 If you've been following what's happening with social media, the big social media giants have perfected and engineered the science of understanding human reactions, understanding how your neurotransmitters work and understanding how your hormones work. And we as a society today have become more or less of an outrage society, a victimhood society. And if you missed my last video talking about victimhood, I highly recommend you check that out. I'll leave a link below this video. And so what most people are doing today is what Victor Frankel talks about. They are reacting as opposed to responding. They aren't logically and rationally doing due diligence on stuff they read. Now, when I talk about rationality and when I talk about understanding what you're reading, I'm not talking about how smart you are. I'm not talking about the intelligent capabilities that you might or might not have. What I'm talking about is pausing. This is where logical thinking and rational thinking come into play. You're using heuristics. And so ask yourself this, how many of you are there on Instagram, Twitter, you read headlines, right? And right away you think this is accurate. And I'm the first one to admit I've done this many times. You know, we're human, but there comes a time and point where enough is enough, where we're inundated with so much noise in social media. Every second people are spending time on their phone. Every second they're addicted to that dopamine high. Every second they want validation for other human beings. Remember, we are pressurized by human cognitive biases. And these biases have evolved for millions of years of evolution. And at some point they served us as a beneficial factor in human evolution. But with technology today, it's actually disability. Owen E. Wilson, a famous biologist states, we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions in godlike technologies. Our emotional DNA, our hardware, our epigenetic methylation has not caught up to where technology is today. And we have literally become zombies and slaves to technology. Now technology itself is innate. It's like a tool. So it has no principles like, you know, Buddhism talks about this, not good or evil. It's a tool in front of you. This is a tool. It's how you understand the tool. It's how you frame the tool. It's how you appreciate both the double-edged sword that the tool can be good and the tool can be evil. Both at the exact same time. It's a duality. And so I just want to go through like simple processes that anyone can use. I don't want to dive in deep. I don't want to make this complicated. Just simple heuristic processes to use when it comes to understanding what you've just seen or read. So number one, doesn't matter what you're reading. It doesn't matter what you are watching. It doesn't matter what you're viewing, whether that is on the medium of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or you're watching a documentary really doesn't matter. When you're inputting information, automatically there's a process in your mind and automatically there's an output. And in 99.99% of human beings, the process is an emotional process. Like I said, it all depends on your upbringing. It depends on your hardware, which is your genes, then your software, which is the epigenetic methylation and then based on your family structure, your religious structure, your society structure, your political belief system. This, this ingredients within the recipe creates your output from a reactionary standpoint, right? You look at today between left and right. They're both on the extreme side of the bell curve. And you look at people even in the dietary camp, veganism versus let's say carnivores right now. They're both on the far spectrum and they are emotionally charged. And no matter what facts you put in front of either or they refute those facts, right? That's a confirmation bias. We call it where you'll cherry pick data points just to confirm your own theories. This is the process that all human beings go through. You know, you have your experiences, opinions, people's facts, data and through your own experiences of life and through your own experience of life, you automatically put out an output. However, what we want to do is we want to eliminate and this takes time. We want to eliminate the natural reactive process into the output to a rational thinking process. Now, the only difference is, is the delta, which is time. We give some examples. You are in the camp of veganism and you read something that goes against it. Automatically, but no, that's wrong. As opposed to understanding the process of, hey, here is some interesting information in front of me. Maybe I'm wrong for some things. It's not black and white. There's no black and white. There's no black and white in politics. There's no black and white in dietary lifestyle choices. Human beings are not black and white. We're many shades of gray and very complex creatures. And so you receive this new data point. It can be like, hey, do you realize that meat is actually beneficial for a lot of people or you realize some vegan foods they're eating might be unhealthy, et cetera. As opposed to just automatically diving into your emotional response system, you actually pause as a first step. You pause and you don't do anything. You let it ruminate. You pause and you think about it. Now, hold that thought in your mind about pausing. These are like three key things I like to do when it comes to rational thinking. And so going back to the vegan example, you read something and before you do anything, before you automatically become a keyboard warrior, this is fucking returning. And this person doesn't mind talking about you pause and it's going to be hard. Trust me, it's going to be really hard. But you pause and you just let it be. You let what you've read or watched sink in and then you go through these three simple processes. The number one, the first process I think is the most important process. It's an excellent process that counteracts your cognitive biases that you have is detachment. This is why a lot of psychedelics are really good at this. Actually, I should make a whole video about the beneficial use of psychedelics for different circumstances in your life. But detachment is one of the best ways to view a certain, let's say, debate or a certain conflict of interest that you have. Because when you're reacting to something, you're reacting from a first person scenario. You're reacting from my own emotional response because you have your identity. This all goes back to ego. The only reason why people are validating through confirmation bias is their ego. They'll never come out and say they're wrong. They'll never admit that they're wrong. They're too much attached to their identity of their ego and God forbid their ego is wrong. And these are masks, as Carl Jung talks about, as Joseph Campbell talks about, as Arthur Schopenhauer talks about. These masks that people wear protect their ego. And so detachment is a good first step when it comes to rational thinking. Now, it's easier said than done. It's like, yeah, yeah, I'm just going to attach myself. It's not. It's very difficult. But the point of this video is I just want you to understand that there are processes. I want you to understand there are systems in place that you can slowly implement over time. So let's say you read the thing about veganism. You instantly get angry because that's your emotional response. That's your ego getting angry because it counteracts your own thesis. And the first thing what you want to do is detachment from it. And you just let it sit. Once you've kind of overcome your emotional instinctual reaction. And that's like, it's probably lasts a couple of minutes. Then you want to get into the logical thinking. And there's a heuristic. So we're going to go into the next slide. And once you've gone through the logical filtration system, then there's an order of process. We talk about it with Occam's razor. What is usually the correct answer is the straightest line, point A or common sense more or less. So those are the three primary things from rational logical thinking. Detachment using a logical filtration system. And then there's an order to it. So this is kind of like the filter system. You have an issue going back to the veganism thing. And it can be like, hey, meat is healthy. Here's like a thousand scientists that came out, met an analysis, etc. Obviously there's variables for that, you know, grass fed and how the animals are raised. Is it wild caught, etc. But the first thing is like logical thinking based on first impressions. And you make yourself a filtration system. So I'm a firm believer in what Ray Dalio talks about. And it's called triangulating your opinion. Really important to have opinion from different people outside of your camp. So you don't get caught up in your group thing. You don't get caught up into selective biases. You don't get caught up within. I have to protect my ego at all costs. What matters the most is data. What matters the most is getting to the truth. And as Buddhism states, the truth hurts. But the truth is liberating. The truth gets you to your goal, right? What matters the most is the goal. It's not your ego. What matters the most is getting to the accurate information that will give us the best results. So you have the issue here. And the first step is you pause, you detach. You go through your logical thinking. And what I like to do is I like to reach out to people. I like to... For me, I'm a libertarian. I don't even like to label it. There's a good Vedic saying, if you label me, you're gonna get me. I don't even like to be labeled, but I have more libertarian philosophies. It's easier for people to understand. And for me, I'm always interested for how people come from a socialist side. And my family comes from a socialist system that collapsed former Yugoslavia. And believe it or not, I spent a lot of time with socialists. I'm really interested to know how they think. Why they think that way. What was their upbringing? What brought them to that point? And what brought me to my point? It's not that we hate each other. It's that we just don't understand each other. There's a big difference. The biggest misconception that humans have is we believe that we communicate with each other. In reality, we don't. Our two eagles are screaming at each other and we're actually not sitting down and communicating properly and seeing that we actually have a lot in common as opposed to a lot of differences. And so, what I like to do is I like to do this three times. First round, second round, and third round. Yeah, we'll go back to that. And so, that's kind of like a simple heuristics. I like to go over. It's, I hear something. I read something. I pause. You bite your tongue. You don't become a keyboard warrior. You pause and you detach yourself from this. Victor Franco talks about this. Do not become the slave of your emotions. The only thing that you own is that small buffer between the stimulus that's coming outside inside to you and the response to that stimulus you have. And so, detach from it. Let it be. It is what it is. Next, you use the logical framework that I just showed you. And then you go in order. Step one, step two, step three. And I'm a firm believer, like I mentioned before, go find out people that have opposing views. Don't argue with them. Understand where they're coming from. Understand how do they get to this conclusion and you did it. Why is it that your conclusion is X and their conclusion is Y? Why is that? There has to be some commonality. You know, how do they run their experiment that they came to Y but you ran your experiment and you came to X? What gives? And dive in deep. I'll leave you with this. There's a lot of books out there to read about critical thinking or logical thinking, but I think Daniel Kahneman's book, Thinking Fast and Slow, is one of the best out there because it combines both heuristical models overlaid with behavioral science. So I think it's one of the best books to read on this subject. It's not going to give you crystal clear answers of like this is what you're going to do in the situation but shows you the, you know, system thinking type of processes and why people behave a certain way and why we think a certain way and what kind of cognitive biases are influencing our decisions. And so remember guys, don't be outraged, do critical thinking, do logical thinking, and it's about pausing and slowing down. Spend less time on social media and if you find something that automatically triggers you, remember that's your emotional ego talking and for you to succeed in whatever you're doing, you must dissolve that ego. Your ego will be the defeat of yourself. And an ego, it's not good or bad. It's just a tool and through your childhood, you build masks that represent your ego. It's about evolving the masks and understanding that they existed for a reason. They protected you for a reason, but now it's time to evolve those masks that are newer masks to give you better success in life. And so pause, reflect, detach, use a heuristical model, talk to people who have opposing viewpoints and then really build up a new thesis. Okay guys, if you had any questions, leave your questions and comments below this video. Subscribe to my channel, like, share, and I wish you guys all the best. Peace.