Systems Thinking Ep. 3 - First Principles Thinking

morning everybody David Shapiro here with another video so my systems thinking series was rather popular uh and I actually had to take a while to get to episode three because I had to do spend time basically unpacking how my own brain works to articulate it very clearly now I am ready and so here we go uh before we get started just quick plug for my patreon I do all my videos for free I'm closing in aiming for about 150 videos this year between this Channel and my main Channel I would prefer to keep doing this

so if you uh consider supporting me on patreon every little bit helps and it'll allow me to continue doing this indefinitely all right so today's video about systems thinking is about first principles or first principles thinking and so there's a few other common things that you can might know these by foundational principles axioms so like there's engineering axioms or scientific axioms or whatever Universal principles yeah Universal principles core assumptions basic assertions um these kinds of things so lots of people talk about it most famously Elon Musk gray is like oh first principle singing and everyone's

like what does that mean so I'm here to tell you one how that what it actually means but more importantly how to do it and how to practice it before we get into that though uh we really have to unders unpack uh epistemics which is the theory of knowledge or the study of knowledge how do you know what you know so there's two primary philosophies or intellectual movements that you need to know about over the last 100 to 150 years so first is modernism modernism uh came about after the enlightenment uh basically modernism uh from

a from a scientific and and intellectual standpoint uh basically says there are absolute truths out there science and rationality can prove everything um that the narratives or metanarratives the overarching explanations for How the Universe Works actually exists uh and so what you have to remember is that this was a departure from more uh dogmatic superstitious and spiritual interpretations of the world so as secularism was on the rise people are like oh what do we replace this with because before it was you know there's transcendentalism and and all the various interpretations about uh the way that

the world Works through the lens of religion and God and that sort of thing so it was a very modern way of thinking to say like hey maybe uh maybe evolution is a thing because remember when Charles Darwin came up uh that was a thing now what happened after that though was that uh science was still Limited in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and so there were there were failures there was inabilities to explain certain things and after you know A Century of being frustrated uh and unable to explain everything a bunch of

parisians got together and said well maybe truth actually isn't Universal maybe there are just too many exceptions maybe it's all very subjective and Squishy and so they basically just threw it out wholesale and part of the reason that this happened was because the very western-centric world Europe and America started having more contact with other cultures around the world uh the Muslim world uh the Eastern Asian particularly also uh sub-Saharan Africa and South America so the global South had very different ways of looking at the world and so there were no Universal truths and so the

idea was that oh well maybe maybe we don't know what truth is maybe truth doesn't even exist and so this is the Paradigm that we've been in for the last 50 or so years 50 to 70 years where the idea is truth doesn't exist truth is subjective question everything yada yada it's all very uh uh meta I guess you could say uh and so I included this little graphic about the about the uh kind of the the Pyramid of of knowledge and so at the fundamental level the world is just data so data is the

raw signal that you get from your instruments from your eyes uh well actually what you see what your eyes pick up is data but what you actually see is um information because it's already been distilled and so this this pyramid represents subsequent levels of distillation uh and and extraction of meaning about information and so the reason that I have this here is because conventional wisdom is at the top and we laud conventional wisdom but conventional wisdom might be wrong and that is one of the biggest strengths of post-modernism so what you think you know and

the wisdom that you think you have is entirely built on cultural foundations not entirely I'm not going to say that but it is certainly influenced by by cultural foundations and this is one thing that modern science tries to do is to uh get get underneath all of those things and this is where first principles uh thinking comes in because the the first principles uh speak to how you interpret data so first principles or axiomatic assumptions uh are the are the the rules of the road the framework that you use to in to convert data into

information and interpret the information into knowledge and transmute it into wisdom so that's why this graphic is here so let's unpack post-modernism just a little bit more so if you hear things of like truth is subjective and there's no such thing as truth and etc etc we live in a post-truth ERA this is the fundamental nature of post-modernism and while the the term post-truth era is a relatively new term uh basically it started in the 60s in Paris or 50s in Paris so we live in a world of alternative facts now from a rhetorical standpoint

this is nothing new uh uh Napoleon Bonaparte was famous for uh being able to spin things uh so the power of narrative the power of story has always been true and so then this is what I have up here the truth is beliefs evidence interpretation and consensus and of course these are these can be easily manipulated by a clever speaker and so this is this is kind of my social definition of truth so what is true to one group of people will be different to another group of people and this is called an epistemic tribe

actually so anyways um yep where were we oh yeah so because one some of the some of the core ideas of post-modernism have been embedded in the Zeitgeist uh but most people don't understand epistemics as much as someone who studies it you end up with some basically thought-stopping platitudes like everything is a social construct or all perspectives are equally valid or language creatures creates reality so these are very very overly simplified platitudes that come from post-modernism and they are basically weaponized in politics and debate and uh in the news media now one thing to keep

in mind though is that this is the the post-modernism is basically an intellectual temper tantrum because the colonial West couldn't reconcile its beliefs and positions with the uh beliefs positions and Views around the world um and so essentially post-modernism is a uh highly colonized way of thinking uh and basically uh it's kind of an intellectual crab mentality where the Western establishment said well if I can't be the Arbiter of of truth then maybe nobody can let's just throw the baby out with the bathwater now that being said post-modernism has some some real strengths first question

everything and reject all Dogma this is an incredibly powerful thing because uh like some of the advantage advantages of it is question patriarchy uh question racism question the status quo post-modernism is what the move the intellectual movement that finally allowed for people like the hippies and others to push for civil rights and women's rights and that sort of thing uh because it's like well we've been operating under the assumption that men are intellectually Superior to women for centuries but let's question that and so with post-modernism nothing is sacred which that is actually a good thing

but if you take it too far you end up being very cynical and nihilistic and then finally if you continuously appeal to the fact that nothing is sacred and nobody knows anything then you you say nobody is the Arbiter of Truth there is no such thing as truth my truth is uh the only thing that I care about and you end up with misinformation and disinformation so these are two sides of the same coin where you are allowed to question everything and you should question everything but it is possible to take it too far so

how did I how did I even come to this understanding of post-modernism this is an example of of first principles thinking uh and we will now unpack how to engage in this level of first principles thinking all right so I already mentioned the most famous first principles thinker is uh Elon Musk so the the story is rather simple and I don't know if he actually had this conversation or if uh if somebody else you know gave him the idea and he took it and ran with it either way whatever he wanted to build a space

company so he said why are Rockets so expensive well because Rockets are treated as disposable okay well what if we don't treat them as disposable it was a it was a a foundational assumption because of how difficult rocket retrieval would be that every time you sent a rocket up to space either some of it would be left in space or some of it would crash into the ocean and either way you'd have to start with a brand new rocket every single time um and so then Elon Musk with SpaceX has said well why don't we

just reuse them why don't we just land the rockets and reuse them and now some of the uh some of the the Falcon nines have been reused like I don't know 20 times 30 times so and of course rather than you know having a million dollars or you know several million dollars worth of Rocket engines crash into the ocean just to be lost forever you get to use them multiple times so this is the good part of post-modernism you question the estat the academic establishment just because the universities and the professors and the Emeritus and

tenure track professors say so doesn't mean that it's actually true and of course the academic establishment has been the Arbiter of you know truth and facts for a very long time you also question the Zeitgeist so the Zeitgeist is conventional wisdom the spirit of the times you can question common sense you can question the general consensus by questioning everything by challenging Dogma that allows you to get to new uh new places all right so first unpack assumptions this is the first step of first principles thinking you have to explore the assumptions that you're making and

actually this is a fun exercise that you can do with chat gbt you say like okay this is what I believe blah blah blah and then say uh get you know do a deep evaluation what are all the assumptions that I'm making what are the underpinning assumptions uh that I'm making about this thing and it's really good at doing that and it's a very fun exercise and it'll actually teach you more about how you think um and and the under things that underlying things that must be true in order for those beliefs that you carry

to actually be effective so uh there's uh three primary vectors that we get assumptions from one is familial and otherwise inherited uh beliefs so just things casual things that you hear from your parents when you're a child they tend to stick in your mind a lot um even once you learn better uh later on in life you might still default back to that original memory uh likewise cultural and cultural and social beliefs uh tend to be very very sticky uh these come from everything from the radio and television and Internet and just the people that

you see on a daily basis because you are geographically constrained to a particular region or also another epistemic tribe such as online communities and so these will continuously I'll say indoctrinate because that sounds like like it's not it's not a conscious effort though you you assimilate into various cultural and epistemic tribes which then you just you you'll get a lot of implied or unconscious assumptions without even realizing that you're getting them and then finally education formal rigorous education does tend to indoctrinate people into certain patterns of thought so the metaphor that I like to use

is that you're a goldfish in a bowl um you have only known the gold the the the glass walls of the bowl and the water you don't know what it's like outside of the Goldfish Bowl you don't know what the glass is or why it's there as far as you're concerned that is the edge of the universe and you can see outside of it but you can't go there so one thing that you can do to unpack your assumptions other than ask chat GPT to challenge your assumptions is you zoom out you take a big

step back and I talked about this in my uh systems thinking episode 2 taking perspectives excuse me um so first there's the temporal context look at the timelines what led to your beliefs here one thing that's very interesting and usually very elucidating is when you reverse engineer your current beliefs based on how you got here and like everything that happened from historical events to family history to global history scientific history basically look at the history of everything that led to your current beliefs and in that in those cases many things will become very very clear

and so for instance as I've been recovering from burnout one of the things that I've done is learned about the work ethic of America how did we get to this workaholic uh place there's a tremendous amount of cultural baggage that led us here and I'll be right back okay sorry about that uh yes so the historical context because uh all the ideas and beliefs and and assumptions that you have didn't get there on accident and many of them get just kind of get embedded as something as simple as old wives tales there's lots and lots

of other ideas uh beyond the example that I just gave for instance sometimes uh a fact or belief will be injected like the idea that you lose 90 percent of your heat through your head uh that is a drastic misunderstanding of a study that was done in I think Poland or Germany or something anyways the original study was actually someone trying to figure out how much uh heat soldiers lost through their head while they're sleeping under a like uh feather comforter or whatever in the in the in a cold environment um and so yes if

you're under in a in a very very warm bed and your head is not uh covered then yes you lose 90 percent of your heat through your head under normal circumstances that is not true the second way you can zoom out is your Geographic context your physical context today and so this is what I'm what I meant by like epistemic tribes so where you are in a city or a state or the country uh there's going to be a lot of conventions in that particular area uh as well as you know the hemisphere of the

planet that you're in the language that you speak uh the religion the the legal system that you are uh influenced by all of these things will give you various assumptions and um of course you know going back to the idea of perspective taking one of the best ways to challenge your assumptions and perspective is to learn about another one which we'll talk about in just a minute um so comparing and contrasting uh this is this is uh this is one way to kind of shine a light on those assumptions that you're making so particularly from

a cultural concept context the more you study other cultures because at first they're going to feel very very foreign very alien to you but the more you study them the more you can understand their way of thinking and their way of believing and just their way of being which is a really good way of making you conscious of the way that you live so remember if you're the Goldfish and then you spend a little bit of time living as a lizard you're going to see oh my world is actually really different from that of a

lizard and so uh when these other cultures these other schools of thinking feel very unfamiliar it's very very common to just mentally categorize them as other to diminish them and reject them uh but uh this is just because humans have a very strong preference for familiarity so you work to make these other schools of thought more familiar and you will see you'll see the differences compare and contrast and this will make you a more well-rounded thinker okay number two for uh this uh for first principles thinking is elegant simplicity so this is a quotation it's

one of my favorite quotations of all time he didn't really say this but it's it's close to something that he said uh but Einstein this is often attributed to Einstein you don't truly understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother uh and the idea there is very powerful where if you have a hard time explaining something you don't fully understand it yet and once you do have a Mastery of something you can teach it to basically anyone and most things particularly in physics but many things kind of come down to very elegantly simple

descriptions they're easily defensible axiomatic assertions so for instance E equals m c squared incredibly elegant very simple um there's not much else to to really say about that uh but uh one thing that I can that I will point out is that if you don't fully understand something what many people do is they'll wrap more and more layers of logic and rules and exceptions to things because they don't actually understand the underlying principle and so in this case when uh when the parisians created post-modernism and they're like oh well you know truth is subjective truth

is this blah blah blah so they they wrapped truth the idea of Truth and all kinds of like just logical gymnastics uh because they were making a different set of fundamental assumptions and they had not actually gotten to the correct elegantly simple truth of the way that the world works so for instance uh they hadn't come up with the idea of epistemic tribes right the idea that there are uh adaptive benefits to humans just in general being mentally flexible and able to adapt to different cultures and different tribal schemes um that is a far more

simple and elegant solution than just how freaking confusing post-modernism is so if you're trying to get to foundational principles optimized for elegance and Clarity so this is a Feynman diagram Richard Feynman was uh he's been what he got a Nobel Prize in physics voted the seventh most important physicist of all time helped with the atomic weapons program at Quantum Computing and nanotechnology now not everything can be distilled down into such Clarity but many things can so tectonic theory like when you're trying to come up with an explanation for why do volcanoes happen why do earthquakes

happen why do subduction zone happens how does subsidence happen how does like why why do continents seem to move around when you have all these disparate facts we take it as we take it for granted that we understand tectonic plate Theory today but remember that just over a hundred years ago this was not accepted Theory but the tectonic plate theory was an elegantly simple solution that uh accurately described everything so that you can also call that Occam's razor Newton's Laws of Motion very very simple uh laws of motion that have proven to be very robust

free market economics the idea that uh that the market will price things accordingly based on supply and demand Charles Darwin's natural theory of natural selection and then of course my own work on here is the comparatives I got to those by continuously looking for what are the most foundational core principles here that are elegant and simple because the thing is is when something is elegant and simple uh then it should be uh also robust and defensible but also very useful number three cross pollination so one really good way to get to First principles thinking is

to cross pollinate or cross-train your brain so over specialize and you breed in weakness this is absolutely true siled thinking um with or insular thinking is very often the case particularly in Western academics but basically you end up with academic pride and other stuff like snootism kind of creating this siled effect where you are deliberately not allowed this is this is a this is a convention an unspoken convention in many academic disciplines where you're literally not allowed to borrow the language or or information from another discipline I remember there was a tweet going around recently

where a biologist had basically reinvented calculus because they needed to solve a particular problem but they didn't know calculus so they just said oh hey here's the derivative of a curve in bubble blind they use the wrong terminology and everyone's like did this biologist never take math um and so some of the reasons that this happens particularly in the uh in the Ivory Tower and the academic establishment is because uh one uh conformance is reinforced through entrenched power structures you must exemplify this department and if you go to that other department for anything even if

you ask them for a cup of sugar you are a traitor conformance is expected and non-conformance is deeply deeply punished this is also has to do with the legacy of colonialism and patriarchy particularly in Western universities and so as I mentioned earlier there's a lot of let's say intellectual Pride or intellectual insecurity where a lot of westerners still prefer to think that the Western way of thinking is the correct way of thinking uh and so because of all that it's like oh well if you're not from the I've literally had many many professors uh kind

of message me about some of my work early on and when when I don't have a PhD they literally just stop talking because in uh my wife and other explained it to me where uh American professors are so concerned about their reputation that they can't even be seen interacting with the Ruffians with the people outside of the establishment and so because of this the academic establishment very very strongly rejects any ideas that did not come from The Establishment and someone told me that Silicon Valley is much the same where it's like if it wasn't invented

here if it wasn't invented in Silicon Valley then clearly it's of no value because we have the smartest people in the world and so whatever came from outside clearly has no value um so yeah challenge all that use post-modernism correctly challenge The Establishment challenge the status quo uh break those power structures um and uh study on related disciplines so for instance uh philosophy really honestly cannot make heads or tails of human morality um and the simple conclusion is because philosophy is the wrong tool for the job if you keep going to the hardware store for

milk you're not going to ever get milk from the hardware store but if you look at human morality and ethics through the lens of say Evolution or Neuroscience or any number or economic theory suddenly morality makes a lot more sense so basically you need to look at a a variety of disciplines in order to get the bigger picture so cross-training your brain cross-training your brain is just as valuable as cross-training your body if you're an athlete so creative Hobbies particularly for people in stem careers achieve higher success more recognition and solve problems better um just

as your body benefits from a variety of exercises and activities so does your brain uh now that being said uh you know if you decide to mix Psychology and Neuroscience and philosophy and you know anthropology and whatever like that is going to uh provide you with more generalizations more insights and you're going to be able to remix those and you'll also kind of start to see patterns emerge so uh and this this also happens for Less intellectual things so for instance my dad told me a story many years ago he was a welder uh when

he was in his uh late teens early 20s and so he was a welder and then uh you know you well you weld up a piece of equipment and then you pass it on to the paint shop and the paint shop is like you guys really suck at this and and he's like no no we don't like we're good welders and so what they did was they they had all the welders do painting for a day so that they could see how their flaws and their mistakes carried forward and so then by having the welders

be painters for a day then they're like oh I see what actually matters in my work for the next step uh you'd you often see a lot of cross-training in more intellectual jobs like developers need to spend a day in infrastructure RIT or in product or devops or whatever and so this is also a big reason why managers often come up doing the job that you're doing now or something very similar is because they've been there they've done it um but yes so cross pollination cross-training your brain very important another way of thinking about this

is to be is to be transdisciplinary so the old word for this as being a polymath so polymath is someone who basically knows everything which uh at the beginning of the modern University system in the 15th century it was actually possible to learn everything um if you were graduated it's because you took literally every class that the university offers but then of course as more and more specialization uh and more knowledge was accumulated that became less and less possible so you had to have a specialization but point being is that a lot of people are

over specialized and so what happens is you might have a multi-disciplinary team where you've got you know person a b c and d all working on the same problem uh you might have an interdisciplinary team where you know you have two teams kind of synthesize their stuff or you get uh you you get all of that into one person and so to be transdisciplinary means that you study all the different things you study the intersection of many different disciplines this is the best way to cross-train your brain and this is also how you can be

a polymath or a genius or whatever it's not an accident it's something that uh you very deliberately do I have done this instinctively my entire life because I saw that there was very obvious value in Merit and pulling from different schools of thought what I learned from from picking up the art of fiction helped me with science and so on and so forth you're if if you deliberately cross-stream your brain and look for those insights you will inevitably be smarter and uh better at systems thinking and better at discovering first principles number four is analytical

third space so I thought somebody else invented this term I I was I read it on like a forum or something but every time I look for analytical third space I can't find anyone defining it the way that I originally saw it um and it's also there's like four examples on the internet so this is a neologism I guess but there's a couple of quotations out there which tell me that people knew what analytical third space was uh for literally thousands of years so it is the mark of an educated mind to entertain an idea

without accepting it Aristotle might have said that or something like it the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function F Scott Fitzgerald so that's more like 100 years old anyways you might say that like oh well if you have uh two opposing ideas that's cognitive dissonance but the idea is that when you when you practice analytical third space you very deliberately say okay I have this idea and this idea and they are incompatible they are mutually exclusive

but you can play with them like a child plays within a Sandbox and you say okay where do they overlap how do I reconcile them can they be reconciled so this is why I often say that fiction is the playground of the mind is because you have great scientists and engineers and mathematicians who enjoy fiction science fiction Star Trek and other stuff and that is the best example of an analytical third space you say Okay suspend all disbelief throw out all the rules for the sake of argument let's assume this is true and then let's

run that thought experiment our brains are very flexible and can do that so you deliberately ignore the constraints boundaries and assumptions that you normally have in the physical world and you adopt a new set of constraints boundaries assumptions and rules and so when you practice creating an analytical third space cognitive dissonance is never actually a problem and one thing actually that I noticed is that because so few people have this ability when someone has when when someone actually has the ability to use analytical third space and they can say oh hey like okay I'm thinking

from this school of thought right now and it means this and I do this so I actually saw someone else doing it very deliberately it was The Lex Friedman and Ayla uh podcast I think it was it was it was a it was an interview that Ayla was on and they were talking about something and she's like oh well are you thinking from this school of thought and then she could switch to another school of thought I'm like oh I do that um so I think she also intuitively discovered analytical third space so basically the

question is which set of assumptions are you making and when I challenge people with that a lot of people get really pissed off because they say I'm not making any assumptions these are the facts and so what they've done is they've created a smaller container where they believe that they know everything and they believe that they have intellectual control over it and it's a very rigid way of thinking um so this leads me to another example of first principles thinking and cross-pollination where I mixed this idea this philosophical intellectual idea of analytical third space with

Keegan's theory of cognitive development so most people when I say that they've put themselves in a container they are right here they say this this set of boundaries this set of facts uh and this this epistemic tribe that I belong to this is the truth and so when I say what kind of assumptions are you making people in this state get really pissed off um next the self-authoring mind um basically they're able to see themselves as a part from their epistemic tribe they're able to look at their epistemic tribe from the outside say okay I

see all the beliefs and ideas and constraints and boundaries that my tribe operates by but I'm going to be apart from that and then I'm going to very deliberately study that so that I can understand it and then finally this is where I am at and a few other people but basically you very deliberately understand every school of thought that you come across every way of thinking every epistemic tribe and so you can say okay well if we're using you know the Copenhagen interpretation that's over here and if we're using string theory that's over here

and if we're looking at you know post post-modernism and everything is a social construct that's over here and so the ability so this is what Aristotle meant when he allegedly said it is Mark of an educated mind to entertain an idea without accepting it is you hold yourself outside of all of these schools of thought and this is the this is the mo one of the most powerful ideas of deliberately finding first principles thinking and being a systems thinker and then finally as you practice these things you will be able to discover Universal principles so

I know at the at the beginning of the video I said you know the social definition of Truth is beliefs evidence consensus and and uh and interpretation the thing is though is once you have developed your mind in this way when you've achieved stage five the self-transforming mind um where you can you don't you you realize that you don't actually have to reconcile every Paradox or every mutually exclusive Paradigm you can you can observe them and say okay in this context in this information domain that makes sense but there is a gap between that idea

and this idea you can still start to see the linkages between those ideas and find those Universal principles um so this this idea the uh Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development um is very similar to Keegan's stages of cognitive development but this has to do with morality and so this is the point is that when you look at uh when you look at morality and ethics pedagogically through the lens of psychology suddenly morality makes infinitely more sense that it is learned and that it is a uh that is a a procedure it is a process

philosophy not in the 2500 years of philosophy's History never once looked at morality pedagogically yes uh some people said that like virtues can be learned but not one of them ever looked at the the progress of learning morality from the perspective of a child growing into an adult and so this is what I mean by you know in 2500 years philosophy never figured this out and it was not that that particularly like difficult to look at but because of the conventions within philosophy the the tunnel vision that they that they created for themselves philosophers never

figured this out it took a it took a different school of thought a different set of tools to find that actually yes this framework is how all humans learn moral development um and so but of course uh we are living in the post-truth era the post-modernist era which says that there is no such thing as a universal truth uh but instead there actually is and this is the framework by which morality Works um yep so keep searching um if you're still experiencing cognitive dissonance it's because one you're not that good at uh analytical third space

and all this other stuff so you need to get from here to here to here um so some things you can do if you experience that cognitive dissonance um maybe you you also haven't spent enough time distilling something down into its uh Core Essence you might need more perspectives uh you might still be making assumptions that you're not aware of you might need a new layer of abstraction so you might need to go up you might need to go down you might still be using the wrong tool you might still be using the wrong framework

or methodology to approach the problem so here's a short checklist you can use to ask yourself in order to get to those first principles thinking do you have all the facts and evidence do you have all the models and Frameworks do you have all the perspectives and contexts do you have all the approaches and methods do you have the right insights and ideas are you aware of your constraints and assumptions so you can approach becoming a genius very systematically and solve all problems accordingly all right so for a quick recap uh there's basically five five

elements to this part of systems thinking to First principles thinking one unpack all the assumptions that you're making every single one of them number two look for elegant simplicity this is like you know find the E equals MC squared level of elegant Simplicity for anything that you're working on uh number three cross pollination uh cross-string your brain uh become transdisciplinary or a polymath and again this is not something that is done you know it's not something that you're born with it is something that you cultivate deliberately like a garden over many years uh number four

learn to use analytical third space so the best way to think about that is Keegan's theory of cognitive development where in the in the the Final Phase you're able to look at all the schools of thought uh and then finally five find those Universal principles by being transdisciplinary and by using all of these other tools and then once you find those Universal principles those are the fundamental axioms by which you can operate um so here's some personal conclusions just a really quick thing uh this was this was modernism where it's like yes we can get

to the truth and so they're digging really quickly to get to the truth but then post-modernism gave up just before they got to the truth they said eh throw the whole thing out so as a hasty generalization um based in Western insecurity nihilism and it was an intellectual temper tantrum um and so this is my criticism of it be aware of it as I mentioned earlier in the video post-modernism still has a tremendous amount of value uh particularly in the ability to question dogma that being said don't take it too far thank you for watching

I hope you got a lot out of this video