282 How To Become Dangerously Self-Educated (Before It's Too Late)

David:The most important thing that you can learn right now is how to educate yourself. And I don't mean reading more books, listening to more podcasts, or taking more courses. I mean learning how to decide for yourself what is actually true. Because whether you realize it or not, you've spent your entire life being told what to believe by your parents, your schools, the media, governments, experts, religion, culture, and now algorithms. And here's why that matters. Your beliefs create your reality. They determine what you see, what you don't see, the decisions that you make, the actions that you take, what you believe is possible, and ultimately the life that you create. So if you've outsourced the formation of your beliefs, you've also outsourced the creation of your reality. And in a world where we're being exposed to more information, more opinions, more algorithms, more AI generated content, and more competing versions of the truth than at any other point in human history, I believe the ability to educate yourself is becoming one of the most important skills that you can develop. So in this episode, I'm going to show you what self education actually means. Why so much of what we've been taught may not be serving the life that we want to create. And how to begin questioning what you've been told so you can consciously choose what you believe and ultimately create an entirely different reality. So let's get into it.

David:Welcome to A Changed Mind, a journey into the topics that matter to you most. From the neuroscience and spirituality of mind and personal growth, to groundbreaking strategies for health, wealth, and relationships, to open and honest conversations about pressing global issues such as the environment, censorship, corporate capture, and democracy. Each and every episode reminds us of the certainty of the goodness of the future and provides the teachings, tools, and timeless wisdom, um, inspiring you to create real, lasting change in your life and in the world. If you've been desiring a sanctuary for your spirit, a place to go to tune out the distraction, negativity, and doom and gloom so that you can tap into the deep power, the vibrancy, and the potential you have inside. You're in the right place. Welcome to A Changed Mind.

David:All right, guys. We are told from the time that we're very young that education is one of the most important things that we can pursue. And so most of us spend 12, 16, sometimes 20 or more years of our lives becoming educated. We learn mathematics and science and history. We learn how to write. Eventually, we learn some sort of professional skill that allows us to go out into the world and get a job, build a career, maybe you start a business, you start Making some money, and all of that is useful. I'm not suggesting that traditional education does not matter. I'm suggesting that there's an entire category of education that most people never receive. Because think about all of the things that you've learned in school, and then think about some of the most important questions that you will ever have to answer in your life, like who am I? How does my mind actually work? Where do my beliefs come from? Why do I respond to certain situations the way that I do? And ultimately, how does reality actually work? And what role do I play in creating the reality that I experience? Those are not small questions. Those are arguably the questions that determine the quality of your entire life. And yet most of us were never formally taught how to investigate them. And one of the most famous injunctions inherited from ancient Greece was inscribed at the temple of Apollo at Delphi. It said, know thyself, two words. And yet you could spend your entire life trying to understand what they mean. Because somehow we've created an educational system capable of teaching you how to understand almost everything except yourself. And I think there are really two different kinds of education. There's the education that teaches you how to function in the world, and then there's the education that teaches you how to understand yourself and consciously create your life. You have to have both. The problem is that most of us received an enormous amount of the first and almost none of the second.

David:And this is why you can meet somebody who's extraordinarily educated in the traditional sense. They can have a bachelor's degree, two Master's degrees, a PhD. They can have tremendous expertise in their field. And they may have never seriously investigated why they believe what they believe. They may have never asked themselves where their definition of success actually came from, or why, despite accomplishing almost everything they thought that would make them happy, something still doesn't feel right. Because maybe they did everything correctly. They went to school, they worked hard, they got the credentials, they built the career, they built the company, made the money, bought the house, essentially followed the curriculum that was given to all of us. And then maybe somewhere around 35 or 45 or 55, you look around and you think, is this it? Like, why am I still anxious? Why am I still chasing something?

David:Why do I have all of these things and still feel like something is missing? Those are exactly the questions I had that actually led me into my journey of personal growth. And that's where the second education begins. Not the education of your profession, the education of yourself. Because here's something that I think Most people don't really stop and think about. You weren't born believing what you believe today. You didn't come into this world with a philosophy about money or success or relationships or politics or health or spirituality. You learn those things. You absorb them from the environment around you. Some of them came directly from your parents, many of them. Some came from school. Some came from the culture that you grew up in. Some came from television or the news or religion or beliefs that people held who you respected. And increasingly, they come from an algorithm that's constantly deciding which ideas we are going to encounter next. Now, I want to be really clear about something. There's nothing inherently wrong with any of this. This is how human beings learn. None of us has enough time to independently verify everything that we know about the world. I acknowledge I have never personally split an atom. I have never traveled outside the solar system and looked back at the Earth. At some level, civilization requires us to rely on, on other people's knowledge. We have to have teachers and experts and scientists and doctors. We need people who have spent decades studying the things that we haven't studied. So the problem isn't that we receive information from other people. The problem is that somewhere along the way, borrowed information becomes borrowed belief, and we stop recognizing that something was an idea that we were given, and we begin experiencing it as reality itself.

David:And that distinction matters enormously because beliefs aren't just thoughts floating around in your head. Beliefs become the filter through which you experience your life. In other words, if I believe that people can't be trusted, I'm going to notice evidence that people can't be trusted. If I believe that money is incredibly difficult to make, I'm going to interact with opportunities differently than someone who believes money is abundant and that they have the ability to create value. If I believe, for example, that I'm fundamentally not good enough, that belief is going to influence the relationships that I choose, the opportunities I pursue, and how I interpret other people's behaviors towards me. So two people can experience the exact same experience and walk away with completely different perceptions of it because they're experiencing that event through completely different belief systems. This is one of the foundational ideas that has transformed my life and I've been teaching now for years. Your beliefs create your reality not because believing something magically makes it appear even though it can, but because your beliefs organize your perception. Neuroscience tells us that out of a hundred things that you could focus on, you only pay attention to 12, 12% of your reality. And that 12% is what is in alignment with what you believe. Your beliefs influence your emotional state. They influence your decisions, they influence your behavior. And those things profoundly affect the results that you produce. So if beliefs have that much influence over the reality that you're creating, there's a really important question you have to ask. Who chose these beliefs?

David:Because if you never consciously examine them, then the answer is probably somebody other than you. And this is where self education becomes incredibly important. Because if you outsource your beliefs, you outsource your reality. You can spend your entire life trying to change your circumstances without ever examining the belief system that's continually creating them. You can try to make more money while holding beliefs that make you afraid of money. You can try to become more successful while unconsciously believing you're not worthy of success. And that's why self education is so much bigger than acquiring more information. At some point, you have to stop simply adding more information to the operating system. You have to examine the operating system itself. And this brings us to another problem.

David:Because if we're going to take responsibility for our own education, we have to become much more interested in. In the truth. And the truth is difficult. I recently heard a, uh, really compelling keynote from the author Yuval Noah Harari. And he was talking about why fiction has an inherent advantage over truth. And I thought that the way he explained it was fascinating. One of the advantages fiction has is that truth tends to be complicated. Reality doesn't have an obligation to give us a simple answer. You investigate almost any complicated issue deeply enough, and eventually you start encountering nuance, contradictions, and competing evidence. But human beings like simple stories. We like good guys and bad guys. We like explanations that tell us exactly why something happened. We like certainty. And fiction can give us that. Truth often can't. The second advantage that fiction has is that truth is expensive. You know, I don't mean financially. What I mean is it costs effort. If I want to actually understand a complicated issue, I may have to read the argument from one side and then deliberately go find the strongest argument from the other side. I may have to look at the underlying research instead of somebody's interpretation of the research. I may have to spend hours trying to understand something before I realize my original opinion was based on almost nothing. That is work. But accepting a story that somebody hands me is easy. And then there's a third advantage that fiction has. Fiction can be manufactured almost infinitely. I mean, think about it. Truth is a narrow body of work. Fiction has infinite possibilities. Truth is constrained by what actually happened. Fiction isn't. You can create a thousand false stories in the amount of time it takes somebody to investigate whether one of them is actually true. And so when I heard Harari talking about this, I thought, this is such an important way of understanding the world that we're living in right now. Because it's not necessarily that people believe things that aren't true because they're stupid. Often the false story simply had an enormous competitive advantage. It was easier to produce, easier to understand, easier to consume, and easier to believe.

David:And this is why I've developed some level of compassion and empathy for people who don't agree with my perspective, even when I've done the deepest level of research and taken the time and done the effort. Because I get that fiction is just easy to buy into. And now technology is amplifying that advantage exponentially. But there's another part of this that. That I think is even more important, because there are really two reasons that truth is difficult. The truth outside of us is difficult to discover. We talked about that. There's an infinite number of false stories out there, and getting to the truth is hard. But here's the other thing. The truth inside of us is difficult to face. And sometimes the reason that we hold on to a belief isn't because we don't have enough information. It's because the belief protects us from something that we don't want to see. Maybe I'm contributing to the problems in my marriage. Maybe I don't actually want the career that I've spent 20 years building. That maybe my obsession with achievement is simply ambition and causing me to sacrifice my relationships and my health. Maybe part of it comes from a belief that if I accomplish enough, I'll finally feel like I'm enough. Those things are uncomfortable. And human beings have developed an extraordinary number of ways to avoid discomfort. We can drink or smoke or look at pornography. We can work constantly. We can disappear into our phones. We can obsess over politics. We can binge watch television. We can even use education itself as another form of distraction, constantly consuming another book, another podcast, another seminar with that ever actually sitting still long enough to confront ourselves. And that's why I think one of the greatest obstacles to self education isn't access to information.

David:It's our willingness to discover something we don't want to know. Real self education requires curiosity, but it also requires courage. Because sometimes education gives you new information, and sometimes education requires you to let go of the person that you thought you were. This reminds me a lot of when I was in my recovery. Like I had to confront the truth of the fact that my life had become unmanageable, and I was denying it over and over again, despite the signs that were clearly in my face. A failed business, blacking out, broken relationships. Yet I wanted to deny it because it was uncomfortable realizing that, man, I was going to have to do some deep work to actually transform myself and transform my life. It was a lot easier to just create some fiction, which was, what's the big deal? You know, I'm in my early 30s, and I just like partying on the weekend and smoking some pot and chasing some girls. It requires a rigorous honesty.

David:And all of this becomes even more important when you look at what's happening with information right now. Because for most of human history, humanity had an information scarcity problem. Like, if you wanted to learn something, getting access to the information itself was difficult. I know I'm dating myself because I was born in the 1900s. But back then, if you wanted to actually understand something, if you were in the middle class, you had a thing called encyclopedias, and you would walk over and you would find the addition that had a letter on it that was associated with the topic that you were going to look up, and you'd grab the JK volume and you'd look something up, or you'd go to the library. Universities for most of history were inaccessible to most people. Experts, historically were difficult to reach. So education was largely organized around solving the problem. How do we give people access to knowledge? But that's not the problem anymore. We're entering the exact opposite environment. Information is becoming infinitely scalable. I can pull my phone out of my pocket and access more information in 30 seconds than a human being live living 100 years ago could have encountered in an entire lifetime. And now AI takes that to another level. I don't even have to search for the information anymore. I can ask a question, and an artificial intelligence synthesizes thousands of ideas and gives me an answer in seconds, which is extraordinary, but it creates a new problem. The question is no longer, where can I find information? The question is, how do I know what to believe when I have access to everything? Because the same technologies that give us unprecedented access to knowledge give us unprecedented capacity to make up information. We can generate articles, images, voices, videos.

David:We're entering a world where seeing something with your own eyes think about this. May no longer be sufficient evidence that it happened. And at the same time, algorithms are becoming extraordinarily good at understanding what captures your attention. So you don't simply have infinite information. You have infinite information being filtered and selected. Specifically for you. And that means the skill set required to navigate the world is changing. Knowing a lot of facts isn't enough. Having access to information isn't enough. Even being intelligent isn't enough. You need discernment. You need to be able to encounter an idea without immediately accepting or rejecting it. Uh, you need to be able to ask, where did this come from? And what motive might they have had? What is the evidence for this? Am I actually evaluating this information? Or am I looking for information that confirms what I already believe? Am I changing my mind because the evidence changed? Or because I've heard the same story repeated enough times? And maybe most importantly, can I remain uncertain long enough to actually learn?

David:Because that's an incredibly difficult thing for human beings to do. We want certainty. We want the answer. We are reactive. We want somebody to tell us what is true. And the world we're entering is going to punish that tendency. Because the more sophisticated our information environment becomes, the more sophisticated we have to become in the way we consume information. And that's why I don't think self education is, is simply a nice idea anymore. I think it's becoming a survival skill. It's the survival of your ability to think independently. It is the survival of your ability to distinguish reality from narrative, and ultimately the survival of your ability to consciously determine what you believe rather than having your beliefs shaped for you. So what does all this actually mean in practice? Because I don't want to walk away from this episode thinking self education means you need to read 50 books this year. That's not the point. In fact, there was a period of time, close to a decade, that I look back on as my pivotal growth decade, when I didn't even crack a book.

David:But I also don't want you to hear what I'm saying and conclude that the answer is to distrust everybody. That's not self education either. Self education means developing a relationship with knowledge in which you take responsibility for what you believe and you're aware of what you believe because it shapes the way you perceive information. And, uh, one of the simplest ways to begin doing this is to start auditing your beliefs. Take something important in your life. Money, relationships, success, health, your own potential. Just pick one thing and ask yourself, what do I actually believe about this? What do I believe about money? What do I believe about success? What do I believe about what's possible for me?

David:And then where did I learn that? That's actually a fascinating question, because you may realize you've been organizing your entire financial life around something your father Said when you were 8 years old or you've been approaching relationships according to something you learned by watching your parents marriage, or you spent 30 years trying to achieve a definition of success that came from your culture rather than from you. And then ask, how do I know this belief is true? You can find evidence for almost anything. I want you to ask yourself, what evidence contradicts it? Does that make sense? How do I know this belief is true? Can I find evidence that supports it? Is an easy question. The more challenging question is what evidence contradicts it? What would somebody who believes the exact opposite point to? What does this belief cause me to notice? What does it cause me not to notice? How does it affect the decisions that I make? And then maybe the most important question, what reality is this belief creating for me? Because ultimately, that's why this matters. Self education isn't an intellectual exercise. It's not about becoming the smartest person in the room. It's about becoming more conscious of the ideas that are creating your life. And if you want a really solid hack on this, take a look at your life.

David:Because the life that you got right now, the bank account that you got right now, the relationships that you have right now, the health that you have right now, the spiritual groundedness that you do or do not have, the relationship with a higher power, your life right now is the balance of what you've believed up until this point in time. So if you don't like what you see, begin to self educate around money. Not to go out and learn about how money works, although that's fine. But reorganize and reestablish your beliefs around money. Self educate yourself around health and what's possible for you with wellness and vibrancy. Self educate yourself around relationships and how there is someone out there for you. Or you can restore the intimacy in your current relationship. Self educate yourself about psychology and history and technology and spirituality. Yes, go learn from people who know more than you read, people that you disagree with. Uh, expose yourself to ideas that challenge you.

David:Use AI every tool that's available to you. But most importantly, take a look at what you believe, because that's the lens through which all this information is going to filter. And understand the distinction that I'm making here. I'm not telling you to reject authority. I'm telling you to stop confusing authority with truth.

David:Because a truly self educated person can sit with a doctor and listen carefully to what the doctor has to say without blindly accepting everything that they're told. They can listen to a spiritual teacher without surrendering their own sense of judgment, they can watch the news without assuming that the story they're being shown represents the totality of reality. You can use AI without outsourcing your thinking to artificial intelligence. And you can listen to me without blindly believing me either. In fact, I think that's incredibly important. Don't believe something because David Baer told you so. Take what I'm teaching you, examine it, question it, test it against your own experience, see if it produces results, and then decide what you believe. Because the moment I tell you to stop outsourcing your beliefs to everybody else, and then ask you to outsource those beliefs to me, we've completely missed the point. The goal isn't to find a better authority to tell you what to think. The goal is to become a free thinker.

David:And I think that's ultimately what freedom means. Not that you know everything, not that you're always right, not that you don't need anyone else. It's quite the opposite. A free person can learn from everybody precisely because they don't have to blindly follow anybody. They can encounter new information and stay open. They can discover that they're wrong about something and change their mind. They, uh, can recognize a belief they've carried for 40 years and decide it no longer belongs to them. And the more that you do that, the more something begins to change. You stop simply inheriting your beliefs and living a, uh, life by default, and you begin choosing them and creating your own reality. Because if your beliefs create your reality, then the moment you begin taking responsibility for your beliefs, you begin taking responsibility for the reality that you're creating.

David:This, to me, is self education. It's not simply the acquisition of more knowledge. It's becoming the conscious author of what you believe so that you can become the conscious creator of your life. And if you want any help with that, we've got a ton of tools. You can check out all the links in the description of this episode.

David:In fact, right at the top there, there's our free David AI powered assessment. It's going to help you identify three of your biggest limiting beliefs that have been shaping your perception of reality. And it's going to introduce you to a really powerful tool called the decision Matrix to help you transform them. It's absolutely free. It only takes you about three minutes. If you haven't done it yet, I highly recommend you check it out. And if you have not yet, please subscribe to the channel. Hit that little bell icon. I come out with two episodes a week. You'll get an immediate notification and it is really the badge of honor of being a part of our community is to be a subscriber to the channel.

David:Don't forget we are also on the audio platforms if that is your preference. And if you love this episode as much as I love sharing it with you, do both of us a favor and pay it forward. Introduce someone else to this conversation because this project that we're working on here together called Self Help and Personal Growth, it's not a do it yourself, it's a do it with others. So I love you so much. Thank you for bringing your energy and your time and your spirit here with me today and I will see you in the next episode.

David:Hey, it's David. One more thing. If you want to go even deeper on everything we've talked about on today's episode, don't forget to jump over to www.DavidBear.com. you can find the link in the show notes and subscribe to our newsletter. A couple of times a week. I'm going to be sending you the latest episodes that we've released along with additional free trainings. You'll get immediate access to the My Free Mind Hack ebook and go even deeper into all the tools, the technologies and the frameworks that have helped tens of thousands of people established a changed mind. Don't forget to jump on over to the site and I will see you in the next episode.