All right I promised you that I would give you the user interface for reality and I'm working on a book idea. An awful writer do not but it has to do with filters. And I was trying to think of all the different filters that one can put on life. And I've argued that if you have experience in enough domains you can look through more windows. Or another way to say that is you have more filters by which to understand the world.

And I would contend this is not yet a complete list and I might end up combining some categories a little bit but let's say this is about 90% right. I contend that these are the filters. Then if you learned enough about these, and you wouldn't have to be an expert on any of these things, but if you learned logic and religion, if you, mating let me explain that one as a filter. What that means is to understand, let me get that guy out of here. Bad person goes away. All right that's always satisfying. Did Soros Irish get rid of the crazy people anymore? All right so having gotten rid of our trolls.

So mating is the idea that you can see the world through the lens that everything we do is to show off to get a mate. Even if you have a mate we're just sort of automatically designed for mating. So if you see the world through that lens you can really understand a lot of the world.

You should know a little bit about statistics and science, persuasion, economics, simulation. That's not a word. Let's call it the simulation, the simulation theory that we might be a simulation.

The idea that some people just see the world as winners and losers. Other people might see it as predator and prey. There's also a strategy way to look at the world. There's an abundance mindset. Yeah the abundance mindset is that you're not taking things from other people. You're finding a way that everybody gets something.

And then the moist robot idea which might be redundant. Just the idea that we're dumb machines and irrational.

So my concept is this. That if you knew enough about these fields you would have the user interface to reality and you would be able to actually see your reality and manipulate it almost in a god-like way. I said almost. I'm not saying you're omnipotent but that you could do things which would not seem possible to people who had fewer filters.

So the more filters you have the more clear is, you know if you could see it like an analogy, the more clear the screen is and the more obvious then many of your choices are.

So this probably would require a book to really explain it well but the useful part of this is that you probably don't need more of it. Examples would be a good example. Let's see if I could pick one. Well let's take abundance.

So we have a problem with Communist China because it looks like they think that the best thing for China is for the United States to be weaker. So that's the opposite of an abundance mindset. President Trump has an abundance mindset. He used it with North Korea. He's used it with President Xi. Obviously it's not working in China and who knows what's happening in North Korea but they don't seem to be mad at us at the moment so that's good.

But the president said hey if we work together we both get richer. If we stay enemies we don't. Now obviously it seems that China has some kind of winner loser predator prey mentality that there are only people winning and losing and they want to be on the winning team. Whereas the president of course still has those filters as well but he has extra filters.

So instead of obviously knowing that if he went to China and said hey it's a win or lose situation one of us could win and what does go lose you know good luck we're gonna win you're gonna lose that wouldn't really get you very far in negotiations. But if you go into the negotiations with an abundance mindset you get that you know maybe a price of flexibility on the other side.

All right so let me give you some other examples. I like to use this example all the time. If you understand economics and you understand business models then you probably understand that it's very unlikely you'll get a speeding ticket at 6:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning.

Now that's something that you could see clearly if you have the economics filter. And if it's not obvious to you why you're not going to get a ticket at 6:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning no matter how fast you speed it's because you don't have that filter yet. Maybe I can explain why.

The police department is like every other organization. They have a budget and so they have to use the budget where it makes sense and not where it doesn't make sense otherwise they'll run out of money and not be able to do the things they need. So given that almost nobody has a car accident at 6:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning it's probably the least likely time that speeding is ever an actual safety problem because there's just nobody around. And if they are they're not drunk you know for the most part. 6 a.m. I would say not too many drunks. And so you will notice that economics would predict it would predict that there are very few speed traps at 6:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning. And I would argue that if you live to be a hundred you might never see one.

So that's a very trivial example but I go through life with an understanding of business models and economics that does allow me to see around corners. I can literally predict based on economics whether there's a policeman up ahead in that speed trap or they also often hide. So in my neighborhood there's a place they often stay and I can predict that accurately as it turns out.

All right let's take strategy. A perfect example of that, when I wrote my book "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big" I introduced the idea of systems versus goals and the idea of talent stacking. You know I've talked about it enough that I don't need to explain it again. But in the context I'm talking about here a lot of people wrote to me, a lot, a lot of people, and said my god when I heard those things it really you know it all came together and then I had a strategy and then I could implement it and it's already working.

So I would hear tremendous things about people learning that strategy and when I would hear it I would say to myself you know when I wrote that the thing I was most worried about is that people would say we already knew that. But I was hoping that people did not have enough sort of background in strategy to know that it makes sense to layer your skills intelligently and it makes sense to have systems versus goals. I didn't know if people didn't know that until I wrote the book because you really don't know what other people know. I thought it would be additive and it turns out it was life-changing for a lot of people.

So that's a perfect example. And the strategy is not worth much unless you have some understanding of statistics. And I don't mean you have to be able to do the math. I mean that you have to in a common sense way be able to look at things and say okay that's more likely than that under these conditions. You wouldn't be able to tell what's true versus the margin of error. I'm talking about the big level stuff.

For example here's a perfect example. The headline this week was that there was a study of Santa Clara residents and they found that I forget the exact number but somewhere in the range of two percent of them seemed to have the antibodies for the coronavirus. And that would indicate maybe there was a lot more of it in the general population. But anybody assumed now Balaji Srinivasan who if you don't follow him on Twitter you should, he has a background that would include all the credible knowledge but most importantly he understood statistics and he understood how to read the document and he looked at it and said wait a minute according to this the reliability of the test is that it could have false positives up to like in that same neighborhood. In that same, I'm rounding everything off to make it simple, but that the false positives could be in that same neighborhood.

So in other words it was a whole study that either showed that nothing happened or that there's wildly more virus and the completely opposite ends are both demonstrated by the same data. Now did you know that when you read the study? Did you know that? I mean I didn't even look at the details and I'm not sure I would have picked it out if I had. But the point is the more you know about statistics the more you can just look right past people's assertions to the truth. Now the logic could do that. I couldn't.

Now that doesn't mean that the study is bogus. It just means that you can't be sure which is completely different than we're sure that there's tons of virus in the world that we don't know about. There's a big difference between well it could be true and oh it's totally true we just studied that. Those are not that similar.

All right. Do you want some other examples? Here's some other examples. I said winners and losers on here but you could say victims and oppressors I suppose. Victims and oppressors. So if you see the world in terms of victims there's a good chance you're going to think you are one. And when you start thinking you are one your filter just starts producing evidence of it, confirmation bias. And that can be a very frustrating and also maybe not too close to reality view of the world. So that's a bad filter.

A better filter is that you're not a victim and that you have a lot of control over your life. So that's just a better filter anyway.

I don't want to talk about the details of these. I'm just asserting that there might be, how many things aren't there here? So there might be under 15 filters that can explain just about everything you see in life.

And I've said before that when I was very young I sought to understand the user interface for reality and I actually have dedicated my life literally to try to figure out why things are the way they are and why it works and what can you do differently. And this is sort of the result of it. That I started layering different skills together especially a degree in economics so I can understand that filter.