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skelet hello boys and girls ladies and germs this is Tim Ferris welcome to another episode of the Tim ferah show where it is my job to sit down with worldclass 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 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 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 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 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 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 combo and now without further Ado please enjoy and thank you for
listening first up retired United States Army General Stanley mccristal former commander of joint Special Operations Command from 2003 to 2008 and bestselling author of risk a user's guide you can learn more about General
mccristal and his work at mccristal group.com why one meal a day 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 and I started running distance which I enjoyed but I also o found that my personality was such that I'm not real good at eating three or four small disciplined meals I'm better to defer gratification and then eat one meal and
for me that's dinner and so what I do is I sort of push myself hard all day try to get everything done and then sort of reward myself with dinner at night what time do you usually eat dinner whenever I'm finished work and it would be like 8
or 8:30 there's a challenge when you work really long hours because suddenly you start to eat very late and then you go directly to bed that you feel like you're sleeping with a football in your stomach and do you drink coffee earlier
in the day I'm just thinking with the workout in that many hours a lot of people would fade how do you prevent yourself from fading yeah I have a tendency I'll drink coffee I'll drink other beverages too water and and different things and I do find that
there are certain days your body just says eat and eat right now and I used to keep a bin of those hard pretzels in my office in Afghanistan and I'd grab a handful of those 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 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 when I was younger and I got serious about working out I was a second lieutenant and I as I mentioned I started getting fat and I had a first sergeant of my parachute
infantry company that likeed to run 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 I had a one period when I was a captain when 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 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 all alternate 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 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 I will start at my home if we're at home and I go down to my basement I do four sets of push-ups as many as I can do for four
sets and I alternate that with with a series of ABS exercises 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 3 minutes of a plank and then I'll do some yoga that I learned for about two or three minutes then I'll do
another set of push-ups then I'll go to my next ABS thing which is a uh crunch like crossover then I'll do a two and a half minute Plank and then I'll do more yoga slightly different and I'll do another set of push-ups and then I'll do
my third set which is crossover situps 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 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 and then I'll come back and I've only do four sets of push-ups so the last time I don't do push-ups I then do one more set of the crunch like and I'll flip over do
my last plank which is one minute and then do some final yoga and that'll take me about 45 to 50 minutes then I'll leave my house and go to the gym because my gym opens at 5:30 it's three blocks from my house I assume we mean am yeah so I can do all this from 4:30 I get if
I get up at 4:00 I can do all that from 4:30 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 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 what not I'll do a few other things in that and I can do all that in 30 35 minutes so by 6:15 620 I can be done at the gym head back home get cleaned up and then be starting
work 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 there's a certain self-image you
know 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 and particularly over life now whenever I'm injured and I even even a slight
period it bothers me a lot so I think that's part of it second is the military there's an expectation if you are not a physical leader in the kind of organizations that and I were in 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 going to go down 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-commission officers said sir what are you going to do at Harvard I said I'm going to study he says you're going to work out and I said yeah presumably I will and he goes you know you come back here with a p HD
but you're out of shape we're going to have a word for you and it ain't going to be doctor and I just thought that was so good it also puts a discipline in the day I find that if the day is terrible or whatever but I worked out at the end of the day I 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 I made a couple calls I knew we had a big problem and I went put my clothes on and I ran for hour clear my head stress myself didn't make it go
away but that was something that I do in those situations for me I try to 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 right Stan what book or books have you gifted the most to other people I have probably given the most copies of a book written in 1968 by Anton ad Myer called once an eagle 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 and in fact into the post-war years on the one level it's a little simplistic there's one who is wealthy and ambitious and and somewhat unscrupulous and the other who is a
Nebraska farm boy who wins the Medal of Honor and Thrifty Brave clean reverent Etc 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 the challenges of war and their personal side as well and I gave that to a tremendous number of young officers and ncos with whom I serve 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 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 I'd love for you to just talk
about your experience with major BR I think it was your first meeting if you could talk about that a bit I think it's uh seems to be a key turning point for you yeah it 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 I didn't do well academically because I didn't know how a 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 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 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 so I I went that summer and I went off to training and whatnot they send me around the Army to do different things and I came back that fall and we had changed tactical officers 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 and is a tactical officer like a residential adviser in college or something along those a little like that you have a commissioned officer a captain or a
major for each company which has about 120 cadetes in it and they don't live in the company they're not there every day but they are responsible for the company so they have an office 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 and so after the first couple years I came back and I expected to have this new Tactical officer my first in briefing and
counselling he brings each person in together I expected him to look at my record and then give me the riot act for you know my problems and shortcomings and whatnot and I sat down with him and he had been he's a special forces officer he sat down and he goes well I'm
looking at your record here 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 mistal he said no no I got it he goes uh I'm looking at
you you know you've gone outside the boundaries a couple times he said but your peer ratings are really good my peers were or reflecting confidence and whatnot he says I think you're going to do great and it was amazing 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 so after my first two years of my mispent youth I'd say I suddenly was
dating someone seriously so I had this T 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 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 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 work 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 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 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' done so it changed my opinion for lots of
reasons this being one of them my great point average skyrocketed my last two years and I finished on the dean list and all which was for me nose bed territory but it was a lot because of the way people around me just started shaping my expectations 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 if you had and this may be difficult question but if you had say 100 athletes civilian
athletes and I say athletes just to take the physical component largely out of it this question came from reading about the nine-week ranger course at Fort Benning I guess so if you had 100 athletes and had eight weeks to train 20 of them for combat how would you select
them and how would you train them 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 lost a boatload of weight and he comes out and he's a specialist in
second ranger battalion so 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 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 if they can't do those obviously you've got to teach them the the things that are absolutely required but if you assume that most people come out of basic training initial training with those technical
skills I'd spend times on things that do two things the first would be to push themselves after World War II when they talked to organizations that had then been through combat they said what of your training was of value and what was of less value
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
there was the stress there was the sense of danger although they were set up to inherently be safe that required it to that I would add dealing with uncertainty I would try to put people in cases where 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 then how do you simulate oh actually the brings up 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 roleplay that uncertainty are there good ways to do that there were a number of ways to do that to make tough decisions and whatnot I 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 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 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 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 once they got into that firefight I in fact reinforce that enemy with about a hundred and so suddenly what happen is they get in a firefight that they can't extract from and very quickly they have wounded of their own
and so now they're in this situation and I'm playing higher headquarters I'm actually on the ground watching but I through the uh my controllers I'm playing higher headquarters and I say all right your mission is to get the 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 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 of course say nope nope nope won't happen you're going to have to make the decision 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 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 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 I'm really loving this example what are you hoping them to exhibit or what are
you looking for in that a scenario like that 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 falling comrade so I'm not leaving a falling com we're
staying here period and then you say wait a minute the president of the United States sent you to rescue those American citizens 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 so what's more important your personal promise or the promise to the nation and your mission and whatnot and it was this
quandry 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 I'm not sure that wasn't the right answer and I
couldn't tell them afterward that it was but none of them left them but they agonized over it 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
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 but if we're looking sort of in the rearview mirror
what military leaders come to mind who are most underrated in your opinion that's a great question because there are people who did things for which they get huge credit then there are other people who changed the direction of organizations and of course I think
ulyses S Grant is often underrated 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 I think he took a 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 the problem was as long as you had an existing Army and that that was going to take a very
focused effort that was going to be high cost and you weren't going to lower the cost by doing it more slowly it was cumulatively had to get it done 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 going to embarrassed to say I can't remember his name there was a naval Admiral between the first and second world war who was essentially championed the development of aircraft carriers there were people
who championed the development of air power and that was pretty obvious but building aircraft carriers during that period when battleships were still keying 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 for those people listening I'm sure somebody listening or reading on the blog will 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 Stan do you listen to Audi books when you out 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 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 on the page and so I realized I was going to have to 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 and initially it was eclectic because audio books weren't
that prevalent and so my wife would go to the library she'd go everywhere she could get all these audio books I'd download them onto my iPod on my computer and then put them on my iPod and so it was whatever was available later as more things became available I
I had a wider choice but I found that eclectic part really good I learned to run with audiobooks 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 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 and I listen to that to 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 so I just finished a book on the South African gold and diamond trade Cecil roads and and whatnot up through the bore War it was fascinating and it probably took me you know six eight weeks of Shaving time to do that but then on these other books
I found that I go through books very very quickly if you're working out hour hour and a half a day you actually go through books much faster than I would if I just had reading reading time 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 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 I tend to like sweeping history stories of an era that's you know 20 30 40 years or 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 and I will also do binge reading meaning I went through a period where I read about whaling and I read like five whing books together or I'll
read biographies or something about the founding fathers and I did seven or eight George Washton other founding fathers and because they're all you know mutually overlapping 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 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 we're here in Silicon Valley a lot of people fashion themselves Warriors of one sense or another and they read sunsu of war and they think of their business
as very high stakes But ultimately in the field I mean you guys are dealing with life and death decisions so I'd love to hear in the cases where something goes wrong so you make a decision people go out on a raid there are more fatalities than expected and
you have to operate rationally and effectively the next day what would your internal selft talk sound like and then what would you say to the team to get them ready for the next day 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 worried about Al-Qaeda worried about Afghanistan we went in it was turned out to be remarkably rapid and relatively speaking lowc cost in terms of casualties and whatnot and then
Iraq actually The Invasion turned out to be the same way so the 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 then as we got into the difficult area after fall of 2003 and got into 2004 and five something different happens one we started to realize that this was going to be very hard and every time we lost a comrade
they were not going to be the last and that's a different mindset because then people start to make their person calculation they said how long can I do this before the roulette wheel hits me and is it going to even come out right if we pay all this price are we
going to have a successful outcome and that's a different mindset as well what I found myself was if you stay focused on the mission and everybody understands the cost of that when you have a an outcome where people are killed or
wounded 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 it's very difficult to make those kinds of calls you can find yourself locked up in the 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 twoth thirds back training and getting ready and that was about the
tempo we could maintain for a long long time but we had a period when we needed 2/3 of the force in the fight and mathematically of course because the last thirds back on Alert in the US that's not indefinitely sustainable and just at the time we made the I made the
decision to do that we started taking a bunch of casualties 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 I mean that's the effect TE Lawrence writes about it as ripples in a pool that go out through these small communities tribes and and really our forces were a tribe so suddenly the effect of that can cause
you to be even more impacted by uiss S Grant used to say that he didn't visit hospitals much 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 don't become detached from the loss and you don't go into denial 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 they're responsibly arrived at to the best of my ability and they are judiciously executed to the best of what we can do so this would be potentially what you just said what you would sort of remind yourself of in those moments 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 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 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 maybe their grandfathers had and certainly no one on 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 and so what I told him 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 and that's I think the best catharsis you can do difficult as it is get back on the horse exactly just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to
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to learn more so take a look with Helix better sleep starts now and now Liv beree 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 livb podcast
you can find Liv on Twitter and Instagram _ B Liv welcome to the show it's nice to see you thank you for having me 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 I think it was yellow oh that's what it was for it was for Mike cable it was from Mike 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 but 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 and to get into the Zone coming here on the drive over I listened to Orion the remastered oh great choice n Choice very very uh because my first now we're really getting off track here but that's okay there is no track my
very first album I ever bought was on cassette tape and it was Master puppets and can you guess why I bring up Metallica well well they were my love that boarded on a unhealthy Obsession from the ages of like 16 to 22 so that's probably a I would guess
why you brought up I don't know how you would know that though well you know we do research over here middle insider. net the Iron Maiden of the poker World they called you and there's a short discussion of The Unforgiven and this led you I guess in
some respects into guitar do you still play guitar I don't you don't but you did for a period of time I did yeah I from like 16 or 17 till 24 basically until poker took over 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 I used to I used to be very a shiny new activity would come along and I would if it ticked enough boxes I'll be like I have to become the
best at this I would rarely become the best at it but I would certainly go down the rabbit hole deep enough to become proficient and I was like that I would say until some point in my probably my early 30s some point around the age of 30
where I lost that a little bit and in some ways that's good because it means I can try greater breadth of things but it comes a little bit at the cost of then not ever picking and I'm currently struggling with the fact that I'm being too much of a jack of all trades master
of none like not knowing what I'm am I going to be focusing on YouTube or maybe I should just do speeches or maybe I should actually just start a company and give up on this silly like public facing stuff it can be a bit of a blessing in a
curse I guess not fixating on one particular thing but certainly as a teenager I was I don't know certainly with metal cuz I think you know with teenagers so often you you don't because you haven't formed your identity yet right you will form it typically around
a genre of music sure I was a metal head which is you a metal head oh for sure oh sick right so yeah you get it like and metal is so I mean I say was as if it's past tense if I'm in the gym I'm still a metal head right exactly 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 panta look say fan Elmo like a little bit you Phil anelo after his vul Display of Power era
whatever yeah so I was kind of uncool until the age of 16 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 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 no I wanted a really heavy like panta was like a that was like nice day on the beach you know I'm talking like dumu Bor bam you know some of the the swed Swedish black metal
or Norwegian black metal once you get to the Scandinavian yeah death metal and you've gone really deep yeah exactly um 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 all right let's paint a picture here what was your 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 cuz I'm
trying to Overlay that on what you just said so I first learned to play poker age 21 mhm yeah it was 2005 I just graduated uni didn't really know what I wanted to do thought I was going to carry on in physics but I decided to take a gap here
because when I first started taking physics I was like oh I'm definitely doing this this is so interesting I love it but then the more time got to spend with like PhD students or even people doing their masters they seemed I don't
know they just didn't seem very happy and they weren 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 and I
was also still wanting to be a rock star at the time and I was like H 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 here and I think I signed up
oh I was doing like random like goth modeling sometimes and I as one does in their Gap year right well I 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 I also got paid to be a cage dancer in rock clubs in London yeah well you know I was I was admiring the the boots on the way in this is a this is a shoeless household so thank you for accommodating
this this is not my Least Metal sock ever I'm so embarrassed these are gray 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 I you understand how much paint I'm in
actually the fact that this is these I have so many like most of my socks are black I just just grabbed whatever I needed to goth modeling which I also did during my Gap here totally lying I'm kidding kidding and I wish I wish I could have so goth modeling cage dancing
mhm and then I think I signed up for this like 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 and singers I was rapidly getting pretty damn broke because dancing in a rock Club cage doesn't pay you anything really and you know I had some student debt mounted up up and really didn't want to get a real job for you know my
parents were like you have to what are you doing you've moved to London get a job so I was like okay I'm going to this seems reasonable I've always liked I've wanted to try being on TV I like game shows this seems like a game show I'll apply turns out they wouldn't tell us
what 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 and the sort of loose scientific premise was
they were looking for five different personality types to see which you know is most suited for the game so I got selected for that what was your personality type they called me the professor which I most certainly was not I mean I could see it I could see it I I
was I literally turned up in skin tight tiger print spandex self-made trousers 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 no I mean that was genuinely how I
dressed Style emoting no it was it was my genuine appearance as I said I lived and breathed metal sounds good for TV right and I think that's probably why they selected me honestly like very overconfident to the point of like cocky 21y old brat who was unheard of with 21y
olds yeah I don't know I just 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 and they're like oh we're definitely bringing this is going to be a good one and I didn't disappoint
because I ended up having a complete meltdown on the show so glad this is not on the internet basically on the final I think we played like seven preliminary rounds where we would the five of us would play and then like that would
accumulate points and those points would translate into chips for the final game where we would play for the 100,000 and I was winning you know I was leading going into that and clearly I had a knack for the game and I remember the the hosts and the professionals that
they bought on the show to teach us were like oh you're definitely going to win you know you are the most talented at this so I was so sure I was going to win this thing 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 and then I looked at the board again and noticed there were four diamonds out
there and I didn't have my I had two black cards and audibly went now I'm not I'm no professional but is that what what would call a tell yes that is that is a tell do not do that um and the my opponent who was a really nice guy qule was like well I guess she
doesn't have a diamond and he was like I'm all in and instead of again keeping my my call or anything I just started crying like melted down the producers are high-fiving in the background oh my God yeah they were literally and and and
and they like oh Liv what's the matter tell us more I was like you makeup everywhere I think I I I like run away from the table they try and follow me with the camera 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 and funny enough while I was in the 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 5 pound Reby so you know was the
cheapest tournament they had what is a Reby a rebi means that if you for the first hour or so if you bust out you can just buy back in again so considering it was only5 pound entry you can imagine it's just pandemonium everyone's going
in every single hand and people will easily like spend like1 pound in their entry overall you know 20 rebis good for the house yeah but I turned up with 1010 because I was like well it's a 5 pound tournament why would I ever need more than you know5 P for the entry and5
pound to buy a drink and that'll be my my day so you're like you're like a player in a video game with two lives where everybody else has like 100 lives right yeah and most people were were doing that yes only for the first hour then once after that
period ends then if you Lo bust out you're out this is the first tournament I ever play and I enter this thing somehow get through this Carnage period in the in the in the first hour the zombies I think keep yeah I think I did re bu once with my other5 so I didn't
buy a drink and anyway I ended up winning it ended up playing until 500 in the morning it was like 120 people in it and I came home I remember just having this you know they paid me out in tens and 20s 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 and I remember going home to my boyfriend at the time and waking him up at 5:00 a.m. and just throwing the cash on him like this is this is the
best thing ever this is my game and 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 100 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 what do you think helped you during the show itself to make it to the final table 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 the very early n stages of that tournament yeah the TV show right the TV show and then I have more questions I mean I think the thing that was most helpful early on for me and
poker was I was just so pathologically competitive I just had to win and like prove that I was the best in this thing that translated to just more study time more practice like this like laser focus and then this like Ruth lessness because
the thing about poker is that you actually you do have to be really ruthless in the game in what sense in terms of well 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 no it's just a form of it's a strategy within a game as defined by the rules of the game it's an integral part of it ly right if if you're not willing to do that then you're it's not the game for you and play chess
right and then you have to be just willing to I guess just really laser in and pay deep attention to what is going on because technically at any given moment even if you're not in a hand there's really valuable information being exchanged about the way people you know
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 and certainly in the beginning I was just
because I didn't know anything about the actual statistical sort of the mechanics of the game all I could rely on was the you know the stuff I knew which was looking looking for when people are bluffing 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 why would you not begin to study the tables and the statistics and so on well I did
too you did that as well um and the thing is that the statistics required in poker to actually you know at a high level are you're not going to learn within the first month sure right 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 so I read all the books I could get my hands on you know so I guess my sort of physics training helped to an extent with with being willing to just like
dive in and research on this like on a big amorphous topic and you know not even Clear Directions of where to start that probably gave me a bit of an advantage there and then presumably I have an higher than average IQ from phys dancing exactly
really helps uh and all the drinking and guitar playing and chasing after rock stars yeah but it which I think obviously helps in any kind of strategic game but honestly the thing about poker is 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 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 there's so much luck going on and I didn't realize that early on in the game
in some ways you know like winning that big tournament early on was was not a big tournament that the 5 pound Reby 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 there isn't that much luck it's just who's the best player wins and I think that's partly why it was such a kick in the face when I screwed up up
and didn't win the 100,000 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 of course because there's a blending of
skill and chance yes and money I mean there Stakes buil but 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 cared yeah but there's
just so many different skills that it draws upon so there's the statistical side you know the scientific side there's the the game theory if you really want to dive deep into math and I mean these days you can you know work with simulators you know 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 you know psychology me 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 and then also just like I mean there's a scientific way to read body language but sometimes you just get like a vibe that you can't explain so there's just so many different approaches you can take to it and like today I'm going
to work on my body language reading and today I'm going to work on my pot ODS or my combinatorics and so there's never a dull moment and there's always a new situation as well like even after playing for 10 15 years I'll still see something crazy with like
the cards run out like straight flush against quads that kind of stuff like these incredibly rare scenarios will sometimes happen and or people will do weird things or some strange ruling will happen that like everyone's scratching
their heads like I don't know what the right call is here it's it's there's such depth and complexity to the game okay so I'm going to admit something it's embarrassing I been fascinated and Drawn to poker for a very long time and I've never learned how to play properly
no way it's true wow there are many excuses I may have for this one of them is that friends of mine like a guy named Jason calanis want me to play but it's mostly because he wants to take all my money because he's gonna be far better
than I am and that's a compliment Jason U I'll teach you how to beat J and a lot of these investors are very confident I know some of them certainly particularly the quants who I've observed from afar seem to be pretty competent I had
a little bite of the bug probably five years ago when I did an episode of a TV show bringing back TV where I trained for a week or five days probably to play heads up against a whole cohort of folks including some pros and I was able and I was trained by
I want to give him credit Phil Gordon for that and 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 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 at all which I expected would largely be the case but I just got dismembered I mean well that's heads up is a very different game playing against
eight people 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 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 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 work in the path depending on your experience so my question after all of that word solid 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 were like let's play poker how might you think of approaching that well given that you are I mean you pretty well grounded in your personality and that you like both sort of human
interactive things but you can also nerd out really hard yes I don't think there's really a wrong way to teach you poker like if I was to teach my my mom or something like that my mom is the most sounds strange to say she's the least autistic
person in that she is so able to intu social situations Y and unbelievably emotionally intelligent but phobic of math phobic of she's interested in sort of scientific Concepts but if you actually try and get into the technical weeds she's like she
she cannot and she you know her happy it's like she would be in arms with Molly right now just like she's just a she just feels she's a very feel based person and if I was to teach her the game you know I would take her to the table with group of fun people and you
know we would slowly just like turn the cards over and you know talk through I give her the hand rankings I mean take it very steady in in terms of like this is look how the way that they're acting so they seem quite confident that you
know that 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 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 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 I have no idea because I've always refused to play but he's pretty good okay great so so let's just say you know if luck is on my side having some chance in hell well here's the thing so you have a chance in hell
anyway if you sat down and just play not just going to be Jason it's going to be an entire table 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 be there
always a CH okay but let's you know assume the very Basics you know what betting chips means and how you know whether you what 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 okay
let's say we have you can pick the period of time of training right however long it is and then Jason and I are going to play a thousand hands exactly yeah a thousand hands your chance of beating Jason over a thousand hands probably with like just
knowing the rules is 45% that's that's how crazy like that's a thing maybe it's a bit less than that maybe it's sorry Jason maybe it's let's say 37% maybe 35 he's I'm going to get a phone call after this um but let could we get it so that it so
that you are a favorite against him eight weeks of intensive okay yeah if you sat and studied game like all the charts because that's what it is really these days so poker is not 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 you know if you have Jack n 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 calls 70% of the time or something like that it giv basically there are like answers to what you should do in different scenarios with what frequencies it's all about frequencies and so now that we know this and 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 like basically emulate them in their head when they go and play so it's a very
different type of game it's more like kind of almost studying chess moves I was just going to say it sounds a lot like studying like chest scenarios and it wasn't like that even 10 years ago it was very very different I mean there was some it was more about you you'd sort of
do combination calculations in your head and that kind of thing but that was kind of the limit of it and 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 I was just starting to get itchy
feet naturally but it required more and more time spent to at the top levels at least incremental gains exactly diminishing returns in terms of hourly because also what it means is because it's like these Game Theory Optimal Solutions exist it
means that there's technically this perfect style of play any one person can play and 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 like 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 over the short time you know if we play for an hour whoever gets the best cards will therefore win but over
Infinity uh we will bris break even and so that meant that you would have to be putting more and more time in to win a sort of shrinking pot of money essentially which is why I I don't now recommend to people to go out and try and be professionals in poker but I
still absolutely recommend that people to go and learn the game because it is probably the best way to it's it's the best mini analog for the type of complex decision making that you need to do in life you we're going to come back
practice 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 when I tried it live that particularly maybe an easy map is investing and poker there are just so
many variables that are similar M which is why I think so many investors are drawn to it and also give a plug Allin podcast check it out that's jal's podcast with his buds it is a fantastic fantastic show I do think it is one of the best new podcasts newish podcasts
that I've put into my rotation so don't take all my money Jason eight weeks what is the density of practice look like is that two hours a day is it 10 hours a week what do the what does the distribution look like 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 okay oh yeah all right 40 hours how does that break down if we have uh you said eight weeks right yeah so hypothetically let's say week one what is the schedule and curriculum look
like so in the first week I think we would I mean I would sit in 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 you get really familiar with the betting patterns and
that kind of thing and 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 we get to the idea of like ranges because kind of a strange word but basically we're playing a hand
right now I don't know anything about your cards all I know is that you've got two cards out of the you know thousand and whatever the number is combination of two cards that you can have so right now your range is 100% and St back at
you and then as the hand progresses basically I want to narrow down the perceived range that I think you could have you know Nar gain information so I can narrow that down and put you on a hand while meanwhile giving away as little information about my own possible
range so keeping it as wide open to you so it's about maximizing deceptiveness sure while extracting information out of your opponent 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 again the kind of DN we find a table somewhere yeah we' go to a a local I mean probably invite friends over and we just have some have some games and it it's so much fun anyway
those are the best type of poke games bring in my card mechanic and take all their money 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 and are able to 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 four to1 what does that mean what how many cards are there that I need to hit Etc so these kind of pot OD calculations that kind of stuff
could you just take a second and explain what you mean by pot OD calculations so pot ODS are basically you know like an investing to an extent if things go well what do you win versus how much would you lose so and then how do you bet size
accordingly exactly or like you know let's say you're 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 odd offering you five to one well now
it's actually a profitable thing right because you're getting the pot is offering you more than the odds that you need to to hit your card so man I haven't talked about this stuff in ages it's really interesting seeing my brain's like oh find find the words so
those kind of rudimentary types of math calculations that you need to do and then as you get more conf in that then you would start doing more combination calculations 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 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 the conceivable Bluffs they would have given the sort of story that's been told 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 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 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 and then after that if you know you're seeming to grasp all that then we would
actually start looking at the the solver charts so these are these like simulators there's this one called Pio solver that was at least popular in the day when I was playing how do you spell that P IO Pio Pio solver I think it's still the main one and at least when I
was you know using it that was back in 2016 or so it would take many hours to run a Sim so you know you'd be like I want to know what the optimal play is with Jack n suited on a 1084 rainbow board or something like that and then let it run folks Len I
have no idea what means I love how it sounds though yeah there's so much JG I think I need a rainbow that's actually probably where we would start we would start with glossery because there's so many there's so many terms the vocab is is you know
there's just so much going on there but yeah 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 then now you
can you're sort of equipped with this like 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 you know at worst you'll be breaking even
but you'll still be beating them but then because you know what the perfect play is you can look for ways to exploit their screw Ops because in reality everyone even the pros are making mistakes they aren't playing this perfect GTO style but you can't really
know the way that they're screwing up until you know what the GTO is in the first place so it acts as this like Baseline Benchmark of high quality play so we would sit and we would study these charts and if over that course of eight
weeks I got youed so that you were able to like emulate these charts to I don't know how to quantify it but to a good amount that would be more than sufficient to be Jason you know he's not a full-time Pro he's good 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 I was going to say if his poker is anything like his basketball he will his ability to talk is actually incredible that guy is world class he's very good at getting under your skin if
he wants to get under your skin oh yeah oh yeah he's he's he said many we've had we've been at a few parties together and he has he knows how to ruffle feathers but he's so funny I love him 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 long time maybe similar this is like kicking in the gears starting the old car trying to like turn
the key get it to turn over 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 right and the interest what are the
things that might break me or cause me to walk give up 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 so it would be more I think the
reason why you would walk away is because you're like ah actually this isn't that much fun and I'm not playing for I don't care enough about beating Jason you're not playing for suitable stakes and you're like this is not worth
for people listening I'm just using Jason as a standing CU it's fun but right I care I don't care enough about beating anyone exactly like they just the opportunity cost would be too high that would be the only reason I think cuz I think you would find it fun
otherwise now 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 well absolutely be brutal 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 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 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 like saying things to needle and that's
a big part of the game getting the verbal bamboo shoots under your fingernails um 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 cuz ultimately you can study
all the charts and think you're a GTO machine and like oh I'm I'm fine but then you get down and he looks you in the eyes and it's like well you screwed up that hand Tim like what are you going to do what are you going to do huh you know and just goes for Jason on you like
you'll forget everything the Red Mist um I call it the white Red Mist I've never heard that okay I like it the Red Mist descends like if there's two mental blocks and that's when one might go tilt tilt exactly if I if I'm catching the
ler tilt very good uh for those who don't know tilt is is uh what people do basically when their emotions get the better of them and they start playing badly now is monkey tilt just an exaggerated version of that yes okay yeah cuz now monkey tilt is just like
the you know you've got sort of I love the image one the flavors conures 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 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 those trads but the Red Mist when the Red Mist but you call
it the white what 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 that would probably be my achilles heal right the White Noise 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 okay yeah just Beach balling just be and I've had that a few times like I remember having it in the World Series
day four or something day five and it was a really big pot and I just needed to think and then but then my brain was like well this is a really important decision you know you should really pay attention to this one like are you paying it well I'm not sure you're
paying attention why are you listening to me and so this little voice and then I was like okay pay attention let's count the combos of what they've got and just nothing so in the end I was like I you know my system two are you familiar
with with system one system two no okay oh wait a second system one system two is this like Daniel conman yeah it's a Danny car if you could just give some context his thesis is that we have two modes of thinking well system one is like your intuitive like if I ask you
what's 5 plus 5 you immediately know the answer is 10 so it kind of you got got a shot of a dring so I that you were going to make me do multiplication tables wait wait all right uh so that's your system one it's just the things you immediately
know an answer to or you you know it's like an unconscious process you know if you technically it's system one if you're driving down the street and someone cuts in front of you you your 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 and in your system two is the like conscious thinking so if I was to ask you what 471 plus 88 is it would be 5 uh 60 I even forgot the numbers now nine 471 and 88 471 88 what's that ion
471 yeah 9 five five 559 is that right 559 I have no idea is 5 I can't even remember anyway the whatever that was you can't you can't use your gut feelings for that right you have to think it through you have to do the calculation mentally in
your head so that's your system too and poke is 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 I didn't even answer my own question and I have no excuse so may I may I make a quick aside
MH 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 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 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 map it out map it out and move these beads and so on in their minds but astonishing my partner Eagle can kind of do that yeah it was one of the ways he got me honestly he just you
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 cuz now everyone's going to do it to him but he can usually answer within like a second or two wow that's fast yeah it's hotot rock stars to mental
mathematics yeah so those are I can't where I was going now so where you were going is we were talking about system one system two and that white noise moment yes and that is not a time that you can rely on system 2 is that what
you're were going to say or right exactly cuz system 2 has shut down is offline yes offline it's not do not does not compute there's nothing there hello 44 404 404 yes blue screen to death and it's bad when that happens in F no good at all terrible yes and that
is you know if you're playing 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 even I've had it when I
had a really good hand yeah 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 and again because I just it just it's it's so hard because I think you you're put
into well you know this stuff better like your your sympathetic nervous system is in is in play right uh 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 let's talk about the regulation the self regulation so 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 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 EUR into 1.25 million EUR which is around 1.7 million and if I'm getting roughly I believe that that math right that was at the EP Sano and
it was 500 EUR Buy in or $500 it was a 500 satellite tournament into the main event buy in which was ,000 so everyone was buying in for 5,000 but I won my way in because I couldn't afford the 5,000 yeah I I won my way in thr a feeder smaller tournament so a few just
housekeeping questions about this how long after that first tournament win after the TV show was this this was 200 10 so five years 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 so what type of self regulation did you learn over that period of time and then subsequent to that oh man that that tournament was nuts because you know the TV show is in 2005 I didn't actually turn fully
professional whereby I was living off it until 200 like late 2008 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 so i' been I've been
playing on the circuit now for like a year and a half and I played some bigger buy tournaments but I'd never made like any like really big final tables or anything and this Italy one kind of happened by accident it was uh remember the volcano that went off in Iceland
yeah I do and it shut down European airspace I was in the south of France with something completely different and I couldn't get home and someone I heard that there was this tournament going on in Northern Italy and it was like a
train rideway so I was like all right screw it I'll go there thank God for volcano bless that volcano oh yeah and then I arrived and there was this like this feeder tournament it's called a satellite that night where you know it was 500 EUR entry and one in 10 people
would win their ticket for the 5,000 the main event so I won my ticket that night like 4 in the morning and then went and played it the next day starting at noon 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 wait a minute you can't leave that just give us a teaser and then maybe we'll come back to it I had my first of a handful of completely unexplainable borderline metaphysical experiences in uh I won't say what it
it'll be better if we talk about we'll come back to that later anyway so I had a very strange thing happen just before the tournament started at noon and long story short 6 days later it ended up being the largest tournament ever held in Europe at this time leaving that
undescribed is what I call keeping the audience listening yeah you better keep watching uh and now for sure commercial break that's good I ended up being the 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 6 days later I was on the final table down to the final nine how many hours a day are you playing uh you 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 because in the beginning the stakes are like okay I might lose my 5,000 EUR buying but as the tournament wears on and you know
there's less people your your chip stack is worth more and more in terms of equity and so your loss aversion starts to oh yeah go by the time of the like the end of day five where we played down to the final table the final n for Ninth Place I was
already guaranteed I think 90,000 I only had like I think I had like 50,000 pounds to my name at this point 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 like $
1.7 and that morning I think I got some sleep the night before cuz I 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
you know 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 I was like I was lying there I had pocket
Jacks I had a king queen you know just these fictitious hands my brain just could not shut off and that was my night the night before and I was just like in a complete T cuz I'm like I'm not going be to 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 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 it was that the first time that had happened or had that happened to you before 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 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 I wonder if you just spent all of your stress calories yeah you know what I mean like that tank
was empty yeah so you needed to switch to a different tank honestly it felt like I had something guiding me that whole time it was a very strange experience and anyway I won and it was great 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 or the feeling of being guided what else have you learned about regulating whether it's the white noise
or especially for me personal interest when someone is actively trying to with you and disrupt all of your systems the best thing I 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 you can 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 and I I
imagine my favorite color yeah which is usually a mix of like turquoise and purple something like that and I just I'm sucking that in and pulling it down into my stomach and then it's just like this ah settling feeling and it's half of it is just like
bullshitting myself but it's an interrupt it's an interrupt exactly and it just is enough to like settle your nervous system for a second just ground you back to here and then be like okay now what's the problem 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 like playing a silly little in my head just to like make light of the situation a bit but that it requires a lot of ability to sort of step out and observe
the situation because obviously once in the Red Mist particularly the Red Mist more than the White Noise by definition you are like animalistic you are you don't have the ability to step outside and observe a situation well so it's I think just practice really practice
getting angry you know practice reading I guess a way you could do it is go like go read something that you know makes you angry like really like reliably gets your blood pressure up and then try and like build in some kind of trigger that
makes you do the the three breaths thing so for 99.9% of the satom masochistic users of Twitter myself included just go just go on Twitter yeah just go on Twitter every day like you'll be reliably upset for two minutes oh man Twitter oh what a what a nasty
neighborhood that's turned into so sad 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 sparking for if he sees me taking deep breath he' be like yeah Timmy take those deep breaths come on
buddy you can do it oh sorry I upset you oh yeah yeah you're doing great just close your eyes don't even look at me close your eyes don't look at me don't worry you can't hear me yeah yeah yeah he'll just 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 sure no I mean what happened was I played a bunch of these tournaments not of ones
quite this eyes but I'd still played a lot of tournaments at this point and I was there before before it actually started 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 Poké
Stars whose event it was you know they dimmed the lights like welcome to EBT Sano huge we've got incredible field blah blah blah and then they dimmed the lights and they put on on the screens around the room just like a promo exciting promo video you know and I
remember distinctly the music it was chemical hey boy hey girl which I always loved I always love that song yeah good choice yeah and you know I was like oh this is cool yeah I'm excited and while I was just like listening to it
just like out of nowhere this like a bolt of lightning felt like there was like this like and this voice in my head said you are going to win this tournament and it sounded like my own voice but what I can't remember is whether it was I am going to win or you
are going to win but I'm pretty sure it was you are going to win but it literally sounded like my own voice and it was so sounded like your own voice yes it was like the you know when you speak in your head like the The Voice
you hear like most people have that right you know that Tuesday voice that everyone hears oh man I'm learning learning a lot out here um 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 it's even happening a little bit like the hair's 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 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 okay cool 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 so it's always a bad feeling when that happens and I was like oh man I'm nearly out the tournament I guess that was you know so like
I had like little multi moments over the next few days where it clearly was a real thing because I I've like checked in on it and I even told a friend of mine on Dat you mean checked in on it meaning you remembered that it had happened that it had happened well
because obviously the rational explanation to this is the it it's just a false memory you know that I have retroactively remembered something that didn't really happen as a way of reconstructed it multiple points at which you referred to it yes and I even
have a friend My my friend Melanie who was there and I bumped into her in the 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 uh things are going well really weird 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 and we actually had this conversation and to the point that she after I won it she was like what the was that you like predicted this
I'm like I know I don't know so yeah I don't know how to explain it 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 so what was interesting was ask uh I apologize for
doing this Herky jerky questioning style but did you have any of those types of experiences when you were younger you recall no no I was not like a weird kid you know that had sorry let me start weird kid you weren't like the kid from
the six sense no I wasn't the six sense kid no uh no I did not is to that question I had not really ever had I think anything you like I never saw a ghost or anything like that I'm not asking about ghosts I mean to me me in with the Ghost Hunters come on I want to
just paint the picture of that I was a very in fact like a deep skeptic right well you still are a deep skeptic in a lot of ways right but like certainly then like i' never had anything weird that I couldn't really explain in any
conventional way i' certainly not had any time Loops or anything like that or weird voices in my head but yeah to answer you question of like is it a sort of common thing in poker no not so much a common thing in poker but have you since had more of those types of
experiences not of like explicit premonitions no I'm not nothing even close to that I have had one really notable thing that I am happy to talk about it it's if you change your mind we can cut it later exactly for one 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 particular it was like a sort of low frequency buzzing humming quite
frequently like so so some some kind of tinitus yeah but it was almost like a pressure and voices particularly men's voices became distorted to the point that they were unbearable to listen to and it was really bumming me out it would come in like clusters I would have
it like for a few hours and it would go away and come later on in the day and 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 and this went
on and off for a few months and I went and saw a doctor multiple doctors and had hearing tests and they said oh you're losing your hearing and the low frequencies of your of your hearing in that ear we think you have many A's disease many a is this degenerative
thing which usually people end up completely when they have it where basically the nerve cells in in the inner ear start dying and they don't really know why they think it's something to do with like salts andon channels and it's incurable as far as I
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 it was just bad news to find that out 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 like vomiting and so on and so you can imagine I was like really down in the dumps finding this out and then cut to three month later or so go to Burning Man and I have for the first time one of these vertigo attacks one of the days 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 so I was then really down in the dumps 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 I do energy healing 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 it go she's like I can try and 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 and she starts sucking over my ear with
her mouth like not touching it but just like and it was really unpleasant like you you can imagine that sensation of someone like inhaling over your ear and I was like oh please stop she's like no I need to get this there 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 that was bad I don't know what that was that was really really bad again I was not fully sober so this is
slightly uh you know retelling but I just remember being so shocked I just didn't expect anything to actually happen 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 and she said afterwards you know she came around after a little while and she's 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 it's gone away and I was like 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 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 subscribe to anything like that I like I'm a physicist in fact like you
know I proud like I kind of built a career of being a like 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 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 would incredibly beneficial to me such a
blessing so yeah so these experiences are particularly interesting to me as direct firsthand experiences of course secondhand now that I'm listening but are particularly interesting to when I'm speaking with someone who has demonstrated a very well-developed
ability to use system 2 thinking and rationality and reasoning and Mathematics and so on 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 happens 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 you I'm
sure you know 6,000 years ago or whatever it was with the Egyptians I'm sure they thought they had most things figured out 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 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 right nonetheless even if it were just placebo effect incredible I
that doesn't diminish the Absurd inexplicability of it the current mechanisms that we understand and that's super exciting to me it's super exciting to me and it doesn't mean that you nor I would Advocate that people just accept
everything at face of value of course not there's horseshit everywhere I mean we're sitting in Austin like the the world capital of spirituality there's so much nonsense and so many charlatans but I do pay attention to people like
you who have demon rated in other areas they have the ability to think rationally and have some grasp of a very good grasp of Science and so on right 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 right like can they have they demonstrated any ability to use structured reasoning in other plac are they able to cross-examine their own beliefs right exactly exactly 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 you like Western science for any number of reasons that don't make sense to me like if you've ever had antibiotics yeah Western science may have saved your life and there there
many other examples I certainly wouldn't be here for more for Western medicine let's just say not science and I struggle with where to even take this cuz there's so many directions that could go that are pretty strange but and I don't want to co-opt physics so please
give me a slap here if this is just an amateur butchering the the the good name of physics but I've had a number of cognitive scientists on the podcast like Donald Hoffman I've had physicists on the podcast although some would consider
mitaku more of a science communicator but still as some fundamentals I've had private conversations Serv with a number of physicists 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 bore way back in the day relative to Quantum Mechanics 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 SpaceTime itself as an objective reality I mean there there are pieces people can find online by qualified scientists on the death of SpaceTime right 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 and like Donald hufman even thinks that well not just Donald hufman he thinks that Consciousness essentially gives rise to space yeah and while a lot of
theoretical physicists poo poo his ideas and I think by and large they are correct to even they would agree that it seems like space itself is an emergent property it's not a fundamental thing you know we're not objects rattling around in a big empty box it is a thing
that emerges from basically interactions of mathematical functions on some whether it's on a substrate or whether it I don't know if it even needs a substrate I'm I'm too rusty on that stuff but it's super weird if you dig into the fundamental structure of this
reality this not like a this is not a you know Wiccan witchcraft shop with like tarot cards in the display case not to knock that right but like we're talking about some of the most esteemed scientists in a hard science with peer-reviewed Publications
and so on and if you just look at that stuff closely enough shit's really weird yeah there's a paper I was recently reading that's like digging into the that it seems like SpaceTime is well space itself is essentially coming out of observers interacting with each other
conscious Consciousness is interacting with each other but it's really from what I can tell really granular legit physics I mean it's it's a math paper basically um it's beyond my pay rade so I don't know I may need your I want I
want to it's like Sean Carol I don't know if you've ever had him on Sean Carol I haven't had on but my brother introduced me to his podcast mindscape is it mindscape excellent podcast so if Sean Carol is out there listening or if anyone knows him let him know
I'm he may not want to hear this 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 he really is yeah and he had an excellent episode on sort of archa iCal
exploration of Stonehenge and other artifacts as external pneumonic devices super cool so Olivia question for you 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 what do you do with that It's Tricky I mean you know I think with all these things it's walking this fine line between gullibility open-mindedness
whatever you want to call it and skepticism and cynicism and 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 be bluffing me with you know you could have Aces or you
could be bluffing me with 64 suited that missed the card it needed so you become very comfortable in terms of holding concurrent belief States in your mind with different weighted probabilities of those things being true so with these
like you know these two weird unexplainable experiences that I had you know whether it was the ear thing was just pure Placebo which would still be crazy because it would mean that like basically I have the ability to heal my mind by thinking I was going through
some kind of like thing sucked out my ear fine and potentially hear heal your inner ear yeah like like I just literally told I had a degenerative thing and I was going to go deaf and like 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 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 it's just that I've now broaded my as you mentioned you know it's almost like people become they believe in the scientism as opposed to to being a scientist a true scientist is that you are maximally curious 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 minimize all the biases and things that could mess up your experiment and give you a faulty result and so there's no reason why I can't incorporate these two
data points in terms of I mean I haven't gone out and done any science I I really should I guess go and do some tests and see if I can try and recreate that experience but it's very ult because it was a set set and setting were very
important and what happened there I would assume anyway I don't know that well when they make the Netflix series about it and they recreate the entire environment and then you can sit down and try to recreate yeah so what I I guess I've done is I have upweighted you
know whereas before I would have given the probability that energy healing is a real thing 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 basy that I would give it
actual zero maybe like one in a million B oh that's good we we don't have time to unpack that like you know would 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 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 that is still more probable than that it is something completely like some completely novel
thing that is untapped but that said you know I've actually had a few other little ones I won't go into but like other little data points of just like weird energy things that have happened in certain scenarios it's helped me but it's still important to keep the like
skeptical hat on and extraordinary beliefs require extraordinary evidence and in order for me to like give up everything that I know about our current understanding of the world I would need significantly more data points and I
think that would it's just not the practical way to go forward 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 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 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 it's also not good enough for you to just get the gist of a few sentences in an abstract and confidence intervals 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 the sort of like capital s in either case it has a capital s lesson is not good so if you suum to that one of
The Telltale characteristics that I've come across is they'll ask if something was a controlled study or a placeo controlled randomized study randomized control you know RCT and then say well how many how many subjects were there or what was the end if they get you know
fancy and I might say 20 25 and they're like oh yeah small study well mon sense and I'm like it's not that simplistic right the quite a few variables you have to take into account so recommendations for folks who are interested number one studying the
studies by petera MD 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 the risks of taking meta analyses as
gospel also because garbage in garbage out and there's there's a lot to it 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 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 Placebo is an excellent book many of his feature pieces are are exceptional there
was 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 so in certain places say a placebo pill and a blue capsule or a red capsule perform better than other
colors it's really you need to do to not don't do a blue or red one in this day that's true that's true yeah we can 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
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 you can look at something like poor
Charlie's Almanac with Charlie merer although it's a bit dense and it's a little user unfriendly in a lot of respects but what were you going to say a thing I would recommend is some of Julia gff's work on um the Scout mindset and uh motivated reasoning what
was the first one the Scout mindset Scout mindset yeah 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 she her last name is g a l e f yes she goes into
that sort of again that when I first learned about rationality like I read everything on L wrong if people know that which is incredible resource for it and it you know really breaks down you know how you get this you know your brain which is like the map to match the
actual territory which is the universe as accurately as possible 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 you know in a classical sense rational I you know
clearly went off the beaten path into some like weird land but it was actually very beneficial to me even if it was like some completely useful fiction it was still useful yeah yeah and this idea of like useful fictions I think needs to be explored further 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 yeah you don't prove something 100% most of the time it's like well literally never actually yeah exactly I mean you you can have overwhelmingly compelling data even with
say an observational study say with the sort of quintessential example would be cigarette smoking causing lung cancer right but most of the time 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 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 I was a subject in one of Daniel Conan studies and it was not very intellectually engaging it was like space bar time like a you green square popped up or something but I needed the $7 an hour or
whatever it was and I've been a subject at Stanford with heat exhaustion experiments that was also not terribly fun marching to exhaustion with like 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 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 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 so I
actually want one of my next videos I want to make on this which is about basically these signaling Prestige bad incentives that get Society stuck in these kind of these these traps essentially so we're stuck in one of those with the current status quo of of
the way science is done and is not at all to knock any scientists you know they're doing the doing their absolute best but this the way the system has been designed we give all the reward to the people who first make the new fancy
Discovery and don't give any credit to the people who then actually replicate it and verify it totally so there's this incredible incentive to be always looking for some new novel thing in order to get that you know get your your thing published in nature and get those
research dollars for the next time but it doesn't actually really Advance human knowledge because so many of these things don't replicate and 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 and it's there there's a name for it so so there's this really incredible short online book called inadequate equilibria by the guy who wrote most of the stuff on Les wrong ala owski and I recommend inadequate equilibria yes it's it's name
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 a basic person who thinks everything's explained 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 and they have this three-way discussion talking about like 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 like I like you must include this in the show notes how long would you say it is I mean ideally they read they could just read chapter 3 honestly it's it's I don't know it's like a 45 minute read
yeah it's just it's like a book chapter and you can kind of read us down alone we'll put this we'll put it in the show notes but basically it's it's talking about these like these traps that we can get into where it gets people now speaking Game Theory it gets Society
stuck in like shitty Nash equilibria so a Nash equilibrium is when two people or 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 national equilibria are
actually created equal 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 so like a good example of this would be so I just made a video called
the beauty Wars about this like fictitious thing called mik which I call like the demon of negative sum games basically it's like the god of negative some games it's the it's a force of bad usually economic incentives that make people sort of sacrifice things that
they want in order to optimize for a short-term goal and the example I talk about is these Beauty filters on stagram I don't know if You' spent any time 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 mad 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 would go online and you would not be able to tell 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 there so subtle but they're so effective it
seems like there is clearly just some kind of optimal face structure that you know our eyes find pleasing and it just tweaks people makes their eyes a little bit wider apart or a little bit bigger or the lips you know just just changes the the proportions just right that it
sets the the you know the dopamine Spike off in your brain and it's going to make online dating really hard oh man well so as a girl on Instagram 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 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 you know if I want to keep playing the game of trying to grow
my Instagram like sex yes the arms race exactly and that's what mik is mik is this like the god of arms races and it's like these these bad incentives where we could the cheap thing for me to do is just to use one of these AI filters on
on on all my pictures and 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 it will make me miserable in the process and if you poll probably most particularly women on on Instagram they are not having a good time with these
things either on themselves cuz if you then like compare your face side to side you're just like man I you you just 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 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 so this is my current
Obsession this thing called and I think about it all the time m o l o c h for people wondering and we'll we'll link to that in the show notes so just 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 probably the best thing is if they search for my name and then the beauty Wars mhm that'll link to the video I just talked about all right and then you can find my channel from and uh just for the
spelling everybody it's live Li IV last name b o e r e e which means I learned just beforehand drunk farmer so they say so they say and I did grow up on a farm so and I did drink a lot it's so good so good yeah Ferris you know the best I can tell you're a big wheel it
could be that it also refers to Ferris like Ferris oxide f e r o u s o Rusty because apparently some of my progenitors were silver Smiths I don't know how it all fits together seems like a very dubious story I'm not sure but I want I want some story to go along with
the last name but I don't have drunken farmer that's an amazing one uh live we should do a round two sometime we're we're practically neighbors we have so much we could talk about 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 going to do it we'll see requires more Mescal to make that decision I think we could we could condense it down we don't have to do the full eight weeks I think commit
to even three weeks honestly I think you would JK will still be better than you at that stage I have to say that no he would be um all right three weeks three weeks I'm going to I'm going to sleep on that I do my I do my best thinking when I'm asleep
so 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 anything at all you like to say before we before we wind this down no I mean I guess do check out my my YouTube
I'd love people to go and um I'm 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 so I would love people to go and just sub to my channel so that they catch my stuff because we you know playing the
rat race the attention Wars 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 talk about a nasty game yeah and mik mik's in that mik
mik's all over that M so Liv we're going to link to everything in the show notes people can find you at lib.com also which I would imagine has links to many things and we'll put links to everything we've discussed all the resources inadequate
equilibria and uh all other good things in the show notes tim. blog SLP podcast and so nice to see you thanks for taking the time this is awesome 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 just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet Friday would you enjoy getting a short email from me every
every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend between 1 and A2 and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter my super short newsletter called five b Friday easy to sign up easy to cancel 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 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 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 if you'd like to try it out just go to tim. blog Friday type that into your browser tim. blog Friday drop in your email and you'll get the very next one thanks for listening
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