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May 10, 2020 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
32:28
Episode 965 Scott Adams: Teaching You the User Interface for Reality and How to Author Your Life With it
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Oh, hey everybody!
I'm glad you could make it.
Today will be, for some of you, the most incredible day of your life.
Not everyone. Some of you will just get a little bit smarter.
Others of you will find a transformational experience happening tonight.
Yes, tonight you're going to find out the user interface for reality itself, so that you can author your own reality.
Don't believe it?
Why are you here?
Yeah, you're curious.
You're wondering, can I do it?
Well, you're going to find out.
So, it turns out that there are some stories that can't be told right away.
There are some things that by their nature cannot be communicated.
And there are a number of reasons why some stories can't be told.
Maybe there's a secret involved.
Maybe there's a violation of trust, if you were to tell the story.
Maybe somebody's being modest and they don't want to brag.
Maybe there's a lack of credentials involved.
Somebody knows something and they're right, but nobody can hear it because they lack credentials.
It might be a question of loyalty.
You've promised you wouldn't tell somebody.
You don't want to hurt somebody.
It might be complicated.
It might be complicated.
And so it's just too hard to explain.
And this is important to know because you're going to wonder, why didn't I tell you where the user interface for reality was before?
It's kind of a heck of a thing to hold out, isn't it?
And the reason is, I couldn't tell you before.
There needed to be a certain perfect situation.
And that perfect situation happened today.
Today. After 22 years, my plan came together.
Today. And I'll tell you about that.
And that plan...
Was that someday I wanted to be in a position to tell you the thing that I'll tell you today that I couldn't tell you until now.
And you'll see why.
Let me show you my path toward figuring out the user interface.
It's important that you know how I got there so that you could have some trust that there's something to it.
And here is my path.
When I was a kid, I was influenced, as was my mother, by the book The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale.
Most of you already know that President Trump was also influenced by Peale.
In fact, weirdest coincidence in the world, or is it?
Norman Vincent Peale was actually the Trump family pastor for the church they went to, but he was more famous For being the author of a book, they suggested that you could somehow change your life, or maybe you were changing reality.
It wasn't really clear if you could simply think positively.
So this was my first introduction to the concept that maybe reality was not fixed and something that you were a victim of, but rather you could do something.
There was some mechanism, some Some tools you could use to give some control over your environment and your life as opposed to having it control you.
And that was my first thought that reality could be programmable in at least some simple sense.
But of course, I embarked on a lifetime of exploration to find out if I could find out more about how to program reality.
And that led me to learn meditation.
I became a trained hypnotist.
Of course, mushrooms let you see the world in a completely different reality.
And all of these things, from studying all the different religions to doing affirmations, which is really just visualizing what you want and writing it down every day.
And then learning persuasion.
These all had the same cumulative effect of teaching me that reality was indeed far more subjective than you're led to believe.
And when I say reality is subjective, I don't mean that there isn't some base reality that's real.
What I mean is that we don't have access to it.
In other words, just take religion.
Two people with completely different religions can go into a store, they can shop, they can get married, have children.
They don't really need to reconcile the fact that they live in different worlds.
One thinks there's an afterlife, one thinks there's reincarnation, one thinks there's nothing.
And yet we all survive and thrive and reproduce.
There's nothing to suggest that our brains are the kind of brains that can understand reality.
Instead, all of the evidence suggests that we can put filters, optionally and somewhat subjectively, On our reality, and the thing that we deal with is the filter.
We're not dealing with the underlying reality, but our filter on it is the thing that's real to us.
And you can change those filters.
So that's the important part.
And you can change them fairly easily.
And if you find a filter that predicts better and makes you happier, well, that's the better filter, even if it isn't a better approximation of reality.
What matters is you're happy.
What matters is you're getting what you need out of life.
So once you accept that there's a subjective reality, you're starting to get ready to accept the user interface for that reality.
So during this time, I started to feel that I may have discovered the user interface for reality.
The reason that I thought that is that my life was working out so well that I couldn't explain it in any ordinary way.
I tried to become a cartoonist with no experience in cartooning, and at about this time, 1997 is the time I'm going to be talking about, I had already won the top award in cartooning without any cartooning experience.
I was the hottest cartoonist in the country.
And at about the same time, I had written my first book, and it was a number one New York Times runaway bestseller, with no experience at writing books.
And there were a number of things that I was touching and doing, you know, the licensing for Dilbert, etc.
And it seemed as if I could manipulate reality.
But here's the thing.
Was I manipulating reality to get these ridiculous results, or was I simply good at my job?
How can I tell? How would I know if I were manipulating reality, because that's sort of what it felt like, but that didn't seem right, right?
Or was I just good at my job, and I didn't realize how good I was, so I performed better than I expected?
Maybe. Could be.
It's possible. But I wanted to test it.
And so in 1997, I did a bold experiment.
And the experiment was this.
I very publicly and annoyingly made a prediction, and I chose an area in which I had no expertise, which is important.
Because if my good success so far had been because I was just good at my job, Then one way to test it, of course not perfectly scientifically, but at least to get an indication of what's happening in the world, I thought I would try something that was just impossible.
I would make the most unlikely prediction and then wait as long as it took for it to become true.
And if indeed I could hit the most unlikely prediction, then maybe other people would believe me when I explain to them The user interface for reality.
Because this was something I couldn't communicate because why would you believe me?
Why would you believe me that I actually knew where the user interface for reality was?
Well, I had to do something that was so weird and so out of my experience zone that if I got that right, you would be forced to say, okay, that could have been luck too, but at least I'm going to listen to you.
So I won't claim...
That I'm right.
I will claim that it makes me sound incredible enough that for the first time that little doorway just opened and I can tell you something that I couldn't tell until now.
And here's what it was.
I predicted that in my lifetime, the theory of evolution would be debunked in scientific terms, not in religious terms, but in scientific terms.
You can imagine how well that went over.
Because again, I intentionally chose an area in which I don't have credentials.
All the people who do have credentials rushed in to destroy my career and reputation as best they could, quite angrily, for what they thought was giving, let's say, comfort to the intelligent design people.
They didn't want them to have any energy.
And although I was not promoting a God view or intelligent design, per se, They felt that if simply on this narrow point, that if evolution I was predicting was going to be debunked in my lifetime, well, you know, obviously I'm a nut, and I should not be listened to, and you shouldn't listen to anything else I ever say.
That was 22 years ago, 23 years ago.
Today, two things are true that weren't true back then.
Number one, We're in the era of the Trump administration.
And in the Trump administration, you've watched as my predictions about Trump, not just that he would win, which was interesting, I don't look at it yet, not just that he would win, but I predicted boldly and many times that he would change your understanding of reality.
And that was also necessary for you to hear what I'm going to say next.
If you had not experienced yourself the fact that there's this guy, Adam Schiff, who's created an artificial world and sold it to half of the public, in which the president was guilty of colluding with Russia, at the same time the other half of the country knows that isn't true, you see it with your own eyes.
There are two movies, subjectively, That are running based on the same observations.
Now, if you hadn't seen this with your own eyes, time after time after time during the Trump administration, two completely different worlds being created in whole, and they both can survive.
The Adam Schiff world, his worldview is surviving the fact that we have the transcripts and we know none of it's true.
This still doesn't change it.
The people he convinced are still just as convinced.
Now, in order for me to tell you the crazy stuff I'm going to tell you next, you had to live and experience reality breaking down that way.
You had to see different worlds being formed right in front of your eyes.
But here's the tough part.
You have to be willing to take it up to the next level.
The lower level of awareness says that you have the right answers, and those people who disagree with you, let's say on the other side of politics, they have the wrong answers.
If that's where you are, you're not ready.
And when I show you this, it's just going to make you angry, and you're just not ready.
If you can follow me this far, you're ready.
And it goes like this.
If you understand that neither of you have a grasp of reality, not you, and not the person who disagrees with you on politics, neither of you have a grasp of reality.
Once you understand that, that you've simply chosen filters that may or may not work well, may or may not predict well, but it gets you through life.
You can get through your life with your filter.
And that's all it is.
Once you understand that it's the filters that we deal with, not the reality, then you're ready for the next part.
So something happened today that was a very big deal in my life because it opened the door for me to tell you the next thing I'm going to tell you.
And it was that there was a podcast by Red Pilled America on iHeartRadio with Patrick Kurelshi, I hope I'm saying that right, and his co-host Adriana Cortez.
Now, I tweeted this so you can take a good...
Oh, you should just see it.
Well, you should listen to it, I should say.
You should listen to this podcast.
It's one of the best produced...
Written, directed, performed thing I've ever seen.
I mean, it is really high quality, just as a production.
So even if the content didn't interest you, and believe me, it will.
It's really interesting. The content is amazing.
Part of it's about me, which is part of the story.
But it's just really well done.
So do yourself a favor and listen to it.
It will be necessary, probably, for you to fully get this next part.
But you can do it afterwards and it'll be fine.
And here's the story he told.
And I won't ruin it for you because you really need to get it from him.
He told the story of my prediction.
And by the way, you might be watching this right now.
And if he is, hi Patrick.
It was an amazing job on the podcast.
He told the story of...
He heard of my prediction about evolution being debunked.
And then he... He brought the story into the question of the simulation.
Now, of course, if the simulation is true, then what we believe about evolution probably isn't, because you don't need evolution if you have the simulation.
We just are here, and our history is created on demand whenever we go looking for it, and then it's made to be compatible programmatically.
And Patrick told the story very well of how there are very serious people like Elon Musk We had some clips talking about it.
He had some clips of me talking about it.
But then he had clips of actually credible people.
And here's the fun part. You know, actual scientists.
Nick Bostrom was mentioned as the creator of it.
He talked about some science fiction things that are fun as well.
And essentially, what Patrick did is told you something that I couldn't do myself, which is I couldn't tell you that my prediction had actually came in.
I've been trying to, but I feel like I had failed at it because I'm not credible about judging my own prediction.
Obviously, I've mistaken it.
But once you see it from a credible source, in other words, listening to the scientist talk, compatible with what I've been saying and also directly saying, If the simulation is true, evolution isn't.
So 22 years later, I'm not saying that evolution is not true.
I'm saying that there is now a competing theory that serious scientists buy into, and although you can't tell which one is the true one, if either one is, maybe neither, maybe they're just filters, but what you can tell is the odds.
And the odds are, Maybe a billion to one for the simulation.
Doesn't mean evolution can't be true.
It's just that the odds are a billion to one against it, because the other theory is better.
Now, having told you that, and again, hearing it from me should not be compelling.
And that's probably what you're feeling.
You're thinking, I don't know.
I'm not buying that the simulation means evolution.
I'm not buying that.
That's why you have to hear the podcast.
So hear the podcast, and then you will.
Alright, so, having nailed my 22-year gamble, that I could make a prediction so unlikely that the best explanation is that somehow I'm authoring the reality.
Now, just as a filter, again, that doesn't mean that I can actually change reality.
It means that if I put that filter on it, I get good results.
And if you just think you're happy, but you're not, are you happy?
Yes, you are. If you think you're happy, you're happy.
If you thought you went through life as a billionaire, but you were just crazy and you weren't, still good?
Still good, because you're happy.
You thought you were a Somebody was asking me for Patrick's last name.
It's Patrick Kurilsche.
C-O-U-R-R-I-E-L-C-H-E. But just Google.
If you want to find it, Google Red Pilled America on iHeartRadio and then my name will pop up.
Alright, at long last...
The user interface for reality.
Some of these things you're going to say, hey, I've heard about those.
I've heard about them in your book, Win Bigly.
I've heard about them in your book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.
And I saw a few things in your latest book, LoserThink.
And that is where you should go if you want any detail on these.
But let me run through them. First, you must accept the frame, at least as a filter, That there could be a subjective reality and that you can manipulate it.
Again, you might only be manipulating your own impression of reality, but that's good enough if it predicts well and gets you to a happy place.
You should accept that systems work better than goals.
People are telling me every day that after reading my book, they implemented systems and it changed their life.
This is one of the biggest buttons on the interface for life.
If you don't like where you are and you want to go somewhere else, learn how to build systems for everything from your diet to your career to your social life to fitness, everything.
And that's in this book if you want more details.
Talent stacking, also from the same book.
The idea that if you intelligently add new talents, you become not just a little bit better, But exponentially better because talents really explode your capability and your options.
So this is one of the biggest buttons on the interface to reality.
Now you've seen these before, a few of them, but it's the totality of them that I'm trying to present.
You've seen them individually.
Affirmations, the idea of writing down or visualizing your goals, seems to be something that gives you the impression that it works.
And I say that very carefully.
Does it work? Do affirmations change reality?
I don't know. But I can tell you that when I've used them, the results I've gotten don't seem like anything could have been natural.
I mean, I cured an incurable voice problem.
I had ridiculous stock market luck when I used the affirmations.
My career, as I told you, is just crazy.
And It feels like it works, but I'm not going to tell you it does.
Again, you should see these as filters.
If it feels like it works, keep doing it.
Alright, you should know that the mating instinct is the base of pretty much all of your impulses.
So if you haven't learned that pretty much everything from the way you talk, present yourself, hold yourself, dress, everything you do is some kind of expression of your mating instinct, whether you like it or not.
Everything you show off about, everything that you don't want to show if you have a flaw, pretty much everything you do comes back to wanting to look good and present yourself well for mating purposes.
Once you understand that, you start to understand where the buttons are.
Because you'll say, oh, that's why that's happening.
It's an extension of the mating process.
Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
You'll see it everywhere. It's like the veil will come off, and you'll start seeing everybody's actions as, wait a minute, why is it everything is compatible with that showing off for mating purposes situation?
Here are the other buttons, which are mostly self-explanatory, but freedom is a big thing.
People will trade a lot for freedom.
You could say, would you like a bad life with freedom, or a good life with no freedom, and people will take the bad life with freedom.
So if you ever have a chance to create a situation where you can offer someone more freedom, that's very powerful.
That's a button. And you should get as much for yourself as you can, and you can use it as a tool to help other people get what they want, because they will trade a lot for freedom.
And freedom can come in the form of getting money, that gives you freedom, having a flexible schedule, being in the right kind of social situation, etc.
So there's lots of ways to get. Fear is a motivator.
I don't recommend using it.
Unless you're trying to save somebody.
You could use fear to keep them from smoking cigarettes, for example, but I wouldn't use this in the evil way.
Curiosity is one of the most important and overlooked buttons on the human interface.
You can see that authors that are good at it will make you curious at the end of a chapter So that you'll want to keep reading.
So building curiosity into things is a really, really important button.
You'll see that President Trump does this often because he'll tease things that are coming.
He'll say, yes, well, I've got an announcement on that, and tomorrow you're going to hear about that, and I think you're going to be really impressed.
When you can stoke somebody's curiosity, You can really shape what they do, and you can shape your environment through curiosity.
Very, very powerful. You notice how I use this to get you to come here.
Novelty is very important for memory.
So you want to make sure that you always inject novelty.
It's what triggers memory.
Because your brain will get bored of the sameness, so you need to trigger memory and attention with novelty.
Contrast is a way to get people to move from where they are to where you want them to be.
You just say, well, it's much, much less expensive than this.
So contrast is one of the most important buttons.
Use contrast often.
Hey, you don't want to be this bad.
You could be over here.
Repetition and simplicity.
Our brains are just simple machines.
The more you repeat, the more the wiring gets solidified.
And if you keep things simple, the brain can process it and deal with it.
If it's complicated, your brain has a tendency to just flush it out.
Can't deal with it. Flush it out.
So simplicity is important.
The fake because is a form of pseudo-logic.
Sometimes you need to get people moving with a fake reason that doesn't even actually pass logical standards But people don't need logical reasons.
Just look at politics.
People have incredibly different opinions and many of them are smart.
So if you've got smart people on opposite sides of basically every issue, you can see that they don't need real reasons.
We're not a species that operates on real reasons.
We'll take a fake reason.
We'll take one we made up.
We'll take a guess.
We'll follow our friends.
Once you understand that people don't need real reasons, it frees you.
Because if you're locked in a little world at a lower level of awareness where you say, well, I'm not going to convince somebody unless I have a real reason.
Sorry, that's not the reality any of us live in.
Real reasons are good.
I mean, if you have them, use them.
But we don't need them. Once you know you don't need them, and their reality can be authored, you're in better shape.
Pacing and leading, I've talked about, that's just matching somebody until they feel comfortable with you, and then you can lead them.
People can be very influenced by aspirations.
This is another way to refer to the high ground maneuver.
The high ground maneuver is essentially you challenge somebody to be a better version of themself.
Sort of the Jesus method, right?
You know, it's not telling you you must do something or you'll die.
That's fear. Aspiration is, don't you want to be the better version of yourself?
Don't you want to be the person who sees the big picture?
Very, very important button.
Association, you know that any quality of one thing rubs off on the other.
If you want somebody to like something, pair it with something else they like already.
So the likability of one thing will rub off on another, but also the unlikeability.
So for example, if you have a TV show, let's say the news, and you have commercials that are really unpleasant, eventually the unpleasantness bleeds into the show, and it would be better if you associated only things that were positive.
So learning to associate only with positive things, one of the most important user interface rules of reality.
I accidentally put contrast twice, forget that.
Pattern recognition, once you realize that the humans are not logical machines, we're pattern recognition machines.
And so pattern recognition that isn't very good.
Pattern recognition is what makes you a racist.
Pattern recognition is what makes you an ageist, a sexist, everything bad.
Because your patterns are all you have.
You're not really a logical person who reasons everything out.
Your brain isn't big enough.
You wouldn't have enough time.
So instead, you default to these little biases, which are determined by patterns.
Now the problem is, many of those patterns are fake.
Let's say you had met three Elbonians in your life, and every one of them slapped you in the face with a glove.
The next time you met an Elbonian, you'd be like, oh, no thank you, I don't want to get slapped in the face with a glove.
Those last three Elbonians were pretty rough on me.
But, it's only three Elbonians.
The odds that your pattern is predictive, probably low.
So we fall victim to patterns, but you can also use patterns to convince people of things.
If you are consistent, people will say, oh, this person's always honest.
So patterns are a tool, but they're also our biggest defect, and you have to understand it that way.
And then, of course, understanding the brain as a visualization machine is very, very important, because visualization is the biggest Most powerful part of your brain.
It's the part that influences you most.
And so, one more look at the full board there.
And so the idea is that these buttons are the important ones.
Visualization, if there's one there that just stands out as being the one that you should sort of focus on the most, visualization would be a good one.
Now, these are the buttons.
For the user interface.
I can tell you that almost every day I get a message from somebody who read this book which was the beginning of this.
I had to hide what this was in a practical book because the world wasn't ready to believe the facts don't matter.
And the world wasn't ready to believe that you could author your own reality.
So I played it a little safe in this one because the world wasn't ready.
But if you want to learn about most of these things, they're in there.
And then in Witt and Bigley, because President Trump had ripped apart the nature of the universe, it allowed me to say, now you see it, right?
Facts don't matter.
Now you see it.
That they're just separate worlds and bubbles, and we can live in our bubble, and we'll never know the difference.
And then, of course, loser think tried to just, well, teach you to think better, because...
That's always going to be useful.
You'll be more effective and you'll have a better handle on the user interface of reality if you can think and argue better.
So, this is my lesson.
I'm going to keep it on one topic.
I hope this was useful.
Maybe you could tell me in the comments if you've got something out of this.
This is the sort of lesson that might not change you tonight, but it's never going to leave you.
Once you've seen it, you can't unsee it.
You're all changed.
You don't know it yet.
And this will become sort of a, let's say a framework that you now have added to your mental map.
And now when you see things that fit that framework, it will get stronger over time.
And so you'll see that this view of the world will take root And then every time you compare it to the old way you saw, you're going to say to yourself, wow, is that a coincidence?
Because this new way of looking at the world just feels like it predicts better.
But I'll keep an eye on it.
So this will get stronger and stronger over time, and maybe never stop getting stronger.
Well, we're getting good comments, so I think that maybe we did our job here.
And feel free to refer back to this often, and I think you've got everything you need now to author your own life.
You're no longer a victim of reality.
You are no longer the subject of reality.
You're now an author.
Some of you were already authors, and now you're better authors.
And those of you who didn't know you could be an author of your reality, well, you just found out.
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