Afford Anything - What Chess Taught Me About Making Smarter Life Moves -- with Steve Gossett

Episode Date: April 17, 2017

#73: Last January, I went to a party at a trailer park that featured a huge bonfire, a few llamas, and a member of Public Enemy. (I realize that sounds like the setup to a joke. Welcome to my life.) While I was there, I met a former competitive chess player named Steve Gossett. Steve is a Los Angeles-based filmmaker who creates Princess Rap Battle videos for a YouTube channel with more than 1 million subscribers. But that's not why I invited Steve onto the show. I asked him to join me on the podcast to discuss the lessons that chess taught him about money, work and life. On this fascinating episode, Steve and I discuss:  - Opening Theory: At the start of the game, you have a limited selection of moves. Yet you can quickly lose the game if you choose the wrong moves. Don't lose at the outset. - Muddled Midgame: While the first few moves are (relatively) simple, even the experts don't quite understand the complexities of the mid-game. - Gambit: Sometimes, you need to be willing to give up a piece on the board for the sake of getting another strategic win. - Eliminate options: You'll fatigue yourself if you try to consider every move. Learn how to quickly eliminate options so that you can focus on choosing between a small handful of optimal moves. - Think ahead: Don't just think about the consequences of the next move. Think many, many moves ahead on the board. Also, realize that every move carries an opportunity cost: once you move a piece on the board, it's not in that same position anymore -- for better or for worse. - Study/practice/knowledge can reduce time pressure: Chess is a timed game with a ticking clock. You can make smarter, faster decisions through study and practice. Knowledge is your competitive advantage. I hope you find this conversation as fascinating as I did. Enjoy!  - Paula Links to the Princess Rap Battle and Whitney Avalon's YouTube channel can be found in the show notes at http://affordanything.com/episode73   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can afford anything but not everything, and that's true not only about the way you spend your money, but also the way you spend your time, focus, energy, attention, any scarce or limited resource in your life. I'm not saying this to promote a scarcity mindset. I'm not saying this to scare you. I'm saying this because, despite the fact that I believe in abundance, it is also the case that there are certain areas in our life in which we face inherent tradeoffs. And when it comes to our money, our time, our focus, there's an inherent trade-off. Every yes to something is an implicit no to something else. So the question becomes twofold.

Number one, what decisions are we going to make? What is most important? And number two, how do we align our day-to-day behaviors with those decisions, with those values and priorities that we hold? My name is Paula Pan, host of the Afford Anything podcast, where we explore these questions. There are no straight answers. But in every episode, we try to work a different. angle to figuring out how to get closer and closer to being able to answer these questions and

incorporate those answers into our lives. Today's episode is a particularly fun one. So a few months ago, and now this is going to sound totally weird, but just hang with me for a second, okay? So a couple of months ago, I was hanging out at this airstream park. It's like a park full of airstream trailers. And it's in downtown Las Vegas. I met this guy who was there for see, yes, the Consumer Electronics Show, which is this big trade show that comes to Las Vegas every January. So at any rate, you know, we started talking. We were the only, it was like four in the morning. We were the only sober people there. I had not had a drop to drink the entire night. Neither had he. And so we started talking because we connected on that level. So, you know, of course, like any normal cocktail party conversation, it's like, what do you do for a living?

And so I mentioned this show and kind of the theme of what afford anything is all about. And he started talking and we had just interviewed Billy Murphy, who's a professional poker player. And the long time listeners may remember that episode, Billy talked about expected value and variance and how he incorporated all of those concepts from the world of poker into the decision-making processes that he uses in his day-to-day life, both in work and in life in general. Steve, when I said that and when I talked about the interview that we had just done with Billy Murphy, Steve told me that he had been a very experienced chess player. And he started talking about the difference between poker and chess. Poker is a game in which you have incomplete information. Chess is a game in which you have complete information. All players know exactly what's happening on the board at all times.

So the decision-making framework is a little bit different and yet there are many lessons from chess. that can also be extrapolated into both business and life. And as he started talking, I was like, wow, this conversation is fascinating. Steve is super intelligent. I was just transfixed by everything that he was saying. And I thought to myself, I would love to record this conversation and share it with the world. And then I realized, hey, wait a second, I can. So I invited Steve to come on to the show to talk about,

what playing chess has taught him about money, work, and life. And without further delay, here he is, Steve Gossett. Hey, Steve. Hey, Paula, how's it going? It's awesome. I'm really glad that we're chatting. Could you introduce yourself to the audience? Because I'm excited to share you with them.

Sure. My name's Steve Gassett. I am a filmmaker in Los Angeles. I've done a lot of strange but interesting things in my background. Tell me about some of that. Well, as a filmmaker, I am currently best known for making princess rap battles. You can find them on YouTube. They're on the Whitney Avalon channel, and I write, direct, edit, and produce, and do it the color for those videos. They're amazing. I'm going to link to them in the show notes. They're hilarious.

Excellent. Well, then that's what I do with most of my time now. I've had a multitude of jobs and experiences that have led to me being able to do that. I think I consider a lot of even jobs that don't seem like they lead into being good at that. I think everything sort of the human experience all leads towards being better at a job like that. We'll chat about Princess Rat Battles at the end of this interview because they're awesome and I'm fascinated by them. And I definitely binge-watched them for, you know, after you and I met. But the reason that I wanted to bring you on the show today is because when you and I met, so just for the listeners for background, we met at the Airstream Trip. trailer park. It's this like park of airstream trailers in downtown Las Vegas. You were there

with a member of Public Enemy after some conference. There was some guys swinging a big fire staff. It was just, it's what we call a typical night in downtown Vegas. I was there at 4 a.m. and there was, there was a really nice llama there that was that I got to meet. No, it was super interesting. I think I was there for, was it CES that we were there for? Yeah, yeah. You were there for CES? Yes. Yeah. Wonderful little shindig. And I was there with Hank Shockley of, Hank Shockley is one of the producers from public enemies, part of their bomb squad.

And you and I got to talking. That's right. It was 4 in the morning and we started talking because we were the only, neither one of us were drinking and we were the only sober people there. Well, at 4A, like, I think the next day I had to catch a flight. So being sober at 4 a.m, sometimes you have to be. But it was good because you get to. to have interesting conversations while everybody else is amazed that they can see the stars. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And that's how you and I got to talking. And you mentioned I had just had Billy Murphy on the show and he's a professional poker player. And so you told me about

the Princess Rat Battle videos and I started talking about this podcast. And I started telling you about the interview that I had just done with Billy Murphy in which we talked about decision-making in the context of poker. So expected, you know, variance and expected value and how all of those decisions are made. Yeah, exactly. And that's where you began talking about your background as a chess player. I know you did some stuff with Madruth Gathering as well and some other things,

but you began talking about game theory and decision-making in that context. And that was so fascinating that I wanted to bring you on the show. Certainly. Because a big part of the theme of this podcast is how to make better decisions. So that's what I'd like to chat about today. I'd like to say that I'm not an expert in making great decisions, but I do strive to get better all the time. For a little bit of background, when I was very young, probably about four or five,

I started playing chess and very soon started beating my dad who taught me how to play, and soon was looking for more competition and started doing a lot of scholastic events. And eventually, there's a small school in Indianapolis called Sycamore School. I went to for a couple years, and it was a sort of, it was a private school, sort of the gifted, educated, weirdo crowd, and we had a very, very good chess team there. A coached by a man named Bernard Parham, who is sort of an old school chess hustler and a great teacher at that. We had a very good team, and we would often compete with the other sort of elite schools, the Hunter, the Dalton, not in New York. there's another big one in Arizona. I think Fuller is the name of the school there in Arizona.

We actually placed fourth in the nation for our team. We were state champions. And it was very interesting because chess gives you such a good background for decision-making and sort of looking ahead at what the decisions you make now affect the decisions in the future. Tell me a little bit more about that because I just elaborate on that. I won't ask any leading questions yet. Sure, sure. Well, a lot of chess is you look down and you look down.

you're like, wow, look at all these pieces. And once you get past these phase of, I know what can move, you have to get into the why. There are a lot of different concepts and a lot of ways to look at chess as sort of a battlefield or a mathematical representation of one thing or another. But in the end, the object is to win the game. And to win the game, you have to checkmate the opponent's king generically. We don't need to get into any corner cases just yet. But understanding what moves will get you there.

and what spatially will get you there. And what's important about chess, as sort of we discussed there at the bonfire, is that chess is a game of complete information. Everybody can see all the pieces. There's no hidden information. There's no secrets in chess. One of the great things is that at any point in time, assuming that the rule set is the same, at any point in time,

you can show me a game from the 1800s, and it is exactly the same as it is now. There are no differences. There's no changes, and there's no, you can look at a board and there's nothing new there. Same with checkers but as opposed to poker

poker is a game of incomplete information at least like most games like say hold them. Everybody, you get your two whole cards and you know that and no one else does and there's also a bunch of cards in the deck that make up the rest of the cards and no one else knows what those are

so you have incomplete information and all you know is what you have. You don't know what your opponents have and you have to make decisions based on, when you talk about EV, that's for expected value. Like, what is the value I can expect? Like, if I put X amount of money in, am I guaranteed a 3 to 1 if I think I'm a 30% chance to win? You start doing those sort of number crunchings when you're playing poker, because you have

to be able to deal with incomplete information. Both chess and poker still have, like, you can look at your opponent's face, and sometimes you know if someone's acting or sometimes they're really beat. Poker has a lot more of that than chess. occasionally in chess you'll catch somebody especially at the scholastic level like little kids will try not to look at the piece that they're really wanting to take like they see something they see an opportunity and so like they will try to look away they'll try to disguise their intent but that's that's less about chess and more about human interaction in sociology

I want to know a little bit more about decision making in chess and sort of I'm asking about that because I'm trying to extrapolate lessons there that people can, that listeners can ultimately apply into any facet of their lives. Decision making in chess, given that it is a game of complete knowledge, because that's the part that fascinates me. You know, as you mentioned in that previous podcast episode where I was talking with Billy Murphy about poker, you're right, it's all about expected value because poker is a game of incomplete information. You know your own cards. You know what you have, but you don't know what, you don't know what else is out there. And so you're dealing with many unknown variables. I'm going to jump right in because I think there's something just in talking about this that's interesting to me about chess and how you learn how to play chess.

You learn how to play chess in a variety of ways. But once you get a little bit good, people start working on opening theory. Opening theory is there are at the very beginning of the game, not every piece can move. Your ponds can move and your knights can move, but nothing else can, which limits the number of possible moves that you can have. people start learning the common openings, the kinds that you will see out of opponents, and they start learning the different intricacies. Because there's ways to lose the game as soon as two moves in.

So you don't want to lose the game that quickly. So you start learning what the different openings are. And people write books and books and study over and over again, all the different openings and what that leads to. And what it often leads to is a sort of muddled midgame, where there aren't as many known factors. Most grandmasters can play the first 10 moves. you know, not Grandmaster's the wrong word, but they can play the first 10 moves very quickly

because they've done those moves so many times and they already know what they're going to do until they hit a point where they need to make a decision where there's something new, where they have other things to consider, or there's additional complexities, where it isn't just the world of the known. And funnily enough, at the end of the game, especially scholastic level or early in chess, like a lot of grandmasters know when they're beat and they will just simply resign, But if you don't know when you're beat, you need to know how to play the end game. The end game, and they teach you how to mate an opponent.

Like, if you have a queen and a king and they have a king, there are a series of moves to get you there. It's like solving a Rubik's Cube. And there are several different, like, piece combinations that you need to know the end game for. And what you need to do is once you've sort of learned how to do the opening, and once you've learned how to do the end, you need to figure out how to get from your opening to an end game that is favorable. Does that make sense? I mean, I feel sometimes I may not be heading in the direction you want, but it's such an interesting topic that it applies to so many different things. It does. It does. So, like, I was thinking through, like, as you were describing that, what I was hearing was a perfect analogy in terms of a person's life and the way that a person's investing choices and the way that a person manages money and manages their career, you know, like at the opening, at the outset, yeah, you do have limited possible moves.

there are only so many decisions that you can make. And you can quickly lose the game within just a couple of moves if you make some very bad decisions at the outset. Like meth or bad friends or whatever, yes. And we all sort of know an endgame that we want to head towards. A lot of people want to have the, I have a library full of all of my favorite books and a nice family and grandchildren. Or they want to have financial independence or they want to have, you know, they want to own all of Boca or Ritone or whatever people's dreams are, they have an idea of an endgame, whether it's realistic or not. But there is that big muddled middle, which is full of the intricate

decision-making that determines how you're going to get there. Right. Exactly. So let's talk about that muddled middle. Yes. You know, assuming that you haven't already lost the game within the first couple of moves, assuming that, you know, you are a person in your 20s who has not gotten yourself into $300,000 of credit card debt, you know, you've made it to the middle, you've made it to that muddled middle. What next? You're staring at a board. You see where the pieces are. You have a variety of decisions in front of you. And there are lots of different theories. There are books that have been written with theories about what to do next. How do you decide what moves to make? All right. So the muddled middle, I think it is smart to look to books or to mentors or to teachers

because one of the things to look to is if you're like there is an end game I want to go to, maybe talk to someone who's literally at that endgame. I think a lot of people who are 20 years old, they don't know any 50-year-olds they can talk to that aren't their grandparents. And I think that there's a lot of knowledge, like by 20, hopefully you're over feeling like you're invulnerable and you know everything. You've hopefully been observant enough to hit that I don't know very much stage. You're also talking to, when you're talking to me, you're talking to someone who's been homeless more than once and still managed to succeed. But, so, So I don't know that all of my decisions were the best because I found myself at least exploring

a lot of options. During college, for example, I thought I might want to be a professional wrestling referee. So I toured the country for two years doing that and not making anything for money and eventually had to turn away from that being a bad decision. When you hear people talk about they failed X number of times, I've tried to fail aggressively. Now, if you're playing a single game of chess, you can't do that. You should actually be playing the smartest, safest way you can. But life isn't one game of chess.

Sometimes, I think people, this ties into decision making. People often, you hear people say stuff like, I want to live with no regrets, or they want that on their tombstone or whatever. But I think that that's actually real folly, because I consider regrets to be the real learning points in your life. Like, let's say in chess, you make a terrible move in the old. opening and you're immediately punished and you lose the game right there. It hurts. You might remember that, but you will never do it again. I think that we associate regrets with a negative

feeling rather than a learning opportunity. And of course, as a kid, you know, learning opportunities sound awful anyway, but looking, I think there's a real benefit. You don't have to, I mentioned meth earlier just as a joke, but you don't need to, there are certain things you don't need to do and learn for yourself, but you also don't need to hate your regrets as if they are not a part of what makes you into being good at what you do. Sorry, again, I've sort of gone off the on a garden path on that, but I think that it's important to note, especially for someone who's going to, the goal of chess or the goal of a lot of things is to improve your system, improve self-improvement.

And part of getting through that muddled middle is you will make mistakes, but you need to be better at seeing them come ahead. Like those regrets are the ones that, like, let's say you, as a 20-year-holder in my 20s, I was not making a lot of investments. But I was going through and doing a lot of interviews and taking a lot of jobs. And I got much, much better at demanding salary that was closer to what I was worth. And being good in the interview room at getting my raise. there or this was just after the time like I graduated with a degree in IT management information

systems and I graduated right after the dot com crash which meant I was screwed I was really like that was a really bad time to try to be looking for jobs in that area so I had to sort of start at the bottom of that and work my way up and that was not a time of company loyalty but the way you could get ahead was to take short contracts and bounce around and get little incremental gains here there and everywhere and try to grow your skill set until you become invaluable. Nobody coming out of college is that. They aren't, basically, depending on what, I mean, there are skill sets that you can come out of college with and be good at, but people aren't ready to hand it over to you because you haven't,

you haven't had some of the failures you get when you go out and say, I'm going to be an architect, let me go out and build a bridge. You don't typically get to go build a bridge your first time. If you're in IT, or even in management, you don't get to just manage a bunch of highly skilled people right off the bat. There's a lot of things you still need to learn. And how to tie this to games. Again, there's a couple different ways to look at something like chess or life or whatever,

where you look at it, if you're only looking at it in a goal sense, like if you're looking and you're say, I think it's very easy to feel, like every day as a failure then, because you didn't accomplish that today, if that was your only goal, or even people that have daily goals, I find often sort of get stuck in that, I think that I am sort of more systems-based. I think that being able to, like, being goal-based to me is like the opening theory, like knowing how to do the first 10 moves, but once you get past those 10 moves, if you haven't won, you get a little more lost. People that can look at a chessboard, or in this case, look at a situation and identify what is important, what is an important, sort of the prioritization.

I find prioritization is super important for what I do now. In something like film production, especially if you're directing or wearing as many hats as I choose to, there are hundreds of things you need to pay attention to at any one point in time. And you need to be able to quickly figure out what is worth your time. I am someone who I care so much about things when I'm filming. I will lose track of things in my real life. And one of the adjustments I had to make recently was actually hiring an assistant. Because if I'm really in the mix, things like rent and groceries aren't important because they aren't part of the project. And so I get so focused on them and I place importance on it.

I had to take a step back and sort of blue hat. And are you familiar, sorry, are you familiar with these six thinking hats? No, I'm not. All right. So there's a guy whose name is Edward Dubano. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it right, but he had a problem solving technique. And he'd go around the country sort of teaching it to large teams that had to solve big problems. And it was a, it's sort of a funny way to get an entire group of people to think about a problem in lots of different ways.

and he had six supposed hats that he would have people wouldn't literally wear, but whoever was running a meeting would say, all right, let's just do white hat thinking for three minutes. And white hat would be just data, just facts about a problem. Or sometimes it would be red hat, like just emotional. And over the course of this, there are six like sort of different ways to think about a problem. And whoever was trying to organize this meeting, it'd be it like, let's say you're Toyota and you've got a recall problem or something like, some big problem you need to solve. If everybody comes into a meeting already with one set of mind, one mindset,

you may not reach the sort of creative problem solving you can get to if you look at the problem with a bunch of different ways on purpose. So occasionally when I'm, like it's not something I incorporate heavily, but occasionally we'll think about the blue hat is for big picture stuff. The sort of taking a step back and saying, when I'm on a film project, I won't stop on what is important to me, which is the story or the actual final product, because to me that is forever and that it has to be that good. And so part of the adjustment I had to make was to suck it up and say, look, I can't do everything in my life and care as much as I do about the film projects.

I have to hire an assistant. So that is one of the adjustments I've had to make even recently in my own life. and that is part of me striving to get better at the muddled middle all the time. So tell me about in chess, literally, how do you learn to get better at the muddled middle? So one of the techniques put forth by my coach was an analytical approach because there's the, a lot of people want to go for the feel approach. They want to just get in there and understand and sort of, like, learn from mistakes. The red hat approach.

Yes. Well, and what he proposed was that every piece sort of has a limited number of places that can move. And he would have us chart out every possible move for every piece. And the way you did it was whatever move was just made. Whatever move was just made basically sets up a new board state. And every board state itself can be. And to analyze the board state, you see what was just moved and where did it move from?

And for both of those squares, you would do a full analysis from like every horizontal vertical diagonals and sort of these spaces where the nights can sit. What changed? And it was a quick analytical. These are the things that these are the pieces that were affected and are affected. And like if they're, so chess is sort of a closed system. And if something, a piece moves from one place to another, there have been sort of two sets of changes made for where it left and where it went to. And that's sort of, that's like the basics of it and the sort of really analytical approach of, you know, like figuring out the importance of all the different factors. For example, the number of pieces you have is a very simple one to understand. There are a lot of different scoring systems that say what a piece is worth. But having one of those and understanding, like if someone has all the pieces and you, you you only have a king, you're really losing.

It doesn't matter how much spacing you have, how much tempo you have, how much, how many of these other things that you have. And the other factors that come into play in chess, and understand, I was a very good scholastic chess player. I am not a world-class chess player. It is just something where I've taken these skills and thought processes from chess and applied them to all, a lot of the other things in my life, even unknowingly. That's sort of like analytical approach.

Like there are only so many, like almost just Spock-like logic occasionally. Like you can eliminate the number of things that something, if you can eliminate the number of things that something isn't, what's remaining is what is. Okay. Can you give me some examples of how you've applied some of these lessons into your life? Sure. Well, something that's common in chess is something called a gambit. It's when you're willing to give up a piece for another kind of gain or it's some sort of trap. For me, I've had a lot of sort of boring officey jobs.

And that to me is a gambit because I'm willing to give up that period of my life to make money and to get by stability and to be working on separate things. And like everybody, like I've had jobs where it's literally I know this is a paycheck. I know this isn't going to actually directly, you know, this isn't the job that I love. But what it will do is it provides me the flexibility to do the things I want to do later in life. And looking at it, not as I'm wasting my life, because I think a lot of people, they've been told to do what you love, which is nice. That's nice to hear. But not everybody does what they love and not everybody who does what they love got there by only doing the things that they loved doing. And so being willing to make sacrifices and make compromises that can get you to where you want to get. I was looking for a job. I located a job. I went in and interviewed for it. I didn't want it. The job seemed like it would be soul-sucking and boring and it was going to be miserable. It was going to be a ton of paperwork that not even like fun paperwork, but very tedious, which is not what I enjoy. It does not comfort me at all. The job was going to be at X dollars an hour. And I said, I don't think I can do it at X. I could consider it at maybe X plus 10 an hour. they came back and said, we think we want you. And I was like, well, I think it's actually X plus 20.

And I said, if you hit that number, I will be there on Monday morning. And because I'd already interviewed well and because I knew that once they'd chosen me, I was able to have that sort of leverage. It was that extra $20 an hour is what made it okay for me to walk through that door. Because I think otherwise, like I had to do sort of a value, an expected value proposition there and figure out if that's what I would. wanted to do. That sort of at least gamble made it worth it for me. We'll come back to this awesome interview about chess with Steve in just a second. First, I want

to give a shout out to one of our sponsors, FreshBooks. If you're an entrepreneur, how much time do you spend sending invoices and chasing down payments and checking to see whether or not your client has paid you on time or waiting for those payments to come in? Probably spend too long. Well, you can circumvent that by using FreshBooks, a system that, a system that, you automates billing your clients. So if you're an entrepreneur, if you have a side hustler, set up an invoice using FreshBooks in a couple of seconds and then they take care of everything else for you. They automatically send follow-up reminders to your clients. They let you know whether or not your clients even looked at the invoice. If you want to give them a try, for free, head to

freshbooks.com slash Paula. That's FreshBooks.com slash Paula. You can try them totally free for 30 days. You don't even have to put in a credit card or a debit card or any kind of card. So there's no gotcha. There's no like automatic rollover at the end. Just give them and go. See if you like them. FreshBooks.com slash Paula. I also want to give a shout out to Bluehost.

If you're interested in starting your own blog, check out Bluehost. They're a company that offers hosting, which is basically the term for the space on the internet where your blog lives. Absolutely fantastic if you are getting started as a blogger and you need hosting and a domain name. You can learn how to set up a blue host account in five minutes or less by visiting afford anything.com slash start a blog where I've got a full set of detailed instructions, step-by-step guide, including screenshots of every step along the way, plus a YouTube video. Check that out, afford anything.com slash start a blog. Can you tell me about some other examples of lessons that you've learned from the game of chess, about how you deal with that muddled middle, about how you make decisions that you have applied into your day-to-day life. Okay. I think something that's important, at least for chess, is in front of you, you can kind of see every possible move.

One of the things you can do is start saying, all right, these moves are bad for these specific reasons. And you can sort of rule out any move that is terrible. You know, there are certain brilliant moves that can be found in terrible. but let's not deal with that right now. You can also say these are moves that I think help me achieve spatial goals, piece goals, tempo, supporting my other pieces, that sort of thing. Because when done well, all of your pieces are working in concert and you're trying to stay several moves ahead of your opponent.

And oftentimes you have to be able to say in your mind, if I move this piece there and then my opponent moves here, what is my response. And like knowing that when people talk about being moves ahead, that's often what they're doing. In chess, one of the ways you can be moves ahead is to, at certain points, you can force your opponent to have to react to certain moves. There are certain moves where you put your opponent in check, then there's only four places they can go. And then you only have to come up with four responses rather than infinity. Sometimes being able to narrow down the choices that you have to choose from, or like, it is important.

I'm somebody who will often boil the ocean on a, and I think I'm using that right, I could be wrong, but I will look at every little possibility. I make music videos. So there's infinite ways that you could put one together, give or take. And I like to look at every possibility. But what you can do is you can start categorizing things as here are things that are good. Here's things that are great. Here's things that are unusable. And start only focusing on the ones that you've determined to be great. And you can even sort of, I guess it makes sense in chess moves as well that if you have 30 reasonable moves, and you would want to pick from the 10 that you determined to be the best. And you don't have to figure out from those 30 what's the best one immediately, because oftentimes you need to be able to compare it to other similar moves. And this actually gets me to an interesting point that I believe strongly and actually helps me with decision making. I think there's a lot of people that don't understand or they don't believe the same way I do about decision making.

I believe that you can have a best move in chess. Chess is a solvable game, even if it hasn't necessarily been solved by computers yet, there is a best move. In any situation, there is a best move. And in something like a career or in a game, there are sort of best moves that you can go for. And even if you don't get them, striving to make the best move in every sort of individual decision spot, that's what can lead to success.

Like, real success can come from making the best decision you can in every situation you're in. Like, if you could do that, you'd be the best person in the world. Like, if you can just make the best decisions, if you make the decisions about your time with your money, with your health, with your life, like all these little things, if you're just striving to make good decisions in all of those, That's the same as every move in chess. If you strive to make the best of that individual time frame, that position, just make the best move you can within there. But what I learned from poker, if I can steal from that for a second. Because chess, there is literally a best decision. In poker, there is not a best.

There is a best probably. And one of the things that's super important that I learned from poker was, let's say you have, you know, you've got aces. and without going into the complexities of it, you're often, like, if there are no other cards turned over in Holden Poker and you have aces, it's probably best for you to say all in, for you to just go for it.

And one of the things that I learned from poker was to make the best decisions you can with the information you have and don't worry as much about the results. Because if your decision-making was sound, that's okay. Like if someone says, I went to the store, I look both ways, and if you get hit by a car on your way to the grocery store, it wasn't that you shouldn't get groceries. You need to work on other parts of your decision making.

Poker helped me to understand that you make the best decision you can and don't worry as much about it because it's very human, I think, to look at patterns that don't necessarily exist and say, you know, I know people that say, oh, every time I wear this shirt, this sports team. wins. And that's such a strange fallacy that humans try to look for those patterns. Do a good job of understanding what your decision actually is and what you're actually affecting. And I've gone too far off a topic. I'm completely following you. In fact, I recently wrote a blog post about the same topic, about the importance of, it was a blog post about my decision that I've recently come to that it might be better to just give up on goals entirely

and focus only on actions and not worry about the results because actions are within your circle of influence, results are not. So if you focus on your actions and don't worry about the results, which is what you're describing in poker, you focus on making good decisions,

and as long as you make good decisions, know that the results are out of your hands. But then bringing it back to chess, your earlier statement with chess was make the best move possible. How do you know what move is best? Well, like, theoretically, there is a best move, right? It is a solvable game.

Checkers is solved. Tick-Tac-Ttoe is solved. We can know what the best, you know, there is a right and a wrong way to play those games. We have not, at least as far, nobody's told me that they've solved chess. And I think the closest you can come is occasionally, like one of the fun things about chess puzzles, like their entire books full of chess puzzles. And what's interesting in them is they will often say mate in three, that if you go first, you can actually create certainty

or you can control every branching decision to the point of being able to say, yes, you can win the game in three moves, just you have to figure out where it is. There does sort of come a limit to how much humans can, how far ahead a human can look because there's so many intricate sort of gear-like interactions in a game of chess.

that you try to, in the midgame, the decisions you make will affect the end game, but you can't perfectly determine what that's going to do. So there's a lot of things to look at on a chessboard, but try to make sure that you aren't losing all the pieces. Try to make sure that you aren't giving up all the space and that you aren't being trapped, and you weren't about to be mate in three.

And if you can get your opponent out of position, because winning the game often happens with just a couple moves ahead on taking an opponent, pawn and using that advantage of having an extra piece to influence the rest of the game. Often just being down a piece with all, if you're down a piece with all other things the same, you're in a lot of trouble to an equally skilled opponent. For how that is in life, there's probably a ton of sort of analogies and correlators you can take from that, but there are opportunities that you take or you don't take that might or might not

lead you somewhere in your end game or whatever we're calling, whatever we're calling this right now. But there are so many people I know that don't want to leave their house because they're unsure. Or if they go out to an event, they're like, I only meet someone that I want to talk to at every, you know, I go to like three of these. And only one of them do I have any fun at? That's something interesting. That is a third of the time you are meeting someone interesting and doing something. And is that worth your time? I'm like, what are you giving up?

Are you giving up television? Are you giving up sleep? Are you giving up, you know, like your family? I don't want, you know, there are things that aren't worth giving up and be able to, like in chess, you have to look at space versus pieces versus tempo versus occasionally. There's one of the interesting things we haven't talked about at all in chess. And one of the things that makes it cool is there's often a clock. There is a chess clock.

It is sort of two clocks side by side and only one of them runs at a time. And you may sit down against someone and you say, we're going to play a game and each of us get an hour to think. And as soon as you make your move, you hit your side of the clock, your starts or stops and your opponent starts. And they can lose the game if they spend too much time thinking. So then another resource you're looking at is actually your time because otherwise you could think and think and think for a year before you made the right move because then you could find, you know, really look at everything. But you don't have that kind of time. There's also a time pressure, so you need to be able to sort of think quickly and you're able to move faster when you're in more familiar positions. If you say, oh, here we're in a midgame, I've got two bishops and a queen and I know what this means.

Or we're playing a game where it's just knights and a big rigid pond structure. I know what this means. I've studied this or I've seen how this worked out for other people and I need to sort of keep these things in mind. and you can start using knowledge or even things that your mentor said or things you read in books to say, this is how I should be approaching this. Even though I don't know exactly what the end looks like, I don't know what the next 40 moves look like. I know what I want it to look like.

I know the general shape of it. And sometimes a great example of this is people don't know what they want to do going into college. At least they shouldn't. But they can often say I know what sort of life I'd want to have coming out of this. and what sort of opportunities I'd want to have. And that's one of the reasons to get a degree is to say, I want to have this sort of earning potential, or I want to have this sort of job.

If you're 19, you don't know if you want to be a surgeon generally. Like, there's a lot of living to do, and there's a lot of things to learn between now and then, but you can say I want to have the opportunity to be that. Or I want to leave my options open. I want to have that kind of flexibility going into it. So hopefully that covers some of what you're asking. Yeah.

So some of the themes that I've heard from you is eliminate your options. You know, in addition to striving for the best moves, part of striving for best moves is eliminating options. So if you've got 30 possible options in front of you, eliminate all but the best 10. Think multiple moves ahead. You know, don't just think one move ahead. Think about what the next move, what the implications of this next move are. three moves, four moves into the future. Look at the whole board holistically. Well, and a good example of that is occasionally you can get up and walk around and look at it from another angle.

You can literally look at a chessboard from your opponent's side. One of the ways that I've gotten, that I've been able to excel in games is literally being able to play both sides of the board, where you literally have all the information in your head. You can play, you can sort of play solitary games and get, it's too, it's so easy to look at it only from your side. And if you can take a good look at whatever your opponent's side is, it's, you don't often have like real opponents in life. But in a game, you can often say, what are they seeing? Even if it's just like a small shift in direction, when you stop looking at it as these are my pieces, these are his pieces or her pieces. And you get up and you actually say, what if this was my side? One of the things I heard very recently I think is very cool because I played a lot of chess as a kid and I went from either and when I would play against other people, other kids my age, there were a lot of them that couldn't play at all and I didn't know how to play with someone who wasn't as good as me. And one of the things I've heard for parents that want to teach their kids how to play, if the parents are good, they can often, one of the things they can do is not, you know, not sandbag it with the kid, but offer to if the kid wants, switch sides.

So if the kid is not having fun or he's lost in pieces, let him switch sides and see what that shift in perspective does. And they can hopefully associate then, oh, this is how this side got to where it is and why it looks better. And it lets him explore that sort of grass is greener because I think that can be an interesting learning piece for kids. And that's something when I would play Magic Gathering or other like competitive games. I would often try to play both sides of it myself, so I would be understanding, because oftentimes in a game, there's someone who is the sort of controlling side,

and someone is the aggressive side. And almost every game, there's a sort of a balance of that, and knowing which one you are is super important. And that's sort of the same in, when we talk about there's certain negotiations where someone is in control, but they don't know it.

So being able to recognize which position you are in is super important. That's a really interesting point, the switching sides and basically seeing your pieces from a different angle. Indeed. Changing frames. Perspective. Perspective. Yeah. Perspective.

And the other major theme that I heard from you from this conversation that we've had when you talked about time pressure, it sounded as though to me what I heard was study, practice, familiar. knowledge experience, all of those things work together in concert to reduce time pressure. Indeed. I think I also consider practice. All those things are what help you develop what people call instinct. I think there's a certain amount of instinct that is sort of like nature. But I think a lot of it is like people have instinct when you're driving when all of a sudden if there was a shopping cart that appeared all of a sudden or a person, you would have an instinctual reaction to do something. But that's because you've thought about it ahead of time. It's because you've, you don't just, we don't naturally, like when you're born, know how to swerve to

avoid something, but you get better at it and you practice at it and you think about it. And some people, there are a lot of things that are instinctual that, like, if there's a lot of time pressure, you want to be able to have trained yourself for that time. I'm trying to think of, so I've, when I worked in software, there were a lot of, like, high pressure, heavy weekends full of tests and you need to be able to run through things quickly and efficiently and know when what was worth stopping the entire show for

and that comes from years of experience or a lot of thought or occasionally if you can't do it by yourself hiring more people to help you with that because you have to know part of being good at something like that is knowing your own limitations

and being understanding that part of your system can be teamwork and cooperation. It doesn't all have to be, even though in chess, everything is yourself, not everything is chess. Tell me about that last sense.

Even though in chess, everything is yourself, not everything is chess. Right. Chess is a, it's a zero-sum game. Someone wins, someone loses. And that's not how life is. Life is often a lot of cooperation. And it's not competition.

And chess is literally black and white. It shows up in so many films. And it's not, life isn't like that. If you're, sometimes you're on a, you know, an eight, eight person project and there's a lot of factors going on that you can't see. There are people that are good at their job. Some people are under a lot of stress in their real life or there are other things. And if you look at it just as a, if you don't switch the board around and look at it from other people's perspective, it may not make any sense. It may look like they're playing the game wrong of whatever it is you're doing.

in life or in work or whatever. I think an important separation came when I realized that everything wasn't chess, that this wasn't, I wasn't out there to just beat everybody around me at whatever it was. It was school or, you know, people that just try to win at life. I think we know those people and most of them are, they aren't people you want to associate with a lot. You like people that understand that multiple,

like there are games in life that multiple people can win. or everybody can win it. And like, there's a terrible example, but like, let's say there's a group of people that go out and play karaoke, they do karaoke. That's not a zero, there's no one winner in karaoke. That is an everybody can win scenario. You don't have to look at everything in life as a, how do I outmaneuver all of my peers and be better than them at everything? It isn't, it is good to take, it's like anything. any hobby or habit, taking what is important from it, but not over-emphasizing.

Like I said, life isn't chess. Life isn't war. Not everything has to be Lao Tzu. Like, now everything has to be the art of war when you're at work. There's a lot of human interaction. There's a lot of, there's just a lot of other factors that aren't covered in something as simplistic as chess. Hmm.

That is a beautiful note. I think we're, we should end it there because I like that as a final wrap. the final bow on it, the final takeaway. Excellent. Well, thank you. Tell us, for all of the listeners who are curious, tell us a little bit about Princess Rat Battles. And for the listeners who aren't familiar with rat battles in general, and Princess One specifically, but Rat Battles in general, can you tell us what they are? Because I actually had never seen one until you and I met, and I looked it up after we met and binge-watched it.

So rap battles in their simplest form are a... lyrical battle, probably between two sides, and it's similar to chess. But online, you can often find rap battle videos. And what we do is we take popular characters that people know and understand. We started specifically with princesses, and we had Snow White and Elsa rap battling against each other. And their viewpoints were Elsa was at the time the new princess, and Snow White represented the old school princess.

So we gave them background princesses to be their sort of hypemen. and the goal is that they duke it out lyrically, where you will sort of almost in a roasting fashion, you will go after someone's weak points and also be sort of braggadocious. So we did one battle in September of 2014, and we put it out, the idea was we wanted to show that we could do high-quality videos of that sort.

It was a proof of concept. Instead, it did really, really well, and people wanted more. And so we have made eight other rap battles since, which I think one of my favorites for those that are into book readings. Do people say book readings? I'm so sorry. We did Catnus versus Hermione, which turned out very well, which was sort of the young adult female heroines battling against each other with their sort of individual takes off. Now, for those of you who are wondering, what is the princess rat battle? And generally, what is a rap battle on YouTube? We got permission to play this one-minute clip from the Princess Rap Battle

YouTube channel that Steve works on. So this comes from YouTube.com slash Whitney Avalon. That's YouTube.com slash Whitney, W-H-I-T-N-E-Y, A-V-A-L-O-N. We're going to link to that channel and this particular video. We're going to link to both of them in the show. notes. This video clip that we're about to play is a rat battle between Katness, the main character from the Hunger Games, and Hermione Granger, one of the main characters in the Harry Potter series. So it's a rat battle between Katniss and Hermione. And the actresses who play these two

characters, one is Whitney Avalon, and the other is Molly Quinn, who plays the character of Alexis Castle on ABC Show Castle. So here we are, a princess rat battle, between Catness and Hermione. Let the rough battle begin. I'm Catniss, and I can't miss. I'm the fastest. You can't catch this. Make a last wish. Gun, I need three cannons for this hat trick. So sick of your shtick.

All I do is win your nitpick. That's why I'm the hero and you're just a sidekick. Pathetic and predictable. I'm hot on your trail. Could have had a victor, but you chose Ginger fail. I bet with one's drawn, he's still just a yawn. With performances worse than Michael Gambon. Got a nimbus up your butt? Well, let's probe deeper.

Never played quidditch, You know I'm a keeper. You must be drunk on butter beer. Now grab a cloak and disappear. Who wants to kick this witch's ass? Hmm, I volunteer! Oh, there'll be no trouble, cause on stage you struggle.

I'll be charming and disarming while I waste this rubbish muggle. I'll end this blasted screw propaganda prostitute who thinks she's so cute with her Girl Scout salute. Just a tribute. Can't decide which guy's sweetest? Share your bread with gale, then stuff your mouth with Peter. How does it help the poor to start a civil war? Your story's a bore.

Why don't you plagiarize more? It's been done before. Ask Dumbledore. It's Battle Royale, such in 1984. And furthermore, if you're keeping score, that's five more points for Gryffindore. That was awesome. Thank you so much for allowing us to play that clip. If you want to see the full video, you can find that at YouTube.com slash Whitney Avalon.

And again, we'll link to that in the show notes, which are available at afford-anything.com slash episode 73. Your YouTube channel now has how many subscribers? How many views? It's like a million views. We're over a million subscribers and we're over 300 million views. And those are just ones on our YouTube channel. There's a ton of people who have ripped our stuff.

It's been all over Facebook. It's all over China. And we try to track what we can. But yeah, it's done very well. And I like to think it's because we put a lot of effort into it because I think it's an easy concept to understand, but we want everything to be filmed well, and we want to have good research lyrics and wardrobe,

and we have everything, at some point in time, I'll tell you about how important it is to have good food on set. That is the most important thing, actually, that I do is I make sure that everyone is fed well, because I understand that about people. You can get great results from them if you pay attention to the little things for them. Yeah. And the major thing that I've thought about,

as I've watched your videos on YouTube, they're incredibly high quality. And as you said, you've created eight of them in total, nine of them in total, since September 2014. So you're going for quality over quantity. Very much so.

And I think that is, I really appreciate that about the work that you do because I think that that is missing from a lot of online content creators. Well, thank you. And truth be told, a lot of that knowledge in the, the appreciation from quality comes from the other jobs that I did coming into it.

I'm sure you've probably had people here talk about the Iron Triangle. We don't have to end on that, but I think the Iron Triangle is super interesting. Do you know what I'm talking about? No, I have no idea, actually. What is the Iron Triangle? I'm not familiar with it. Well, you've seen it, but probably haven't heard it by that name. It is the Pick 2 out of quality, cost effective, and time efficient.

Yes, yes. Good, cheap, fast, pick 2. Exactly. And it is my stance that I never want to leave good because most of YouTube is actually the cheap fast because of the nature of it. And I don't want to compete on that side of things, the cheap fast. But what I do want to compete on is the quality side. And I think that that is our competitive advantage. Nice. Well, Steve, thank you for coming on the show. This has been a really great conversation. And I've loved, since we've had a poker player on the show, I've loved being able to contrast. a lot of what he said with your description of chess as a game of complete information and, you know, how you've taken the lessons from that and applied it to your own incredibly interesting life as an entrepreneur and now as a like filmmaker slash YouTube sensation behind the scenes of a YouTube sensation.

Yes. Well, thank you. I really enjoyed being on the show and it's good to sort of continue our bonfire conversation here. This time without anybody from Public Enemy. around, nor without, you know, any llamas around. Well, next time. We can do that again next time. Bring a llama into the show next time.

Actually, you know, that that llama is technically an alpaca. Ah, that is good to know. Technically correct is a good kind of correct. I'm all for it. Cool. Well, thanks, Steve. All right. Thank you so much, Paula.

Thanks, Steve, for that awesome interview. Now, what are some of the key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Well, here are a few that stood out to me. Number one is the concept of opening theory. In the game of chess, when that game starts, there are a limited number of possible moves that you can make. And yet, despite those limitations, you can lose the game within the first couple of moves. So your objective at the beginning of the game of chess is to not lose the game at the outset. In the game of life, there are a limited number of possible moves that you can make at the beginning.

whether we're talking about the beginning of your adult life, i.e. your late teens, early 20s, or whether we're talking about the beginning of your investing life or the beginning of a new job or a new career or the beginning of your married life or the beginning of your newly single life. You know, in every new era of your life, at the beginning, you can make a few simple moves that will either set you on the right trajectory, the right course, or that can really F you up right from the get-go and make it a lot harder for you to proceed. So in the game of life, for example, getting deep into consumer debt, particularly when you're young, particularly in your 20s, that can really set you back.

Not saving for retirement, again, particularly when you're young in your 20s and 30s, can really set you back. developing a drug or alcohol addiction, or this is Las Vegas where I live, so a gambling addiction, those types of things can really set you back. Now, the difference between life and chess is that in life, it ain't over till it's over. So long as you still have a heartbeat, it's not game over yet. Meaning, as long as you're alive, you can still write the board, you can still win the game. But that concept that comes from opening theory, which is that those first first

couple of moves, despite their limited range, carry pivotal importance. That concept applies, I think, in both arenas, and that was one of the major takeaways that I got from listening to Steve talk about chess theory. After opening theory, of course, comes that muddled middle game, where no one really knows what to do, and even the experts, even the chess masters, even people who have studied this and who spend all day, every day thinking about this, don't really have all of the right answers. I mean, the analogy between chess and life is fairly clear here. The muddled middle game, both in chess and in life,

is the space where we're all just trying to figure it out. And the more you learn about a given topic, whether that's money or business or investing or horses, the more you learn about that topic, the more you realize how little you know. That is the muddled middle game. At this point, this is like kind of a side note tangent, but at this point I've traveled to approximately 45 countries. Most of my friends think that I'm very well traveled.

I feel like the more I travel, the more I realize how few places I've actually been to. Like I've never visited sub-Saharan Africa. I visited North Africa, but I've never visited sub-Saharan. And I've never been to any of the Baltic states. And so when people are like, this is my friend Paula, she's really well-traveled, the thing that pops into my head is like, oh, there are most places I have not seen. Most places I have not visited. There is so much of this world that I still, like, just haven't experienced

and don't have any firsthand knowledge about. And that just, it goes back to the idea, the more you know, the more you realize how little you know. And so anyway, I think I've driven this point into the ground. So we're going to move on to the next takeaway lesson that I gleaned from this interview, which is the concept of the gambit. And a gambit is when you are willing to give up a piece on a chessboard for another win. So you essentially are willing to make a trade-off. if you're willing to trade one piece for another.

And that's the very concept of afford anything, that every decision that you make is a trade-off. And if you decide to buy a rental property, then you're taking that money, the money that you're investing in that rental property, and you are implicitly deciding that you are not going to use that money to buy more shares of a broad market index fund

or to pay off a mortgage that you hold, or to fly to Vegas and just drink champagne and eat caviar for a weekend. Those are all of the trade-offs that you were implicitly making every time that you walk down one particular path. And that's what that gambit is. That gambit is a risk. There's no such thing as a risk-free decision or a risk-free investment or risk-free life because the fact that you are making any choice at all means that you are betting on that choice. So that's the concept of a gambit.

Next key takeaway, and this is a quote that he said that I really liked and I wrote it down, not everybody who does what they love got there by only doing what they love. And so that concept, that quote, is related to the notion of a gambit. Sometimes you have to make tradeoffs, take risks, take bets, do things that you wouldn't prefer to do in order to get to a better place. a big part of how to create passive income is to work hard now so that you can get rewards in the future. And that means that the lifestyle that you have now will not necessarily be your ideal lifestyle. It means that you make certain trade-offs in the short term for the sake of a better long-term future.

That's what I heard when Steve said that line about not everybody who does what they love got there by only doing what they love. And that, to me, is part of the lesson of that the concept of a gambit, where every day we're making choices, we're taking risks, we're making bets, and we're doing so hoping that those bets will pay off in the long run. And they may or they may not, but all we can do is try to figure out that muddled middle game to the best of our ability. A few other key takeaways that I got from this conversation, eliminate your options. Sometimes the way to proceed in the game of chess or in the game of life is not to exhaust yourself with decision fatigue that comes from thinking of every possible option. Sometimes if you eliminate the vast majority of options and you concentrate on the two or three quote unquote best ones, the ones that you think have the highest likelihood of success, you can focus your energy and effort on choosing between just a few options.

If you consider too many options, you may end up stuck in analysis paralysis. And that's not good for anybody, particularly given the fact that this game has a timer. And the longer you stay stuck in analysis paralysis, the more that timer ticks forward. Another key takeaway is to think many moves ahead. Don't just think about what's going to happen in the short term in the next one or two moves. think about what's going to happen five or six or seven moves ahead. And in the game of life, don't just think about what's going to happen in the next couple of months or even in the next year. Think about what the consequences of your decisions will be in the next five years, ten years.

To give you an example of this, I wear sunblock every single day. I have never, never have I ever had a sunburn in my life. I could spend literally 12 hours in full sun and walk away completely fine. So, you know, my friends will often ask me, like, why do you bother wearing sunblock? And I am like the person among my group of friends. And I'm the one who's like sitting in the shade wearing a big hat, like rigorously reapplying SPF 30 every two hours. And my friends are like, why are you doing this? You don't burn.

And my response is always like, well, that's true. don't burn, but I do have the capacity to think more than three days into the future. I understand that there are still long-term implications. There's still long-term damage that I would be doing to myself, despite the fact that I won't suffer the short-term consequences, at least not the same short-term consequences that many of my friends would. And so that to me is an example of thinking many moves ahead. I'm not concerned with what's going to happen in the next three days.

I'm concerned with what's going to happen in the next 30 years. And the same concept, the same like philosophical framework that guides me to rigorously wearing sunblock and staying well hydrated is the same framework that guides me to saving for retirement. That 401K contribution won't do jack for me in the next three years, but guess what? 30 years from now, I'm going to be darn happy that I've got that. And so that to me is the concept of thinking multiple moves ahead. And then finally, the last takeaway that I got from this conversation with Steve that I want to share with you is that there is time pressure because there's a clock that's ticking on that board. And study, practice, familiarity, knowing what you're doing and thinking about what you're doing and thinking about how to think, critical thinking. that can reduce time pressure

and that can help you make better, smarter, wiser, faster decisions. And so again, we get back to that muddled middle game. There are no right answers. But the more you study these topics, the more you think about them and read about them and listen to people talk about them and converse about them, the more time and energy and brain power that you spend analyze which is to break apart, and synthesizing, which is to put back together, the more of that that you devote to a given topic, the more that you will be able to develop an intuition about

what the right decisions are. And once you do that, you can make wiser decisions and you can do so faster and with more confidence. And so that lesson in chess, which is that study and practice and knowledge can reduce time pressure, that constant. also very much applies to money, work, and life. So those are some of the takeaways that I got from this interview with Steve. I would love to know what you think. Head to the show notes at afford anything.com slash episode 73. That's afford anything.com slash episode 73.

And let me know what you thought. What were some of the key takeaways that you got from this? Did you like it? Did you not? Do you have any questions? I would love to hear your feedback. Affordanything.com slash episode 73. Please also do me a big favor.

Head to iTunes and leave us a review. These reviews are incredibly helpful for helping us get more awesome, interesting guests on the show. And while you're there, upvote some other reviews that you think are interesting or beneficial. Finally, please hit subscribe so that you can get updates about this. podcast whenever a new episode comes out. You can subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher. We now have a YouTube channel, YouTube.com slash Afford Anything. So that's new. Yeah. Thank you so much for tuning in. My name is Paula Pan, host of the Afford Anything podcast. I'll catch you next week.