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Episode: #761: General Stanley McChrystal and Liv Boeree

Author: Tim Ferriss: Bestselling Author, Human Guinea Pig
Duration: 02:08:57

Episode Shownotes

This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10-year anniversary and passed one billion downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best—some of my favorites—from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited.The episode features

segments from episode #86 "General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness" and #611 "Liv Boeree, Poker and Life — Core Strategies, Turning $500 into $1.7M, Cage Dancing, Game Theory, and Metaphysical Curiosities" Please enjoy!Sponsors:AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://drinkag1.com/tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase.)LMNT electrolyte supplement: https://drinklmnt.com/Tim (free LMNT sample pack with any purchase)Helix Sleep premium mattresses: https://HelixSleep.com/Tim (20% off all mattress orders and two free pillows)Timestamps:[00:00] Start [05:57] Notes about this supercombo format.[07:01] Enter General Stanley McChrystal.[07:24] One meal a day.[08:52] Daily exercise routines and their importance.[14:04] The book most gifted.[15:15] A major course correction at West Point.[19:33] Vetting, selecting, and educating candidates for combat.[21:41] "No-win" leadership roleplaying.[25:21] Underrated military leaders.[27:17] Audiobooks.[29:13] What books make Stan's reading list?[30:29] Hopeless dilemmas and managing self-talk in high-pressure environments.[37:09] Enter Liv Boeree.[37:35] Youthful obsessions.[42:04] How poker entered the picture.[49:45] The qualities that made Liv excel at poker from the start.[55:55] Liv's advice to a newcomer wanting to learn poker.[1:04:54] What Liv's eight-week poker education curriculum might look like.[1:11:31] Failure points that might discourage someone during this curriculum.[1:13:35] Red mist, white noise, and fast math.[1:19:37] Volcano-induced tournament participation and self-regulation.[1:28:27] A skeptic's experiences with the unexplainable.[1:44:19] How does Liv rationally coexist with these experiences?[1:48:09] How to become a better skeptic.[1:54:18] Inadequate Equilibria and Moloch.[1:59:14] Parting thoughts.*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_02
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So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one. Drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. This episode is brought to you by Element, spelled L-M-N-T. What on earth is Element?

00:02:56 Speaker_02
It is a delicious, sugar-free, electrolyte drink mix. I've stocked up on boxes and boxes of this. It was one of the first things that I bought when I saw COVID coming down the pike, and I usually use one to two per day.

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00:03:20 Speaker_02
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00:05:18 Speaker_00
At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now is an appropriate time.

00:05:27 Speaker_04
What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living this year over a metal endoskeleton.

00:05:33 Speaker_03
Me, Tim, Ferris, Sean.

00:05:41 Speaker_02
Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss.

00:05:44 Speaker_02
Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with world class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives.

00:05:57 Speaker_02
This episode is a two for one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and passed 1 billion downloads.

00:06:07 Speaker_02
To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes.

00:06:19 Speaker_02
And internally, we've been calling these the super combo episodes, because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider stars.

00:06:33 Speaker_02
These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle, perhaps you missed an episode.

00:06:43 Speaker_02
Just trust me on this one, we went to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at tim.blog slash combo. And now without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening.

00:07:01 Speaker_00
First up, retired United States Army General Stanley McChrystal, former commander of Joint Special Operations Command from 2003 to 2008, and best-selling author of Risk, A User's Guide.

00:07:16 Speaker_00
You can learn more about General McChrystal and his work at McChrystalGroup.com. Why one meal a day?

00:07:25 Speaker_04
Do you actually eat one meal a day? I do. And people ask me why. Is it some zen connection with something? And no, what happened was when I was a lieutenant in special forces many, many years ago, I thought I was getting fat. And I started running.

00:07:41 Speaker_04
And I started running distance, which I enjoyed. But I also found that my personality was such that I'm not real good at eating three or four small discipline meals. I'm better to defer gratification and then eat one meal. And for me, that's dinner.

00:07:58 Speaker_04
And so what I do is I sort of push myself hard all day, try to get everything done and then.

00:08:03 Speaker_04
Sort of reward myself with dinner at night what time do you usually eat dinner when i'm finished work and it would be like eight or eight thirty there's a challenge when you work really long hours because suddenly start to eat very late then you go directly to bed that you feel like you're sleeping with a football in your stomach.

00:08:19 Speaker_02
And do you drink coffee earlier in the day? I'm just thinking with the workout and that many hours, a lot of people would fade. How do you prevent yourself from fading? Yeah, I have a tendency.

00:08:28 Speaker_04
I'll drink coffee. I'll drink other beverages to water and different things. And I do find that there are certain days your body just says, eat and eat right now.

00:08:37 Speaker_04
And I used to keep a bin of those hard pretzels in my office in Afghanistan, and I'd grab a handful of those.

00:08:43 Speaker_04
And other times I might be out doing something physical in the military, like road marching, and suddenly your body communicates, eat pretty quickly or you won't keep road marching, and I'll do that.

00:08:52 Speaker_02
Let me ask a couple of routine questions, questions about routine. And then I'd love to maybe go back in history a little bit. The working out, do you work out every day? I do. What type of exercise and why?

00:09:07 Speaker_04
When I was younger and I got serious about working out, I was a second lieutenant and as I mentioned, I started getting fat and I had a first sergeant in my parachute infantry company that liked to run.

00:09:16 Speaker_04
So we would do loosening up exercises and then we'd run. So I started running and so for the first 20 or so years, I ran.

00:09:24 Speaker_04
I had one period when I was a captain where I ran 15 miles a day, seven days a week, didn't vary, didn't take days off, wore lousy running shoes. It was sort of stereotypically all the mistakes you can make.

00:09:37 Speaker_04
As I got older and I started to have a series of shoulder surgeries and back surgeries predictably, what I learned to do was to alternate.

00:09:45 Speaker_04
So I will run one day, I'll lift weight the next day, I'll bike when I'm home and have that capable so I can round out. But for me, it's very important to do something literally every day.

00:09:56 Speaker_04
I'll only take a day off when I'm forced to because I've got some weird schedule thing that makes it impossible. What does your weight training, your resistance training workout look like?

00:10:04 Speaker_04
I will start at my home, if we're at home, and I go down to my basement and I do four sets of pushups. as many as I can do for four sets, and I alternate that with a series of abs exercises.

00:10:16 Speaker_04
So I'll do, starting with a set of sit-ups, and I'll do 100 sit-ups, and I'll flip over and I'll do three minutes of a plank, and then I'll do some yoga that I learned for about two or three minutes, and I'll do another set of push-ups, and then I'll go to my next abs thing, which is a crunch-like crossover, and then I'll do a two and a half minute plank, and then I'll do more yoga, slightly different,

00:10:39 Speaker_04
And I'll do another set of push-ups. And then I'll do my third set, which is crossover sit-ups. And I'll then do a third plank of two minutes. I'm decreasing each time. Then I'll do some more yoga. And then I'll do my fourth set of push-ups.

00:10:54 Speaker_04
And then I'll do my fourth, which is a flutter kick, 60 flutter kicks followed by static. Then I'll do my fourth plank, which is now a minute and a half.

00:11:03 Speaker_04
And then i'll come back and i've only do four sets of push-ups for the last time i don't do push-ups i didn't do one more set of the crunch like and i'll flip over to my last plank which is one minute.

00:11:14 Speaker_04
And then i'll do some final yoga and that'll take me about forty five to fifty minutes then i'll leave my house and go to the gym. because my gym opens at 530, it's three blocks from my house. I assume we mean am. Yeah. So I can do all this from 430.

00:11:28 Speaker_04
I get it. If I get up at four, I can do all that from 430 to about 520, 525, go down to my gym. And then when I get to the gym, I do four sets of pull-ups. alternated with incline bench press, alternated with standing curls.

00:11:44 Speaker_04
And then in that, I'll also do these one-legged things, balance exercises as the break between them. I was taught that was good for balance and whatnot. And I'll do a few other things in that. And I can do all that in 30, 35 minutes.

00:11:57 Speaker_04
So by 6.15, 6.20, I can be done at the gym. head back home, get cleaned up, and then start work.

00:12:05 Speaker_02
Ready to rock and roll. Yeah. And why is exercise important to you, both when you were overseas and at home? Maybe the reasons differ, but why is that routine ritual important? I think it's several things.

00:12:18 Speaker_04
There's a certain self-image. I think that if I was struggling with my weight, or if I was not as fit as I wanted people to perceive me, and I couldn't perceive myself that way, I think my own self-esteem would suffer.

00:12:32 Speaker_04
And particularly over life now, whenever I'm injured, and even in a slight period, it bothers me a lot. So I think that's part of it. Second is the military. There's an expectation.

00:12:41 Speaker_04
If you are not a physical leader in the kind of organizations that Chris and I were in,

00:12:45 Speaker_04
If you can't do those things physically, you don't have to do it better than everybody else, but you have to do it credibly and they can look up to, then I think your status in the organization is gonna go down.

00:12:57 Speaker_04
When I was left Ranger Battalion Command in 1996, and I went off to spend a year at Harvard, and I remember one of my non-commissioned officers said, sir, what are you gonna do at Harvard? I said, I'm gonna study. He says, you gonna work out?

00:13:08 Speaker_04
And I said, yeah, presumably I will. And he goes, you know, you come back here with a PhD but you're out of shape, we're gonna have a word for you, and it ain't gonna be doctor. And I just thought that was so good. It also puts a discipline in the day.

00:13:25 Speaker_04
I find that if the day is terrible or whatever, but I worked out, at the end of the day, I'd go, well, I had a good workout. No matter what happens, when the Rolling Stone article came out, it came out about 1.30 in the morning, I found out about it.

00:13:39 Speaker_04
I made a couple calls, I knew we had a big problem, and I went put my clothes on and I ran for an hour. Clear my head, stressed myself. Didn't make it go away, but that was something that I do in those situations.

00:13:53 Speaker_02
For me, it's a way of diversifying my identity in a way, so that if everything else is suffering, if I'm losing at everything else for factors outside of my control, at least the bar doesn't care.

00:14:04 Speaker_02
Stan, what book or books have you gifted the most to other people?

00:14:09 Speaker_04
I have probably given the most copies of a book written in 1968 by Anton Myhrer called Once an Eagle.

00:14:16 Speaker_04
It's a story of two characters, both who entered the military right during the First World War, and it follows them up through the Second World War, in fact, into the post-war years. On the one level, it's a little simplistic.

00:14:28 Speaker_04
There's one who is wealthy and ambitious and somewhat unscrupulous, and the other who is a Nebraska farm boy who wins a Medal of Honor and thrifty, brave, clean, reverent, etc.

00:14:39 Speaker_04
But it's actually more complex than that because it takes them through a whole career with all the nuances of army life that the difficulties of peacetime service slow promotions and then the challenges of war and their personal side as well and.

00:14:54 Speaker_04
I gave that to a tremendous number of young officers and NCOs with whom I served because I thought it was a good window to them that the military seems like the day you're living, but it's really a life.

00:15:06 Speaker_04
It's a career and it's going to have an arc and it's going to have ups and downs and left and rights just like your personal life is. And so I found that really valuable.

00:15:15 Speaker_02
I'd love for you to just talk about your experience with Major Barato. I think it was your first meeting. If you could talk about that a bit, I think it seems to be a key turning point for you.

00:15:26 Speaker_04
Yeah, it really was. Several things happened. I had entered West Point and I was from an Army family and I had expectations of myself, but my first two years at West Point were difficult. I got in a lot of trouble for discipline, my own immaturity.

00:15:41 Speaker_04
I didn't do well academically because I didn't know how to study and I didn't study very hard. I really didn't take West Point very seriously. And it was also heavy on math and sciences. And so that was not my strong suit.

00:15:53 Speaker_04
So by the end of my sophomore year, I wasn't ready to quit, but I was having a crisis of confidence. I had gone through some things. I had applied to go to Ranger School as a cadet, which they let a small number each year.

00:16:05 Speaker_04
And in the spring of my sophomore year for that summer, they said, you can't because your record is your lack of discipline is bad enough. you can't go to ranger school. And I was really crushed.

00:16:17 Speaker_04
So I went that summer and I went off to training and whatnot. They send you around the army to do different things. And I came back that fall and we had changed tactical officers.

00:16:26 Speaker_04
Now I'd had a nice tactical officer the first two years, but I don't really think, I mean, he tolerated my two years of problems.

00:16:33 Speaker_02
And is a tactical officer like a residential advisor in college or something along those lines?

00:16:37 Speaker_04
A little like that. You have a commissioned officer, a captain or a major for each company, which has about 120 cadets in it. And they don't live in the company, they're not there every day, but they are responsible for the company.

00:16:48 Speaker_04
So they have an office a couple hundred meters away, and they're responsible for overseeing the cadet chain of command on discipline, and they'll come down and inspect things, and they're also mentors and whatnot.

00:17:00 Speaker_04
And so after the first couple years, I came back and I expected to have this new tactical officer, my first in briefing and counseling, he brings each person in together.

00:17:10 Speaker_04
I expected him to look at my record and then give me the riot act for, you know, all my problems and shortcomings and whatnot. And I sat down with him and he's a special forces officer. He sat down and he goes, well, I'm looking at your record here.

00:17:22 Speaker_04
And he says, I think you're going to be a great cadet and a great army officer. And I literally said, I think you got the files misplaced, because this is Stan McChrystal. And he said, no, no, I got it. He goes, I'm looking at you.

00:17:37 Speaker_04
You know, you've gone outside the boundaries a couple times. He said, but your peer ratings are really good. My peers were reflecting confidence and whatnot. He says, I think you're going to do great. And it was amazing.

00:17:49 Speaker_04
It was transformational, because sort of like that kid in elementary school, where suddenly they start to say, you do have high potential. We just got to pull this out. And I had also started seriously dating now my wife of 38 years dating her then.

00:18:05 Speaker_04
So after my first two years of my misspent youth, I'd say I suddenly was dating someone seriously. So I had this tack who believed with me, I was going to settle down more because I was dating one person. And I could sort of see the end.

00:18:19 Speaker_04
And for me, West Point was this dark tunnel you went into just to go be an army officer. If it could have been done in a weekend, I'd have been happy to do that. I didn't bask in the West Point experience. I just wanted to be an army officer.

00:18:31 Speaker_04
And West Point seemed like the best place to do it. And suddenly I could see, it was two years out, but I could see the reality of it. Here was a special forces combat veteran who was telling me he thought I'd be good for that world.

00:18:45 Speaker_04
What effect did that have on you? Well, I think it caused me one, you don't want to let somebody down who's got faith in you. If somebody doesn't have faith in you, they say, I think you're a screw up.

00:18:54 Speaker_04
You go, well, okay, if I screw up, but you know, but if somebody says, no, I really have trust in you. I trust you're going to do really well. It gives you a new sense of loyalty to someone. You don't want to let them down.

00:19:06 Speaker_04
Plus he's now put on the table in front of everybody. You can do this. It's up to you. He didn't say it that way, but it was clear that's what he'd done. So it changed my opinion for lots of reasons.

00:19:20 Speaker_04
This being one of them, my grade point average skyrocketed my last two years. And I finished on the Dean's list and all, which was for me, nosebleed territory. But it was a lot because of the way people around me just started shaping my expectations.

00:19:33 Speaker_02
The question of selection and training is really fascinating to me for all of these different stages in a military career or a sort of private sector career.

00:19:42 Speaker_02
If you had, and this may be a difficult question, but if you had, say, a hundred athletes, civilian athletes, and I say athletes just to take the physical component largely out of it.

00:19:52 Speaker_02
This question came from reading about the nine-week ranger course at Fort Benning, I guess. So if you had a hundred athletes and had eight weeks to train 20 of them for combat, How would you select them and how would you train them.

00:20:07 Speaker_04
Very interesting and just as an aside the young man the yale graduate who worked with me on the memoirs you read is in his final week of ranger school now so he's lost a boatload of weight and he comes out he's a specialist in second ranger battalion so.

00:20:22 Speaker_04
He read about it, studied it, and now made the decision to go do it. It'll be interesting to hear him after he comes out.

00:20:28 Speaker_04
If I was going to prepare people for combat, if you assume that they can do the basic skills, they can shoot a weapon, they can do first aid, they can do those things,

00:20:38 Speaker_04
If they can't do those obviously you've got to teach him that the things that are actually required but if you assume that most people come out of basic training initial training with those technical skills, i spend time on things that do two things the first would be to push themselves after world war two when they talk to organizations,

00:20:58 Speaker_04
that had then been through combat. They said, what of your training was of value and what was of less value?

00:21:03 Speaker_04
They said long foot marches that forced them physically and really caused them to reach down inside themselves like distance running was invaluable. And the second was live fire training on courses that was as realistic as it could be.

00:21:19 Speaker_04
There was the stress, there was the sense of danger, although they were set up to inherently be safe. That required to that i would add dealing with uncertainty i would try to put people in cases where.

00:21:32 Speaker_04
They have to make decisions with absolutely incomplete knowledge and they have got to live with the results of that and often it'll be bad and what do they do that how do you simulate actually this brings up.

00:21:44 Speaker_02
Perhaps. Red teaming, maybe, maybe not. But how do you simulate, we'll come back to that if I'm leading us in a weird direction, but how do you simulate that uncertainty or role play that uncertainty? Are there good ways to do that?

00:21:58 Speaker_04
There were a number of ways to do that, to make tough decisions and whatnot.

00:22:02 Speaker_04
I had a, when I was a regimental commander, a colonel of the range regiment, put together an exercise that was designed to test them with uncertainty, but also with a no-win decision.

00:22:12 Speaker_04
And so what we did was we went to a battalion on no notice and we alerted them and we took a company of Rangers, put them on airplanes and flew them to Texas and then did a parachute assault.

00:22:22 Speaker_04
And their mission was to then move from the drop zone to this town and rescue a bunch of Americans who were there working nonprofits and whatnot. And they were then to police them up, bring them out to an airfield and be extracted.

00:22:36 Speaker_04
Pretty straightforward. And so they parachute in, and as they move toward this town, they're told that there are a small number of enemy forces there, 10 or so, enough they can deal with, and they develop a plan and they deal with it.

00:22:50 Speaker_04
Once they got into that firefight, I in fact reinforced that enemy with about 100. And so suddenly what happened is they get in a firefight that they can't extract from, and very quickly they have wounded of their own.

00:23:03 Speaker_04
And so now they're in this situation, and I'm playing higher headquarters. I'm actually on the ground watching, but through my controllers, I'm playing higher headquarters.

00:23:11 Speaker_04
And I say, all right, your mission is to get those students out of there, get them out, and get them to the airfield. And they go, wait a minute, I've got 40 wounded. I can't move my wounded. I can't get them, and I'm not going to leave them.

00:23:23 Speaker_04
And I said, we sent you for the students, get them. And so they always try to work around. They try to say, I need more aircraft, I need more forces, something to take away the constraint. And of course you say, nope, nope, nope, won't happen.

00:23:36 Speaker_04
You're going to have to make the decision.

00:23:38 Speaker_04
You are going to pull these students out and accomplish your mission at the cost of breaking faith with your comrades, or you're going to stay there, in which case you're probably all going to get killed and the students are not going to be rescued.

00:23:52 Speaker_04
So you're going to be a failure. And we would do this and it was a fascinating situation because you saw this moral dilemma on top of all the tactical dilemmas.

00:24:00 Speaker_04
And then afterward, we would have these long after action reviews where we talked about it. And the fun thing is there was no right answer.

00:24:07 Speaker_02
I'm really loving this example. What are you hoping them to exhibit, or what are you looking for in a scenario like that?

00:24:14 Speaker_04
It's hard to say. The first thing I would say is you want them to be thoughtful. The first response from people was, okay, the Ranger Creed says, I'll never leave a fallen comrade, so I'm not leaving a fallen comrade. We're staying here, period.

00:24:26 Speaker_04
And they say, wait a minute, the president of the United States sent you to rescue those American citizens.

00:24:31 Speaker_04
If we fail, then what's going to happen is we are going to have the loss of Americans and we're going to have this embarrassment and all of these things. So the nation that is relying on you, you're going to let down.

00:24:42 Speaker_04
So what's more important, your personal promise. or the promise to the nation and your mission and whatnot.

00:24:48 Speaker_04
And it was this quandary that you're looking for them to be more thoughtful than just this automatic black and white reflexive, this is what we do because that's what we do. Interestingly, I didn't have any of the companies leave the wounded.

00:25:04 Speaker_04
I'm not sure that wasn't the right answer. And I couldn't tell him afterward that it was, but none of them left him. But they agonized over it.

00:25:12 Speaker_04
I mean, they tried everything they could, but it was just good because I said, those are the situations you're going to be in. It's never going to be easy, this or that.

00:25:22 Speaker_02
That's a great example. So there's some timeless principles. Timeless practices, obviously things have evolved in many different ways in the military, private sector, technology and so on.

00:25:31 Speaker_02
But if we're looking sort of in the rear view mirror, what military leaders come to mind who are most underrated in your opinion? That's a great question because

00:25:42 Speaker_04
There are people who did things for which they get huge credit and there are other people who change the direction of organizations and of course I think Ulysses S. Grant is often underrated.

00:25:53 Speaker_04
He's viewed as this mechanical basher who is going to just bash the enemy into submission. And I think he was much more than that.

00:26:02 Speaker_04
I think he took an army that was already maturing when he took overall command of Union forces, but he understood the absolute truth that you had to destroy the Army of the South. Capturing Richmond was interesting, but it wasn't the real point.

00:26:17 Speaker_04
The problem was as long as you had an existing army and that that was going to take a very focused effort that was gonna be high cost and you weren't gonna lower the cost by doing it more slowly. It was cumulatively had to get it done.

00:26:30 Speaker_04
And I think he understood the political side of it much more than people give him credit for. So I think he's a huge one. There's another, and I'm gonna, I'm embarrassed to say I can't remember his name.

00:26:39 Speaker_04
There was a naval admiral between the first and second World War who essentially championed the development of aircraft carriers. There were people who championed the development of air power and that was pretty obvious.

00:26:51 Speaker_04
But building aircraft carriers during that period when battleships were still king was a dangerous sort of step out there. So I think those people who push change when change is not otherwise automatically going to happen.

00:27:05 Speaker_02
For those people listening, I'm sure somebody listening or reading on the blog will have the answer, be able to look up that naval admiral. So please put them in the comments on the blog and then I will put it into the post. So we'll have that.

00:27:17 Speaker_02
Stan, do you listen to audiobooks when you work out?

00:27:21 Speaker_04
All the time. It's funny, I first used to listen to music and I get bored listening to music, so I started listening to audiobooks because if you think about time management, what I found was I love to read.

00:27:33 Speaker_04
But particularly when we started the fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, I would have a long day. I'd have good books. I'd go back to my hooch and I'd read about a page and a half and then I'd wake up 20 minutes later with my head on the page.

00:27:45 Speaker_04
And so I realized I was going to have to get a better way. So I started putting audio books on my iPod. And I like history and I like biography. And so I would put those on very eclectically.

00:27:55 Speaker_04
And initially it was eclectic because audiobooks weren't that prevalent. And so my wife would go to the library, she'd go everywhere she could get all these audiobooks. I'd download them onto my iPod on my computer and then put them on my iPod.

00:28:07 Speaker_04
And so it was whatever was available. Later, as more things became available, I had a wider choice, but I found that eclectic part really good. I learned to run with audio books.

00:28:19 Speaker_04
My mind will stay collected on it when I lift weights, and I also, just because I get sort of fanatical about something, I have a little set of speakers in my bathroom. So what I do is I go in in the morning, and I'm listening to one book there.

00:28:31 Speaker_04
I turn it on, and while I brush my teeth, while I shave, while I put my PT clothes on, because my wife's out in the bedroom, I'll listen to this book. and then I'll walk out of there to go work out and I'll have my iPod, I have another book.

00:28:43 Speaker_04
And I listen to that to know when I work out. Now it will take me quite a while of shaving time to get through a book. Are those two separate books or the same book? Two separate books.

00:28:51 Speaker_04
So I just finished a book on the South African gold and diamond trade, Cecil Rhodes and whatnot. up through the Boer War. It was fascinating, and it probably took me six, eight weeks of shaving time to do that.

00:29:03 Speaker_04
But then on these other books, I found that I go through books very, very quickly. If you're working out an hour, hour and a half a day, you actually go through books much faster than I would if I just had reading time.

00:29:13 Speaker_02
And I always love to ask people who read a lot or consume many books, even in audio format, how do you choose your books? So for instance, in this case of the diamond trade and whatnot in South Africa, why did you choose that book?

00:29:26 Speaker_04
I go on audible.com and I buy this package deal where you get a whole bunch of credits, and I look at the history first, and I look at what's trending new just to see if what's trending new.

00:29:35 Speaker_04
I tend to like sweeping history stories of an era that's 20, 30, 40 years, or big projects like the building of the Panama Canal, building of the Boulder Dam, because they got a beginning, middle, and an end, and challenges, or biographies.

00:29:52 Speaker_04
And I will also do binge reading, meaning I went through a period where I read about whaling, and I read like five whaling books together.

00:30:00 Speaker_04
Or I'll read biographies or something about the founding fathers, and I did seven or eight George Washington and other founding fathers, and because they're all you know, mutually overlapping.

00:30:13 Speaker_04
It's very interesting because suddenly you know more about the era and the new one is more interesting because it's filling in holes. And so I'll binge on one subject for a while and then on another subject.

00:30:23 Speaker_02
Oh God, this gives me all sorts of ideas for how I can spend yet more time reading books. So you mentioned the hopeless dilemma earlier where you sort of engineer putting people into a situation where none of the options are attractive.

00:30:37 Speaker_02
We're here in silicon valley a lot of people fashion themselves warriors of one sense or another and they read sons who are the war and they think of their.

00:30:45 Speaker_02
Business is very high stakes but ultimately in the field when you guys are dealing with life and death decision said i'd love to hear.

00:30:50 Speaker_02
In the cases where something goes wrong so you make a decision people go out on a raid there more fatalities than expected. and you have to operate rationally and effectively the next day, what would your internal self-talk sound like?

00:31:09 Speaker_02
And then what would you say to the team to get them ready for the next day?

00:31:15 Speaker_04
A little bit of historical context. If you think about it, and you can compare this to earlier times of war, but the first part of after 2001, we were

00:31:23 Speaker_04
worried about al-qaeda worried about afghanistan we win and it was turned out to be remarkably rapid and relatively speaking low-cost in terms of casualties and whatnot and then iraq actually invasion turned out to be the same way so that there got to be this sense that okay this isn't that hard it's not going to take this long and the cost will not be hard we have a few fallen heroes and we celebrate them but we don't think it's going to be a grinding attrition

00:31:50 Speaker_04
Then as we got into the difficult era after fall of 2003 and got into 2004 and five, something different happens. One, we started to realize this was going to be very hard. And every time we lost a comrade, they were not going to be the last.

00:32:08 Speaker_04
And that's a different mindset because then people start to make their personal calculation. They said, how long can I do this before the roulette wheel hits me? And is it going to even come out right?

00:32:20 Speaker_04
If we pay all this price, are we going to have a successful outcome? And that's a different mindset as well.

00:32:25 Speaker_04
What I found myself was if you stay focused on the mission and everybody understands the cost of that, when you have an outcome where people are killed or wounded,

00:32:38 Speaker_04
If you let yourself freeze up with either the self-doubt that maybe you made a mistake or this sense that there's just no exit to this maze, then of course I think it's very difficult to make those kinds of calls. You can find yourself locked up.

00:32:55 Speaker_04
In the summer of 2005, I had found that we just couldn't do what we had to do without bringing more of our force over. We had a third of our force deployed all the time, and then two-thirds back training and getting ready.

00:33:08 Speaker_04
And that was about the tempo we could maintain for a long, long time. But we had a period when we needed two-thirds of the force in the fight.

00:33:15 Speaker_04
And mathematically, of course, because the last thirds back on alert in the U.S., that's not indefinitely sustainable. And just at the time I made the decision to do that, we started taking a bunch of casualties.

00:33:28 Speaker_04
And when you take casualties in a very elite force, it's not the nameless rifleman at the end of the squad that nobody knows. It is Chris, who I have served with for 10 years. I'm the godfather to one of his kids. I'm married to his sister."

00:33:43 Speaker_04
I mean, that's the effect. T.E. Lawrence writes about it as ripples in a pool that go out through these small communities, tribes, and really our forces were a tribe.

00:33:53 Speaker_04
So suddenly, the effect of that can cause you to be even more impacted by... Ulysses S. Grant used to say that he didn't visit hospitals much.

00:34:04 Speaker_04
because he found if he went and he saw the terrible carnage for which he was responsible, he'd lose his nerve to command it. So what I think happens is you don't become detached from the loss and you don't go into denial.

00:34:16 Speaker_04
What I found is you keep yourself focused on the objective. And you say, this is what we are doing, this is important, this is attainable, and the steps we are taking to it are the best steps I can figure out.

00:34:30 Speaker_04
They're responsibly arrived at to the best of my ability, and they are judiciously executed to the best of what we can do.

00:34:38 Speaker_02
So this would be potentially what you just said, what you would sort of remind yourself of in those moments?

00:34:43 Speaker_04
Yeah. And of course you don't say that quite that explicitly in the organization, but the first thing you do when an organization suffers a loss is not tell them, you know, don't let people marinate in their grief. They can grieve.

00:34:59 Speaker_04
When I was in Afghanistan, the German army got in a firefight and they had four of their soldiers killed. And it was the first four German soldiers killed in combat since World War II.

00:35:11 Speaker_04
And so I flew up to be with this company, and they were literally in shock, and they were all in this room trying to figure out, how do you process this? Because we go to war every few years. The Germans' fathers hadn't been at war.

00:35:23 Speaker_04
Maybe their grandfathers had, and certainly no one in active duty had ever had a soldier killed in combat under their command or a comrade. So they were trying to figure out how to figure this out. How to process the whole thing. Exactly.

00:35:36 Speaker_04
And so what I told them was, that's what happens in war. The enemy gets to do that, you get to kill him, he gets to kill you, and what you do is you get right back at it, and you get right back at it right away and stay focused.

00:35:50 Speaker_04
And that's, I think, the best catharsis you can do, difficult as it is. Get back on the horse. Exactly.

00:35:59 Speaker_02
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00:37:09 Speaker_00
And now, Liv Boree, winner of both the European Poker Tour and World Series of Poker Championship titles, gaming theorist, futurist, philanthropist, and host of the Win-Win with Liv Boree podcast.

00:37:24 Speaker_00
You can find Liv on Twitter and Instagram at Liv underscore Boree. Liv, welcome to the show. It's nice to see you.

00:37:33 Speaker_06
Thank you for having me.

00:37:36 Speaker_02
And we can go so many different directions. I thought we would start, actually, maybe in an unexpected place. So I asked you before we started, what color would you prefer? Black, blue, orange, or I think it was yellow.

00:37:49 Speaker_06
Oh, that's what it was for? It was for mic cable?

00:37:50 Speaker_02
It was for mic cable so that I can tell which line is feeding into which input on this recorder. And it certainly looks a lot better in audio, right? So it does have a certain clown car appearance to it when we do it in person with video.

00:38:07 Speaker_02
When you said black, I said, I bet it's going to be black right beforehand. And it was black. And the reason I said that is I read something about you and Metallica.

00:38:17 Speaker_02
And to get into the zone coming here on the drive over, I listened to Orion, the remastered. Oh, great choice. Yeah. Nice choice. Very, very, yeah. Because my first, now we're really getting off track here, but that's OK. There is no track.

00:38:31 Speaker_02
My very first album I ever bought was on cassette tape, and it was Master of Puppets. And can you guess why I bring up Metallica?

00:38:42 Speaker_06
Well, they were my love that bordered on an unhealthy obsession from the ages of like 16 to 22. So that's probably a, I would guess why you brought it up. I don't know how you would know that though.

00:38:58 Speaker_02
Well, you know, we do research over here. Metalinsider.net. The Iron Maiden of the poker world, they called you, and there was a short discussion of The Unforgiven. And this led you, I guess, in some respects, into guitar. Do you still play guitar?

00:39:17 Speaker_06
I don't.

00:39:18 Speaker_02
You don't, but you did for a period of time.

00:39:19 Speaker_06
I did, yeah. From like 16 or 17 till 24, basically until poker took over.

00:39:25 Speaker_02
So do you then have typically one obsession at a time? Do you ever have multiple obsessions simultaneously or do you tend to have one obsessive fixation and that is where you put your energy?

00:39:38 Speaker_06
I used to. I used to be very... A shiny new activity would come along. If it ticked enough boxes, I'd be like, I have to become the best at this.

00:39:50 Speaker_06
I would rarely become the best at it, but I would certainly go down the rabbit hole deep enough to become proficient. I was like that, I would say, until

00:40:01 Speaker_06
some point in probably my early 30s, some point around the age of 30, where I lost that a little bit. In some ways, that's good, because it means I can try a greater breadth of things, but it comes a little bit at the cost of then not ever picking.

00:40:16 Speaker_06
I'm currently struggling with the fact that I'm being too much of a jack-of-all-trades, master of none.

00:40:20 Speaker_06
Not knowing what I'm going to be focusing on on YouTube, or maybe I should just do speeches, or maybe I should actually just start a company and give up on the silly public-facing stuff, it can be a bit of a blessing and a curse, I guess.

00:40:33 Speaker_06
Not fixating on one particular thing, but certainly as a teenager, I was… I don't know, certainly with metal.

00:40:39 Speaker_06
Because I think, you know, with teenagers, so often you don't… Because you haven't formed your identity yet, you will form it typically around a genre of music.

00:40:47 Speaker_02
Sure. I was metalhead, which is part of… You were metalhead? Oh, for sure.

00:40:50 Speaker_06
Oh, sick. Right. So yeah, you get it. And metal is so…

00:40:53 Speaker_02
I mean, I say was, as if it's past tense. If I'm in the gym, I'm still a metalhead.

00:40:58 Speaker_06
Right, exactly.

00:40:59 Speaker_02
But you don't look it, you don't live it in your visual... No, I mean, I have, like, from the neck up, I definitely have the sort of early era... Well, actually, no, like, mid-era Pantera look to me.

00:41:10 Speaker_06
I was about to say, Phil Anselmo, like, a little bit, you know, Phil Anselmo after his Vulgar Display of Power era or whatever, yeah. Yes. So I was kind of uncool until the age of 16.

00:41:20 Speaker_06
And then metal came along and I was like, oh, this is this is what I was waiting for. And then I just went all out.

00:41:26 Speaker_06
You know, I had the piercings, red hair, black hair, blue hair, the guitar, and just would not listen to anything but metal and not just like new metal. I hated new metal, no corn or anything like that.

00:41:39 Speaker_06
No, I wanted a really heavy shit like Pantera was like a that was like a nice day on the beach. You know, I'm talking like Dimmu Borgir, Burzum, you know, some of the Swedish black metal, Norwegian black metal.

00:41:50 Speaker_02
Once you get to the Scandinavian death metal, you've gone really deep.

00:41:54 Speaker_06
Yeah, exactly. But Metallica were a huge forming part of that. They were the one sort of classic metal band that I still was like, I just loved so deeply.

00:42:04 Speaker_02
All right, let's paint a picture here. What was the age range of your competitive poker career? And then we're going to back into that by going to some very early, early chapters. But what was the span?

00:42:16 Speaker_02
Because I'm trying to overlay that on what you just said.

00:42:18 Speaker_06
So I first learned to play poker aged 21. Yeah, it was 2005. I'd just graduated uni, didn't really know what I wanted to do.

00:42:30 Speaker_06
I thought I was going to carry on in physics, but I decided to take a gap year because when I first started taking physics I was like, oh, I'm definitely doing this. This is so interesting. I love it.

00:42:40 Speaker_06
But then the more time I got to spend with PhD students or even people doing their masters, they seemed I don't know, they just didn't seem very happy.

00:42:49 Speaker_06
And they weren't very, I don't know, just personality wise, I was wondering if it actually was going to work for me. Because all I really wanted to do was go out partying and clubbing and go, you know, see rock shows, metal shows.

00:43:01 Speaker_06
And I was also still wanting to be a rock star at the time. And I was like, I just don't know if this is going to quite work, me sitting in a lab, you know, fiddling around with lasers. So decided to take a gap year.

00:43:10 Speaker_06
And I think I signed up, I was doing like, random, like, goth modeling sometimes.

00:43:17 Speaker_02
As one does in their gap year.

00:43:19 Speaker_06
Right. Well, you know, just any way I could make some money. And I thought, I don't know, I enjoyed dressing up in my heavy metal costumes as often as possible. And I was like, if I can get paid to do that, that'd be great.

00:43:29 Speaker_06
I also got paid to be a cage dancer in rock clubs in London.

00:43:33 Speaker_02
Yeah. Well, you know, I was admiring the boots on the way in. This is a shoeless household, so thank you for accommodating.

00:43:42 Speaker_06
This is not my least metal sock ever. I'm so embarrassed.

00:43:46 Speaker_02
These are grey and pink striped socks with hearts all over them. So yes, it's like the hard exterior, the goth death metal exterior, and then like the soft, sweet inside.

00:43:57 Speaker_06
You don't understand how much pain I'm in, actually, the fact that this is these. I have so many, like most of my socks are black. I just grabbed whatever I needed to.

00:44:05 Speaker_02
So, goth modeling, which I also did during my gap year. Totally lying. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Oh, man. And I wish I could have. So, goth modeling, cage dancing, and then?

00:44:16 Speaker_06
I think I signed up for this website that would advertise different TV shows or modeling opportunities, that kind of thing. And I remember seeing an ad which said something like, could you use your powers of skill and deception to win £100,000 on TV?

00:44:32 Speaker_06
and seeing as I was rapidly getting pretty damn broke because dancing in a rock club cage doesn't pay you anything, really. I had some student debt mounted up and really didn't want to get a real job. My parents were like, what are you doing?

00:44:47 Speaker_06
You've moved to London. Get a job. So I was like, okay, this seems reasonable. I've always wanted to try being on TV. I like game shows. This seems like a game show. I'll apply.

00:44:58 Speaker_06
Turns out, they wouldn't tell us what it was that we were applying for because they needed to keep it a secret, but turns out it was a reality show that was looking for five beginners at poker to teach them how to play.

00:45:10 Speaker_06
The sort of loose scientific premise was they were looking for five different personality types to see which is most suited for the game. So I got selected for that.

00:45:21 Speaker_02
What was your personality type?

00:45:22 Speaker_06
They called me the professor, which I much certainly was not.

00:45:25 Speaker_02
I mean, I could see it. I could see it.

00:45:27 Speaker_06
I literally turned up in skintight tiger print spandex, self-made trousers.

00:45:33 Speaker_02
Now, did you do that because they had put you in the professor category? Was that a rebellion, an act of rebellion, or did that just…?

00:45:42 Speaker_06
No, I mean, that was genuinely how I dressed. It was my genuine appearance. As I said, I lived and breathed metal.

00:45:50 Speaker_02
Sounds good for TV.

00:45:51 Speaker_06
Right. And I think that's probably why they selected me, honestly, like very overconfident to the point of like cocky 21 year old brat who was

00:46:00 Speaker_02
Unheard of with 21-year-olds. Yeah.

00:46:03 Speaker_06
I don't know. I just thought I was the smartest person in the world. And I think I even said something like that in the interview, like the audition.

00:46:08 Speaker_01
And they're like, oh, we're definitely bringing you in.

00:46:10 Speaker_06
Yeah, this is going to be a good one. And I didn't disappoint because I ended up having a complete meltdown on the show. I'm so glad this is not on the internet. Basically on the final, I think we played like seven preliminary rounds where we would

00:46:23 Speaker_06
five of us would play, and then that would accumulate points. Those points would translate into chips for the final game, where we would play for the 100,000. I was leading, going into that. Clearly, I had a knack for the game.

00:46:38 Speaker_06
I remember the hosts and the professionals that they brought on the show to teach us were like, oh, you're definitely going to win. You are the most talented at this. So I was so sure I was going to win this thing.

00:46:49 Speaker_06
And then I ended up making, not to get too technical, but basically I misread my hand. I misread the board. I made a straight on the river. The opponent bet. I was so excited. I was like, I raise, which was basically all my chips.

00:47:02 Speaker_06
And then I looked at the board again and noticed there were four diamonds out there and I didn't have, I had two black cards. and audibly went, oh!

00:47:11 Speaker_02
No, I'm not, I'm no professional, but is that what one would call a tell?

00:47:17 Speaker_06
Yes, that is a tell. Do not do that. And my opponent, it was a really nice guy called Lee, was like, well, I guess she doesn't have a diamond. And he was like, I'm all in.

00:47:31 Speaker_06
And instead of, again, keeping my cool or anything, I just started crying, like melted down.

00:47:36 Speaker_02
Producers are high-fiving in the background.

00:47:38 Speaker_06
Oh my god, yeah, they were literally. And I'm like, oh Liv, what's the matter? Tell us more. And I was like, you know, makeup everywhere. I think I run away from the table. They try and follow me with a camera.

00:47:48 Speaker_06
It was just, you know, classic reality TV meltdown stuff. So that was my intro to poker. But I just completely fell in love with the game.

00:47:56 Speaker_06
And funny enough, during the filming of that, which took two months, I went to a local card club in London to try and get some practice. And they had this now sort of infamous, this five pound rebuy. So it was the cheapest tournament they had.

00:48:13 Speaker_02
What is a rebuy?

00:48:13 Speaker_06
A rebuy means that for the first hour or so, if you bust out, you can just buy back in again. So considering it was only a £5 entry, you can imagine it's just pandemonium. Everyone's going in every single hand.

00:48:25 Speaker_06
And people will easily spend £100 in their entry overall. You know, 20 rebuys. Good for the house. Yeah. But I turned up with £10 because I was like, well, it's a £5 tournament. Why would I ever need more than £5 for the entry and £5 to buy a drink?

00:48:37 Speaker_06
And that will be my day.

00:48:39 Speaker_02
So you're like a player in a video game with two lives, where everybody else has like a hundred lives.

00:48:47 Speaker_06
Right. Yeah. And most people were doing that. Yes. Only for the first hour. Then once after that period ends, then if you bust out, you're out. This is the first tournament I ever play.

00:48:57 Speaker_06
And I enter this thing, somehow get through this carnage period in the first hour.

00:49:03 Speaker_02
The zombies that just keep standing back up.

00:49:05 Speaker_06
Yeah, I think I did three by ones with my other five pounds, so I didn't buy a drink. And anyway, I ended up winning it. I ended up playing until five in the morning. It was like 120 people in it. And then I came home.

00:49:15 Speaker_06
I remember just having this, you know, they paid me out in tens and twenties, I think £750 or something like that, which was more money. So I'd never seen that amount of cash before. Just so much money.

00:49:25 Speaker_06
And I remember going home to my boyfriend at the time and waking him up at 5am and just throwing the cash on him.

00:49:31 Speaker_06
like this is this is the best thing ever this is my game i must be the best in the world like you know it's my first ever tournament basically and i win it so even though the tv show did not go well and i didn't win the hundred grand i'd already got the bug basically from that little win so let me weave through this and inspect a bit because i have many questions

00:49:53 Speaker_02
What do you think helped you during the show itself to make it to the final table?

00:50:00 Speaker_02
What were some of, whether they're your characteristics, things you learned, things you observed, trained abilities, anything that comes to mind that you think helped in the very early nascent stages?

00:50:14 Speaker_06
Of that tournament?

00:50:15 Speaker_02
Yeah, the TV show.

00:50:16 Speaker_06
Right.

00:50:17 Speaker_02
The TV show, and then I have more questions.

00:50:21 Speaker_06
I mean, I think the thing that was most helpful early on for me in poker was I was just so pathologically competitive. I just had to win and like prove that I was the best in this thing.

00:50:35 Speaker_02
And that translated to just more study time.

00:50:37 Speaker_06
Just, yeah, just like this, like laser focus. And then there's like ruthlessness because the thing about poker is that you actually, you do have to be really ruthless in the game.

00:50:46 Speaker_02
In what sense?

00:50:48 Speaker_06
In terms of bluffing people, if you're not comfortable with bluffing someone at the poker table, which I don't think a lot of people say, oh, it's lying. It's like, it's not really lying.

00:50:56 Speaker_06
No, it's just a strategy within a game as defined by the rules of the game. It's an integral part of it.

00:51:02 Speaker_01
It's sanctioned lying.

00:51:03 Speaker_06
Right. If you're not willing to do that, then it's not the game for you. Play chess. Right. And then you have to be just willing to just really laser in and pay deep attention to what is going on.

00:51:20 Speaker_06
Technically, at any given moment, even if you're not in a hand, there's really valuable information being exchanged about the types of cards people play, the way that their bodies move when they're uncomfortable versus comfortable, are they a naturally aggressive person or are they naturally scared, what are the things that make them scared, etc.

00:51:39 Speaker_06
And certainly in the beginning, because I didn't know anything about the actual statistical mechanics of the game, all I could rely on was the stuff I knew, which was looking for when people are bluffing.

00:51:51 Speaker_02
So looking for when people are bluffing. Okay, so let me ask you about the statistical side, because you're coming out of physics. you have, it would seem, a huge competitive advantage.

00:52:03 Speaker_02
Why would you not begin to study the tables and the statistics and so on?

00:52:09 Speaker_06
Well, I did too. You did that as well. And the thing is that the statistics required in poker to actually, you know, at a high level, you're not going to learn within the first month.

00:52:19 Speaker_02
Sure, right.

00:52:20 Speaker_06
And also people didn't even really know, because this is 2005, even the top players in the world back then didn't really understand game theory. like even an average player understands it today.

00:52:31 Speaker_06
I read all the books I could get my hands on, so I guess my physics training helped to an extent with being willing to just dive in and research on a big, amorphous topic and not even clear directions of where to start.

00:52:46 Speaker_06
That probably gave me a bit of an advantage there. Then Presumably I have a higher than average IQ from physics. Exactly. It really helps. And all the drinking and guitar playing and chasing after rock stars. Yeah. But it.

00:53:03 Speaker_06
which I think obviously helps in any kind of strategic game.

00:53:06 Speaker_06
But honestly, the beautiful thing about poker, in fact, is that if you're talking about one night, you can have the literal best player in the world, a medium player, complete beginners, and provided everyone knows the basic rules, then technically anyone can win.

00:53:26 Speaker_06
It's only over the long run does anything actually meaningful start happening. And so even in this TV show where we played, I think, eight different games, statistically it's not that meaningful, the results, over that time period.

00:53:41 Speaker_06
There's so much luck going on, and I didn't realise that early on in the game. In some ways, winning that big tournament early on was not a big tournament, that £5 rebuy.

00:53:51 Speaker_06
It gave me an immense amount of confidence and love for the game, which I think had I not had, I wouldn't have then pursued it as much as I did. But it can also delude you a little bit because I then just assumed, okay, well, I'm going to win this.

00:54:04 Speaker_06
There isn't that much luck. It's just who's the best player wins. I think that's partly why it was such a kick in the face when I screwed up and didn't win the £100,000.

00:54:14 Speaker_02
When you say you fell in love with the game, aside from things that maybe you've mentioned already, what made you fall in love with it? What was so appealing? There's an inherent excitement to it. Right.

00:54:25 Speaker_02
Of course, because there's a blending of skill and chance.

00:54:28 Speaker_06
Yes.

00:54:28 Speaker_02
And money. I mean, there's stakes. Right.

00:54:30 Speaker_06
We're actually just winning the potential of just winning, you know, making a living where I don't have to go and sit in an office and I can do that. That was obviously a big carrot.

00:54:40 Speaker_03
Yeah.

00:54:40 Speaker_06
But there's just so many different skills that it draws upon. There's the statistical side, you know, the scientific side. There's the game theory.

00:54:50 Speaker_06
If you really want to dive deep into math, and I mean these days you can work with simulators, computer science stuff basically, and go in that angle. But then you've also got this more, there's like an art to it as well.

00:55:02 Speaker_06
You know, psychology, trying to mentally model what level someone is thinking at and be one step ahead of, they're going to zig, you're going to zag, that kind of thing.

00:55:11 Speaker_06
There's a scientific way to read body language, but sometimes you just get a vibe that you can't explain. There's just so many different approaches you can take to it.

00:55:22 Speaker_06
Today I'm going to work on my body language reading, and today I'm going to work on my potholds and my combinatorics. never a dull moment. There's always a new situation as well.

00:55:34 Speaker_06
Even after playing for 10, 15 years, I'll still see something crazy with the cards run out, straight flush against squawks, that kind of stuff.

00:55:42 Speaker_06
These incredibly rare scenarios will sometimes happen, or people will do weird things, or some strange ruling will happen that everyone's scratching their heads like, I don't know what the right call is here.

00:55:52 Speaker_06
There's such depth and complexity to the game.

00:55:55 Speaker_02
Okay, so I'm going to admit something, it's embarrassing. I've been fascinated and drawn to poker for a very long time and I've never learned how to play properly.

00:56:06 Speaker_06
No way.

00:56:07 Speaker_02
It's true.

00:56:07 Speaker_06
Wow.

00:56:08 Speaker_02
There are many excuses I may have for this. One of them is that friends of mine, like a guy named Jason Kalkanis, want me to play, but it's mostly because he wants to take all my money. Because he's going to be far better than I am.

00:56:23 Speaker_02
And that's a compliment, Jason. I'll teach you how to be Jason. And a lot of these investors are very confident. I know some of them certainly, particularly the quants who have observed from afar, seem to be pretty confident.

00:56:40 Speaker_02
I had a little bite of the bug probably five years ago when I did an episode of a TV show, bringing it back to TV, where I trained for a week or five days probably to play heads up against a whole cohort of folks, including some pros.

00:57:02 Speaker_02
And I was able, and I was trained by, I want to give him credit, Phil Gordon for that. for a very short period of time until the next skill I had to learn for the next episode pushed it right out of my head.

00:57:15 Speaker_02
Had a lot of fun with Heads Up, but one night when the filming had finished, and I was like, you know, let me go try just a regular table. And I got slaughtered. Like, it did not translate.

00:57:28 Speaker_02
at all, which I expected would largely be the case, but I just got dismembered.

00:57:32 Speaker_06
I mean... Well, Heads Up is a very different game to playing against eight people.

00:57:37 Speaker_02
Yeah, totally. So yeah, one-on-one, a totally, totally different game. But it actually brought back, in a way, my love of mathematics and statistics, which I lost

00:57:48 Speaker_02
not to make this like a confessional, but I lost it in 10th grade because I had this one teacher who just had this huge ax to grind with the boys in the class and almost all the boys ended up quitting math or avoiding it after that class.

00:58:00 Speaker_02
My brother had the opposite experience and then later became a PhD in statistics. So it's amazing to look at these divergent kind of points, right, where you have a fork in the path depending on your experience.

00:58:13 Speaker_02
So my question after all of that word salad is, If you were to suggest a way of learning or to teach me an approach to learning, regular poker, whatever that means, the type of poker I would play with my friends who are like, let's play poker.

00:58:34 Speaker_02
How might you think of approaching that?

00:58:37 Speaker_06
Well, given that you are… I mean, you're pretty well-rounded in your personality and that you like both sort of human interactive things, but you can also nerd out really hard.

00:58:47 Speaker_01
Yes.

00:58:48 Speaker_06
I don't think there's really a wrong way to teach you poker.

00:58:50 Speaker_06
Like, if I was to teach my mum or something like that, my mum is the most — sounds strange to say, but she's the least autistic person — in that she is so able to intuit social situations and unbelievably emotionally intelligent. but phobic of math.

00:59:14 Speaker_06
She's interested in scientific concepts, but if you actually try and get into the technical weeds, she cannot. She would be in arms with Molly right now. She just feels. She's a very feel-based person.

00:59:30 Speaker_06
If I was to teach her the game, I would take her to the table with a group of fun people and we would slowly just turn the cards over and talk through. I'll give her the hand rankings.

00:59:40 Speaker_06
I'm going to take it very steady in terms of like, this is how the way that they're acting. They seem quite confident. take a more the human approach to it. But I think with you, we would want to jump sort of straight into the game theory to an extent.

00:59:56 Speaker_02
So let me apply some parameters if I could just to allow us to conjure an image. So let's just say he's really going to want to take my money now, which he will probably. So let's say I had a game with Jason and you can pick

01:00:11 Speaker_02
the sort of minimally viable period of time over which you think I could learn to be competent enough that I might have a chance. Is it four weeks? Is it 12 weeks? This is also not knowing how good Jason is.

01:00:26 Speaker_02
I have no idea because I've always refused to play.

01:00:29 Speaker_05
He's pretty good.

01:00:31 Speaker_02
Okay, great. So, so let's just say, you know, if luck is on my side, having some chance in hell,

01:00:37 Speaker_06
Well, here's the thing. So you have a chance in hell.

01:00:40 Speaker_02
Anyway, if you sat down and just play... Because it's not just going to be Jason, it's going to be an entire table.

01:00:44 Speaker_06
Well, no, but even if you were playing one-on-one against Jason, if you guys sat down, assuming you know the basic rules of like which hand beats what.

01:00:50 Speaker_01
There's always a chance.

01:00:51 Speaker_06
Okay, but let's assume the very basics, you know, what betting chips means and whether you have a straight on the river or not. Assuming that, you and I could sit down and play 10 hands, and it's basically 50-50 who wins.

01:01:07 Speaker_02
Let's say you can pick the period of time of training, however long it is, and then Jason and I are going to play… A thousand hands, let's say. Exactly.

01:01:17 Speaker_06
Yeah, a thousand hands. Your chance of beating Jason over a thousand hands, probably with just knowing the rules, is… 45%? That's how crazy it is. Maybe it's a bit less than that. Sorry, Jason. Maybe it's, let's say 37%, maybe 35%.

01:01:36 Speaker_06
I'm going to get a phone call after this. But could we get it so that you are a favorite against him? Eight weeks of intensive. If you sat and studied all the charts, That's what it is really these days.

01:01:56 Speaker_06
Now that we know the mechanics of the game, basically there's this thing called game theory optimal solutions to different scenarios, which is basically, if you have Jack-9 suited on this type of board against a person in this position, you will want to check-raise them 30% of the time and check-call 70% of the time or something like that.

01:02:15 Speaker_06
Basically, there are answers to what you should do in different scenarios with what frequencies. It's all about frequencies.

01:02:21 Speaker_06
Now that we know this, and you can run simulators to give you the answers of all these fictitious scenarios, now it's changed the game into basically who's willing to learn as many different scenarios as possible, and basically emulate them in their head when they go and play.

01:02:36 Speaker_06
So it's a very different type of game. It's more like almost studying chess moves.

01:02:40 Speaker_02
I was just going to say, it sounds a lot like studying chess scenarios.

01:02:44 Speaker_06
It wasn't like that even 10 years ago. It was very, very different. I mean, you'd sort of do combination calculations in your head and that kind of thing, but that was kind of the limit of it.

01:02:55 Speaker_06
Honestly, it's actually one of the reasons why I, in the end, didn't like the game as much anymore. I've been doing it for 12 years anyway, and I was just starting to get itchy feet naturally. But

01:03:05 Speaker_06
it required more and more time spent at the top levels, at least.

01:03:11 Speaker_02
There were incremental gains.

01:03:12 Speaker_06
Exactly. Diminishing returns in terms of hourly. Also, what it means is, because these game theory optimal solutions exist, it means that there's technically this perfect style of play. Any one person can play.

01:03:24 Speaker_06
The more people study this style, the more people are close to it. and so that means there is a ceiling of how perfectly you can play.

01:03:31 Speaker_06
Technically, if you and I are both two computers that are able to play this game theory optimal style, we're just breaking even against each other over infinity.

01:03:39 Speaker_06
If we play for an hour, whoever gets the best cards will therefore win, but over infinity we will just break even. and so that meant that you'd have to be putting more and more time in to win a sort of shrinking pot of money, essentially.

01:03:52 Speaker_06
Which is why I don't now recommend to people to go out and try and be professionals in poker, but I still absolutely recommend that people go and learn the game because it's the best

01:04:05 Speaker_06
mini-analog for the type of complex decision making that you need to do in life.

01:04:10 Speaker_02
And we're going to come back to this because I do think with my very little exposure to poker, and having watched some on TV, and nonetheless having had my ass handed to me,

01:04:22 Speaker_02
when I tried it live, that particularly maybe an easy map is investing and poker. There are just so many variables that are similar, which is why I think so many investors are drawn to it. And also, give a plug, All In Podcast, check it out.

01:04:41 Speaker_02
That's J. Cal's podcast with his buds. It is a fantastic, fantastic show. I do think it is one of the best new podcasts, new-ish podcasts that I've put into my rotation. So don't take all my money, Jason. Eight weeks.

01:04:55 Speaker_02
What does the density of practice look like? Is that two hours a day? Is it 10 hours a week? What does the distribution look like?

01:05:04 Speaker_06
to be confident that you'll have like a 60, 40 edge on him, I would want to do 40 hours a week at least.

01:05:11 Speaker_02
Okay.

01:05:12 Speaker_06
Oh yeah.

01:05:16 Speaker_02
All right. 40 hours. How does that break down if we have, uh, you said eight weeks, right?

01:05:22 Speaker_05
Yeah.

01:05:23 Speaker_02
So hypothetically, let's say week one, what does the schedule and curriculum look like?

01:05:28 Speaker_06
So in the first week, I think we would, I mean, I would sit and just run out lots of different hands. I think in person is better than online, so you actually just get to play with the cards, feel what it's like.

01:05:41 Speaker_06
You get really familiar with the betting patterns and that kind of thing. We would talk about the more sort of general things like, why are we betting? What are we seeking to find here? Okay, we want to find information.

01:05:53 Speaker_06
We'd get into the idea of ranges because, kind of a strange word, but basically We're playing a hand right now. I don't know anything about your cards.

01:06:01 Speaker_06
All I know is that you've got two cards out of the thousand and whatever the number is, a combination of two cards that you can have. Right now, your range is 100%. Same back at you.

01:06:13 Speaker_06
As the hand progresses, basically, I want to narrow down the perceived range that I think you could have, gain information so I can narrow that down and put you on a hand. Meanwhile,

01:06:24 Speaker_06
giving away as little information about my own possible range, so keeping it as wide open to you. So it's about maximizing deceptiveness while extracting information out of your opponent.

01:06:35 Speaker_06
So I'd teach you about concepts like that, and we would talk about ways that you can do that. And then I think we would go and actually play a little bit in person, just so you get used to the dynamics.

01:06:46 Speaker_06
We'd go to a local, I mean, probably invite friends over and we'd just have some games. And it was so much fun anyway. Those are the best type of poker games.

01:06:54 Speaker_02
Bring in my card mechanic and take all their money.

01:06:55 Speaker_06
Exactly. Yes. And then after that, I think we would start, I don't know at what stage, but you know, once you seem competent and are able to,

01:07:06 Speaker_06
you're able to do sort of basic math calculations in your head about, okay, well I have to call $100 into a pot of $400. I'm getting 4 to 1. What does that mean? How many cards are there that I need to hit, etc.?

01:07:17 Speaker_06
So these kind of pot-odd calculations, that kind of stuff. Mason.

01:07:20 Speaker_02
Could you just take a second and explain what you mean by pot-odd calculations?

01:07:24 Speaker_06
So pot odds are basically like investing to an extent. If things go well, what do you win versus how much would you lose?

01:07:31 Speaker_02
And then how do you bet size accordingly? Right, exactly.

01:07:36 Speaker_06
Or let's say you're trying to hit a flush And there are nine cards left in the deck that could help you, say, out of 36. So you have a 25% chance of hitting the card you need. And meanwhile, the pot is offering you five to one.

01:07:51 Speaker_06
Well, now that's actually a profitable thing, right? Because you're getting, the pot is offering you more than the odds that you need to hit your card. So Matt and I haven't talked about this stuff in ages.

01:07:59 Speaker_06
It's really interesting seeing my brain's like, oh, find the words. So those kind of rudimentary types of math calculations that you need to do. And then as you get more comfortable in that, then you would start doing more combination calculations.

01:08:14 Speaker_06
So as you're sort of narrowing down your opponent's range, there will be presumably some hands that they will have that are better than your hand.

01:08:22 Speaker_06
You know, so what we would call value hands that they would be playing, but they would also have some bluffs in there. So you need to try and think about what are the conceivable bluffs they would have, given the sort of story that's been told.

01:08:32 Speaker_06
You know, like pre-flop they raised early, so that means they probably have stronger cards than weaker cards. So you can narrow it down to like the top end of the cards, like aces, kings, ace-king. ace, three suited, that kind of stuff.

01:08:45 Speaker_06
But then on the flop, when an ace came out, they actually slowed down. So that maybe suggests that they don't have an ace. Maybe they have more like nines, tens, eights, you know, to a pocket pair like that.

01:08:54 Speaker_06
Weaving together bits of evidence to be able to narrow down people's ranges and put them on like conceivable bluffs versus conceivable strong hands. So that kind of stuff.

01:09:03 Speaker_06
And then after that, if you're seeming to grasp all that, then we would actually start looking at the solver charts. So these are these simulators. There's this one called Pyosolver that was at least popular in the day when I was playing.

01:09:18 Speaker_01
How do you spell that?

01:09:19 Speaker_06
PIO. PIO solver. I think it's still the main one. At least when I was using it, that was back in 2016 or so, it would take many hours to run a sim.

01:09:31 Speaker_06
You'd be like, I want to know what the optimal play is with Jack-9 suited on a 10-8-4 rainbow board or something like that, and then let it run

01:09:40 Speaker_02
Folks listening, I have no idea what they mean to you there. It's okay. I love how it sounds though.

01:09:45 Speaker_06
Yeah. There's so much jargon.

01:09:46 Speaker_02
I think I need a rainbow.

01:09:47 Speaker_06
That's actually probably where we would start. We would start with glossary because there's so many, there's so many terms. The vocab is, is, you know, there's, there's just so much going on there, but yeah.

01:09:57 Speaker_06
So we would start running simulations so you can see and understand, like, this is what the optimal solutions would be in these certain situations. Because once you know what the optimal solutions are,

01:10:07 Speaker_06
And then now you're equipped with this really solid baseline of what the perfect play is, where if you don't have any information about your opponent that you can just follow and know that at worst you'll be breaking even, but you'll still be beating them.

01:10:21 Speaker_06
But then, because you know what the perfect play is, you can look for ways to exploit their screw-ups. Because in reality, everyone, even the pros, are making mistakes. They aren't playing this perfect GTO style.

01:10:32 Speaker_06
but you can't really know the way that they're screwing up until you know what the GTO is in the first place. It acts as this baseline benchmark of high quality play. We would sit and we would study these charts.

01:10:45 Speaker_06
If over that course of eight weeks I got you so that you were able to emulate these charts to, I don't know how to quantify it, but to a good amount, that would be more than sufficient to beat Jason. You know, he's not a full-time pro. He's good.

01:10:58 Speaker_06
Like, he's played a lot. And we've only played once. And I was more just, like, bemused at the amount of words that were coming out of his mouth.

01:11:04 Speaker_02
Well, I was going to say, if his poker is anything like his basketball, his ability to shit talk is actually incredible.

01:11:11 Speaker_05
That guy is world-class.

01:11:12 Speaker_02
He's very good at getting under your skin if he wants to get under your skin.

01:11:15 Speaker_05
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. We've been at a few parties together and he knows how to ruffle feathers, but he's so funny. I love him.

01:11:27 Speaker_02
Excellent interviewer and moderator. I just want to second the recommendation that was made earlier. Let's depart from the training for a bit. We may come back to it. But actually, let me ask a question I haven't asked in a long time.

01:11:41 Speaker_02
maybe similar, this is like kicking in the gears, starting the old car, trying to like turn the key, get it to turn over.

01:11:49 Speaker_02
If you could predict the main reasons, the failure points, the reasons I would quit in those first eight weeks, what do you think they might be? Assuming that I had the time, right?

01:12:02 Speaker_02
And the interest, what are the things that might break me or cause me to walk, give up?

01:12:08 Speaker_06
if for some reason you couldn't wrap your mind around what these charts mean, I guess that would be a sort of breaking point. But I just don't see that ever happening, to be honest.

01:12:19 Speaker_06
I think the reason why you'd walk away is because you're like, actually, this isn't that much fun and I don't care enough about beating Jason. You're not playing for suitable stakes. And you're like, this is not worth my time.

01:12:29 Speaker_02
For people listening, I'm just using Jason as a stand-in because it's fun. But right. I don't care enough about beating anyone.

01:12:36 Speaker_06
Exactly. Just the opportunity cost would be too high. That would be the only reason, I think. Because I think you would find it fun otherwise.

01:12:42 Speaker_02
I would have to. I wouldn't have to, but... ensure that I have a certain frequency of play after putting in 40 hours a week for eight weeks. Otherwise, the decay rate would be brutal.

01:12:54 Speaker_06
And part of that time, by the way, in that 40, it's not just studying the charts, it's also going out and actually practicing and getting real.

01:13:00 Speaker_06
Because assuming you're going to play one-on-one in the flesh, a big part of poker that we haven't touched on yet as well is

01:13:06 Speaker_06
emotional control, understanding yourself and your own biases, not only cognitive, but also the way different negative emotions will arise, which they will in the game, particularly with someone like Jason, who is so adept at saying things to needle.

01:13:21 Speaker_06
And that's a big part of the game.

01:13:22 Speaker_02
Getting the verbal bamboo shoots under your fingernails. Exactly.

01:13:26 Speaker_06
That would be as important, particularly if you're playing for a particular, you know, you're training for a big match, the mental game side of it.

01:13:34 Speaker_06
Because ultimately, you can study all the charts and think you're a GTO machine and like, oh, I'm fine. But then you get down there and he looks you in the eyes and it's like, well, you screwed up that hand, Tim. What are you going to do?

01:13:44 Speaker_06
What are you going to do? Huh? And just goes full Jason on you. You'll forget everything. The red mist. I call it the white void.

01:13:51 Speaker_02
The red mist. I've never heard that. Okay. I like it, though.

01:13:53 Speaker_06
The red mist descends. There's two mental blocks

01:13:58 Speaker_02
And that's when one might go tilt.

01:13:59 Speaker_06
Tilt, exactly.

01:14:00 Speaker_02
If I'm catching the lingo.

01:14:02 Speaker_06
Yeah, tilt, very good. For those who don't know, tilt is what people do basically when their emotions get the better of them and they start playing badly.

01:14:11 Speaker_02
Now, is monkey tilt just an exaggerated version of that?

01:14:16 Speaker_06
Yes.

01:14:16 Speaker_02
Okay, yeah.

01:14:18 Speaker_06
Monkey tilt is just like the, you know, you've got sort of... I love the image.

01:14:21 Speaker_02
One of the flavors. Now, the reason that this is fresh on the mind is not too long ago, I was in a non-sober state and decided that it was the perfect time to start making stock trades.

01:14:35 Speaker_02
And my friend was watching me and he's like, I think you may be full tilt right now. And I was like, do I look excited? Do I look upset? I'm not. I'm not on tilt. Those didn't work out very well.

01:14:48 Speaker_02
But the red mist, when the red mist, but you call it the white, what?

01:14:52 Speaker_06
Well, so there's two. There's the white noise. So the white noise is when, so redness is when you're angry. Someone has wound you up.

01:15:00 Speaker_02
That would probably be my Achilles heel. Right. The white noise.

01:15:04 Speaker_06
Yeah. And the white noise is where, for whatever reason, perhaps, you know, you're just really tired or you're really stressed, but you'll go and consult your brain and it comes back with nothing.

01:15:15 Speaker_02
Okay. Yeah. It's just beach balling.

01:15:18 Speaker_06
And I've had that a few times. I remember having it in the World Series day four or something, day five, and it was a really big pause, and I just needed to think. But then my brain was like, well, this is a really important decision.

01:15:30 Speaker_06
You just really pay attention to this one. Are you paying attention? Well, I'm not sure you're paying attention. Why are you listening to me? So there's this little voice, and then I was like, okay, pay attention.

01:15:38 Speaker_06
Let's count the combos of what they've got, and just nothing. So in the end I was like, you know, my system two. Are you familiar with system one, system two?

01:15:47 Speaker_02
No. Oh, wait a second. System one, system two. Is this like Daniel Kahneman?

01:15:51 Speaker_06
Yeah, it's a Danny Kahneman thing.

01:15:52 Speaker_02
If you could just give some context.

01:15:54 Speaker_06
His thesis is that we have two modes of thinking. Well, system one is like you're intuitive. Like if I ask you what's five plus five, you immediately know the answer is ten. So kind of your gut instincts.

01:16:05 Speaker_02
I just got a shot of adrenaline so that you were going to make me do multiplication tables.

01:16:08 Speaker_06
Well, wait. So that's your system one. It's just the things you immediately know an answer to. It's like an unconscious process. Technically, it's system one.

01:16:18 Speaker_06
If you're driving down the street and someone cuts in front of you, your body will take over and you'll swerve because you don't have time to do a sort of cost-benefit analysis of going left or right.

01:16:26 Speaker_06
And then your system two is the conscious thinking. So if I was to ask you what 471 plus 88 is… It would be 560… I didn't even forget the numbers now.

01:16:36 Speaker_02
471 and 88. 471 and 88. What's that? I can't do it. Yeah. 9.

01:16:51 Speaker_01
559? Is that right?

01:16:58 Speaker_06
I have no idea. Whatever that was.

01:17:02 Speaker_02
You can't use your gut feelings for that.

01:17:04 Speaker_06
Right. You have to think it through. You have to do the calculation mentally in your head. So that's your system too.

01:17:09 Speaker_02
And poker's really interesting because... You know I'm on five hours of sleep. I just want to buy myself a little bit of... wiggle room on the mental math.

01:17:18 Speaker_05
I didn't even answer my own question, and I have no excuse.

01:17:21 Speaker_02
May I make a quick aside? One of the coolest things I've ever seen was when I was 15 as an exchange student in Japan, and I got to know multiple kids because it's mandatory that every kid learn how to use an abacus.

01:17:36 Speaker_02
And something like one out of every 30 or 40 kids would get so good that they no longer needed the physical abacus. They could see it in their minds. And so for party tricks,

01:17:48 Speaker_02
their friends would just lob these like three digit multiplication problems at them and they could come up with the answer. It would take them a second because they actually had to physically.

01:17:59 Speaker_06
map it out.

01:17:59 Speaker_02
Map it out and move these beads and so on. I love that. In their minds, but astonishing.

01:18:05 Speaker_06
My partner Igor can kind of do that.

01:18:07 Speaker_02
Yeah?

01:18:07 Speaker_06
It was one of the ways he got me, honestly.

01:18:09 Speaker_06
He just, just throw numbers at him and he'll, he hasn't done it in a while and he'll hate that I've mentioned this because now everyone's going to do it to him, but he can usually answer within like a second or two.

01:18:18 Speaker_02
Wow. That's fast.

01:18:19 Speaker_06
Yeah. It's hot.

01:18:21 Speaker_02
Rock stars to mental mathematics.

01:18:25 Speaker_06
Yeah, so those are... I can't remember where I was going now.

01:18:28 Speaker_02
So where you were going is we were talking about system one, system two, and that white noise moment.

01:18:33 Speaker_06
Yes.

01:18:33 Speaker_02
And that is not a time that you can rely on system two. Is that what you were going to say?

01:18:37 Speaker_06
Right, exactly. Because system two has shut down.

01:18:39 Speaker_02
Yeah, system two's offline.

01:18:41 Speaker_06
Yes, offline. It does not compute. There's nothing there. Hello. 404. 404, yes. Blue screen of death. And it's bad when that happens in poker.

01:18:50 Speaker_03
It's no good at all. Sounds fucking terrible. Yes.

01:18:53 Speaker_06
And that is, you know, if you're playing, it can be various reasons. It can be because if you're wound up, someone's gotten under your skin, that will shut it off. But also just pure adrenaline and stress. You know, you're excited.

01:19:07 Speaker_06
Even I've had it when I had a really good hand. And I was really, I was like, oh man, I'm going to win a huge pot here. This is so exciting. And I'm like, well, I need to think through what the optimal bet size is.

01:19:16 Speaker_06
And again, because I just, it just, it's, it's so hard because I think you're, you're put into, well, you know, this stuff better. Like your, your sympathetic nervous system is in, is in play. Right.

01:19:27 Speaker_06
So you're kind of in fight or flight and that is not conducive to slow cognitive thought. It's conducive to, immediate, you know, physical stuff really useful for, but not so good for the mental.

01:19:38 Speaker_02
So let's talk about the regulation, the self-regulation. So I have in front of me some notes. Obviously you can see them. Those who are on audio only will not be able to see them.

01:19:47 Speaker_02
That's fine because it makes me sound more professional if you think I'm doing everything off the top of my head. So at one point, you turned 500 euros into 1.25 million euros, which is around 1.7 million.

01:20:02 Speaker_02
And if I'm getting roughly, I believe that that math, right, that was at the EPT San Remo and it was 500 euro buy-in or $500

01:20:13 Speaker_06
It was a 500-euro satellite tournament into the main event buy-in, which was 5,000 euros. So everyone was buying in for 5,000, but I won my way in, because I couldn't afford the 5,000. I won my way in through a feeder, smaller tournament.

01:20:26 Speaker_02
So a few just housekeeping questions about this. How long after that first tournament win, after the TV show, was this?

01:20:37 Speaker_06
This was 2010, so five years.

01:20:41 Speaker_02
Wow. All right. So five years later, this happens. Presumably in this tournament, there was less and then crying and running away from the table. Correct. Okay.

01:20:53 Speaker_02
So what type of self-regulation did you learn over that period of time and then subsequent to that?

01:21:02 Speaker_06
Oh man, that tournament was nuts because, you know, the TV show was in 2005. I didn't actually really turn fully professional whereby I was living off it until late 2008.

01:21:15 Speaker_06
I was still sort of playing casually, couldn't really get my act together enough to... I wasn't good enough really to be living off poker before then.

01:21:24 Speaker_06
So I'd been playing on the circuit now for like a year and a half, and I played some bigger Bayern tournaments, but I'd never made any really big final tables or anything. And this Italy one kind of happened by accident.

01:21:35 Speaker_06
Remember the volcano that went off in Iceland?

01:21:38 Speaker_01
Yeah, I do.

01:21:38 Speaker_06
And it shut down all of European airspace. I was in the south of France for something completely different, and I couldn't get home. And I heard that there was this tournament going on in northern Italy, and it was like a train ride away.

01:21:50 Speaker_06
So I was like, all right, screw it. I'll go there.

01:21:51 Speaker_01
Thank God for volcanoes.

01:21:52 Speaker_06
Bless that volcano. Oh yeah. And then I arrived and there was this feeder tournament, it's called a satellite, that night where it was a 500 euro entry and one in 10 people would win their ticket for the 5000, the main event.

01:22:05 Speaker_06
So I won my ticket that night, like four in the morning, and then went and played it the next day, starting at noon.

01:22:11 Speaker_06
And a very strange thing happened to me actually at noon before the tournament started, but that's like another topic I think we can get into later maybe.

01:22:18 Speaker_02
Wait a minute, you can't leave that. Just give us a teaser and then maybe we'll come back to it.

01:22:23 Speaker_06
I had my first of a handful of completely unexplainable, borderline metaphysical experiences. I won't say what it is now. It'll be better if we talk about it later.

01:22:38 Speaker_03
We'll come back to that later.

01:22:39 Speaker_06
But anyway, so I had a very strange thing happen just before the tournament started at noon. And long story short, six days later, it ended up being the largest tournament ever held in Europe at the time.

01:22:48 Speaker_02
Leaving that undescribed is what I call keeping the audience listening.

01:22:51 Speaker_06
Yeah, you better keep watching.

01:22:52 Speaker_02
And now, for a short commercial break.

01:22:56 Speaker_06
I ended up attracting the biggest field of players of any tournament in Europe to date, at the time at least, was over like 1,200 people. So huge, huge tournament. And six days later, I was on the final table, down to the final nine.

01:23:11 Speaker_06
How many hours a day are you playing? I played like 10 hours a day on average. Some days were a bit longer, some days were a bit shorter, so you can imagine how exhausting that is. Also, because the longer you're going, the more intense it gets.

01:23:25 Speaker_06
Because in the beginning, the stakes are like, okay, I might lose my €5,000 buy-in, but as the tournament wears on and there's less people, your chip stack is worth more and more in terms of equity.

01:23:36 Speaker_02
So your loss aversion starts to go vertical.

01:23:40 Speaker_06
By the time of the end of day five where we play down to the final table, the final nine, for ninth place I was already guaranteed I think 90,000 euros. I think I had like 50,000 pounds to my name at this point.

01:23:54 Speaker_06
So I was already guaranteed double my net worth for whatever happened on that final table. And first prize was the 1.25 million euros, so like 1.7 dollars. And that morning, I think I got some sleep the night before.

01:24:10 Speaker_06
because I'm somewhat of an insomniac anyway. So if I have something on the next day that's big, I often will just not sleep very well. And so you can imagine this cranks it up to 10. And I was dreaming.

01:24:20 Speaker_06
I don't know if you ever have that where you've been doing a lot of a particular thing, like trading or whatever, and you sort of semi-sleep and see the thing. I was playing poker.

01:24:29 Speaker_06
I was lying there, I had pocket jacks, I had a king, queen, just these fictitious hands. My brain just could not shut off.

01:24:36 Speaker_06
And that was my night, the night before, and I was just like in a complete tears because I'm like, oh no, we have a play tomorrow, like I'm a mess. I was so nervous before the final table. I like threw up three times on the way, like walking down.

01:24:47 Speaker_06
It was so stressful. But I don't know, once we actually started playing, once I got the cards in my hand, it was just like, and I just switched into this like mode of, I don't know, it was weird.

01:24:58 Speaker_02
Was that the first time that it happened or that happened to you before?

01:25:02 Speaker_06
Not to that extent, because I think it was a perfect storm of, like, such extreme nerves and being such a mess beforehand. And then, like, actually being able to play well. I don't know.

01:25:13 Speaker_06
The Delta felt more than I'd ever had it before, but I had had that before where I was, like, able to, like, get into the zone very well.

01:25:18 Speaker_02
I wonder if you just spent all of your stress calories. Yeah. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, that tank was empty. Yeah. So you needed to switch to a different tank.

01:25:28 Speaker_06
Honestly, it felt like I had something guiding me that whole time. It was a very strange experience. Anyway, I won and it was great.

01:25:34 Speaker_02
Of course, I'm not going to let go of the metaphysical experience. We are going to come back to that probably quickly, but before we do, for people who are not going to bank on having metaphysical experiences or the feeling of being guided,

01:25:48 Speaker_02
What else have you learned about regulating, whether it's the white noise or, especially for me of personal interest, when someone is actively trying to fuck with you and disrupt all of your systems?

01:26:03 Speaker_06
The best thing I've found, and it's super simple, is just breathing. Three deep breaths. It's so cookie cutter, but it just works. Just close your eyes and inhale in.

01:26:17 Speaker_06
You could feel, even if your heart's pounding, my heart's actually pounding a little bit now because I'm retelling the story, it's funny. But just that, you notice that, you feel your body, you breathe in and you breathe it into your belly.

01:26:28 Speaker_06
And I imagine my favorite color which is usually a mix of turquoise and purple, something like that. I'm sucking that in and pulling it down into my stomach, and then it's just like this, ah, settling feeling.

01:26:40 Speaker_06
Half of it is just like bullshitting myself. It's an interrupt, exactly. It just is enough to settle your nervous system for a second, just ground you back to here, and then be like, okay, now what's the problem?

01:26:54 Speaker_06
Another thing that's helped as well is I just like laughing at myself. Oh, you're taking this one awfully seriously. Oh, silly. Like playing a silly little in my head just to like make light of the situation a bit.

01:27:06 Speaker_06
But that it requires a lot of ability to sort of step out and observe the situation because obviously once you're in the red mist, particularly the red mist more than the white noise, By definition, you are animalistic.

01:27:17 Speaker_06
You don't have the ability to step outside and observe a situation well. I think just practice, really. Practice getting angry. Practice reading. I guess a way you could do it is go read something that you know makes you angry.

01:27:30 Speaker_06
It really reliably gets your blood pressure up. Then try and build in some kind of trigger that makes you do the three breaths thing.

01:27:41 Speaker_02
So for 99.9% of the sadomasochistic users of Twitter, myself included, just go on Twitter.

01:27:47 Speaker_06
Yeah, just go on Twitter. Every day. You'll be reliably upset.

01:27:51 Speaker_02
For two minutes. Oh man, Twitter. What a nasty neighborhood that's turned into.

01:27:58 Speaker_05
So sad.

01:27:59 Speaker_02
As you were saying this, I'm imagining, I'm imagining Jason listening to this and formulating in his mind, that's why I was smirking, for if he sees me taking deep breaths, he'd be like, yeah, Timmy, take those deep breaths.

01:28:11 Speaker_02
Come on, buddy, you can do it. Oh, sorry I upset you. Oh yeah, yeah, no, you're doing great.

01:28:15 Speaker_05
Yeah, just close your eyes. Don't even look at me. Don't even look at me.

01:28:17 Speaker_02
No, close your eyes. Don't look at me.

01:28:19 Speaker_01
Don't worry.

01:28:19 Speaker_05
No, no, nothing to see here.

01:28:19 Speaker_02
Just imagine I'm not here.

01:28:20 Speaker_05
You can't hear me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He'll just end the stream of words.

01:28:22 Speaker_02
It's not like everybody's waiting for you or anything. All right, before I lose track, which I wouldn't, but what the hell happened in the morning? And you can contextualize this however you want.

01:28:34 Speaker_06
Sure. No, I mean, what happened was I played a bunch of these tournaments, not ones quite this size, but I'd still played a lot of tournaments at this point. And I was there before it actually started.

01:28:47 Speaker_06
Usually people turn up late, but for some reason I was there in my chair before the first hand was dealt. And I remember they, the company Poker Stars, whose event it was, you know, they dimmed the lights.

01:28:56 Speaker_06
They were like, welcome to EPT San Remo, huge, we've got incredible feel, blah, blah, blah. And then they dimmed the lights and they put on the screens around the room, just like a promo, exciting, you know, a promo video, you know.

01:29:07 Speaker_06
And I remember distinctly the music. It was Chemical Brothers' Hey Boy, Hey Girl, which I always loved. I always loved that song. Yeah. And, you know, I was like, oh, this is cool. I'm excited.

01:29:16 Speaker_06
And while I was just like listening to it, just like out of nowhere, this like a bolt of lightning felt like it was like this, like, and this voice in my head said, you are going to win this tournament.

01:29:29 Speaker_06
And it sounded like my own voice, but what I can't remember is whether it was I am gonna win or you are gonna win, but I'm pretty sure it was you are gonna win, but it's literally sounded like my own voice.

01:29:39 Speaker_02
And it was so- It sounded like your own voice?

01:29:40 Speaker_06
Yes. It was like, you know, when you speak in your head, like the voice you hear, like most people have that, right?

01:29:45 Speaker_02
You know, that Tuesday voice that everyone hears.

01:29:51 Speaker_06
Oh man, I'm learning a lot out here. It sounded like how I would sound in my own head to myself. and it said, you are going to win this tournament. And I got this rush of goosebumps.

01:30:03 Speaker_06
It's even happening a little bit, like the hairs up on my, you know, on my arms. And I remember looking around the room, like, did, did I just say that out loud? Did anyone else hear this? And everyone else was just like in their phones or whatever.

01:30:14 Speaker_06
And I was like, well, that was freaky. And then the lights came back up and they're like, okay, cool. Shuffle up and deal. And I was still like stunned. And I was like, OK, cool.

01:30:25 Speaker_06
And then like halfway through the day, you know, and then I sort of a little bit forgot about it. But then like halfway through the day, I got in a big pot and I lost half my chips. You know, it's always a bad feeling when that happens.

01:30:34 Speaker_06
And I was like, oh, man, I'm nearly out the tournament. I guess that was bullshit. You know, so I had like little multiple moments over the next few days where it clearly was a real thing because I checked in on it.

01:30:45 Speaker_06
And I even told a friend of mine on date.

01:30:46 Speaker_02
What do you mean checked in on it? Meaning you remembered that it had happened?

01:30:50 Speaker_06
That it had happened. Well, because obviously the rational explanation to this is that it was just a false memory. You know, that I have retroactively remembered something that didn't really happen as a way of like making- You reconstructed it.

01:31:01 Speaker_02
Exactly, I reconstructed it. But you have multiple points at which you referred to it.

01:31:04 Speaker_06
Yes. And I even have a friend, my friend Melanie, who was there and I bumped into her in the women's bathroom on like day two. And she's like, oh, you got a lot of chips. It's going well. I was like, yeah, yeah. Things are going well. Really weird.

01:31:16 Speaker_06
I feel like I'm going to win this. In fact, I almost had a premonition that I did. And she's like, yeah, you seem really confident. We actually had this conversation. And to the point that she after I won it, she was like, what the fuck was that?

01:31:26 Speaker_06
You like predicted this. I'm like, I know, I don't know. So, yeah. I don't know how to explain it.

01:31:34 Speaker_02
Now, I think you said string or series of experiences. Is that type of experience in poker isolated to that? And it doesn't have to be constrained to poker.

01:31:45 Speaker_02
So, what was interesting was after I- Actually, may I ask, I apologize for doing this herky-jerky questioning style, but did you have any of those types of experiences when you were younger that you recall? No.

01:31:56 Speaker_06
No, I was not like a weird kid that had, sorry, let me start again.

01:32:02 Speaker_02
You weren't like the kid from the Sixth Sense.

01:32:04 Speaker_06
No, I wasn't the Sixth Sense kid, no. No, I did not, is to answer that question. I had not really ever had, I think, anything, like I never saw a ghost or anything like that.

01:32:15 Speaker_02
I'm not asking about ghosts. I mean, don't lump me in with the ghost hunters, come on.

01:32:21 Speaker_06
I want to just paint the picture of that I was a very, in fact, like a deep skeptic.

01:32:26 Speaker_02
Right. Well, you still are a deep skeptic in a lot of ways.

01:32:29 Speaker_06
Right. But certainly then, I'd never had anything weird that I couldn't really explain in any conventional way. I'd certainly not had any time loops or anything like that, or weird voices in my head.

01:32:38 Speaker_06
But yeah, to answer your question of, is it a sort of common thing in poker?

01:32:42 Speaker_02
No, not so much a common thing in poker, but have you since had more of those types of experiences?

01:32:49 Speaker_06
Not of like explicit premonitions. No, nothing even close to that. I have had one really notable thing that I am happy to talk about it.

01:32:59 Speaker_02
If you change your mind, we can cut it later.

01:33:01 Speaker_06
Exactly. For want of a better word, I had an extreme energy healing, an almost accidental one. So it was a few years ago and seemingly out of the blue, I started getting this very unpleasant sensation in my ear where

01:33:19 Speaker_06
It was like a sort of low-frequency buzzing, humming quite frequently. Some kind of tinnitus, but it was almost like a pressure. Voices, particularly men's voices, became distorted to the point that they were unbearable to listen to.

01:33:37 Speaker_06
and it was really bumming me out. It would come in clusters. I would have it for a few hours and it would go away and come later on in the day.

01:33:43 Speaker_06
It was stopping me from doing any social events because any loud scenario was unbearable, but particularly men speaking. I just couldn't handle it. This went on and off for a few months. I went and saw multiple doctors and had hearing tests.

01:33:57 Speaker_06
They said, oh, you're losing the low frequencies of your hearing in that ear. we think you have Meniere's disease.

01:34:05 Speaker_06
Meniere's is this degenerative thing which usually people end up completely deaf when they have it, where basically the nerve cells in the inner ear start dying and they don't really know why.

01:34:14 Speaker_06
They think it's something to do with salts and ion channels, and it's incurable as far as they know. And so I was told that's what I probably have. And they're like, it's pretty, really sorry. It's, you know, it was just bad news to find that out.

01:34:26 Speaker_06
And also because one of the symptoms of it is you start having balance problems as well. You get like these vertigo attacks and people be like vomiting and so on. And so. You can imagine, I was really down in the dumps finding this out.

01:34:37 Speaker_06
Then cut to three months later or so, go to Burning Man. I have, for the first time, one of these vertigo attacks one of the days.

01:34:44 Speaker_06
I mean, I wasn't completely sober, but it was not a good time, as you can imagine, having a vertigo attack while not being sober for the first time. I was then really down in the dumps.

01:34:53 Speaker_06
And then on the last night of the burn, I was talking to some friends and started talking to this girl who I kind of, I don't know that well, but she's a friend of a friend. And I mentioned about my ear and she's like, Oh, well, I do energy healing.

01:35:06 Speaker_06
I'm an energy healer. I was like, I don't know what that is, but sure. Do whatever you want to do. Yeah, have a go. She's like, I can try. And

01:35:17 Speaker_06
after she sort of put her hand over my ear for a few minutes, and then she says, I remember saying something like, there's something there, I need to get it.

01:35:27 Speaker_06
And she starts sucking over my ear with her mouth, like not touching it, but just like, and it was really unpleasant. Like, you can imagine that sensation of someone like inhaling over your ear. And I was like, oh, please stop.

01:35:37 Speaker_06
She's like, no, I need to get this. There's something there. and she does it, I don't know, for a few minutes and then eventually kind of collapses in a heap on the floor crying and freezing cold, going, oh my god, that was bad.

01:35:51 Speaker_06
I don't know what that was. That was really, really bad. Again, I was not fully sober, so this is a slightly retelling, but I just remember being so shocked. I just didn't expect anything to actually happen.

01:36:04 Speaker_06
I didn't really feel anything other than this, like, unpleasant sensation of her sucking. But I was so shocked at the way she was now reacting. Because she was shocked. She did not seem to expect whatever had just happened to her.

01:36:14 Speaker_06
And she said afterwards, you know, she came around after a little while and she was like, I don't know what it was. It was like bad energy. I don't know. It's gone. I'm very pleased to say it's fully gone and it's gone away. And I was like,

01:36:26 Speaker_06
well, okay, what does that mean for my symptoms? Am I cured?" She's like, yeah, yeah, you'll probably have symptoms for a couple more weeks and then you'll be fine. And that's exactly what happened. And I haven't had any problems since.

01:36:36 Speaker_06
It kind of just like, it just blew my world open because aside of that premonition thing, which I'd kind of forgotten about, I have not ever subscribed to anything like that. I'm a physicist.

01:36:50 Speaker_06
In fact, I kind of built a career of being a materialist, rationalist physicist. and I don't have any time for any of that stuff. It's all nonsense. It's all confirmation bias. No one's ever actually tested it empirically or proven it.

01:37:04 Speaker_06
Show me the study and I'll believe it. But here I am having that experience with two what feel like pretty incontrovertible data points that something that I cannot explain happened and fortunately was incredibly beneficial to me. Such a blessing.

01:37:23 Speaker_06
So yeah.

01:37:25 Speaker_02
So these experiences are particularly interesting to me as direct first-hand experiences.

01:37:34 Speaker_02
course secondhand now that I'm listening, but are particularly interesting to me when I'm speaking with someone who has demonstrated a very well-developed ability to use system two thinking and rationality and reasoning and mathematics and so on.

01:37:57 Speaker_02
in not just the world, but in competitive arenas, right? So you have a calibrated and also tested ability to use those faculties that you've developed. And I'm glad you're mentioning these things just because weird shit happens.

01:38:16 Speaker_02
And the idea that we have it all figured out is ludicrous. Even though humans at any point in history, whether you go back to the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, I'm sure,

01:38:26 Speaker_02
you know, 6,000 years ago, or whatever it was with the Egyptians, I'm sure they thought they had most things figured out.

01:38:32 Speaker_02
And it's just so clear when you begin to really poke and prod, and as you gain more years and have more experiences, especially if you start pushing into some strange corners, that there's a lot we simply don't understand.

01:38:47 Speaker_02
And even if we were to say not chalk those up to false memories, but let's just say we chalked it up to placebo effect, Nonetheless, even if it were just placebo effect.

01:38:59 Speaker_06
Incredible.

01:39:00 Speaker_02
That doesn't diminish the... absurd inexplicability of it with the current mechanisms that we understand. And that's super exciting to me. It's super exciting to me.

01:39:16 Speaker_02
And it doesn't mean that you nor I would advocate that people just accept everything at face value. Of course not. There's horseshit everywhere. I mean, we're sitting in Austin, like the world capital of spirituality. There's so much nonsense.

01:39:30 Speaker_02
and so many charlatans, but I do pay attention to people like you who have demonstrated in other areas that they have the ability to think rationally and have some grasp of, a very good grasp of science and so on, right?

01:39:49 Speaker_02
That's kind of one of the first litmus tests for me. If someone's sharing something with me, I'm like, all right. Can they fight logically out of a paper bag? Have they demonstrated any ability to use structured reasoning in other places?

01:40:05 Speaker_06
Are they able to cross-examine their own beliefs?

01:40:07 Speaker_02
Right, exactly. And are they skeptical in other areas, or is it just like, okay, they accept anything as long as it's alternative, but they reject Western science for any number of reasons that don't make sense to me.

01:40:24 Speaker_02
If you've ever had antibiotics, yeah, Western science may have saved your life, and there are many other examples. I certainly wouldn't be here for more for Western medicine, let's just say, not science.

01:40:35 Speaker_02
And I struggle with where to even take this, because there's so many directions it could go that are pretty strange.

01:40:43 Speaker_02
And I don't want to co-opt physics, so please give me a slap here if this is just an amateur butchering the good name of physics, but I've had a number of cognitive scientists on the podcast, like Donald Hoffman.

01:40:58 Speaker_02
I've had physicists on the podcast, although some would consider Michio Kaku more of a science communicator, but still has some fundamentals. I've had private conversations, certainly, with a number of physicists.

01:41:10 Speaker_02
And I lack the foundation of mathematics necessary to fully appreciate it, but when you even start to look at the conversations that were being had between Einstein and Bohr way back in the day relative to quantum mechanics,

01:41:26 Speaker_02
putting aside even the experimental design and evidence for quantum entanglement that have been done, I think in the Canary Islands and in other places, stuff is really strange. Just even space-time itself as an objective reality.

01:41:44 Speaker_02
I mean, there are pieces people can find online by qualified scientists on the death of spacetime, right?

01:41:51 Speaker_02
And thinking about that as almost a UI that we have evolved to utilize, but not as the one and only user interface to whatever we might be contending with.

01:42:04 Speaker_06
And like Donald Hoffman even thinks that, well, not just Donald Hoffman, he thinks that consciousness essentially gives rise to space. And while a lot of Theoretical physicists pooh-pooh his ideas, and I think by and large they are correct too.

01:42:22 Speaker_06
Even they would agree that it seems like space itself is an emergent property. It's not a fundamental thing. We're not objects rattling around in a big empty box.

01:42:31 Speaker_06
it is a thing that emerges from basically interactions of mathematical functions, whether it's on a substrate or whether it… I don't know if it even needs a substrate. I'm too rusty on that stuff.

01:42:44 Speaker_06
But it's super weird if you dig into the fundamental structure of this reality.

01:42:49 Speaker_02
This is not a Wiccan witchcraft shop with tarot cards in the display case. Not to knock that, right? But we're talking about some of the most esteemed scientists in a hard science with peer-reviewed publications and so on.

01:43:07 Speaker_02
If you just look at that stuff closely enough, shit's really weird.

01:43:11 Speaker_06
Yeah. There's a paper I was recently reading that's digging into the that it seems like space itself is essentially coming out of observers interacting with each other.

01:43:25 Speaker_06
Consciousness is interacting with each other, but it's really, from what I can tell, really granular, legit physics. I mean, it's a math paper, basically. It's beyond my pay grade, so I don't know. I want to send it to Sean Carroll.

01:43:39 Speaker_06
I don't know if you've ever had him on.

01:43:40 Speaker_02
Sean Carroll, I haven't had on, but my brother introduced me to his podcast, Mindscape. Is it Mindscape? Excellent podcast. So good. So if Sean Carroll is out there listening, or if anyone knows him, let him know. He may not want to hear this.

01:43:54 Speaker_02
I don't know what his opinion will be of me, but big fan of his podcast. He's a damn fine thinker and a damn fine communicator.

01:44:01 Speaker_06
It really is, yeah.

01:44:02 Speaker_02
And he had an excellent episode on sort of an archaeological exploration of Stonehenge and other artifacts as external mnemonic devices. Super cool. So Liv, Olivia, question for you.

01:44:23 Speaker_02
How do you, as someone who is a trained rationalist, materialist, although you may not identify as solely those things, I don't want to imply that, how do you integrate some of these experiences into your life, your framework, your worldview?

01:44:41 Speaker_02
What do you do with that?

01:44:44 Speaker_06
It's tricky. I think with all these things, it's walking this fine line between gullibility, open-mindedness, whatever you want to call it, and scepticism and cynicism, and

01:44:58 Speaker_06
I think where my poker training comes in handy is that poker trains you to think in probabilities. You're never certain about anything. You could have aces or you could be bluffing me with 6-4 suited that missed the card it needed.

01:45:14 Speaker_06
So you become very comfortable in terms of holding concurrent belief states in your mind with different weighted probabilities of those things being true.

01:45:22 Speaker_06
So with these two weird unexplainable experiences that I had, whether it was the ear thing was just pure placebo, which would still be crazy because it would mean that basically I have the ability to heal my mind by thinking I was going through some kind of thing being sucked out my ear, fine.

01:45:39 Speaker_02
And potentially heal your inner ear.

01:45:41 Speaker_06
Yeah, I was literally told I had a degenerative thing and I was going to go deaf and no one's been cured of it. And this has miraculously gone away. So whatever the hell happened, the point is, I didn't go and change my life.

01:45:51 Speaker_06
I didn't suddenly go and be like, that's it, I'm going to go and practice energy healing and become a witch and so on. I continued still like I still am an adherent to the scientific method.

01:46:01 Speaker_06
It's just that I've now broadened my… As you mentioned, it's almost like people believe in scientism as opposed to being scientists. A true scientist is that you are maximally curious.

01:46:11 Speaker_06
You do your best to devise experiments in order to get reliable, robust results that you can use to predict the world. and you try and minimise all the biases and things, it could mess up your experiment and give you a faulty result.

01:46:24 Speaker_06
There's no reason why I can't incorporate these two data points. I mean, I haven't gone out and done any science. I really should, I guess, go and do some tests and see if I can try and recreate that experience.

01:46:37 Speaker_06
But it's very difficult, because set and setting were very important in what happened there, I would assume. Anyway, I don't know that.

01:46:44 Speaker_02
Well, when they make the Netflix series about it and they recreate the entire environment, then you can sit down and try to recreate it.

01:46:49 Speaker_06
Yeah. So what I guess I've done is I have up-weighted, you know, whereas before I would have given the probability that energy healing is a real thing.

01:46:57 Speaker_06
I would have given it like a, probably if you'd asked my old, like skeptical self, I would have literally said it's zero, but you know, I wasn't such a bad Bayesian that I would give it actual zero. Maybe like one in a million.

01:47:08 Speaker_02
Bad Bayesian. That's good.

01:47:12 Speaker_06
We don't have time to unpack that. I would have given it a one in a million. And now I have updated it, you know, with this evidence to how many orders of magnitude do I want to go?

01:47:25 Speaker_06
I mean, I will give it, I at least give it a one in 100, but I think it's more likely that there is a, an explanation through what we know conventionally

01:47:36 Speaker_06
that is still more probable than that it is something completely, like some completely novel thing that is untapped.

01:47:41 Speaker_06
But that said, I've actually had a few other little ones I won't go into, but other little data points of just weird energy things that have happened in certain scenarios. It's helped me. But it's still important to keep the skeptical hat on.

01:47:55 Speaker_06
Extraordinary beliefs require extraordinary evidence. In order for me to give up everything that I know about our current understanding of the world, I would need significantly more data points. I think that's just not the practical way to go forward.

01:48:09 Speaker_02
Yeah, I would also add to that, that if folks want to be proper skeptics, you owe it to yourself and to the people you interact with to be an informed skeptic.

01:48:18 Speaker_02
So if you are going to invoke the name of science and not invoke it like the name of Odin and some like, you know, God works in mysterious ways kind of way, you need to actually, my opinion,

01:48:35 Speaker_02
have the ability to read a study and understand a study and study design. It's not good enough to get the journalistic interpretation from the Wall Street Journal or film the blank online publication. That's not good enough.

01:48:49 Speaker_02
It's also not good enough for you to just get the gist of a few sentences in an abstract. And

01:48:55 Speaker_06
Confidence intervals.

01:48:56 Speaker_02
Right. So confidence intervals, understanding, powering, because you'll also find folks who, and I always, I've been saying scientism, but I guess it's scientism, a sort of like capital S. In either case, it has a capital S and it's not good.

01:49:09 Speaker_02
So if you come to that, one of the telltale characteristics that I've come across is they'll ask if something was a controlled study or a placebo controlled, a randomized study, a randomized control, you know, RCT, and they'll say, well, how many

01:49:23 Speaker_02
How many subjects were there? Or what was the end if they get fancy? And I might say 20, 25, and they're like, oh yeah, small study. And I'm like, it's not that simplistic. There are quite a few variables you have to take into account.

01:49:39 Speaker_02
So recommendations for folks who are interested, number one,

01:49:43 Speaker_02
Studying the Studies by Peter Atiyah, excellent series of blog posts that take you into the fundamentals of understanding how to dissect and understand a study, which includes meta-analyses and gets into the risks of taking meta-analyses as gospel also, because garbage in, garbage out, and there's a lot to it.

01:50:07 Speaker_02
Another recommendation, actually a podcast that I did six years ago, I realized when I pulled this up. This is podcast number 194, The Magic and Power of Placebo.

01:50:17 Speaker_02
This is with Eric Vance, who wrote a book called Suggestible You, subtitled The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal. And he's written very widely on placebos, an excellent book.

01:50:31 Speaker_02
Many of his feature pieces are exceptional. There's a great piece in Wired magazine probably 10 years ago on the evolution of the placebo effect and how it has changed depending on the culture. and other influences.

01:50:45 Speaker_02
So in certain places, say, a placebo pill and a blue capsule or a red capsule perform better than other colors.

01:50:51 Speaker_05
It's really... You need to do a... Don't do a blue or red one in this day and age.

01:50:55 Speaker_02
That's true. That's true. Yeah, we could pick other colors. But the context that surrounds that is really, really interesting. And then the last thing I would recommend people check out is

01:51:05 Speaker_02
cognitive biases and looking at both frameworks intended to avoid them and just getting a better understanding. So you can go to Wikipedia and just look up cognitive biases and get a pretty basic list.

01:51:14 Speaker_02
You can look at something like poor Charlie's almanac with Charlie Munger, although it's a bit dense and it's a little user unfriendly in a lot of respects. But what were you gonna say?

01:51:26 Speaker_06
I think I would recommend is some of Julia Galef's work on the Scout Mindset and Motivated Reasoning. What was the first one? The Scout Mindset.

01:51:36 Speaker_02
Scout Mindset. Yeah.

01:51:36 Speaker_06
I mean, she did a TED talk on it, but she's just written a book on it as well. And I think she actually goes in, if I remember rightly- Her last name is G-A-L-E-F. Yes.

01:51:47 Speaker_06
When I first learned about rationality, I read everything on Less Wrong, if people know that, which is an incredible resource for it.

01:51:53 Speaker_06
It really breaks down how you get your brain, which is like the map, to match the actual territory, which is the universe, as accurately as possible.

01:52:04 Speaker_06
But where I think it's maybe lacking a little bit now, because I've had some of these weirder experiences, which actually where I wasn't, in the classical sense, rational.

01:52:15 Speaker_06
I clearly went off the beaten path into some weird land, but it was actually very beneficial to me. Even if it was some completely useful fiction, it was still useful. This idea of useful fictions, I think, needs to be explored further.

01:52:29 Speaker_02
Yeah, I'd also add that much like poker, science, I don't think a lot of folks realize, is largely a game of probabilities. You don't prove something 100% most of the time. It's like, well- Literally never, actually. Yeah, exactly.

01:52:44 Speaker_02
I mean, you can have overwhelmingly compelling data, even with, say, an observational study, say, with the sort of quintessential example would be a cigarette smoking causing lung cancer, right?

01:52:57 Speaker_02
But most of the time it's like, this suggests with this degree of certainty that this is the case. But when you start to look at the replication crisis, which is not just in social sciences, it's all over the place.

01:53:12 Speaker_02
And especially if you start to actually roll up your sleeves and get involved in science, whether that's as a subject. I've been a subject in studies at all sorts of places. I started doing it as an undergrad.

01:53:24 Speaker_02
I was a subject in one of Daniel Kahneman's studies. And it was not very intellectually engaging. It was like spacebar every time I like a you know, green square popped up or something, but I needed the $7 an hour or whatever it was.

01:53:37 Speaker_02
And I've been a subject at Stanford with heat exhaustion experiments. That was also not terribly fun.

01:53:43 Speaker_02
Marching to exhaustion with like a esophageal probe and an anal probe kind of meeting in the middle in fatigues with weights on a treadmill and a sauna to like complete mental collapse. Yeah, so why do I do these things?

01:53:55 Speaker_02
Because I'm interested in seeing the process. And even some of the best science you could point to in the most prestigious journals, when you actually get in there, it's a lot messier than people think.

01:54:07 Speaker_02
But people want to have confidence in something, then religion has become so out of fashion that they look to the high priests of science and they're like, at least I have the confidence in this being true.

01:54:18 Speaker_06
So one of my next videos I want to make on this, which is about basically these signalling prestige bad incentives that get society stuck in these traps, essentially.

01:54:32 Speaker_06
So we're stuck in one of those with the current status quo of the way science is done. And this is not at all to knock any scientists. They're doing their absolute best. But the way the system has been designed, we give all the reward to the people who

01:54:46 Speaker_06
first make the new fancy discovery, and don't give any credit to the people who then actually replicate it and verify it.

01:54:52 Speaker_06
There's this incredible incentive to be always looking for some new novel thing in order to get your thing published in Nature and get those research dollars for the next time.

01:55:03 Speaker_06
But it doesn't actually really advance human knowledge, because so many of these things don't replicate. It's we're sort of stuck in the spiral of just like everyone's trying to please do whatever they can to get in the journal.

01:55:15 Speaker_06
And it's there's a name for it. So there's this really incredible short online book called Inadequate Equilibria by the guy who wrote most of the stuff on Less Wrong, Eliezer Yudkowsky.

01:55:25 Speaker_02
And I recommend... Inadequate Equilibria.

01:55:28 Speaker_06
Yes.

01:55:28 Speaker_02
It's a heavy name.

01:55:30 Speaker_06
Oh man, I know it sounds it's so good. It has one of the best things. It has a discussion a fictitious discussion with an alien from a perfect society, like a basic person who thinks everything's explained.

01:55:41 Speaker_06
You know, everything that's wrong in our society is because of, like, there's bad people being greedy. And then with a cynical, smart economist.

01:55:48 Speaker_06
And they have this three-way discussion talking about, like, the reason why the US healthcare system is so expensive. And it sort of goes into this meandering thing about— That's a cool premise. It's so good.

01:55:56 Speaker_06
Like, you must include this in the show notes.

01:55:59 Speaker_02
How long would you say it is?

01:56:00 Speaker_06
I mean, ideally, they could just read chapter three, honestly. I don't know, it's like a 45-minute read. Yeah, it's like a book chapter, and you can kind of read it standalone.

01:56:09 Speaker_02
We'll put it in the show notes.

01:56:10 Speaker_06
But basically, it's talking about these traps that we can get into, where it gets people now speaking game theory. it gets society stuck in like shitty Nash Equilibria.

01:56:21 Speaker_06
So a Nash Equilibrium is when two people or multiple people are playing in a strategy where it would be bad for anyone to deviate from that strategy. It's like everyone's stuck doing that. But not all Nash Equilibria are actually created equal.

01:56:33 Speaker_06
There are some where if everyone was doing X instead of Y, everyone would be happier. They'd also be like, you know, now stuck in a new thing.

01:56:42 Speaker_06
I just made a video called The Beauty Wars about this fictitious thing called Moloch, which I call the demon of negative-sum games, basically. It's like the god of negative-sum games.

01:56:54 Speaker_06
It's a force of bad, usually economic incentives that make people sacrifice things that they want in order to optimise for a short-term goal. The example I talk about is these beauty filters on Instagram. I don't know if you've spent any time.

01:57:09 Speaker_02
They are horrifying. I mean, in how dramatic they are. I'd never seen these things before until my girlfriend showed them to me and I was dumbfounded. They're mad.

01:57:19 Speaker_06
They're horrifying not only in how impressively good they are at doing stuff, but also how now the really insidious ones are the subtle ones. because there are some where you would never, you'd go online and you would not be able to tell.

01:57:31 Speaker_06
If you don't know the person, or even if you know the person, you wouldn't necessarily be able to tell. You just think it's a good picture of them. They're so subtle, but they're so effective.

01:57:39 Speaker_06
It seems like there is clearly just some kind of optimal face structure that, you know, are eyes fine pleasing. And it just tweaks people.

01:57:45 Speaker_06
It makes the eyes a little bit wider apart, or a little bit bigger, or the lips, you know, just changes the proportions just right that it sets the dopamine spike off in your brain.

01:57:55 Speaker_02
And it's going to make online dating really hard.

01:57:58 Speaker_06
Oh, man.

01:57:58 Speaker_02
Well, so as a girl on it, not that I'm on the field, I'm not on the playing field. But but right. If I were, that sounds like a headache.

01:58:04 Speaker_06
Well, and but also for people who use them like so I'm a girl on Instagram. You know, I for a while certainly like made a lot of my career off the way I looked. there's such an incentive pressure.

01:58:15 Speaker_06
If I want to keep playing the game of trying to grow my Instagram, it's the arms race. Exactly. That's what Moloch is. Moloch is the god of arms races.

01:58:24 Speaker_06
It's these bad incentives where the cheap thing for me to do is just to use one of these AI filters on all my pictures. I know I'm going to look good, and I'm going to get a ton of likes, and it'll grow my thing. But

01:58:34 Speaker_06
it will make me miserable in the process. And if you poll, probably most, particularly women on Instagram, they are not having a good time with these things either on themselves.

01:58:44 Speaker_06
Because if you then compare your face side to side, you're just like, man, it just makes you feel ugly. And so we're in this weird situation where no one wants to do stuff that makes them hate their face, but they're doing it anyway.

01:58:57 Speaker_06
It's like a lower Nash equilibrium. You know, we could all be in a higher Nash equilibrium where we're not doing it, but instead we're all stuck down there because of these bad game theoretic incentives.

01:59:05 Speaker_06
So this is my current obsession, this thing called Moloch. And I think about it all the time.

01:59:09 Speaker_02
M-O-L-O-C-H for people wondering, and we'll link to that in the show notes. So just to underscore this for folks, because I do suggest that everybody check out your YouTube channel, what's the best way for them to find your channel?

01:59:21 Speaker_06
Probably the best thing is if they search for my name and then The Beauty Wars, that'll link to the video I just talked about. And then you can find my channel from there.

01:59:31 Speaker_02
And just for the spelling, everybody, it's live, L-I-V, last name, B-O-E-R-E-E, which means, I learned just beforehand,

01:59:42 Speaker_06
Drunk farmer. So they say. And I did grow up on a farm.

01:59:47 Speaker_02
And I did drink a lot. So good. So good. Yeah, Ferris, you know, the best I can tell.

01:59:55 Speaker_05
You're a big wheel.

01:59:57 Speaker_02
It could be that. It also refers to ferrous, like ferrous oxide, F-E-R-R-O-U-S, because apparently some of my progenitors were silversmiths. I don't know how it all fits together. Seems like a very dubious story.

02:00:15 Speaker_02
I'm not sure, but I want some story to go along with the last name. but I don't have drunken farmer. That's an amazing one. Liv, we should do a round two sometime. We're practically neighbors. We have so much we could talk about.

02:00:28 Speaker_02
We've got a million other things, even in the notes in front of me that we could cover and should cover. I'm thinking about this training and... Are you going to do it? We'll see. Requires more mezcal to make that decision.

02:00:41 Speaker_06
I think we could, we could condense it down and we don't have to do the full eight weeks. I think commit to even three weeks. Honestly, I think you would, J. Cal will still be better than you at that stage. I have to say that. No, he won't be.

02:00:56 Speaker_02
All right, three weeks, three weeks. I'm going to sleep on that. I do my best thinking when I'm asleep. Let me sleep on that. Is there anything else that you would like to say? Any closing comments? Places you'd like to point people?

02:01:10 Speaker_02
Anything at all you'd like to say before we wind this down?

02:01:13 Speaker_06
No, I mean, I guess do check out my YouTube. I'd love people to go and I'm now I've moved to Austin and I'm like building a studio and everything. I'm going to be ramping up production again.

02:01:24 Speaker_06
So I would love people to go and just sub to my channel so that they catch my stuff because of, you know, playing the rat race, the attention wars.

02:01:32 Speaker_06
That's the name of the next video is the attention wars, which is about why Twitter and everything is making us so angry and hate each other. Yeah, that's a big one.

02:01:39 Speaker_02
Talk about a nasty game.

02:01:41 Speaker_06
And Moloch. Moloch's in that.

02:01:43 Speaker_02
Moloch. Moloch's all over that.

02:01:44 Speaker_06
Fucking Moloch.

02:01:47 Speaker_02
So Liv, we're going to link to everything in the show notes. People can find you at livbury.com also, which I would imagine has links to many things.

02:01:57 Speaker_02
And we'll put links to everything we've discussed, all the resources, Inadequate Equilibria, and all other good things in the show notes at tim.blogslashpodcast. So nice to see you. Thanks for taking the time.

02:02:12 Speaker_05
This was awesome.

02:02:13 Speaker_02
Thank you. Super fun. Super fun. And for everybody listening, as per usual, thanks for tuning in. And until next time, just be a little kinder to yourselves and to others than you think is necessary and take care. Hey guys, this is Tim again.

02:02:30 Speaker_02
Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?

02:02:40 Speaker_02
Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.

02:02:49 Speaker_02
It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered. or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things.

02:02:59 Speaker_02
It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.

02:03:11 Speaker_02
And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So, if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.

02:03:26 Speaker_02
If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Element, spelled L-M-N-T.

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Be sure to also try the new Element Sparkling, a bold 16 ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water. Again, check it all out. DrinkElement.com slash Tim. DrinkLMNT.com slash Tim.

02:06:06 Speaker_02
This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I view AG1 as comprehensive nutritional insurance, and that is nothing new.

02:06:17 Speaker_02
I actually recommended AG1 in my 2010 bestseller more than a decade ago, The 4-Hour Body, and I did not get paid to do so.

02:06:26 Speaker_02
I simply loved the product and felt like it was the ultimate nutritionally dense supplement that you could use conveniently while on the run, which is, for me, a lot of the time. I have been using it a very, very long time indeed.

02:06:40 Speaker_02
And I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road.

02:06:54 Speaker_02
So what is AG1? What is this stuff? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food source nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system.

02:07:06 Speaker_02
Since 2010, they have improved the formula 52 times in pursuit of making the best foundational nutrition supplement possible using rigorous standards and high-quality ingredients. How many ingredients?

02:07:20 Speaker_02
And you'd be hard-pressed to find a more nutrient-dense formula on the market.

02:07:24 Speaker_02
It has a multivitamin, multimineral superfood complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health, an antioxidant, immune support formula, digestive enzymes, and adaptogens to help manage stress. Now, I do my best, always, to eat nutrient-dense meals.

02:07:39 Speaker_02
That is the basic, basic, basic, basic requirement. That is why things are called supplements. Of course, that's what I focus on, but it is not always possible. It is not always easy. So part of my routine is using AG1 daily.

02:07:54 Speaker_02
If I'm on the road, on the run, it just makes it easy to get a lot of nutrients at once and to sleep easy knowing that I am checking a lot of important boxes. So each morning, AG1. That's just like brushing my teeth, part of the routine.

02:08:08 Speaker_02
It's also NSF-certified for sports, so professional athletes trust it to be safe. And each pouch of AG-1 contains exactly what is on the label, does not contain harmful levels of microbes or heavy metals, and is free of 280 banned substances.

02:08:23 Speaker_02
It's the ultimate nutritional supplement in one easy scoop. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase.

02:08:36 Speaker_02
So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one. Drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out.