Bias. Americans are brainwashed with consumer American culture and live in an American bubble. They don't travel. They aren't educated. They have the same level of development as Trump or Bush so they see him as one of their own.
To be fair, other countries and cultures are also stupid in this way. They all fall for nationalist vibes and strongmen. China, India, Hungary, Russia, France, UK, Italy, Brazil, etc.
Remember those C and D students from high school who were ignorant and lazy and sloppy and didn't even try for excellence? Well, there are 100+ million of them and guess who they will be voting for? They couldn't find China on a map if you gave them a million dollars. These people live like animals. They do not think or develop themsleves, they run on group-think. They haven't sat down to contemplate a damn thing in their lives. They do what church or boss or friends tell them. Friends drink, they drink. Like monkeys. This is your average voter. So what can you expect? They have zero understanding of how government works. All they understand is vibes. Own those gay pedo Libs! That is the level of thinking that we're dealing with.
The #1 predictor of whether you will vote for Trump is simply your education level. The more ignorant you are the more appealing Trump appears.
And if you were highly intelligent you would see that Trump is a dangerous degenerate within 5 minutes of hearing him. But of course, no one wants to admit that they are that ignorant. It's too painful, so instead excuses are made for why Trump seems appealing or reasonable.
But the simple truth is that Trump's entire political movement is pure idiocy and depravity. No better than Hitler's relative to his time.

I won't go so far as to call him a con-artist. I think he genuinely believes in what he's doing. It's just that he lives in one of those tech-bro bubbles with too much money and no deeper values or purpose.

All that means is that he has good genetics.
He didn't create it for himself. In fact, all of his success is built atop that foundation of solid health, which he assumes everyone who follows him also has, but they don't.
You cannot bluster and bullshit your way into good health. You use good health to bluster and bullshit. This is what the entire health industry is built upon: people with great genetics singing about how healthy they are and how you can be like them when in fact you can't unless you got good genetics too.
Taking mushroom supplements and New Age herbs is not going to give you Owen's level of health. He's just fooled himself on that point because he takes his own health for granted.
Just to be able to do pickup consistently requires good health. Because it demands so much energy. All this is taken for granted within the community.
This doesn't mean Owen lying, his worldview just takes certain things for granted because he is not focus on truth, he is focused on selling you a dream of success.

Gym rats gonna gym rat.
Going to the gym to get girls is stupid.

Most adults are just children.

@VictorB02 You gotta learn the lesson that phone numbers don't mean shit. They give them out 30 times a week. You're one of 30 dudes she gave it to.
Girls give you a phone number just to get rid of you.

Everyone knows what a dream is. You have them every night.
Now just expand that notion into a more crystalized dream, which you call your life.
If your night dream was coherent and lasted 80 years you would just call it life.
That's because there is no other, more realer reality.

@OBEler I won't lose it.
And what really matters in that domain is not whether I have it but whether you find it for yourself.

That's for later.
People need help with more human things first. Teaching overly advanced stuff leads people astray.
Alien Consciousnes is not going to do anything for your human life. You will still have all the human shit to deal with.

You don't use text to build rapport. You use it to invite her to a fun social event.
"My friends and I are going out to the club on Friday. Will be much fun. Come with us."

That's the rub.
Hard to get laid when you aren't around humans.
The real solution here is to change your lifestyle to be more social. Rather than trying to drag a girl back to your crypt.

I told you that there are no gaurantees.
You keep wanting them. Then don't take any risk. You will achieve nothing but you will be safe from any failure.
If you are asking such questions then you have already failed at success.

Depends on what you consider to be the function of philosophy. Many people consider it to be the study of ideas of old dead men. So in that case yes.
You can spend the next 2 years reading Hegel and still not understand what his actual view was. Or you can just go to Wikipedia and read about monism and idealism and make more progress in 20 minutes than you did in 2 years.
Again, what is it you actually want out of being a philosopher?

I have said nothing against their truthfulness.
My health does not allow me to use psychedelics any more. But my health situation is pretty unique, so you should not draw too many conclusions from that.

Psychedelics affect people too differently to make an universal claims here.
The bottomline is that you don't know how they will affect your health, so you should be careful. You don't know how much your body can take. One day it might fail.

Depends entirely on you.
Of course not. Most people are wage slaves and have no freedom to do anything but pay their bills until they die.

I knew guys who got laid plenty and worked a 9-5 job. They just go out every weekend and collect lots of numbers and set up dates.
One of my pickup buddies in Vegas is a doctor. He has a normal job. Another of my old wings was a dentist.
If you do pickup 3 nights a week x 3hrs per night that's 9hrs, leaving you with time for a fulltime job.

The bottomline is that you will never know what you are capable of until you give it your best shot, and you make use of all the expertise, methods, and tools that worldclass experts offer.
You guys want some kind of guarantees and promises of success, but success doesn't work like that. You know who succeeds? People who take risks. The risk is work for no reward. That's what investment is. And no investor wins on all his bets.
You have to get comfortable with lots of effort and failure.
It's like you guys want to say to me: "Leo, I will only do effort if you promise me success." And my response is, then you have already failed at life and there's no helping you.

Academic philosophy is a very specific kind of game. If you wish to play that game and be accepted by others who play that game, then yes, you need to study the historical work.
What is it you seek? Truth? Understanding? Consciousness? Love? You can get all those much better by not playing academic philosophy.
In the end, no academic philosopher understands reality.
I recommend you get your priorities straight and focus on what truly matters, not some human-invented scheme. You will be dead soon. Life is too short to waste it in mental masturbation.

You can know suffering without holding it as "evil" or "bad" or "wrong", or judging it.
Yes, there is a lot of suffering in the world. But it is not evil. And it necessary. And it is largely self-inflicted due to lack of consciousness. So if you really want to reduce suffering, it would be wise to stop judging it.

You are very much affected by others. "Survival" here means a lot more than just foraging for food and building shelter. You are a deeply social creature. You could not survive without other human beings. You are almost totally dependant on other human beings to keep you alive. Human survival is largely social. Which is why you care about your self-image so much. Which is why you'd be embarrassed to walk outside naked in the middle of New York City. It very much affects your survival. And which is why you might be scared to approach a girl and ask her on a date. Your survival is on the line all the time. Every action you take all day long is basically you grappling with survival. Every thought you have is you manipulating yourself to increase your survive.
Notice the truth of this.
That's a survival question, which has nothing to do with Truth or enlightenment.
The question of "How do we build a good society?" is really the question of "How do I increase my odds at survival?"
There is nothing wrong with building a better society, but it is irrelevant to Truth. In fact, it's a big distraction from pursuing Truth. And if you try to build a better society from a position of survival, you will inadvertently cause a lot of suffering to people, because you're acting out of self-preservation, not genuine greater good.
Notice, that it is also possible to jail a person without calling him bad or evil. You could jail him with compassion and genuinely help him to heal. I am not saying we shouldn't have laws and jails. Laws and jails are necessary in a large, complex society. But what isn't necessary is the judgment, demonization, and self-righteousness that goes along with it.
That's fine. But that's an issue of survival. You can be enlightened and also be engaged in survival. But you're not likely to get enlightened so long as you're preoccupied with survival.

"Family Values" don't make sense to me personally. 
I clash with my brother on this all the time; he is really emotionally attached to my immediate and extended family, whereas I basically see them like I don't give any particular importance to who I'm related to, they're just like everyone else to me.
I do appreciate growing up in a household that was creative (they are both artists) and having a family that doesn't abuse me. But I totally see that valuing family will and does get in the way of embodying your vision. I have never really found a reason to include family in my vision for my life, other than society telling me that family is super important for some reason. I can 100% relate to being around family when travelling and not being able to fully surrender to the experience.
 
I would say that you can be ruthless to who you "cut out" of your life, and at the same time be courteous to their feelings. Unless the entirety of your life's vision is to "please mommy and daddy", then they don't need to be a big part of your life, that doesn't mean you need to stop calling them or visiting them on their birthdays. 
You sound really wise and inspiring, I wish you all the best.

I have been stuck in the house with my parents for almost 5 months now. Normally I would be in college and I had plans to study abroad but because of the pandemic I had to move back home. I have since worked through a lot of family trauma in therapy so the good thing is that I'm not super triggered around my parents anymore. That said, I know deep down that I am not happy nor fulfilled here.  It is rather draining to deal with them. I simply want to detach and move on. I tried to talk to my dad about this since he tends to be more understanding.
I told him that I want to leave as soon as I become financially independent because even though I am not in pain, I simply don't like it here. He went on this whole thing on how I "don't have family values" how "blood is thicker than water" and how "there is no one like family because people outside of your family don't care about your best interests and will stop at nothing to screw you over."  I know a lot of this has to do with trauma and his upbringing, but the whole concept that you should do anything for your family and take whatever is dealt to you rubs me the wrong way.
I started thinking this way in regards to cutting my family out even before the pandemic started. In January, I went with my family to the Taj Mahal. It was a beautiful place and I enjoyed taking in the experience but I felt miserable during most of the trip my mom was yelling at the service workers  and the rest of my family was going on rants about nationalism.  It taught me that I could be in one of the most beautiful places. I could literally be standing in front of one of the seven wonders of the world, but with the wrong people around me, I simply won't be able to take any of that beauty in. It was heart breaking. I feel so trapped in this circumstance with no place to go, not because of the pandemic but because of narratives of how "family is the only one who is going to love you" that are being fed to me.  As concerned as I am about the pandemic, I kinda can't wait to go back to college. I realized that I'd rather be alone during a pandemic than be with my family at paradise.  My life is beautiful and I want to appreciate it to the fullest extent. 
I also grew up South Asian and I feel that this narrative of putting family first is so pushed on us and for a long time I thought that cutting off your family was simply a white people thing. 
I'm not mad, I'm not upset, I'm just done. I love my family, I just don't want to have anything to do with them. 

Recently I watched Leo's video on Self Deception part 1, and he made a point about the whole concept of family just being another self deception, a profound and hilarious quote from the video is
It is true. My self actualization process is just scratching the surface, I still strugle with depression, confusion, anger, sadness, etc. Every day working to stay present with these feelings.
Probably one of my biggest neurosis is my relationship with my father, recently I've felt that I don't love him very much, I feel pity, compassion, anger, resentment. This lack of love also happens with most of my family members which I feel as strangers. I'm sure that my inner child has feelings of love towards them but other fragments of "my self" feel very different. Of course society's indoctrination tells us that we SHOULD love our family just because the "genetic relationship" or because they raised you, gived you shelter and "unconditional love" etc.
An advanced self actualized human can feel the same love towards his mother or towards a coffee table, but I'm not at that level yet. Can anyone relate? How do you picture or experience a propper relationship with family members who you dont really love. People who have gived their best to raise you (and that in itself is admirable and something to be grateful) but due to tremendous neurosis have created deep emotional wounds? "SHOULD" it be a "close" relationship? Or if we decide to have a distant or non existant relationship, isn't it very likeable to feel guilt for not "loving as you are supposed to love your family"? My family, specially my mother criticize me a lot for being distant and not being loving with them. Maybe is just an inner child crying? a crybaby? I have no idea where this comes from, feeling confused about this topic.

@Water by the River The issue with everything you said is that it admits that there exists consciousness higher than your own. Which most enlightened folk and nondualists would like to deny.
So you are trying to have it both ways. When I claim higher consciousness, you ridicule and deny it. But when I corner you about why you cannot walk through a brick wall, you tell tall-tales of higher Buddhas and astral deities in other dimensions. And you plead human finitude.
You justify your limited human dream as being necessary and enjoying it. But when I speak of pursing and enjoying higher consciousness you dismiss and ridicule it as something indulgent or misguided.
So all this means that you are an enlightened bullshitter. Your spiritual bullshit is precisely designed to prevent higher consciousness. And THAT is the reason why I teach in the manner that I teach.
I do not care about tales of astral realms. I asked you why you cannot walk through a brick wall on Earth. And the only plausible answer is: because you lack consciousness.
If enlightened people would just admit that they occupy a low state of rat consciousness then I would never say a single bad thing against them. But that is the last thing they want to admit. So here we are.
I hope now everyone is crystal clear on this matter. I will not be wasting any more of my time explaining myself to you.