Transcript of the Video: "The User Interface for Reality" by Scott Adams
The video features Scott Adams presenting a whiteboard lesson on what he calls the "User Interface for Reality." He explains various concepts as "buttons" or tools to navigate and influence subjective reality. Below is a cleaned-up transcription of his spoken content, based on the subtitles and visual frames. I've corrected minor OCR errors for readability while staying faithful to the original. The whiteboard lists the key concepts he discusses, which I've included at the end.
All right, 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 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 a few things new in my latest book Loserthink. That is where you should go if you want any detail on this, but let me run through it.
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 How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, they implemented a system, and it changed their life. This is one of the biggest problems: you don't like the buttons on the interface for life. If you don't know where you are and want to go somewhere else, learn how to build systems—everything from your diet to your career, social life, fitness. That's in this book.
Talent stacking, also in 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 that I'm trying to present. You see them individually. Affirmations: the idea of writing down or visualizing your goals seems today like something that gives you the impression it works. And I say 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 that could have been natural. I mean, I cured an incurable voice problem I had, ridiculous stock market luck when I used the affirmation, my career as I've told you is just crazy. 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.
All right, you know that the mating instinct is the base of pretty much all your impulses. So if you haven't learned that, they're 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 know it or not. Everything you show off about, everything you don't want to show because 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 see where the buttons are, because you'll say, "Oh, why is this happening? It's an extension of the mating process." Once you see it, you can't unsee it. It will come off, and you'll start seeing everybody's action, and you'll say, "Wait a minute, why is it? Everything is compatible with showing off for mating purposes."
Here are the other buttons, which are mostly self-explanatory. But freedom is a big thing—people will trade a lot for freedom. You can 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 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 use it as a tool to help other people get what they want, because they'll 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 it.
Fear is a motivator—I don't recommend using it unless you're trying to save somebody. Yeah, you could use fear to keep them from smoking cigarettes, for example. But I wouldn't use this in an evil way.
Curiosity is one of the most important and overlooked buttons on the human interface. You can see that authors are good at it—they'll make you curious at the end of a chapter so you want to keep reading. So building curiosity into things is a really, really big button. You see President Trump does this often, because he'll tease things that are coming: "Yes, well, I've got an announcement, and tomorrow you're going to hear about that, and I think you're going to be really impressed when you hear it." When you can stoke somebody's curiosity, you can really shape what they do, and you could shape your environment through curiosity. Very, very powerful. You notice how I used 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 is 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 less expensive than this." So contrast is one of the most important buttons—use contrast often. "Hey, don't you want to be bad? You could be over here."
Repetition in simplicity: our brains are modified, 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 do that, flush it down. 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, or we'll follow our friends.
Once you understand that you are locked in a little world at the lower level of awareness where we say, "Well, I'm not going to convince somebody unless I have a real reason," sorry, that's not the reality. And if we lived in a world with real reasons or good ones—I mean, if you have them, use them—but we don't need them. Once you know you don't need them, their reality can be authored by you.
Pacing and leading: I've talked about that—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 themselves—sort of the Jesus method, right? It's not "tell you you must do something or die"—that's fear. Aspiration is: "Don't you want to be the better version of yourself? Don't you want to be a person who sees the big picture?" Very important button.
Association: you know, 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 will rub off on the other. 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. It would be better if you associated only with things that were positive. So learning to associate only with positive things is one of the most important user interface rules of reality.
I accidentally put contrast twice—forget that. Pattern recognition: once you realize humans are not logical machines, we're pattern recognition machines. And so patterns—recognition that isn't very good pattern recognition is what makes you a racist. Pattern recognition is what makes an ageist, sexist—everything bad—because your patterns are all you have. You are not really a logical person who reasons everything out—your brain isn't big enough, you wouldn't have time. 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 slaps you with a glove. The next time that an Elbonian would be like, "Oh no, thank you, I don't want to get slapped on my face with a glove—the last three Elbonians were pretty rough on me." But it's only three Elbonians. The odds that your pattern is predictive are probably low. So we fall victim to patterns, but you can also use patterns to convince people of things. If you are consistent, people say, "Oh, this person is always honest." So patterns are a tool, but they also are our biggest defect, and you have to understand that.
And then of course, understanding the brain as a visualization machine is very important, because visualization is the biggest, most powerful part in your brain—it's the part that influences you most.
And so one more look at the full board there. And some of these buttons are the important ones. Visualization—if there is one there that just stands out, this being the one that you should sort of focus on the most—visualization would be a good one.
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 it 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 are there.
And then with Win Bigly, 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 there are just separate worlds, bubbles, and we can live in our bubble and we'll never know the difference."
Then of course Loserthink tried to just, well, teach you to think better, because that's always going to be useful. You would be more effective than if you have a better handle on the user interface for reality if you can think better.
So this is my lesson—I'm gonna keep it to one topic. I hope this was useful. Maybe you could tell me in the comments if you got something out of this. This is sort of a lesson that might not change you tonight, but it's never going to leave you. Once you have seen it, you can't unsee it. You're all changed—you don't know it yet. And this will become a framework that you now added to your mental map. When you see things that fit that framework, it will get stronger over time. And so you see this view of the world will take root every time you compare it to the old way you saw it. 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 I did our job here. Feel free to refer back often. You have everything now to author your own life. You are no longer a victim of reality. Some of you were already authors, but now you are better authors. Some of you didn't know that you could be an author of your reality. Well, I will leave it at that end and have a terrific night tonight, and the rest of your life is looking good.
Whiteboard Content
The whiteboard titled "User Interface for Reality" lists the following concepts (added progressively during the talk):
- Accept the Frame (Subjective reality)
- Systems vs Goals
- Talent Stacking
- Affirmations
- Mating Instincts
- Freedom
- Fear
- Curiosity
- Novelty
- Contrast
- Repetition
- Simplicity
- Fake Because
- Pacing & Leading
- Aspirations
- Association
- Pattern Recognition
- Visualization
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