---
feed: "DANIEL_ON_SLOPE"
codex_section: "S09"
source: VideoTranscript
title: "SCOTOMAVILLE 02.02 - Process"
conv_id: "video-5DCsRe0T9xQ-20200902"
share_url: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DCsRe0T9xQ"
created: "2020-09-02"
message_count: 1
category:
  - "Scotomaville"
  - "Volume Two"
  - "Process"
  - "Self-Awareness"
  - "Learning"
  - "Critical Thinking"
summary: "At the Hood River sandbar launch site in Oregon, Daniel uses wind-foiling as a living metaphor for the process of learning self-awareness. He walks through the four stages of competence (unconsciously incompetent → consciously incompetent → consciously competent → unconsciously competent), demonstrates how mimicking experts accelerates growth, and shows real-time examples of spotting personal scotomas in habits, equipment, and production workflows. Viewers see Daniel pivot from accepting easy 'answers' and rules to sleuthing out true solutions, with input from Angelina, veteran windsurfer Alex Laudon, and clips from Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sam Ross, and Carson Miller."
keypoints:
  - "Learning self-awareness follows the same four stages of competence as any skill: unconsciously incompetent, consciously incompetent, consciously competent, and unconsciously competent."
  - "Mimicking those who have already succeeded (experts, mentors) is the fastest way out of Scotomaville—practice, fail forward, and repeat."
  - "Most people accept easy 'answers' or create new rules to cover blind spots; real solutions are found only on the other side of a scotoma."
  - "Critical thinking (per Neil deGrasse Tyson) and self-talk are the mental tools that turn awareness into understanding and discipline."
  - "Production scotomas (e.g., missing drone cable, key-fob habit, wrong footwork) reveal how unconscious habits stall progress until diffuse sleuthing uncovers them."
  - "Persistence through awkward failure and unlearning perfected but outdated habits leads to unconscious competence and graceful mastery."
tags:
  - "scotomaville"
  - "process"
  - "volume-two"
  - "four-stages-of-competence"
  - "wind-foiling"
  - "mimicking"
  - "scotoma-solution"
  - "critical-thinking"
  - "hood-river"
  - "fail-forward"
monomyth_stage: "06 - Tests, Allies, Enemies"
gameboard_position: "Camp 2: Tests, Allies, Enemies"
truth_score: 92
entropy_score: "Low"
tone:
  sentiment: "Reflective"
  emotions:
    - "Inspired"
    - "Practical"
    - "Encouraging"
  sycophancy_level: "None"
  notes: "Daniel narrates conversationally with on-location footage, blending teaching, personal vulnerability, and expert interviews. Tone is patient and motivational, slowing down to let viewers absorb the significance of process over quick fixes."
related_events:
  - "COVID-19 pandemic ongoing: US deaths nearing 190,000; nationwide mask mandates, social-distancing rituals, and school reopening delays (NYC pushed to Sep 21)"
  - "Kenosha protests and unrest following Jacob Blake shooting (Aug 23); President Trump visits Kenosha on publication day (Sep 2)"
  - "Widespread Western US wildfires fueled by heat, drought, and wind; record acres burned in Oregon and California"
  - "Trump administration declines to join global WHO-led COVID vaccine effort (COVAX)"
syndication_status:
  arnie: false
  chris: false
  redmond: false
  clint: false
  pilot: false
ma5_inheritance: "Initium"
pre_silicon: true
voice_print: false
codex_candidate: true
phase: "Volume 2 - Expedition Skill-Building & Process Mastery"
enriched_date: "2026-04-15"
---
![[5DCsRe0T9xQ_maxres.jpg]]
### Original YouTube Description

Learning HOW to learn will accelerate skill and life mastery. This episode demonstrates the process of becoming self-aware with examples from wind-foiling in the Columbia Gorge. Becoming consciously incompetent requires courage to accept failure in order to become consciously competent. Most of us build our habits and beliefs by ACCEPTING answers. The challenge with that is we are 100% wrong half of the time. SETTLING for an answer is far easier than seeking out a final solution. Finding solutions to challenges is far superior to simply swallowing answers. "Solutions are found on the other side of scotomas". We learn most sports by mimicking. Likewise, we climb our Personal Everest' by following the examples of those that have gone before us. Watch how simple it is to create a new 'rule' based on an answer, compared to 'mastering' a solution. We do this all day long... to our detriment. Thanks to these content experts: Adam Walters - [https://muon.marketing/](https://muon.marketing/) Alex Laudon - [https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-laudon-046aa5a4/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-laudon-046aa5a4/) Angelina Musik-Comp - [https://wellnessbychoice.com/](https://wellnessbychoice.com/) Carson Miller - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxJ1mUsU1V0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxJ1mUsU1V0) Garth Harden - [https://www.youtube.com/user/MrGarthHardin](https://www.youtube.com/user/MrGarthHardin) Neil deGrasse Tyson - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kPINNhHGNw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kPINNhHGNw) Sam Ross - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clfHadOx9rQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clfHadOx9rQ) Yuval Noah Harari - [https://www.ynharari.com/](https://www.ynharari.com/)

### Cleaned Transcript

**Daniel:** Welcome back to a fabulous day in Scotomaville and we're in Volume Two. As you might remember, Volume One is my personal toolbox—the mental tools. As Neil deGrasse Tyson excellently put it in a MasterClass that I just recently finished: it's not what you think that matters, it's how you think. Critical thinking skills, the ability to spot your own scotomas, talking to yourself, your self-talk—how you develop that. And that's what this episode is about. It's the process of learning. I'm going to use some examples of some of the things that I'm going through the process of learning. You have to be patient with yourself. You have to understand the bigger picture so that you can get through the tough parts of the journey.

Here's a humorous self-observation of awareness. The reason why I say mimic and for you to do your own video is that you're going to start editing to tell your story and go, "My nose hairs are turning silver. I have to shave. Clean up. What? A distracting—I have to do all those videos over again." Little things that you weren't previously aware of start piling up and there's more and there's more and there's more. Thank God, eventually you get a handle on it. I think. Maybe not. Laugh with me. Awareness and understanding and discipline. Oh, I got a new discipline now. I'm gonna shave up my nose.

Let's go down to the launch site near the Hood River sandbar where everybody is windsurfing, kite foiling, kite boarding, wing surfing. It's a place where we spread our toys out and collaborate on the learning experience—commiserating with each other's crashes but ultimately learning by mimicking. There's lots of learning going on because we're all willing to fail often, fail forward. We get up and try again. All of these things that we do on the water are very similar to your journey of self-awareness.

It starts with being unconsciously incompetent—that is, you're not even aware of how bad you are. So the very first thing you do is move on to becoming consciously incompetent. That is, you now know how strong the wind is, how bad the conditions are for your skills, and all the things you need to learn by practice. So you move to the third stage which is becoming consciously competent. That is, you're practicing things that you're learning, like the tools from Book One. Ultimately you'll become unconsciously competent. You'll be able to just jump on, get up, and go where you want to go. You'll be in control. Four stages. So it starts off unconsciously incompetent, becoming consciously incompetent, moving on to consciously competent, and then finally unconsciously competent. That's why we practice and crash.

**Angelina:** So you went from windsurfing to wind foiling and I would bet that you experienced going from stage one to stage two which is to go from unconsciously incompetent to becoming consciously incompetent and I feel for you because that's the most awkward time.

**Alex Laudon:** Yeah, and machine is proof. Even though he explained to me to stay away from the foil, I managed to kick it good and hard with both of my legs probably a dozen times or better.

**Daniel:** And so unconsciously to consciously. Another opponent. Remember, the burden of proof is on the claimant, not on the recipient. Two years ago I shot an episode about Dataism and global challenges like pandemics and that we better be aware and be prepared. Here's my evidence on iterations, on practicing, on doing things again and again and again until they become second nature. They become unconsciously competent.

**Yuval Noah Harari (clip):** For the first time in history more people die today from eating too much than from eating too little. More people die from old age than from infectious diseases. And more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals combined. Up till now increasing human power relied mainly upon upgrading our external tools. In the future it may rely more on upgrading the human body and mind or on merging directly with our tools. This is why it's so vital to think about humanity's new agenda precisely because we have some choice regarding the use of new technologies. We had better understand what is happening and make up our minds about it before it makes up our minds for us.

**Daniel:** You've heard the saying that the devil is in the details. About the process, subtleties are the thing you have to capture. Our habits are perfected. We're not even aware of them. Awareness leaves you in a confounded state because it can point out to you what you're not doing right, but unless someone tells you what to do correctly you can't fix it. And so you can be stalled and stuck and it can feel horrible. It can end in divorce. It can be bankruptcy. It can be—if you stay there stuck, fixated in this place. So be sure that when you gain awareness of an issue that you seek out the remedy.

**Angelina:** Let the learning begin. Absolutely. Okay, how did I do that?

**Daniel:** You seek out the new habit to create. And I'm saying through mimicking you can get out of Scotomaville, right? By following someone who's been there, by asking questions of those that have already gone into self-awareness and self-understanding and ultimately actualization.

In my first lesson or journey on how to windsurf, it's a number of things that play in this process—from the equipment, having the right equipment, to the order in which the equipment is put together. And you know Daniel had me holding the sail and practicing with the sail on the land so I can get used to how to hold it and the wind's resistance and where my hand positioning needed to be and my feet. To then carrying that gear down to the water, putting it in the water with the waves. So we had to wait a little while because the wind had picked up. And so then once I'm in the water now I'm having to learn how to climb onto the board, get to my feet and balance up, haul, and then once again what I practiced on land beforehand—positioning my hands on the boom so that I could stand up and balance. So for me it was looking at all these little bitty things. You know, I don't know what I don't know, but following his lead—someone who's been there for a long time and has done this work for a long time—being grateful in what I was able to achieve and being okay with there's so much more to go and it's going to take time and practice and consistency in honing my techniques while remembering the process along the way.

**Daniel:** Let me slow the pace of this episode in order to help you really absorb the significance of what I'm about to demonstrate. You see, I've been working on this episode now—400 video clips. That's four times the normal episode number of videos. It's been five going on six weeks for this one episode and it's because I have had to sleuth out the real message, right? Detective Sherlock Holmes to sleuth. I have had to find my own scotoma with my production pace. So my expectation was, hey, one episode a week because that's what I did Volume One with—nay nay. It's been five weeks. It's 400 video clips and I've really struggled emotionally with what I felt was falling behind because I expected things to continue as they have been. It was a habit. It was a rule I unconsciously had set. And I want to slow this down slightly in order for you to absorb the significance of what I'm about to demonstrate—my own process to discover my blind spots.

Your Personal Everest is filled with discoveries of scotomas and you can't just settle for an answer. An example of the process I'm going through is that I'm watching Sam Ross with an excellent series of instructions on foil jibing and I'm attempting to find my scotoma so that I can find a real solution of why I can't gracefully finish a jibe.

**Sam Ross (clip):** If you want to fully foil out of a jibe there's a couple of key things to understand about the feet to make it happen. So first is when the back foot comes out it comes into the middle of the board and that helps you set your height. You want to come in fairly low but the next is the most important—my back foot then works all the way across before I go into the jibe and right back by the back foot strap. It goes all the way back because it helps me keep the lift on and also by having the feet a little bit wider in the middle of the jibe it's easy to shift your weight forward if you want less lift or shift your weight back if you want more lift.

**Daniel:** Just to show you unconsciously incompetent—I had intended and had waited most of the day to set up and shoot a drone shot of my fancy footwork from the air but you got to bring the cable to connect your cell phone to the controller to be able to fly the drone. See, that's sitting on my desk. Well now I'm consciously incompetent. There it is. Perfect example of leaving something in the last place you put it and unconsciously incompetent of it. So now I know to watch out for this and have a new discipline: put this where I think it belongs in the box with the rest of the drone.

What I want you to catch is that it's very simple and human to accept an answer without having the solution. See, solutions are really hard to find because you have to dig deep to find out what the scotoma is so that that blind spot can be corrected so that you can actually not just set up another rule which leads to division. Solutions are found on the other side of a scotoma.

So Carson Miller has a nice little hint which unravels the rule of keeping track of my cable for the controller. See, don't just put it in the box so you remember it. That's a rule. No, watch this: plug that into the side here. Make sure this is open a little bit because what you're going to do is you're going to tuck this cable down just to put it there and now it should fit into this space so when you fold it up you don't have to worry about taking that cable out. You just leave it in permanently which is fantastic and I love this about the controller because it's all hidden away when you want to put the controller away.

You gotta be kidding me. It's that easy. Now I don't have to have it lost all the time.

And about all that fancy footwork that I've been practicing—I've been practicing it wrong as it turns out. I simply need to take a bunch of small steps to get to that position, not a large leap.

**Alex Laudon:** So this is Alex. Hi. And uh Alex tell me how long you've been riding. Let's see it goes back to 1978. That started in France with the windsurfer one design and the teak booms and the 6-3 sail. So that's 42 years ago I think.

**Daniel:** Tell us about what we're watching. You went from here at the launch site to Stevenson and up to Moser. What in the world?

**Alex Laudon:** It's a little sightseeing trip in the garbage. It's perfect. There's 145 you counted I think so. Yeah.

**Daniel:** How long did it take you practicing to be able to get your jibes down on a foil?

**Alex Laudon:** I did my first foiling jibe the third time I went out on the hydrofoil. This is what we call unconsciously competent—right? Just absolutely natural at it.

**Daniel:** What do you say for those of us that are constantly crashing and wanting to give up because we don't think we have what it naturally takes?

**Alex Laudon:** What do they say? The victory begins where the perseverance of others wanes. Yeah, others not so much. Unlearning a perfected habit, right? You first become aware—oh my gosh that's a terrible skill. Nice carving job. I got to let go all those skills in order to foil, right? Undo things you think you were greatly competent and tried a different way. Yeah it's and then it's you get into you know pattern recognition, you know it's the domain of experts in pretty much any field. Which master chess player can look at a chess board and within a few seconds knows exactly what move to make. This recognizes the scene, right? Knows where to go. And you can play against eight players around the table, right? Kasparov does that. Yeah. Don't quit. Keep trying. Never give up.

**Daniel:** Yesterday I had the privilege of you riding behind me sort of spotting me a little. Your comments about my riding—after three years of working on my jibes there was um it seemed to me like you you had it down on reaches. You flew a stable flight and uh you had some a little bit of difficulties with the jibes but I think the equipment that you were on is uh holding you back in your progress because it's things have really evolved a lot in the last two years and wings have become a lot more stable. We know what works for board shapes and when you have good equipment now you can progress more quickly.

You'll remember one of the skills of self-awareness from Volume One: listening. I took Alex's suggestion, rode a larger foil as a demo and discovered that I really do have the skill set for jibing. I just lacked proper updated tools. Hint hint—the tools from Volume One. Pick some of those, practice with them, try them out. They'll do you really good.

Here's another one of those jumping to a conclusion 20-watt brains setting up a new discipline which is based on a rule which is actually nothing more than a cover-up for a scotoma that I didn't want to dig deep enough for because I just wanted to get it over with.

See, there's a series of habits we have to undo. All of that. I have a key fob and a keyless ignition in this truck so when I lock the doors if this is in the truck then anyone can walk up and just unlock the doors. I can't go on the water with this because it's electronic so I can't put it in my wetsuit. I don't want to leave it on a bag on the beach so I've been sticking it in the tailgate in the trunk. Well it lets the doors be locked but I can't get the tailgate locked. So that's been my patch. That's been my answer and I've asked several other people. Well I finally dug around, tried to solve it, right? A real solution because I needed to find out my scotoma and it's simply this: Ford solved it for me. You just press the last two buttons of the door keypad and bingo—the whole thing's locked with your key in it. Okay, solution. But I had to dig in. I had to sleuth it out. I'm saying that's the hard work. The easy stuff is taking an answer that somebody gives you. The hard work is finding out where your scotoma is that you think somebody didn't solve it before or that you just want to be lazy and accept a simple answer.

Nae nae—this is for the record. I just left this $125 piece yesterday on the grass, came back, could not find it in my gear anywhere. So for the first 15 minutes as I dug through all of my gear I was really being disappointed at myself for having left it. And lo and behold somebody had left it on a picnic table for me and no one else walked off with it. That is amazing. Usually gear just walks off down the road and I actually left it on the beach yesterday and it's still here. But now I'm really encouraged that somebody else considered my situation and left it for me. Thank you.

---

**CODEX ENTRY**

**Date:** 2020-09-02  
**File:** SCOTOMAVILLE 02.02 - Process.md  
**Monomyth Stage:** 06 - Tests, Allies, Enemies  
**Gameboard:** Camp 2: Tests, Allies, Enemies  
**MA5 Domain:** Initium  
**Summary:** Daniel teaches the process of learning self-awareness through wind-foiling at Hood River, illustrating the four stages of competence and the power of mimicking experts while exposing personal scotomas in production and daily habits.  
**Key Insight:** Solutions live on the other side of scotomas; accepting answers or creating rules only delays mastery—real growth demands patient sleuthing, unlearning, and persistent practice.  
**Narrative Significance:** This episode deepens Volume Two's expedition by showing how Volume One mental tools turn everyday failures into unconscious competence, equipping the community to navigate 2020's historic disruptions with disciplined awareness.

---

**INITIUM.**