Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 102 | Maria Konnikova on Poker, Psychology, and Reason

Episode Date: June 22, 2020

The best chess and Go players in the world aren't human beings any more; they're artificially-intelligent computer programs. But the best poker players are still humans. Poker is a laboratory for understanding how rationality works in real-world situations: it features stochastic events, incomplete information, Bayesian updating, game theory, reading other people, a battle between emotions and reason, and real-world stakes. Maria Konnikova started in psychology, turned to writing, and then took up professional-level poker, and has learned a lot along the way about the challenges of being rational. We talk about what games like poker can teach us about thinking and human psychology. Support Mindscape on Patreon. Maria Konnikova received her Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University. She is currently a contributing writer for The New Yorker. She is the author of two bestselling books, The Confidence Game and Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes. Among her awards are the 2019 Excellence in Science Journalism Award from the Society of Personality and Social Psychology. She is a successful tournament poker player and Ambassador for PokerStars. She is the host of The Grift podcast. Her new book is The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win. Web site Articles at The New Yorker The Grift podcast Amazon author page Talk on How the Mind Learns Hendon Mob poker database Wikipedia Twitter

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Long-time listeners will know that one of the topics I'm very interested in here on the podcast is thinking, rationality, how human beings cogitate to make decisions about the world. And even longer-term listeners will know that I love using the game of poker as a model for thinking about human rationality. Of course, poker is a very finite, well-defined game. You know what the rules are, you know what the rewards are. But it models a lot of the circumstances that are very important. when we're making hard decisions in our everyday lives. Poker is a game of incomplete information. We don't know what our opponents have. It's a game where there's randomness involved. You don't know what the next card is going to be. It's a game where there probably is a strategy which will at least guarantee you won't lose over the long term,

but you might not know what that strategy is. You have to be a good Bayesian, you have to do your best to model your other opponents, etc. And perhaps most of all, poker is a game where, even if you know cognitively, consciously what the best strategy is, sometimes it can be hard to obey, to follow that best strategy. You can be what in poker terms is called on tilt. Your emotions can get in the way and your rationality can suffer thereby. So the perfect person to talk about all these ideas with is Maria Konnikova, today's guest. Maria got her PhD in psychology at Columbia University, starting with Walter Michal, who was

very famous for the marshmallow test. You know, when you give a small child a marshmallow and ask them if they can avoid eating it while you step out of the room. And the claim is that whether or not the kids can avoid just eating the marshmallow predict success later in life. But Maria decided not to go the academic route

instead becoming a writer, and she became a very successful staff writer at the New Yorker, and then decided that what she really needed to do was up her rationality game, and the best way to do that was to learn to play poker. And not because she was a poker, hobbyist. She literally, as she says, didn't know how many cards there were in the deck. But on the basis of her psychology degree and her work as a writer, she managed to convince

Eric Seidel, who is one of the world's leading poker players, to coach her with the idea that she would get good enough to play in the World Series of poker. Turns out she did way better than that. Not only did she appear in the World Series, she's won hundreds of thousands of dollars playing poker, joined team poker stars as a poker ambassador, and has been very successful overall. in the tournament circuit. All of the story is told, and the lessons for rationality, psychology, and human life are summarized in her new book,

The Biggest Bluff, How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win. I think that this podcast is not about poker, really. We use poker as an example, but it's not teaching you how to play poker. You're not going to learn how frequently to three-bet or whether you should worry about getting check-raised or anything like that. It's about human beings, how they think, how they reason, and in the laboratory of playing poker.

So you'll learn a lot about human beings, maybe even be inspired to go play a few hands of poker while you're at it. Don't forget, there's plenty going on. If you want to go beyond just listening to the podcast, you're welcome to visit the website, preposterousuniverse.com slash podcast, where every podcast has show notes, links to people's books,

and also full transcripts of the podcast. You can also support the podcast on Patreon. You go to patreon. dot com slash Sean M. Carroll. And in return for pledging a dollar or $2 per episode of the podcast, you get to listen to the episodes ad-free, and you also get to ask questions every month as part of a monthly Ask Me Anything. So there's a lot going on during quarantine, during lockdown here, involved with the Mindscape

podcast. I hope that this podcast is doing its tiny little part to keep us all sane and distracted from what's going on all around us. And with that, let's go. Maria Klanakova, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. Thank you so much for having me, Sean. So I guess the obvious question is you have a PhD in psychology. You have a staff writer job at one of the most prestigious publications in the world.

What is it that inspired you to say to yourself, you know what I really want to do is to play poker at a high level? This was not something I had ever seen coming. And had you asked me, you know, five years ago, will you ever be a professional poker player? Will you ever be playing poker on any level whatsoever? My answer would have been ha, ha, ha. Because it's not a lifelong passion of mine. It's not like I've been a poker player from childhood, playing with my friends, playing with my family,

which a lot of professional poker players did do, by the way. If you look at a lot of their stories, you see that they started when they were absurdly young. That's not my case. What brought me to poker was actually just a completely tangential. direction. My last book had come out, the confidence game, and it was doing well. I was doing a lot of media for the book. Everything was great. And then a few months after the book came out, a lot of things just all of a sudden went wrong all at once. I had a major health problem that has still not been

diagnosed. It was some sort of autoimmune thing where all of my hormones just went completely. completely out of whack. And I became allergic to just everything. I couldn't wear clothes, basically. And, yeah, it was pretty bad. My body would just break out in hives randomly. I visited all these specialists. No one knew what was going on.

And this lasted for quite some time. I was just on these horse doses of steroids, and eventually it went away. But to this day, we have no idea what happened. Then my grandmother died, and it was very sudden, just a total freak accident. My mom lost her job, my husband lost his job. Just all of these things happening one after the other after the other.

And none of them are things that we really have any control over. And it really made me just pause and start questioning, you know, what do we really control? What role does chance play in everyday life? And I decided that that's what I wanted to write about, that I wanted to do a book about this. But as you know, you've written books. That's not really a topic for a book. That's just some grand inquiry into the nature of chance. And I'm not, you know, I'm not Chopin-Hauer.

I'm not going to do a philosophical treatise. So I started reading about Chance and someone said, hey, you know, you're interested in Chance. You should check out Game Theory because that's actually a way to look at Chance in a really organized way. So I started reading John von Neumann's theory of games. John Monneumann is the father of game theory and learned that he was not just a poker player, but that poker was the inspiration for game theory.

And that Monneumann very strongly believed that poker was strategically a really wonderful match for strategic decision-making in life in general as a game of incomplete information. And it was the game that most fascinated him because he didn't really love chess. he thought that it was boring because ultimately it was very solvable. There was always a right move and a wrong move. And he didn't like gambling. You know, he hated casino games like roulette, et cetera, because not solvable at all. It's just gambling.

But poker, he felt, was kind of in between where you had incomplete information, but you could very strategically make good decisions. But all the while, there was never, you know, there wasn't quite a solution. So he said, I'm going to solve this. I started becoming fascinated by, you know, what is this poker thing? Why is it? Why did someone as brilliant as Von Neumann think that this held the key to so much? And so I started reading about poker and some light went off.

And that brought me to the biggest bluff. I decided, you know what, this is going to be the book. I'm going to learn to play poker. I'm going to get someone really good to coach me. I'm going to immerse myself in it. and we'll see what happens. And of course, I could never have predicted that I would have actually become good and gone pro. That was now part of the plan. It was supposed to be just a one-year immersion, and it went in a very different direction. And not only did you come from not having grown up

playing poker, but you literally, according to the book anyway, didn't know how many cards were in a deck. Oh, that is true. That is a true story. I am in my first meeting with Eric Seidel, who's one of the best players in the world and became my coach, my mentor, and now is just a good friend. We met over breakfast and, you know, he was very hesitant because he doesn't coach people. He's never coached people before. And what intrigued him was that I wasn't a poker player coming into him looking to get better. I was someone with a clean slate. And he realized just how clean one. I said, well, I know some things. Like, I know that, you know, there are 54 cards in the deck and he just kind of looked that man, I said, what? Did I say something funny? Did I say something wrong? And he, to this day,

he will not let me live that down. And he just jokes over and over. He says, you know, one day those jokers will jump out of the deck. And that will be your day to shine. There are 52 cards in the deck for those of the audience members who are not themselves poker players or card players. Yeah, the jokers don't count. But yeah, I mean, I've heard also the story of von Neumann, one of the great mathematicians and physicists of the 20th century, right? And his interest in mixed games and the balance between randomness and control. But your interest, I guess, at the time, at least at the beginning, was like you said, not to become the world's best poker player, but to sort of think of poker as teaching you something about life more generally. Is that safe to say?

Yes, that's exactly right. I wanted to use poker as a kind of metaphor for. for life to really think through, you know, how, how do we figure out what that line is between what we can control, the decisions we can control, and the things we can't, you know, the, the cards, the outcome, the other players, kind of the things that we don't necessarily have direct control over. As time went on, I actually realized that in some ways, poker was a much better metaphor for life than I could have ever imagined, and that it was also a perfect learning laboratory because I came from an academic background. I have a PhD not just in psychology,

but I studied the psychology of decision making, specifically under conditions of risk and uncertainty, which is very similar to a poker environment. But, you know, what we do as psychologist is we identify all of these problems, all of the ways that people screw up when they're making decisions, the ways that they're irrational. But there aren't that many solutions.

I mean, even someone like Danny Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize for his work in this, And, you know, if anyone knows decision biases, it's connemon. But even he acknowledges that he still exhibits a lot of the same biases and that it's really, really hard to fight them. And as I started playing poker, I had this light bulb moment when I realized this is actually a perfect way to work through these biases and emerge on the other side, a better, less biased decision maker.

because poker actually forces you to sample probabilities over and over and over. And you get to learn, you know, what does 2% feel like? What does 10% feel like? You get to learn all of these things that in day-to-day life we never get to experience. And so it makes you, it forces you to be more precise in your thinking. And it does so in an environment that's controlled. You know, it's not life. Life is messy.

Life is noisy. There's noisy feedback. You can always say, oh, it's not my fault. It's the fault of this or that. And poker's much cleaner because it's a game. It's simpler. And so you can actually work through a lot of these kinks. And what I found as I started playing was that all of a sudden I was making better decisions

away from the poker table, even when my poker playing was still not very good. Well, I thought it was very interesting near the end of the book you mentioned that Nassim Talib of Black Swan fame thinks that the kind of thing you're doing, by learning poker and imagining you can apply it to real life is not a good idea because he thinks that the games are too simple to model reality. Absolutely. He calls it the Luddick fallacy. And he says, you know, don't do this. It's a fallacy. And, you know, whenever you have a Nassim Taleb fallacy, you have to kind of start saying, uh-oh.

Am I screwing up? Am I doing something wrong? And I think that he's absolutely right that poker is too simple. It's not life. But I think that that's where it's strength lies because you can test out so much without the fear of the worst possible outcome. Because the worst possible outcome in poker is that you go broke. Again, you know, if you're playing cash, however much you bought in for that you lose it all. If you're a crazy gambler, you know, you might actually go broke.

But probably unless you're involved with some shady elements, you're not going to die. Yeah, hopefully. And hopefully we hope. And, you know, there are, there's only so much that can happen. It's not like life where anything can happen at any given moment. And so I think that that frees you up to explore, to actually explore different elements of how you can be. You can learn, you know, what does it feel like to be more aggressive? What does it feel like to do this? You can experiment. You can kind of play around with that. you can play around with different decisions, and you can see the immediate feedback in a way that you don't often get a chance to see in life. So I think the simplicity actually makes it a much more

powerful teaching tool, and one that ultimately can be incredibly applicable to life because of the fact that it's stripped from a lot of those externalities that we experience in any other situation that is messy. I mean, I totally agree with Taleb that life is messy, that a game can't model it perfectly, but I just don't see that as a drawback. I see it as a strength. Yeah, no, as a physicist, I'm completely on your side in this difference because, of course, you look at simplified spherical cow models to get sort of a feeling for the basics, and then you can try to tweak it and try to apply it to the messy real world. And the thing that fascinates people about poker is, just like von Neumann would have said, it's in that

balance region where there is randomness. You just can't help it. You can do everything right and lose terribly. The variance is large, but it's also clearly skill, right? And you can see that, well, there's certain people who keep appearing at the winter circle in these tables. Absolutely, absolutely. And the way that I actually explain to people who think, oh, so, you know, you're a gambler. And I say, no, I'm not a gambler. I'm a poker player. It's two very different things. and poker is a game of skill. And the way that I explain the difference between kind of gambling, even like blackjack where you can have a mathematical edge,

but you're still gambling. And poker is that in poker, I can have the best hand and lose and I can have the worst hand and win. And that's a very skillful element. And in no other game in the casino is that the case. And so that to me is just the epitome of skill. And sure, in the short term, you know, luck is huge. I could sit down, you know, with the best player in the world and beat him.

And that's not because I'm suddenly the best player in the world. It's because I got very, very lucky. But if that same player and I were to play together for a hundred hours, you know, a thousand hours, 10,000 hours, the longer the horizon, the more clear it becomes that they are the better player. I won't get lucky over the long term. The variance is going to kind of catch up with me. Yeah, and I think that I like the example that you give that human beings are bad at randomness. We should talk a lot about the different biases that people have because we make mistakes in trying to be rational all the time, and poker does sort of make us face up to them. But one of them is this difficulty in understanding what 2% means, like you said. I mean, I remember even in the last

election when people like Nate Silver were saying Donald Trump has a 30% chance of win. and then he won and people said, well, you see, he was wrong because, you know, there's 70% chance that Clinton was going to win. But 30% chances happen all the time. I mean, even 2% chances happen all the time, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. It's huge. It's huge. I mean, people gave Nate so much crap for that. And I wanted to say, guys, look at how good his model was. I mean, 30% that's immense. That's enormous. It's just, I mean, 30% is just, I mean, it's a lot. It's a hop, skip, and a jump from 30 to 50. Right. And people just, I think one of the other things that poker has really taught me is that

is to be more comfortable with uncertainty because the human mind, this is something that, you know, I've talked about a lot. It's something that as a psychologist, I focus on a lot. The human mind just hates uncertainty. We're very averse to it. We like to resolve it. We don't like to be in this gray world. We like black and white.

We like yes and no. We like to put labels on things. We like to be sure of something. It's funny because my last book was about con artists. And the way that con artists often get people to fall for what they're selling is they give them certainty. They give them actually a story that makes sense. They give them explanations that make sense when people want them. They tell them what they want to hear.

And that's just not the way the world works. Uncertainty is a huge part of everyday life. And we never know everything. And poker just, if you're going to be good at poker, you have to become comfortable in the world of uncertainty. You have to become comfortable knowing that you're never going to have all of the information. And that can be, you know, that's a scary thing.

That's a scary proposition in a lot of ways. And, I mean, probably you're well aware of this from your psychology, background, but one of the things human beings like to do is after the fact, they will come up with the story to why that thing had to happen, right? If whatever happened was just sort of predestined. And it's hard to just say, well, that's the way the cookie crumbled that particular time. Absolutely. Absolutely. We have so much hindsight bias in the way that we analyze information. In fact, when one of the things that I learned while playing poker that I've then applied to other areas of life that I really just encourage people to do if they want to make better decisions

is keep track of your thinking in the moment so that you have a tool to protect yourself against hindsight bias. So, you know, when, for instance, when I'm playing and I know that I'm going to have to talk through a hand with my coach, I think through my rationale, you know, I'm raising here because X, Y, and Z. And I have to keep that in mind. it not only forces me to slow down and actually think through this decision and be reflective about it, rather than reflexive about it and just do it because, oh, this seems like a good place to bet. But then it also gives me something to go back to and say, did I make the decision for the right reason? Because of the decision worked out, it's so easy to say, yeah, of course,

I made it for the right reasons. And it's so powerful to do that because in life we so often just say, oh, well, I knew that, but I did it because of blah, blah, blah. And you didn't know that, right? You're actually rewriting history. All the time. Yep. If you like learning new things, and who doesn't, you might want to check out The Great Courses Plus,

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That's T-H-E Great Courses, plus.com slash mindscape. Start learning a whole bunch of new things today. And one of the things that von Neumann proved, I'm not going to get exactly the theorem correctly, but, you know, a game like poker does have an optimal strategy, right? It has a strategy where in principle, if you played this way, no one else would consistently beat you. But no one knows what that is, right? So we have, on the one hand, this sort of mathy problem of in one situation, what should you do if you were perfectly rational? and then we have the psychology problem of can I bring myself to be perfectly rational in this situation?

And how do you balance trying to learn those two things? Yeah, it's a difficult thing to balance. And I don't think that I don't think we're there yet. I don't know when we'll be there yet. You know, one of the things that I love is that to this day, you know, Von Neumann was so far ahead of his time. But to this day, poker hasn't been solved. Right. Go has been solved. So many things have. And poker actually talked to some AI researchers while I was researching the book to kind of get a sense of what they were thinking. And I had no idea. I knew that there were AI teams working on No Limit Holden, but I didn't know that poker was actually kind of the paragon of AI problems that it was what people used to test AIs against to try to see, you know, how does this work? And even when they can get something close, it breaks down multi-way against many people because, as you were saying, you know, there is this

problem of how rational do I want to be. There's a constantly moving rationality because it's it's different to say I can't be exploited and to say I'm going to win. Right. You want to play so if you know who you're playing against, the best strategy for you is not the game theoretical optimal strategy because you want to be exploiting the weaknesses and the people you're playing against. Absolutely. Absolutely. But if you're playing against someone who's also very good and who understands that, then they might start exploiting you in turn. And you just have this constant dance back and forth. And then you start thinking, oh, did they do this so that I would start exploiting them because they knew I would so that then they could put me in this horrible situation

where they're going to counter exploit me much worse. And it's just this constant iterative analysis. That's why it's so human. That's why it's so difficult. That's why it's so fascinating and beautiful in the end. And the particular way that we failed to be rational at the poker table is called going on tilt, right, when something happens to you

and you, you know, the poker players know that sometimes you're not at your best. And I actually, I think even though I'm a big fan of poker and I've read lots of books about it, yours might have been the first book that pointed out, you can go on tilt in a positive way. Like, things are going too well for you and you become to think that you're a genius as well as things are going terrible

and you just become bitter. Yeah, absolutely. People do tend to think of tells in a negative way. I think the reason that I was able to or that I thought of it in a much broader way is that because my background isn't just decision making. My advisor in graduate school was Walter Michelle, who people might know as the marshmallow guy. he was the man who had the Bing marshmallow studies, how long can you wait for a marshmallow? And he followed these preschool kids for decades and showed that the amount of time that they waited actually predicted a lot of other things in life. And he called this delay of gratification. And I was Walter's last grad student. And I had a chance to work with some of the old Bing students.

and to learn a lot about what self-control looks like and what emotion looks like and what tilt, even though I didn't know the word tilt at the time, it's a beautiful word, right? I feel like we should use it in every context. It's so good and it can be so evocative and it can be used as every single part of speech, which I love. It's perfect four-letter word. But anyhow, after this. that owed to the word tilt, I saw that it could actually, that that emotionality could be from a very positive source. It's not that the kids were mad at the marshmallow or whatever it was they wanted.

It was wonderful. They craved it. It was a very positive emotion, but it impaired their thinking. It impaired their decision making because they were in such a excited state. So when I learned the notion of tilt, I was already looking to see, oh, well, I know that emotions can actually be positive and negative. And if it's an emotion and if it's an emotion that's incidental rather than central to this decision, then it's going to make me less rational. Then it's going to make me take a decision, make kind of a judgment that I wouldn't otherwise make because I'm relying on an emotion that has nothing to do with it.

And so in poker, when most people think tilt, they think, oh, the angry guy. The person who's losing and who's just getting mad at everyone and who's fuming and who just says, oh, fine, you know, you can't bully me around anymore. Watch this. But there's also the player who's winning and who becomes, who thinks this is amazing. Like, I can do no wrong. As you said, I'm a genius. People always become geniuses when they're winning. I mean, it's just, it's crazy. They just suddenly, they know everything. And so if you're making decisions, because you think you're on a role, or if you're making decisions because you feel like you're owed the chips because everything's just going your way. And so you say, oh, I'm just going to call with these two cards because I'm hitting everything. If you start making decisions like that, you're also on tilt because you're also no longer thinking through things in a rational way and you're letting completely incidental things color how you're processing the current situation. Just like probability doesn't have a memory, your stack of poker chips doesn't have a memory.

It doesn't know that you've just won 100 big blinds or whatever it is. Exactly, exactly. They're just chips. And we just, we love imbuing all sorts of things with personality and with meaning and with intention. But so it's just noise. It's just, you know, it's just stuff that does not. care about us. It has no emotions. It has no memory. It doesn't care whether we're winning or losing. You know, the deck doesn't care. It's going to be the deck. But nevertheless, I mean, I agree with all of these things. And yet I, like you and everyone else in the world who has played poker has these experiences where immediately after you do something, or at least 10 seconds after,

you know, like, wow, that was a really irrational thing to do, right? And you can, know what the rational thing to do is, and yet you don't do it. And I guess my two questions, very, very tiny questions, I'm sure you can answer very quickly. Number one, why does that happen? Do we do things that, you know, part of our brain certainly knows is irrational? And number two, are there, you know, practical strategies that you learned from poker or from this journey you were on for doing that a little bit less? Yeah, there's a big difference between theory and execution and there are a lot of steps in between. So I find myself still many, many times.

I can see myself from the outside. I know what the correct move is and I don't make it because usually it's an emotional reason. I'm scared. I don't think it's going to work. I don't want to lose a lot of chips. I don't want to take on the risk. I'm feeling risk-averse.

Or I'm feeling very risk-seeking. And even though I know I should fold and I know the correct decision here, is that I don't have the best cards. I'm just mad at this person. They're just rubbing me the wrong way and I want to do it anyway. And so I do it. And right away I say, oh, my God, I know I should fold right now.

So it happens in both directions. And usually it's an emotional reason. And sometimes it's also an execution problem where you just, you theoretically know, but you don't trust yourself enough. And so in poker, and I think this is true. everywhere in life. If you're not feeling it, it's not going to work because people can see that. They can sense weakness. They can sense hesitation. They can sense when you're bluffing in a sense, even if you're not bluffing. So in a negotiation, if you say, well, you know, I want a raise,

but they can see that you're really scared and you're scared of saying that and that you're not going to walk away. You're not going to get that raise. And it's something where, you're there's this there's a disconnect between what you know you should do what you actually do and then if you do it and that disconnect is still there

it's still not going to work so you need to have everything be in sync and that's difficult so I think the way that one does that is first through practice so you have to just do it over and over and over people who study too much theory of anything whether it's in poker or

in some other arena and don't actually practice, don't actually do these things, don't actually put themselves out there and play hands, whether it's actual hands or metaphorical hands. Without that practice, you're not going to be able to get comfortable. You're not going to be able to execute under pressure. What you're trying to do is get it into that part of your brain where it becomes almost instinct, where it becomes something that's easy for you to do. It's like when you're learning any new skill, think about, you know, something like, well, this is a horrible example for me because I don't know how to drive, but think about what I imagine learning how to drive is for most people.

That at the beginning, you know, you're really, you have to try to coordinate everything. Everything is kind of a little scary. You really have to pay attention to everything. And then at some point, you're really, it all goes on autopilot, so to speak. And things become much easier, and then you can also start executing things that you couldn't do before, like three-point turns, which I still am not quite sure what they are, but I know they're scary.

But this makes sense in sort of, you know, Kahneman's distinction between System 1 and System 2, right? I think it's that System 1 is all the automated, you know, subconscious things going on in System 2 is your conscious cognition that takes a lot of brain power to focus on. And so what you're saying is what we can try to teach ourselves to do is to move as many processes from system two into system one, right? Make them subconscious.

And then that leaves system two with its very precious, finite amount of brain power to think about the important cases that are not automatically solved by our newly found instincts. Exactly, exactly. A lot of it comes down to that. And a lot of it comes down to realizing when we need to put system two online. When I was just starting to play poker, it was really hard for me to execute any sort of meaningful bluffs because I was just so worried about paying attention to everything. And it's also because I had a very good teacher who would tell me, you know, I need you to pay

attention to the stack sizes. I need you to pay attention to how many times this person has raised in the last 10 hands or 100 hands or whatever, just all of these things. And I'm thinking, ah, you know, I can't even find the poker room in the casino. How am I ever going to? How am I ever going to think about all of these things at once? And slowly, slowly, slowly, you start, that's become second nature because you're getting used to doing it.

And then all of a sudden you can think, you start being able to think, okay, you know, are these the right cards to bluff with in this situation? Is this the right time to raise? Is this the right time to make the move? that still doesn't mean you're going to be able to do it because you still might be scared because you might do it once and it doesn't work. You get caught and then you feel sheepish and you don't want to try it again or you don't get caught. It works and then you become a little bit too optimistic and start making mistakes in the other direction. And so it's, you know, you have to keep doing it over and over

and you have to get to a point where it's comfortable and where to me one of the things that actually really helped me and this is very funny because I'm, you know, I'm a psychologist. The last math class I took was in high school. That's not my background at all. I was very nervous, you know, starting poker that I would need advanced mathematics. Eric told me, you know, no, you don't. You'll be fine.

As long as you can, you know, add, subtract, multiply, divide, you'll be fine. But so I always thought my edge was going to be psychological, which it is. However, the thing that actually helped me learn to be more confident in executing bluffs and executing moves in figuring all of that out and actually putting into practice what I knew I should do in theory was working with solvers and working with this highly mathematical thing. I don't need to understand how to run Monte Carlo simulations. The computer can do it for me. But if I do it and if I understand the inputs and understand what I'm working with and then look at the output

and then try to reason through why, you know, why does the computer say that I should bluff with this particular hand, with this particular card, and you suddenly start to see the logic behind it, see the thinking behind it. And then when you're playing, it doesn't feel like a bluff. It feels like, oh, I know that I should do this here with this card this percent of the time. I'm not bluffing. I'm actually just executing the strategy that I should based on what I'm holding, based on what I'm seeing, based on what I'm doing. Of course, it's nowhere in this space, especially for me, especially for someone who isn't mathematically inclined.

But that was very surprising to me that a mathematical tool actually helped me psychologically be able to be more confident about some of these situations where I, in the past, couldn't execute, where I couldn't quite pull the trigger. It does make me wonder, because I'm wondering about, you know, again, why we do have these failure modes or these mistakes. Kahneman talks, I think, a little bit about how some of our heuristics and our instincts have evolved for certain reasons. But it almost sounds like what we should be aiming for at the poker table is to remove

emotions from our decision-making process entirely, right? To become SPOC or data as much as possible. And maybe that is a difference between playing poker and living our lives. Absolutely, absolutely. But I actually think that what we should aspire to do is, first of all, I think we should realize that we can't remove emotions entirely because we're emotional creatures. We're human. And it's not always good. It's not always the right thing to do to remove emotion from a situation. There was a lot of work that was done by Antonio Demosio, neuroscientist on something called the Iowa gambling task. I won't get into that task because that task has a lot of problems with it, but it was since replicated in other gambling environments. And he looked at people who actually had cortical damage,

whose brains did not process risk. So they had no risk aversion whatsoever. And they ended up not doing well. They went broke. So people who just couldn't experience the fear of risk at all, went broke and did not make good decisions. And so sometimes emotions are actually important, right? Sometimes emotions keep us from going broke. They're there for a reason because they're central to the decision. So I think what we need to learn is to actually be more mindful and more self-reflective

and pay more attention to ourselves as we play so that we can, one, identify when we're feeling an emotion, to figure out what the emotion is and where it's coming from so that we can, 99% of the time we want to discard it and say, okay, emotion, I see you're here, I'm going to put you aside. I know I'm feeling you, but you're not important for my decision. Let me just put you here and make my decision without you. And then that 1% say, okay, you're actually telling me something important. Maybe I should listen to you. You know, maybe it is time for me to step away from the table because I'm just not capable of thinking,

clearly right now because I'm too angry. I can't control it. I can't actually put it aside or whatever it is. So I think it's a lot of it is about learning to see those, to see kind of those patterns, those thought patterns, those reaction patterns in yourself so that you can then just account for them and acknowledge them and then put them aside and make a decision without them. Let me pause for a second to talk about policy genius, a wonderful online website that makes it easy to understand how to buy insurance. You might not be thinking right now about something like life insurance or auto insurance, home insurance. And even if you do think about it, it can be intimidating. There's a lot of red tape.

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PolicyGenius will find you the best rate. they will handle the process completely. They'll get you and your family protected and hopefully give you one less thing to worry about. Yeah, and the idea of bluffing is probably one of the regimes in poker where emotions come in pretty strongly. And I remember being very impressed by when I first appreciated it. I think it was von Neumann who proved that whatever the best strategy is

in a game like poker, it's going to be a mixed strategy where you don't do the same thing every time in exactly the same situation. And that is exactly the kind of thing human beings are just not very good at judging. And so you have to be in a situation where you know what the on average best play is and yet not do it sometimes. And I don't know whether, you know, there's probably some mixture of bringing emotions into the game because you want to be a little bit of a daredevil, but also suppressing the wrong emotions in these kinds of times. Absolutely, absolutely. And we are, I mean, we are very bad at mixed strategies. And oftentimes we think we're randomizing. That's a very popular term in poker these days that you're randomizing your strategy. You know, 25% of the time I do this. So 75% I do that. And we don't normally. It's very hard for humans to do that. And so what a lot of actually the best players do is they have some sort of randomizer so that they, for instance, I know a lot of players look at a watch. And they look at where the second hand is. And they look at.

and they have, you know, because they can look to see, you know, if it's between, you know, 12 and 1 or 1 and 2, et cetera, then they have their randomizer. And if it happens that 10 times in a row, they're doing the play that they don't really want to be doing, well, so be it, because they just look at that and that's what they're doing. And that's true randomization or as true as you can get at a poker table. But it's still incredibly difficult. And yeah, emotion really does play into it. That's why we don't randomize correctly. That's why we don't mix well because we often just say, oh, I know that I'm supposed to do this whatever percent of the time.

I feel like doing this right now. So I'm just going to do it. But I actually have a theory about this because I know about that trick of looking at your watch with the secondhand to randomize. But we also know that human beings are bad at feeling what real random sequences are like. Part of me thinks that what we should be aiming to do is not to be random, but to appear random. We should try to give the opponents at the table the appearance that we do something 30% at the time, whether or not it's actually that way. So I kind of think that it would actually be better just to judge, well, I've done this the last three times, and I know that I should do it only three out of four times.

So next time with 100% probability, I'm going to do the other thing. I think that's really smart. When I was researching the biggest bluff, I met this man who's a really fascinating thinker, whose name is Frank Lance, and he runs the Gaming Center at NYU. I should say that both Antonio DiMasio and Frank Lance are previous Minescape guests, so the audience just know about them. That's great. Okay, excellent.

So I had a chance to talk to Frank Lance, and he has done a lot with game design. And what he told me is that actually a lot of people, when they're designing games, they design the probabilities incorrectly on purpose because they know that the human mind doesn't experience real probabilities in a good way. So they know that players will get frustrated, you know, if it's really random and they're just on a losing streak. And so they actually skew it. They skew their randomizer, so it's not truly random. One of the reasons he loves poker is because you can't do that. in poker and poker. Poker is a naturally random game.

And so he thinks that it forces us to acknowledge that and that it forces the human mind to actually kind of take that into account and to be, just to hit over the head with it and deal with it. And he actually thinks that it's a perfectly designed game, but one that modern game designers would never design because people, players would actually just rebel and say this is rigged.

And if you think about it, think how many times people play poker online and say, this is rigged. This is a rigged site. How can I keep losing over and over because they don't understand that true probabilities can look like that and that sometimes, yeah, you get quads four times in an hour on a table. And the flip side of that is that, you know, we can say how poker is a merciless teacher and makes you try to be as rational as possible. Yet we both know real poker players and some of them are pretty darned emotional and

convinced that all the luck in the world goes against them, right? We can name names. Absolutely. Absolutely. We will not name names. I got, you know, talk about luck. I got so damn lucky that Eric Seidel was the person I wanted to coach me and that he said yes. Because he is just one of the calmest, just most even-keeled people you'll ever meet. He just, he does not tilt. And the fact that he would just nip all of those bad thought habits in the bud for me. That was so powerful because I wanted to do the same thing. You know, I would start telling him bad beat stories. And for non-poker players, bad beat stories are basically when you should have won,

but you didn't. Someone sucked out on you or, you know, set over said. You know, someone had higher cards than you and just the world won against you and you want to start ranting and raving. And the first time I tried to do that, he yelled at me. I mean, it's very hard to imagine if you've ever met Eric Seidel raising his voice. But he came as, it was as close to a yell as I've ever heard. And he explained to me that this was just a really, really horrible way of thinking,

that I should not dwell on that because, yeah, that happens. That's just variance. I can't control the outcome. And so it's a bad mental habit and it's going to make me a worse player. And I think he's absolutely right. because if you keep dwelling on the bad beats, it's going to affect your decisions. It's going to affect your emotions. I mean, it's going to make you a less pleasant person to be around.

But it also just actually affects how you process hands and how you process information. And I'm so grateful to him, even though in the moment, you know, I was pretty upset and I wanted to just let him, you know, have him listen to me. I'm so grateful to him because these days, you know, I don't remember how I bus tournaments most of the time. unless it was a very interesting hand. I don't even remember those hands because all I remember is when did I make an interesting decision? You know, when were there interesting thought problems?

What went wrong or what went right? How could my decision improve? Not what the outcome was. And Eric would always say, you know, I can listen to the hand. I want you to tell me the hand if you have a question about it, if there's something interesting.

And he even, so when we discuss hands together, he doesn't care how it ended. After my river decision is done, he doesn't care if I want or lost. In fact, he doesn't even want to know. That information is totally irrelevant. All he cares about are the decision modes leading up to it. And I think that's so powerful. And that really, it's very, also, it's very freeing. Because if you just think that way about everything, not just poker, it really helps you, I think, let

of things and just be a much more even-keeled person. Now I understand why Eric is such just a Zen Master. Well, I think Zen Master is exactly the term I was going to bring up. I mean, it's almost monkly or saintly, this idea that the process and what we do is what we should be focusing our judgment on, not the outcome. I mean, in the real world, the idea of being results-oriented sounds like a compliment, right? But poker players use it as an insult because you care about what the result was, not whether or not you made the right decision. Absolutely. Absolutely.

And being results oriented is one of the worst mistakes you can make as a poker player because it's going to stop you from improving because you're going to take the wrong information and you're going to draw the wrong conclusions. You know, if a really bad decision works out a few times, you're like, oh, I should always do this because they always fold here. And no, you just got very lucky. You got lucky twice. And that that's all that happened.

You made really, really bad decisions. And so it's so important not to be results oriented. And it also keeps, I think, one of the reasons that Eric has had the longevity that he's had is because he's been very savvy about managing his money, even when he's winning. Because he knows what variance looks like. He knows that no matter how much he wins now, that doesn't mean. he's going to keep winning at the same rate. So many players who could have been great players just went broke because they go on a hot streak. The variance is in their favor.

They make a lot of money and then, whoops, they stop winning. But by that point, they've already spent it all. Right. And there they go. There goes their career. So I think that it's important not to be results oriented, not just when you're playing poker, but to then take that thinking in a broader way. Well, and that's a lesson where maybe slightly.

less confidently, but we can apply it to broader questions of outcomes and results in life, right? There are people who, you know, do take wild risks. Many of them fail and we never hear of them. Some of them do really, really well. And in their minds and the minds of the rest of the world, they're geniuses and could do no wrong. But if you, you know, if a million people flip a bunch of coins, some of them are going to get ten heads in a row. Absolutely. Absolutely. And then, you know, the ones who are successful, write books and use hindsight bias to explain exactly why they were successful and then other people try to do it because you're choosing on the dependent variable, which you know you cannot do.

You need to have, exactly. You know you need to have all those other cases. Okay, well, what about all the companies that did everything you're doing and failed or all the people who did everything you're doing and failed? And it's so hard for us to think that way. We look at the success stories and we want an explanation. We want certainty. We want a story. We want a narrative. We want to know what brought you from point A to point B. And it's so easy once the success is there to supply the reasons. And this is very unlike academia or journalism where the best people inevitably rise to the top for reasons of value and virtue.

Absolutely. Always. Just how everyone knows. Yeah. Just so everything. And podcasting also. Yes. Oh, absolutely. Speaking of which, you were a trained psychologist and this was, I guess, your pitch to Eric Seidel, one of the world's best poker players, like you're slightly bringing a slightly different angle to this. Did it help? Did being a trained psychologist, you know, when you sit down at the table, once you know the basic mathematical formulas and probabilities, were you able to psychologize your fellow players a little bit? And was that a useful skill? Absolutely. I actually do think that being an outsider more broadly, but a psychologist and a journalist really helped me. So the psychology part helped me identify a lot of the things and a lot of the dynamics that I was seeing. And so I had a framework within which to work so that I knew, you know, I could not just see the bias. I could name the bias. I knew what was happening. And it helped me address it better. because I had this metacognitive awareness that I think a lot of people who are playing at the poker

table don't have simply because that's not their background, that's not their framework, that's not the way they think through things. But I think that that really helped. And also knowing how people can tilt in a lot of different ways helped me identify positive tilt, helped me identify all of these dynamics. So Walter Michelle, my advisor, he had this theory that basically we all only exist within situational contexts, and we're different people in different contexts. And what you need to know in order to figure out, well, what kind of a person is this,

is to have something that he called a behavioral signature for them, given that this happens, what happens then? So he'd say something like, you know, there's no such thing as a person who's risk-seeking. There's a person who's risk-seeking in certain environments, but maybe in other environments, that person is very risk-averse. There's no such thing as a person who's just sociable 100% of the time. You might be very extroverted, you know, very outgoing love people. But believe me, I will find that

person with whom you are not only not sociable, but you become, you know, the least sociable person in the world. I will find that situation. And so having that sort of background and having that sort of approach to people really helped me, I think, identify dynamic. at the table that other people might have missed. And I actually use it a lot in the sense that I talk to people. I talk a lot at the poker table, not when I'm playing. When I'm in a hand, I don't talk at all. But when I'm sitting, you know, I get to know people. I try to figure out, you know, where are you coming from? Why are you playing? What's motivating you? I try to get at some of their inner psychology because that helps me understand them. And that helps me understand why they might make certain

decisions why they might make certain plays. I've gotten much better at it over time. In the beginning, I was bad, just flat out bad because I wasn't quite sure what I was looking for. And I didn't know poker. And so I lacked part of that context. But I think over time, I got much better. And then the journalist part of me, I think was incredibly helpful because I'm used to listening. I'm used to being in the background and just letting people tell me their stories. And at the poker table, it's so valuable not to have your own ego at the table and to just look at everyone else and let them tell you what their stories are. I think that's one of the things that actually is my biggest edge is that I try to keep my ego out of it.

Well, one of the great things about your book, I think, is that you seem to delight, you take a special pleasure in talking about your failures when something went terribly wrong. But that's what's educational, right, to the rest of us. And one of them was that, you know, early on in your career, you would make what I, this maybe this is a term of art in psychology, but you called thin slice judgments where basically judging someone on their appearances and leaping to a conclusion too quickly and ignoring contrary signals. So that's another thing that poker, I guess, teaches us to be better at. Oh, absolutely. And yes, this is a term of art in psychology where you use a thin slice of someone to then just make a judgment about everything. And there are so many stories I

could tell you about poker, but usually they involve guys in tank tops and with big biceps and tattoos. I mean, that's usually, and usually facial hair too. That's how a lot of these stories start. But also, or little old ladies, right? I mean, there are things. Or little old ladies. Yes, that too. That too. Or little old ladies. And those are kind of the two strongest, but boy was I wrong in so many instances where I just saw a guy like that and I'm like he's a bully he's going to be like a total poker bro he's going to be trying to and a lot of times they're not they're just normal players or sometimes they're even very tight and like they aren't aggressive at all and if they're aggressive you have to be really careful and the little old ladies you know even though that they think you think that they're your best friend and that they're harmless and that they're so nice and sweet and wonderful if they're a good poker player and a lot of them are, they will then throw that right back at you. And there's no female solidarity either. Nope, they'll be telling you that you're a sweet young darling while they're counting your chips in their stack, right?

Exactly, exactly. I mean, there's a saying in poker. There are no friends at the poker table. And it's so easy to forget it. I mean, I've forgotten it so many times. I still sometimes forget it because, you know, I don't want to be mean. You want to be friends, but nothing personal. You can't possibly be bluffing me.

I mean, we were having such a nice conversation. I know. Well, Jennifer and I both like playing poker, but we won't play at the same table in the casino together. It's just asking for trouble. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that that's a very wise policy. I hope you're never at a table in the tournament together.

There have been some interesting situations with, I don't know if you know the Greenwood brothers, Sam and Luke. They are identical twins. And sometimes they're seeing. and they're both high-stakes tournament players, both really nice guys, really ethical. There's never been any hint of anything untoward between the two of them, but it's awkward, right? You're sitting right next to your identical twin.

You're like, okay, I'm going to have to bluff you because that's what's going on. And they do. They do not soft play each other. Sometimes it's just vicious when you watch them on a TV table, or you're like, ooh, ooh, that's awful. You can see it happening. Yeah. Well, one of the themes in your book that's relevant to this is you're sort of, you have a search for the right metaphor to bring to your adventure as a poker player. Like you started off, I forget, but there was like you were an army general and then you were a jazz musician and a detective and then eventually a storyteller, right?

I mean, you realize that, and this was in your wheelhouse. Like when you look at these people who you're playing with, telling an inner story about who they are and more specifically telling a story, about that particular hand and the actions they took in it was very helpful in deciding how to respond? Absolutely. You're so right. I really, I mean, I tried on so many hats as I went on this journey. And it was, it was so funny to realize that at the end of the day, storytelling, which is what I've always done, is the thing that can serve me the best. I mean, sometimes you have to, you realize that the tools you already have are the ones that really do work incredibly well. And this was actually an insight that I got from Phil Galfond, who is also just this wonderful

poker player, great guy, who spent a lot of time working with me as well. And at some point, you know, he told me to try to use what I already know, to try to use my storytelling skills. And when he said that, that actually made something click because I realized, you know, everyone does tell stories at the poker table. Every single action is part of a narrative. And that helps you, when you're thinking about how other people play, it helps you analyze it because you're not trying to think, okay, you know, the probability of him, you know, blah, blah, blah is X. Because as we've already talked about, most people aren't rational, aren't playing in such a very strict game theoretical way. They're human and they're trying to tell you a story. So you look for inconsistencies. You look for

what they've said, you look for, you know, does everything add up or not? And it also helps you play better because you start thinking, okay, does my story make sense? And what's the story I want to tell? And how do I tell it from the beginning? It helps you lay out your plan of attack. It helps you lay out your strategy before you make the first move because you have to think through the whole story. you have to think through the whole narrative. And like with any story, you have to be willing to change. So sometimes, you know, you're writing and you realize that your outline was wrong, right? That what you thought was going to happen in this piece or in this book isn't what's happening.

And then you have to reevaluate. And I think that that kind of flexibility is also very important in poker because you could have the story, the outline, the idea for hand, you know, what's going to happen. And then the information just changes drastically. And you need to be willing to then scrap it and say, okay, well, what was the story I was telling? How does this new information fit into it? And can I adjust it or not? And sometimes the answer is no. And that's when you know, okay, I need to give up.

Yeah. This is not a story that's going to end. I remember when I started playing poker, one of the dumbest things that I would do was I would, you know, 20 minutes or half an hour had gone by and I had not bluffed at all. so I would decide before the hand started that I was going to bluff this hand. And that's just not good because if you learn a little bit, you realize there are good places

to do that kind of thing in bad places and you have to be able to adapt to that story in real time. Another thing that human beings are just bad at, right? Like we tend to make a plan and bullheadedly go forward with a plan. Absolutely, absolutely. We tend to not always be the most flexible creatures. No.

And we often don't like reacting to new things and new developments and new circumstances. Once again, I think it's that aversion to uncertainty. You know, we have a game plan and we want to follow the game plan. Don't try to tell me the game plan has changed. I've prepared for this game plan. And it's a skill. I think it's something that we can all learn.

We can all be better at. I mean, it's something that I am still working on every day. I think all of these elements that you learn in poker are things that you just have to keep working on. And I think the moment that you say, I've mastered this is actually the moment you should be really scared. Yeah. Because none of these are things that I think ever can be mastered fully. Well, we should give our listeners who are either current or potential poker players some tangible advice that they can use to improve their games. So I was thinking you can give whatever advice you think is most interesting.

but I was going to ask about tells, about the idea that something someone says or does or gestures or facial expressions at the poker table can give away whether they're strong or weak or bluffing or telling the truth. Do you think, is that a real thing? Is that something that the experts rely a lot on? I think tells are a real thing and I think that they're underused. That said, I think that at the highest levels, there are far fewer tells than at the lower levels because the better a player is, the fewer tells there are. And a lot of times, tells don't look like what you think they're going to look like. So a lot of times people are looking at things like, oh, you know, did he fidget? Did he do this? Did he do that?

Oh, he looked up. And I've heard that looking up is a sign of lying. And things like that, like just gestures and very specific things. most of the time those are too noisy because in order for a tell to tell you anything, it needs to be something that's reliable. And for that, you need a lot of observation and frankly just don't have enough time at a poker table to get enough instances to know whether something is actually a tell or noise. But the way that tells, I think, work much better is if you start looking at deviations from behavior,

So just pay attention. I mean, my number one piece of advice is pay attention to all of the players. It's really hard if you're sitting at a full table. So start with the two players to your left because those are the players that you'll be playing with most often because you are the button when they're the blinds. And so you'll just automatically be in pots with them more often than with other players at the table. And just start. watch them and look how are they sitting, how are they acting normally when they're not playing, how are they acting in a hand, and try to get all of the data that you can. So whenever a hand goes to showdown, whenever you actually see what they had, think back through how they acted and how they played that hand, you know, were they bluffing or not, because you have some concrete evidence and then you can actually start drawing some sort of kind of some sort of vague connection and then what you want to be looking for is any deviations from how they normally behave. So if they're normally sitting in one way and then suddenly their posture has shifted,

it might shift differently for every single person. And so that a shift in posture in and of itself of someone's suddenly sitting more still or someone's more moving more, that doesn't mean they're bluffing or not bluffing. What about this specific person, you know, have they acted this way before? And if not, you know, try to figure out what does it mean based on the information you have? And even then, be careful. Well, but that's the hard thing. If someone does something very much out of character, it could be because they're either really weak or really strong.

It's just that they're not in the middle. Exactly. That's why I said try to look at showdowns, you know, try to see if that happens. when they show a hand down and you see were they strong or were they weak. But like I said, even then be careful because that should not be the thing on which you base your decision. It should be kind of the drop in the bucket if you need more information. So I try not to have a tell be the thing that I rely on the most. Under rare circumstances, people have tells that are real.

So I had, I once played with a guy who, when he was weak, you could just tell. His whole posture just shifted. And it was, it was so funny. And I just, I was so sad when we were moved to different tables because I loved playing with him. But that's rare. It's more like the tiebreaker. I mean, you still got to like figure out what your percentages are and how you're exactly, exactly.

A tiebreaker is a wonderful way of looking at it. But I do, I mean, I do think it's important. to pay attention to how people are acting, because sometimes you'll also pick up on cues that you don't even realize you're picking up on. Okay. But also, and also, I mean, the the exhortation to pay attention is very crucial because over and above the tells, right, you're building up a model of this person, you know, how they act in different circumstances.

And it might have, it might be completely based on their actions, not on their facial expressions, their actions in the sense of what their bets and raises are and stuff like that. But people are different, and that's kind of crucial. Absolutely, absolutely. And then one of the other things that I write about in the book that I won't go into detail now, but that I think is fascinating, is that paying attention to people's hands can actually be one of the physical things that is the most telling. So people tend to move differently, tend to move their hands differently

when they're different degrees of strong. I think that's really interesting. So if you're one of your goals anyway at the beginning of, was not just to win hundreds of thousands of dollars in poker tournaments, but to learn to be better thinker and reasoner and so forth. Did it work? Is the rest of your life affected by the training you have in poker? And can other people, you think, improve their mental game by practicing at the poker tables? Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, my thinking has become so much stronger, just around everything. And

I just, I feel a difference in how I approach situations, you know, how I break them down, in my ability to really try to gauge the quality of a decision without looking at the outcome, without thinking about the outcome. That's not something that I was good at before. And I mean, sometimes it's still really difficult to think that way, but at least I try. I've become much better at identifying my emotions. I think I've become a much stronger person because I've had to confront a lot of kind of internal issues I've had that would make me much more passive at a poker table.

That would make me fold. That would make me kind of play in a suboptimal way because I've had to confront it in poker. I think that has made me more able to confront it in my personal life. So I've had some negotiations where I was able to get more money than I otherwise would, for instance. Like a very practical thing came out of it. That was only because I was thinking in these kind of post. poker terms. And I think, especially right now with, you know, everything going on in the world, the fact that I think poker has really made me realize and try to internalize a lot of the

tenets of stoicism that I'd studied as an undergrad, but never really understood what, what it meant. I think that that's really served me well, you know, the idea of controlling what you can and focusing on those things that you can control and then letting go of the things that you can't realizing, you know, the world is going to happen, bad things are going to happen, good things are going to happen, just things are going to happen. I can't control them. So let me focus on the things that are actually within my power. Let me work on honing my skills in the areas where they're actually going to be helpful, the quality of my decision process, the quality of my emotional reactions of the way.

that I think and respond. And the outside world, well, I can't control that. So let me not expend my emotional energy. Let me not expend my mental space trying to worry about it too much. Yeah, no, I think that's a super valuable lesson. But it brings me back to something that I said before, but I'll raise it again, because there are some poker players that seem to live up to that ideal of sort of Zen-like detachment. And then you found in Eric Seidel,

a mentor, maybe Dan Harrington, who you also talk to for the book, is like that. But there's a lot of very successful poker players who just seem like crazy thrill seekers in some way, right? And even if they win a million dollars, they lose it playing Baccarat the next day. So there's clearly some weird balance, give and take, or maybe it's just an ability to turn on and turn off that irrational thrill seeking. that you need to be able to say, you know what, I have a really bad hand, but I think I can force this person to fold, so I'm just going to make a crazy bluff.

And that's, I don't know whether Zen-like attachment is the right attitude to bring to that. No, I think that's a very valid point. And I think that if you're the kind of player who knows exactly why you're running a crazy bluff and you're doing it with a very, very logical approach. I mean, even an Eric Seidel or Dan Harrington, it's perfectly capable of executing an insane bluff in the right moment against the right person. They don't just do it

because they feel like this is the moment to bluff. They don't do it for irrational reasons. And I do think that a lot of players who are really great poker players and then not so great at life, they're capable of doing that at the poker player, at the poker table, but then they just they turn it off somehow. They don't, they don't apply it to any other context. I talked earlier about kind of this metacognitive awareness. Well, they don't have it. You know, for them, they can do it at the poker table and then they just let it all go somewhere else. Someone else who I met during the process of writing this book, who unfortunately died as I was writing, it was one of Eric's mentors, Paul McGrill, known as X-22. And X-20, and X is a perfect example of

someone who was brilliant at games, horrible in life, knew it, and it was still the case. He couldn't quite get over it. Because human beings are complicated messes of different little sub-processes, right? We're not unified singular cogitos or whatever. We have different parts to ourselves that we bring to different situations. Exactly. We're complex. It's shades of gray.

It's not black and white. There's a lot of uncertainty. there's a lot of unknown and there's just there's a lot of complexity there. And I think that that's a wonderful thing. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. We should celebrate it. But so to finish up, I mean, I'm not even sure if this is a question or just a statement

that maybe you can expand upon, but aside from poker and aside from rationality and emotions and bringing them into line and things like that, your book is also a story about just taking a wild leap into learning something not as a young kid that is a completely different world, right? You know, it's a testament to the excitement and the potential downfalls sometimes of just throwing yourself wholeheartedly into something that is pretty alien. I mean, what are your feelings about that

having done it? You know, you tell these great stories about going on helicopters in Monte Carlo and casinos in Macau and so forth. Yeah, I mean, I think that's absolutely true. It was a huge leap and it just scared the crap out of me in every single way, both because I took an established career and said, I'm going to put you on hold and I'm going to just go into this crazy world. And so many people I respected told me I was insane. They said, you know, you can't stop writing regularly for the New Yorker. Everyone's going to forget your name.

They're going to forget who you are. You need to be in front of people. You need to build the momentum of your career. You need to build your reputation. You can't do this. Other people would say, well, if you're going to pull a George Plimpton and go all experiential journalism, why poker? I mean, it's gambling. It's horrible.

It's this awful thing. Why go into that world? And so I had a lot of these thoughts in the back of my mind. I said, you know, this might be a terrible mistake. And I was really scared. And then I was really scared also to write this book because I'm not a first person journalist. You know, normally I only write about other people. I don't use I.

I don't remember the last time I used I in a piece I wrote. And this book was going to be completely different. And so that was also a huge leap of faith for me. I didn't know if I'd be able to pull it off. I didn't know if people would like it. I didn't know if people would like my voice. I didn't know what my voice was in that context. So all of it was really scary.

And in a weird way, that's how I knew it was something I really wanted to do. Because the way that I've actually approached a lot of my life is that new things should be scary. And if you're not scared, that means that you're not challenging yourself enough. That means that you're just not going to grow because you're staying too much in your comfort zone. And I've done a few, you know, crazy career things in my life. I moved to New York with just no money whatsoever. I became a bartender. I took a job for $23,000 a year in New York so that I could write.

And a lot of these things didn't quite work out. I think I went through like five jobs in my first year out of college. But I think, and it was always scary. But I always thought, you know what, let me do it. And I'm very, very lucky. in the sense that even though I don't come from a wealthy family at all, I mean, I grew up just in a poor family and now they're nicely middle class. but, you know, we came from the Soviet Union. We had nothing.

We were just political refugees. And so I never, it wasn't like my parents would say, oh, don't worry, you know, we'll pay your rent. They couldn't. They would love to, but they couldn't. But they are the most supportive, loving people, and they've always had my back. And so I knew that, like, if shit had the fan, I could always just go home, right? I could always just, I had parents who were there. And, you know, they said, we can't pay your rent, but you can't.

come move back in with us. You know, we can't give you this, but we love you and we support you. And the reason we moved to this country is so that you could do whatever you wanted, not so that you'd be a doctor or a lawyer. My sister's already a doctor, so it made it, you know, made it to do that. But so that you could do what you want to do. And I think I don't want to underestimate and understate how important that was, knowing that I had that emotional backing. I think it made me much more able to take risks that not everyone has the luxury of taking. Yeah, I mean, it's once again a mixed strategy, right? I mean, it's a little bit of a balance between being responsible,

understanding that there is a backup plan and so forth, but not just being complacent, not just doing the same thing over and over again. I think it's too easy to be either a crazy gambler or a stodgy stick in the mud. and keeping things interesting without inviting disaster is a tricky balance and worth trying, worth aiming for. Absolutely, absolutely. I think that's, if I can keep meeting that goal throughout my life, I think it will be a life well lived in a lot of ways. Me too, and I think the book is a great success, and people who read it will get that feeling and the excitement will come across. So Maria Konnikova, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast.

Thank you so much for having me, Sean.