' perspective. You
  107. 10:39take on their religious beliefs. You take on what they think you should do for a career. And if they're born in the
  108. 10:45industrial age, that equals go to school, get a job, retire at 65. And then there's level two, which is the
  109. 10:50individualist stage where critical thinking emerges and you construct your own model. So you build your own
  110. 10:55perspective. And for a lot of people, this is often based on their parents' perspective. They don't fully break out
  111. 11:01yet. They they are still in this singular one-dimensional way of thinking about the world. So you may not do
  112. 11:07exactly what your parents want you to do, but you're still on the default path that society set for you. So, go to
  113. 11:13school, get a job, retire at 65, and you may be choosing your own major. You may
  114. 11:18have you may want to get an art degree when your parents disagree with that, but they're still happy that you're
  115. 11:23going to college to get a degree. And then there's level three, which I'm going to call synthesis. And this is where you see your model as one among
  116. 11:30many. You hold contradictions and use perspectives as tools rather than law or some unquestionable truth. Now, these
  117. 11:37aren't just things that I've made up. This is how minds evolve over time. This has been documented and a lot of people
  118. 11:44don't reach that level three. They either remain Bible thumpers so to say
  119. 11:49across multiple domains, not just religion, as level one thinkers, or they rebel against that and consider their
  120. 11:55own way of doing things as law. But when you're a synthesis, you start to break out of the like single-minded
  121. 12:02perspective. you start to understand that, oh, there is actually some form of truth in how other people do things,
  122. 12:09which is a crazy thought to many people. Who knew that everyone is right in one
  123. 12:15way or another? And then level four, we're going to call this generative thinking. So, you create original perspectives that didn't exist before or
  124. 12:22you come to ideas without outside influence. So, if we go back to the graph, you can see how like level one
  125. 12:28starts to unlock level two and then level three and then level four. It's not like you have to get 100% through
  126. 12:34level one in order to move up the ladder. Like you can be at level one completely, but you can tap into level
  127. 12:42four occasionally. But of course, we want to tap into that more. We want to maximize this so that we increase our
  128. 12:48surface area of thinking. Now, one important distinction here is that level one and level two can be considered
  129. 12:54first tier thinking. If we group those together, what that means is that it's overly dogmatic, right? I'm right,
  130. 13:01you're wrong. Or my group is right, your group is wrong. And then they fight against each other a lot. Then levels
  131. 13:07three and levels four can be considered second tier thinking. This is where you start to reject dogma and you start to
  132. 13:14actually seek truth for once because your truth isn't the only truth. You understand that the ultimate truth lies
  133. 13:20somewhere in the middle and usually you don't come to absolute truth. You come to tradeoffs, right? Sol like solutions
  134. 13:27don't really exist, but trade-offs do. That's Thomas Su. Now, one more thing here is that you can be at level four,
  135. 13:33but in a particularly stressful situation, you can regress back down into lower levels. So, you can regress
  136. 13:39down to level one and be very conformist in one domain of your life. When you're stressed and you're going through it or
  137. 13:45you're in an argument with someone and you're really not thinking, that's when you start to like tap into the lower
  138. 13:51levels. So before we continue, I just want to make this exceedingly clear once again is that genius level thinking is
  139. 13:58your ability to continue thinking because at each level of thinking, your ability to navigate that space to both
  140. 14:05known and unknown ideas continues to expand. When you're born, you don't really think. When you're a conformist
  141. 14:11or level one, you think until you reach a point where you have the answer, then you start defending the answer. When
  142. 14:17you're an individualist or level two, you do the same thing but with your answer. And when you reach synthesis,
  143. 14:23you can think far and wide, but your ability to create new lines of thought is not fully developed yet. So reaching
  144. 14:30your highest ability to think, and thus providing the runway for your highest potential in this life boils down to the
  145. 14:36simple practice of noticing when your mind feels threatened, being honest with yourself, and at minimum staying open to
  146. 14:43new perspectives. That's thinking in a nutshell. That's how you think. You don't need any fancy first principles
  147. 14:48thinking to do that. Even though first principles thinking holds some truth. Now after lines and levels of thinking,
  148. 14:54there is your altitude of thinking which is the average of how you think about each line or level. So if we look at a
  149. 15:01new graph, you can kind of see I've condensed the lines. I've added more domains and now they're interconnected
  150. 15:06and you're at various different levels. And you may see something that you've seen before here. Right? to best
  151. 15:12understand how this works and to almost complete the thinking puzzle. It helps to visualize thinking as a skill tree.
  152. 15:18So, in a video game, you can put points into certain traits that allow you to do more inside the game. You can take on
  153. 15:24higher challenges, you can have more fun, and you can continue playing. The same holds true with the mind. But the
  154. 15:30thing is here, higher level traits can only be unlocked once you meet a specific requirement of lower level
  155. 15:36traits. So, in a video game, you can't access something like level three dexterity when you haven't already put
  156. 15:42enough points into, let's say, level three strength. So, many of you are interested in business, which is why I
  157. 15:48keep bringing this up as an example. But imagine a business person who takes it pretty far, right? You make a lot of
  158. 15:54money, but then you hit this plateau and you're like, "Man, I don't know what to do here. Like, I I literally don't know.
  159. 16:01I've studied everything and I can't overcome this plateau." and you can't see the problem because you haven't
  160. 16:06developed other domains of your life. The problem here could be your inability to lead a team, right? Your emotional
  161. 16:13intelligence is so abysmally low that you don't even know that you're causing problems within the company that's
  162. 16:18causing it to stall. In order to be a true leader, you have to develop yourself in all domains of life. At
  163. 16:24least that's my belief. And even if there are people who make it very high without doing that, other domains of
  164. 16:31their life suffer as well. That's not something that I want, at least right now in my life. I want to You have one
  165. 16:38life. Maybe, I don't know, maybe AI changes that, but I want to do cool
  166. 16:44things in this life. I don't want to let problems sit around and fester and just make my life worse. This is also why
  167. 16:51domains like politics or religion or even things like nutrition online are so
  168. 16:57like violent and polarizing. It's a bunch of smart but dumb people just calling each other idiots because they
  169. 17:03can't see from each other's perspective. Okay, so now we need to tap into the fourth dimension. We covered lines,

  170. How to unlock 4-dimensional thinking

  171. 17:09levels, and altitude. But now there's something more. Now, this isn't the fourth dimension of time. That's
  172. 17:15actually the fifth dimension that we're going to talk about. But this fourth dimension does increase your ability to
  173. 17:21think by the power of four because there are four dimensions of reality. And
  174. 17:26these dimensions are perspectives. They're ways of looking at the world in four different major ways. So when
  175. 17:33you're thinking about a belief or an idea or a situation or a problem, you can kind of adjust the lens on your
  176. 17:40camera to see it in four different ways. So here's how this would look in graphic
  177. 17:45form. And you can see that it's divided into four quadrants because there is an inner world which is mental and then
  178. 17:52there's an outer world which is physical. So by inner world what I mean is psychological and cultural. There's
  179. 17:58your individual inner psychology which contains your thoughts, emotions, beliefs and consciousness. And then
  180. 18:04there's the collective inner world or culture which contains group beliefs, value systems and ideologies. Then in
  181. 18:10the outer or physical world you have your individual outer world which is your visible appearance, behaviors and
  182. 18:16physical brain states or other measurements. And then there's the collective outer world which is composed of systems, structures, and social
  183. 18:23institutions. Now, why does this matter? It's because most people and most experts only look at one of them, only
  184. 18:31one quadrant. The neuroscientist only sees the brain states, while the mystic only sees the vibes, or the therapist
  185. 18:39who only sees the behavior, or the sociologist who only sees the social systems, or the philosopher who only
  186. 18:45sees the meaning, which is the culture. So genius thinking in this context is enhanced by your ability to see all of
  187. 18:52them. So as a little example and developmental progression here, let's say that I start learning about
  188. 18:58marketing. I get really good at marketing. And in order to do that, I have to study other people's methods,
  189. 19:03right? I'm in within one line. I'm at level one. I study Alex Hormosi or my own videos and I think, "Oh, this is the
  190. 19:09one true way to do things." But then I grow. I become more mature. I I'm in the
  191. 19:15space longer and I advance to level two and I have my own way of doing things because I've experimented so much which
  192. 19:21has helped me learn more. I become more of an expert because I'm not just copying what another person does. I'm
  193. 19:27doing things my own way which gives me a competitive edge. And then if I have already pursued other interests in my
  194. 19:32life or I continue pursuing interests in my life like psychology and fitness and personal development, it gives me a
  195. 19:38deeper sense of pattern recognition. So, not only can I understand the people that I'm working with more or how the
  196. 19:44world works or how culture works and how I can apply my marketing to that thing, but it also further removes me from
  197. 19:50dogmatic thinking, which frees me up to think even more and become more creative. So, from there, that's where
  198. 19:56things start to get interesting. But one thing I forgot to mention is that when you are thinking, you're usually
  199. 20:02thinking to solve a problem. That's what humans do. That's how we grow. That's what we find enjoyment in. That's where
  200. 20:08we find growth. That's where we find development. That's progress. And the minute you stop growing and thus stop
  201. 20:14thinking, problems start to multiply and life just becomes considerably worse. So if we identify a problem in today's
  202. 20:22world, like the world is becoming corrupt and meaningless. That gives us a starting point to think, right? And it
  203. 20:28also gives us an aim for our thinking. So to start thinking here, we can just question in the four perspectives or
  204. 20:34four dimensions like we talked about. So, how does society control attention and market their ideas to the masses?
  205. 20:40That's the collective inner world. How can your behavior change more than it already has during this process to have
  206. 20:45a positive impact on society? What would be the steps to reaching such a point of influence with your marketing or other
  207. 20:51things that you can leave your mark? This is the individual outer world. What does the job market look like right now?
  208. 20:57Is a job an actual path to achieving such a thing? What about AI? Can I utilize the technology available to me
  209. 21:03to create that impact? This is the collective outer world and it's all kind of merging together here. Am I thinking
  210. 21:09about this the right way or is there more? What am I missing? And how does this make me feel? Does it make me feel
  211. 21:14motivated or inspired or hateful? That's the individual inner world. Now, we can go on with that. But I think you get the

  212. How to tap into the 5th dimension

  213. 21:21point. So now we get to talk about how to tap into the fifth dimension cuz that was the fourth dimension. But we're going to start with a quote by Krishna
  214. 21:28Murdy. It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. So think about that as we go
  215. 21:35through this section. In all previous examples, we never really tapped into the power of history. History is a very
  216. 21:41important thing and it increases your ability to think that much more because if you understand how things develop and
  217. 21:47evolve over time, you can predict, not entirely accurately, but in a more
  218. 21:53accurate way how to go into the future, especially with your own actions, so you can set yourself up for some kind of
  219. 21:58success. But we're not trying to know here. We're trying to understand. We're not trying to memorize facts about
  220. 22:04certain events in history. We're trying to understand the general patterns that unfold because that's going to allow us
  221. 22:11to understand anything that falls within those to some extent. So there are five things you can know here just to think
  222. 22:18about history better. And we're going to just run through these because I want to leave you to thinking on your own. The
  223. 22:24first thing is that the master pattern is transcendent include. So if you take a materialist he would say that reality
  224. 22:31is composed of atoms. If you take a mentalist then he would say that reality is composed of qualia. But if we zoom
  225. 22:37out for the sake of understanding we understand that they're both correct because they're in separate perspectives. So if we look at what's
  226. 22:43actually happening throughout history we can understand that reality is composed on a very general and metaphorical level
  227. 22:49of whole parts. What that means is that it's composed of holes but the those holes are also parts. As some examples,
  228. 22:56matter evolves into life, evolves into mind. Each of those are a whole. And so like matter is a part of life, but it's
  229. 23:04also a whole in itself. Then you can think of word to sentence to paragraph to chapter to book to library to
  230. 23:11wherever you want to go. Then you have machine to computer to artificial intelligence to whatever comes after
  231. 23:16that. Or you have human to house to city to state to country to continent to planet to solar system to galaxy so on
  232. 23:23and so forth. This is why everything is connected in the way that people talk about is because when you observe
  233. 23:28reality from a broad enough level you see exactly this. So with each evolution
  234. 23:35of something when something new emerges it transcends and includes the thing before it. What that means the important
  235. 23:41thing there is that if you transcend and you don't include then something's wrong. And if you remove one of the
  236. 23:48parts from the whole that allowed that thing to exist then the whole self-destructs. So this is why
  237. 23:54environmentalists are so concerned with climate change is because if the biosphere goes to crap, then humanity
  238. 24:02goes down with it. But then you look at it from a technologist point of view and they're like, "Well, we don't really care about the environment right now
  239. 24:08because we're eventually going to create the technology that allows us to make the biosphere better and it will survive
  240. 24:14that way." So they're thinking in terms of acceleration and progress while the environmentalists are thinking of not
  241. 24:21necessarily regression but doing things differently right now so that we can slow down the use of the resources that
  242. 24:28would make the biosphere bad. Now this will make more sense with examples. So
  243. 24:34the second thing you need to know is just how individuals evolve physically. Right? So we need to cover how
  244. 24:39individuals evolve physically and mentally then how collectives evolve physically and mentally. Humans
  245. 24:44specifically tend to evolve or develop through an increasing circle of care or concern. So it goes from egocentric to
  246. 24:52ethnosentric to world ccentric to cosmoscentric or reality itself. What that means is that you're born and you
  247. 24:58kind of start out selfish and then you identify with your tribe or your group and then you identify with humanity as a
  248. 25:04whole or the world and then so on and so forth. But the thing here is that people try to skip levels. They don't
  249. 25:09understand, transcend and include. They try to identify as this world centric
  250. 25:15person who just cares about everyone's equality, but they don't understand that you also have to care about your group
  251. 25:21and yourself because those heavily impact how much you can care about the
  252. 25:26world. It's like you can't what's the freaking what's the quote where you can't fill someone's glass from if your
  253. 25:33own is empty. So this has to be accounted for in your thinking because these people who identify as these world
  254. 25:38ccentric virtuous people are smart but dumb. You do not sacrifice your own
  255. 25:43values or your group values for the sake of these world values that sound so
  256. 25:49noble when it doesn't work without the latter. I mean the former. Sorry. Now I
  257. 25:54can't remember if I preface that as individuals evolving physically or mentally but that was obviously mentally right. Your circle of concern physically
  258. 26:00it's pretty obvious. You go from atom to cell to molecule to organism and and you can like see and feel and taste and
  259. 26:07touch the physical world. You understand how this happens. Now, in terms of how societies evolve physically and
  260. 26:12mentally, they're both deeply intertwined because the tools allow for the worldview or the value system to
  261. 26:19emerge. Now, physically in societies, we see that people evolved from tribes to villages to empires to nation states.
  262. 26:27And the technology here was first hunting and gathering with simple tools and then digging sticks and hose which
  263. 26:33enabled some food surplus and then we invented the horsedrawn plow which led to even more of a food surplus that
  264. 26:38allowed people to discover and explore and conquer. This is close to the enlightenment and why that happened. But
  265. 26:44then we invented machines and computers and we abstracted ourselves further away from both human labor and animal labor.
  266. 26:51So the evolution of societies physically allowed for them to evolve mentally as
  267. 26:56well. And this happens in a similar way as it does in individuals where it's egocentric, ethnosentric, world
  268. 27:02ccentric. But when we are talking about societies or collectives, it helps to use different terminology. So we can use
  269. 27:09something like preodern, modern to postmodern or pre-rational to rational to postrational and then transrational.
  270. 27:15But what that means is that in earlier societies, we first conformed to authority. Right? All we believed was
  271. 27:21that there were rain gods in the sky and if it rained we made them happy. And then we discovered science and reason
  272. 27:26and we started to value progress. And now we're in this postmodern world where we kind of deconstruct everything and we
  273. 27:33think everything should be equal when it doesn't work that way. And so we need to transcend and include the good parts. So
  274. 27:38if we ground this and make this practical and how to actually think about it, think of where we are right
  275. 27:43now in the age of intelligence. If you are still operating on industrial age
  276. 27:49technology as a business or you think that the right path to go down is go to
  277. 27:54school, get a job, retire at 65 because that's what you would do in the industrial age, you're running on this
  278. 28:01outdated software and you need to change it. So if we want to make this practical, we want to ground it. We can
  279. 28:06think of the situation we're currently in where AI is on our doorstep and no one knows what to do next, right? That's
  280. 28:12the biggest problem. But if we look back at history, we can at least tell whether what we're doing is good or not or is
  281. 28:19going to be beneficial for the future. So if you're still running on industrial technology as a business, then that's
  282. 28:25probably not a smart thing to do. If you aren't integrating AI in some way, transcending including, then you're
  283. 28:31probably falling behind. And if you as an individual still have the default plan of the industrial age to go to
  284. 28:38school, get a job, retire at 65 when jobs are at threat of automation and you can't think creatively of as to what you
  285. 28:45can do or you can't predict at least somewhat accurately what a good path to go down is. That's how this is
  286. 28:51practical. That's what I talk about in like all of my videos. Now, everything I say obviously isn't going to be correct,
  287. 28:58but I do think it's heading in the right direction. I'm open to being wrong, but I'm also putting out there I'm I'm not
  288. 29:04just telling people to sit around and just be bulldozed over. Now, another practical way to think about this is
  289. 29:09when you're engaging in debate with another person or on social media, you can start to identify where they lie and
  290. 29:17what type of thinking they are using. So, if you're on social media and someone's just being super polarizing or
  291. 29:24dogmatic or whatever it may be, you can assume that they're thinking stupidly and they're just trying to defend their
  292. 29:30own beliefs. Or if they sound like a TV or social media itself or the news, you
  293. 29:35can assume that they're just regurgitating this pre-programmed line of thought. They're not thinking at all.
  294. 29:40Now, the most useful thing here is to just identify where you are at, where your own center of gravity is, so that
  295. 29:46you can identify your own blind spots and see past them. You don't need to compete with someone else on how well you can think. You simply need to think

  296. We missed something important

  297. 29:53better. So, we've covered a lot of frameworks. We've tapped into this fifthdimensional thinking, but we missed
  298. 29:58something pretty important here. We missed the main thing. Because stupid thinking is just when you stop thinking.
  299. 30:04But what makes a person stop thinking? What makes them turn in on themselves and to just start defending themselves
  300. 30:09endlessly? The answer here is identity and you latching on to beliefs, ideas or
  301. 30:16constructs and just making them a part of who you are because that's inherently limiting. Especially if those ideas,
  302. 30:21beliefs or constructs are small, right? Your your ability to think is determined by your world model. It's determined by
  303. 30:28your beliefs. So you should, in my opinion, adopt the most encompassing
  304. 30:35world model that you can. If you willingly adopt something going into it knowing that it's dogmatic, that it's
  305. 30:40ideological, that it's very one-dimensional, then you're going your thinking is going to take the shape of that. Think of the diehard Republicans
  306. 30:47or Democrats, right? If you become one of the diehards, then you can't think
  307. 30:52out of that little bubble. Therefore, you will never be able to find the truth of the situation. You're just going to
  308. 30:57be arguing in circles and going nowhere. I don't know how more people don't see that or realize it. That doesn't mean
  309. 31:03that you can't adopt the values of either side or think that certain sides hold certain truths. That doesn't mean
  310. 31:10that you have to turn against both of them. That's not how this works either. It simply means that you don't need to
  311. 31:15feel threatened when someone else disagrees with you because that threat is signaling that you think you that's
  312. 31:22who you are. Now, this isn't only in politics. This is literally every single domain. Even something as small as
  313. 31:27marketing like we talked about earlier. You wouldn't know the amount of times that I've seen people on the internet
  314. 31:33talk about, let's say, Alex Hormosy's methods and then someone disagrees with them and says that there can be a better
  315. 31:38way and then they just argue endlessly. It's like how can you not how can you not see that? It applies to religion. It
  316. 31:44applies to vocation. It applies to everything. So a helpful thing here and another thing to think about is how you
  317. 31:50came about getting these beliefs because most people in today's world haven't
  318. 31:55thought an original thought a single day in their life. You were born into a specific part of the world. That
  319. 32:02specific part of the world is called a culture. That culture is practically
  320. 32:07holds its own value system and belief system. If your parents were raised in that culture and you were raised by your parents, those were probably imposed on
  321. 32:14you. And since you weren't able to think for yourself, you adopted them for the sake of survival because you have to
  322. 32:19survive or else you'll be kicked out of the house or something worse. I mean, even in another part of the world with a
  323. 32:25different value system, you could literally get killed and you don't want that. So, you conform. You start at
  324. 32:31level one. And so, those beliefs limit how far you can think from the get- go. And most people don't ever question
  325. 32:39that. They never break out of that bubble. That is the greatest trap you can fall into because you have to
  326. 32:44remember your mind is how you interact with reality. Remember, you see information, you interpret it or make
  327. 32:50sense of it at your current level, line, altitude of thinking, and then you make a choice and then you do that again and
  328. 32:57again and again and then it crystallizes. It becomes conditioned. It becomes repetitive, robotic, and it
  329. 33:02determines the outcome of your life. That's insane. So, you have to increase the space. You have to expand how many
  330. 33:08perspectives you can hold. You have to be able to navigate multiple different scenarios. If you
  331. 33:13only think within the confines set by your parents, teachers, employers, and peers on social media, the outcome of
  332. 33:19your life isn't going to be pretty. Just observe where the average person ends up. And it's not hard to see that. So
  333. 33:25the next time you feel questioned, I beg of you, this is the only thing you have to do is just pause, look at it, observe
  334. 33:33how you feel, and do not collapse in on yourself. Just allow it to sit there. Right? That's not even the thing. You
  335. 33:39don't even have to come to a solution. You don't have to come to any of that. Just stop the stopping of the thinking.
  336. 33:45Just don't respond. Just let it pass by and see where that takes you. So, those
  337. 33:50who practice that will win. If you like this video, like the video, subscribe,
  338. 33:55and while you're here, feel free to sign up for the weight list of Eden, which is the drive that handles your busy work.
  339. 34:01It's a new kind of drive because frankly, Google Drive and Dropbox have been dropping the box and they're really
  340. 34:07not that good. And it also has a projects feature, an agent inside of it, so it can edit all your files. You can
  341. 34:12do your creative work in there if you're a creator who uploads videos. And this is a cloud drive. So imagine having it
  342. 34:18in your finder on your computer, but those never actually download to your computer. So you can quite literally throw away your hard drive, but you can
  343. 34:24search for and drag the right thing into say Premiere or whatever you're editing in. Then you can make edits there and
  344. 34:30it's saved in the drive. You don't need an external hard drive anymore. That's how cool Eden is. Sign up for the wait
  345. 34:35list. It'll be released at some point. With that said, like, subscribe. Glad to have you here. Subscribe to my Substack
  346. 34:40if you want more content like this. And I'll see you in the next video.