The Daily Stoic - Ask Daily Stoic: Ryan and Maria Konnikova Talk Poker, Psychology, and Focusing on What You Can Control

Episode Date: July 15, 2020

Ryan speaks with writer, psychologist, and poker champion Maria Konnikova about how she uses Stoicism to win big at Texas hold’em, and how you can use knowledge of human psychology to make better choices, whether it’s in Las Vegas or elsewhere.Maria Konnikova is an award-winning author who has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Wired, and many other outlets. Konnikova has also made a career as a poker player, winning hundreds of thousands of dollars in tournaments around the world, drawing upon her knowledge as a Columbia University-trained Ph.D. psychologist.Get Maria Konnikova’s latest book, The Biggest Bluff: https://geni.us/XhsrPVNew York Times review: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/books/review/maria-konnikova-the-biggest-bluff.html***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Maria Konnikova: Twitter: https://twitter.com/mkonnikovaInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/grlnamedmaria/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mkonnikova/Homepage: https://www.mariakonnikova.com/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoke podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic. For each day, we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good life. of necessary for living good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women. For more, you can visit us at dailystoic.com. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wonderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoke podcast. It must have been four years ago now. Maybe more. I was in New York. I was supposed to talking at a conference put on by Adobe. The series is called 99U, and I was giving a talk on how stoicism applies to creativity or so.

Stoicism for creatives, so that's like designers and artists and freelancers and writers and stuff like that. I think the talk is online somewhere, if you Google it, and I've also written a bunch of articles for 99U over the years. Anyways, often when you do these talks, there's a private dinner afterwards with interesting people who are talking.

It's one of the perks is you get to go meet all the speakers. It's usually before the conference or after, so everyone's calm and cool and not trying to focus on the work thing. It's just that I've met some people who the relationships have totally changed my life. So this one was awesome. AJ Jacobs was there who I've gotten to know over the years. And someone else was supposed to be there. I was very excited.

We were supposed to sit next to each other at the event. Maria Connecova. She's a writer for the New Yorker. I'd read a lot of her stuff on sort of con men and confidence games. She's a fascinating line of research she's been on, she'd been on over the years. She was supposed to be there.

And mysteriously she wasn't. And I remember I asked the host, like, where is Maria? I was really looking forward to meeting her. And he said, you never believe this. She is working on this project. And she's started playing poker professionally on the side. And she's gotten so good that she's like winning poker

championship, she's making hundreds of thousands of dollars. And so she just couldn't be here tonight. She had like a poker game or something like that. And I said, what's insane? How could that possibly be true? How could that, what, like, who leaves a writing job at the New Yorker to play professional poker? And how could they possibly compete against people

who do this professionally? Well, needless to say, I had no idea what I was talking about and I didn't get to meet Maria that night, but I did get to read her new book, The Biggest Bluff. How I learned to pay attention, master myself and win, which is all about that journey. And then I had her on the podcast, which you'll be able to listen to.

As it turns out, Maria is a big fan of epictetus, this dichotomy of control, the distinction between what's up to us and what's not up to us. It's actually a fundamental part of her training. She's the author of the book, Mastermind, and the confidence game. She's a contributor writer for the New Yorker, written for the Atlantic, the New York Times,

Slate, the New Republic, Paris Review, Washington Journal, a bunch of other awesome places. She was one, a bunch of awards. Her podcast, The Gryft, has also earned a National Magazine Award nomination, she graduated from Harvard, has her PhD in Psychology from Columbia. So she knows what she's talking about. But as I talk about in this thing, I think the best writers are not the ones

who are the most educated, the one who can read the most interesting research. But the people who apply that in an interesting way in real life. And so Maria's journey from being a journalist to a professional poker player, instead of studying risk in the abstract, she went out and lived risk and became very, very good at it, winning hundreds of thousands of dollars in poker earnings and turning her book advance into basically a second career. So to fascinating conversation, I think it's timely one.

We talk a little bit about how we evaluate risk during this pandemic too at the end. So stay tuned for that. It's a great interview. Thanks to Maria for coming on. And yeah, you never know who you're going to end up sitting next to at a dinner. You also never know who you'll miss out on sitting next to at a dinner and where people end up going. That's been one of the interesting parts

of my life. It's just, you know, bumping into someone and then the next thing you know, you see them here and there. And so having this podcast is a great opportunity to reconnect and obviously share some of that with you. So check it out, Maria Conocova, and you can check out our new book, The Biggest Bluff. So I thought we would start with the most fitting place to start, which is, I think it's in your New York timespiece, you use maybe the most important quote in all of Stoke philosophy.

I think maybe one of the most important quotes ever, which is Epic Tita saying basically, the Stoic version of the Serenity Prayer that there's things that are up to us and there's things that are not up to us and the essential task in life is to put things in the appropriate buckets. That is absolutely right.

And I just, I think that poker so embodies that stoic philosophy. And when I've read the N. Carridian, am I pronouncing that correctly? I've always said it in my head. Yeah. When I read it, I just, it was really life changing to me. The way that he is able to say, look, focus on yourself, focus on your reactions, focus on your emotions, focus on your decisions, the rest of the stuff, you can't do anything about. And it's such a powerful and also it for me because you have to be so careful to separate out the decision process from the decision outcome. If you don't, you're not going to be able to play well, you're not going to be able to improve.

If you keep focusing on the cards, if you keep focusing on the outcome, then all of a sudden you'll find yourself broke because you won't be making the best decisions, you won't be making decisions for the right reasons, and you're going to be depressed and depressing to other people. No one wants to hear your bad-beats story again. Well, it's interesting that you use that word sort of liberating because if we think about the context that that quote is coming from, this is a man who spends the first 30 years of his life in slavery. And Roman slavery was, if you can imagine, like the worst kind of slavery there was. I mean, there's a story where, you know, Epic teases his master just sort of breaks his leg for the fun of it.

And so we can sort of see him struggling to find freedom within the sort of literal bondage that he's in. And then when he actually becomes free, I imagine he sort of makes up in his head that the life is going to be exactly the way that he wants it to be. And then still you find out, oh no, the vast majority of what happens to us in life, we have no control over whether we're a slave or the emperor. Exactly, exactly. Yes, the word liberating was an interesting choice.

There are some parts of that where I read it, and I think you can't really believe that. Can you, when he says, well, if your wife dies, then just move on. It's dead. You can't do anything with it. I remember reading that and saying, hey, that's not cool. I want people to be excited by die. But oftentimes you have to say things like that to get your point across. And I do think that there is, there's liberty in letting go

of the outcome and realizing that, okay, you know what bad things are going to happen? And it has nothing to do with me. I mean, variance is impersonal. Probabilities are impersonal. Chance doesn't care about you. Doesn't know who you are. It doesn't know that you've been very good. You've been a good girl, Maria.

So you deserve to do well. That's not how this thing works. Sure. I can be as good as I as I want. And then all of a sudden, these things can still happen. And you need to learn well. That's not how this thing works. I can be as good as I as I want. And then all of a sudden, these things can still happen. And you need to learn that. You need to learn that, you know what, if I keep making the right decision, if I keep thinking through things correctly, if I change my mental frame, so that instead of looking at these things as horrible things happening to me, something that my coach and poker, Eric Sidel, told me at some point,

which I think echoes what we're talking about. He pulled me aside in the middle of the tournament, of a poker tournament, and said, I'm really worried about you. I'm worried about how you're playing, because in the texts you're sending me, you're describing things that's happening to you, not as you at making the actions. And that was, and my jaw dropped. He was right. That's exactly what I was doing. So, I was just, oh man, I can't believe that this happened. I can't believe the cards did this. I can't believe this guy called.

And it was, it's not a good mindset. And it's a horrible mindset for life too. If you keep thinking of things as happening to you, as opposed to you're being able to do something. It's such a powerful mental shift to do the other way to say, okay, you know what, this happened, but here's what I'm going to do. Here's how I'm going to react. Here's how I'm going to craft my response, because that gives you back agency. That gives you back the opportunity to do something. And sure, it doesn't mean that chance is going to all of a sudden say,

I'll snap my fingers and everything will be fine and dandy. No, but at least you'll be doing something and at least you'll be productive and thinking through things productively. And I do believe that that kind of mindset can make good things happen. Well, so to come back to that in a second, I think one of the you I've also been struck with, it almost feels like a callousness in the Stoics, particularly in epictetus about death or loss or pain.

And then you sort of go, well, of course, when infant mortality is 30%, like if we're looking at the probabilities, we can make more rational calculations about, you know, attachments to people and things that, you know, a slave in Rome would have had to be much more closed off. Like, so that one of the fascinating, sort of haunting images and epiphytitis, he does this thing where, you know, he says, as you talk to your children into, in, in Tibet at night, you should say to yourself, like they may not make it through the morning, which is so haunting and dark, and then you see Marcus Aurelius writes the same quoting epictetus, writes it in meditations, but Marcus Aurelius loses five, and possibly six children before they become adults.

So, you know, you're living in a world where things are much harsher. And as much as little as is in our control now, there was even less control in the ancient world. So I think that's maybe where some of that comes from. Absolutely, absolutely. And I do think that it's important to realize that it's not like

epictetus was an asshole. I mean, you don't know, maybe he was, but, but this doesn't make him that. And that rationality is something that is incredibly valuable and is on short supply these days because so many of the ways in which we react are emotional. And that oftentimes is counterproductive because we know from a lot of our psychological biases that we experience more empathy for people who are like us than for people who aren't. That makes us make poor decisions because rather than if we're, for instance, making charitable donations, we won't donate where the money is needed, we'll donate at the thing that pulls at our hard strings. So there's really something about this detachment

and being able to say, you know what, let me think through these things rationally. And I think the stoic mindset goes along with that. And yeah, it can look really harsh from the outside, but I think that it can be a powerful corrective to some of the emotions that aren't necessarily even though they might feel righteous and they might feel good, they're not actually doing as much good as something else could do.

So to go to this idea of agency, it strikes me that sort of the idea in poker and what you sort of discover on your journey is like, although so much of what happens at the table is outside of your control, the car, your Dell, you know, the people you're sitting across from, so on and so forth, what you do control, there's that expression, it's sort of the art of playing a bad hand well. And so I'm just sort of curious about that

because that seems, yeah, this dox are resigned in one sense to what's not up to us, but that's not an excuse for an action. It's, to me, a resource allocation issue. Now I'm gonna focus all my energy on doing the best that I can with what I've got. Exactly, exactly. And that's at the heart of what would make a good poker player.

I mean, I think Epictetus would kick ass at the poker tables. He would be like, he would be a poker god. Because what you need to do is try to run a rational mental calculus and figure out, okay, what are the elements that I'm actually in control of here? Well, I can control my thought process. I can control what I'm giving off, how I'm acting. I can control how I'm reacting to the people here.

Am I letting them get to me or am I being a little bit more detached and cool? Those are all things I can control, how I play the hand. These are things that I can change. What information am I looking at? What am I paying attention to? How we deploy our attention is also crucial because that's such an important choice. And what we pay attention to, the information we gather is going to make our decisions either better or worse, depending on whether we've chosen to pay attention to something relevant or not.

That's a choice, that's a skill, that's something we can learn. And so what we're trying to do is gain as much of an edge as we can over our opponents so that we end up on the probabilities on probabilities side in terms of how we make our decisions and how we get our money in. And by the way, this doesn't have to be poker. This is anything. And all we can do is make the right decision and run that calculus correctly, control the things we can so that we get our money in as a favorite. But even if you're 75% to win, 25% happens and it happens a lot. 25% is actually a lot of time.

So that doesn't mean you made a bad decision. It just means forget it ever happened and make that same decision again and again and again, because eventually you'll be in the 75%. That seems like a hard thing for people to wrap their head around, which also I guess ties in his stoicism. So, stoics are sort of like, you do the right thing, you make the right decision based on the evidence, and you have to actually detach from the result because the result's not up to you.

So, that that that strikes me as a particularly important part of the training for being a poker player, but I guess for life as well as going like, Hey, if there's a three and four chance of doing something and getting the result you want, you'll do that every time. The fact that you did it and four times in a row, you didn't get the result you're supposed to get. I mean, obviously you want to check the math there and make sure that, you know, the game's not rigged or you're not doing something wrong. But the point is, you have to go like, I'm going to focus on the inputs and the actions I control.

And I have to, like you're saying, like you'll take a 75% chance all day because you actually know that the more times you do it, the more that's going to work out for you financially, even if you do lose 25% of the time. Absolutely, absolutely. And that's, I mean, that is crucial. I mean, that is at the heart of what makes a good poker player. That's at the heart of why I think poker is such a wonderful teaching tool because unlike reading about something, when you're actually experiencing it and experiencing it in your wallet, your bottom line will suffer

if you make the wrong decisions. If you say, you know what, I'm not going to do that. Again, I'm going to become much more risk averse because yeah, I was 75% to win, but I lost and I don't like losing. So now I'm just going to play very cautiously. That's bad. That's a bad response and you're actually going to end up losing even more money. And so having that, having it hurt, having it actually have an effect on your bottom line, it forces you to internalize that much better than anything else I found. Because if you don't internalize it, you're going to go broke, you're going to experience all sorts of difficulties. You're not going to be a good player, you're not going to improve. And it is so crucial to understand, you know, you have to sit here and do it all day every day

as the favorite. And yes, you're right, you need to check the mouth and you need to make sure that you're not playing in a rigged game. But as long as those things are accurate, then you just need to let go of the fact that you're losing. And so many players get dragged down by it. They say, oh, man, I'm running so poorly. This is terrible. And then they start making worst decisions. Then all of the process actually deteriorates because they're feeling bad for themselves, where they want to chase their losses. So they become more risk-seeking than they should be. They start doing things that make them more of a loose cannon because they're simply not deploying their resources correctly and focusing on that outcome rather than separating themselves from

the outcome. I remember the first time I tried to tell my coach a bad beat story and a bad beat is when you get your money in really well as a as a favorite. And then someone else hits that miracle card and you don't win. And it happened to me. And I was knocked out of a tournament. And I ran to him and I started telling him the story. He shut me up. He's my coach. He's supposed to listen to me. He's supposed to pay attention. And he just shut me up. He said, I don't want to hear it. And I said, what do you mean you don't want to hear it? He said, do you have a question about how you played the hand? Do you have a question about the decision? And I said, well, no, you know, I had a set.

I was, he said, that's it. I don't care about the rest. There's always going to be someone at the table who tells you the story about how their ace has got cracked. Don't be that person. It's like putting your trash on someone else's lawn. And it also makes that trash sit in you because you're, it's toxic because that's what you're focused on. And that was a powerful lesson and something that I really took to heart, even though it hurt in the moment, I wanted to I wanted to vent. I wanted him to listen, but I'm so glad he didn't. Yeah, there's a conversation I had with with Shaka Smart, who's the head basketball coach at UT,

and he was talking about how he's had to as a coach with if a player takes a shot that statistically, they should be taking. I can't get mad if it doesn't go in. And how hard that is as a coach, right, because you you want to focus on the results. It's like, no, if they took the shot, once it leaves their hands, it's not in their control anymore. And you have to be sort of okay with that shot or not, right? And conversely, as like a defender, they'll talk about it's like, oh, if you may, let's say Kobe was 10% worse coming off the left than the right, as a defender, if you force him to go to the left, and he takes the shot and makes it, you can't get

mad at yourself either because you did everything that you're supposed to do. And I think it sort of goes against our very nature to think statistically because we want to think in terms of results, but but again, run enough times, that's the only way to do it. Absolutely. Absolutely. And we also judge people. I'm so glad that you that you talked about the coach saying, you know, what I have to be okay with it, because so many times people will will not be okay with it. If someone takes a risk or if someone does something that they're supposed to do, but it doesn't work out, instead of saying, yep, you know, you just you were on the wrong side of variance this time, they get blamed and people blame them and their coaches blame them. And if they're the CEO of a company, all of a sudden they find their board wants to

fire them. This happens over and over and over. The human mind just hates separating process from outcome. It's so important. And it's such a crucial life skill. I mean, I, I think you and I are are are on the same page here, but it's just worth stressing over and over. If you can't do that, you're not going to be able to learn, you're not going to be able to improve, your outcomes are going to be bad. And if you judge other

people that way, then that's also quite the failing. I think we need to learn to separate it both for ourselves and for others when we're looking at the results of others. And it can be actually sometimes even more difficult to do it for other people because we so easy to dismiss and say, oh, what an idiot. He should have never taken that shot and to think that way. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on page six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai.

And I'm Sydney Battle. And we're the host of Wundery's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud. From the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feud say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Brittany and Jamie Lynn Spears. When Brittany's fans form the free Britney movement dedicated to fring her from the infamous

conservatorship, Jamie Lynn's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Dysentel wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad free on Amazon Music or The Wondery app. Well, to go to that point, that was something I wanted to ask you about. My two other favorite epic cheetahs quotes are, he says, it's impossible to learn that what you think you already know.

And then he says, if you wish to improve, you have to be content to be seen as stupid or clueless. And so that strikes me as two quotes that were very true about your journey to go from journalists to professional poker player. That must have required one, you know, an acceptance of an incredible amount of ignorance. And then to the willingness to be really bad at something for an extended period of time in order to get good at that same thing. No, absolutely. I mean, I feel like Epic Titus was in my head because because those were that's exactly what I needed to do. I had to realize, okay, you know what, I don't know anything. And so I have to start from scratch. And that's, and then that's

okay. It was intimidating. And I felt so out of place. I felt like a total fraud for the longest time. Honestly, I still sometimes do at the table. I feel like, you know what, I don't belong here. I'm not a real poker player. I still have so much to learn. And I do still have so much to learn. I think it's a, it's why it's such a fascinating game. It's always a journey. But one of the things that I think that I've done well because as a journalist, I've had to always reach out to people who are much smarter than I am and who work in areas that I know nothing about and who are the best in their fields as I wrote about their work, I became very comfortable with saying, I have no idea what you're talking about, please explain it to me again. And saying, I'm sorry, I'm really not getting it because if you pretend to get

something as a journalist and you don't really, you're not going to be able to write about it, well, you're not going to be able to explain it. You need to really understand it. And so there were some areas that I just knew nothing about. And so I would just say, I'm so sorry, I need you to go through it again. I don't get this. Does this mean that? They'd say, no, no, that doesn't mean that. And we'd have to go through this process over and over. And that's the way you learn really well. And I just saying I don't know, saying I don't understand, saying I'm not sure those are such powerful words. And that's how you're going to get better. And I think oftentimes our ego stands in the way of being able to say any of those sentences. And we do well to let it go.

Well, with your work sort of on cons and confidence games and grift, I'm interested to, there's that saying, you can't con in honest man. It strikes me too when I look at where we are politically with these sort of, you know, completely unqualified and competent leaders who have managed to sort of con us into putting them in charge. It strikes me like the other side of that saying is like, you can't con a humble person either. But you know what I mean?

Like it strikes me that one of the elements that sort of manipulation relies on is our own unearned self-confidence or our own sort of sense of our superior judgment? Does that make sense? It does make sense. And I think that yes, people who are overconfident are some of the easiest people to fool. I will say that I'll push back a little against that you can't fool an honest man because I think honest people get fooled all the time. It's just a different kind of conning. You have to realize that everyone has an ego, even honest people. And so what a con artist does really well is try to find your Achilles heel.

What are the things that you believe that aren't quite true? How do you see yourself? What's the version of the world that you believe in? Okay, let me, let me sell that to you. So let me give you an example of a con for an honest man. You're at a gas station, you are filling up the pump, and a woman comes up to you and says, I'm so sorry, my car is stuck down the road. Can I have money for gas? I promise I'll pay you back. I'm late to the hospital. My daughter is having surgery. Well, wow, all of a sudden you're like, well, am I going to be this horrible human who starts questioning you and saying, hey, you know, do you really, can I see the medical bill? Can I, can I call the hospital? Or are you going to say, yeah, you know, here's $10.

So, so there's a con for everyone because people like to see themselves as good. People like to see themselves as kind as generous. We like to think good things about ourselves. So I think that you can, you can go that way, but it's all ego. You are absolutely right about that. And it's all because we see ourselves as better. And we'd like to hope that we're better and that we're smarter. And humility is a very, very good way to avoid a lot of cons. Unfortunately, you're not going to avoid all of them,

but you will avoid some. I think that humility is just an undervalued and incredibly important trait. Yeah, and not to get too political life. And I think as time passes, we'll be able to have this conversation in a non-political sense. But it's interesting to me,

it's almost to experience how you have someone in Trump who's sort of objectively very, very sensitive, objectively, sort of shirks responsibility, sort of faked his way out of having to fight and be it. No, I'm in it, like, sort of at every step of the way, sort of didn't do the courageous thing. It's interesting to me how somehow someone's managed to create a reputation, not with everyone,

but with part of his base, as essentially being the exact opposite of what he is, right? Like, courageous truth teller, you know, says what other people are afraid to say. I'm fascinated with how one manages to do that jujitsu on somebody's ego and otherwise rational life. Yeah, yeah, it's been fascinating. And I think that Donald Trump, I think it's impossible not to get a little political, but I think he's the best con artist that we've seen

in the modern era. He is brilliant at doing this. And he is so good at telling you exactly what you want to hear. What he's good at is figuring out, okay, who am I speaking to? What does this audience want and what are they afraid of? Okay, I'm gonna push those buttons because I do not care if I'm lying. That's kind of the thing that allows him to do this.

He has no connection to the truth, and he doesn't care, it doesn't weigh on him, and so he can be persuasive, because it's not like he's saying, oh man, I have to lie to these people, he just doesn't care, it doesn't weigh on him, and so he can be persuasive, because it's not like he's saying, oh man, I have to lie to these people, he just doesn't care. And so it just frees him up to sell the story that these otherwise rational people already kind of believe

and he figures out, okay, these people are afraid that their jobs are going to go away. So I'm gonna talk about that, and I'm going to tell them what I'm gonna do to keep their jobs. Those other people are afraid that I'm going to talk about that and I'm going to tell them what I'm going to do to keep their jobs. Those other people are afraid that I'm going to give too many cuts to these people. And so I'll tell them the exact opposite. I'm going to say, Oh, no, no, no, I'm going to get rid of all of those jobs. Don't you worry. I'm going to support you. And he's so persuasive while he's saying it because he doesn't care about whether

or not it's true. He just cares about persuading you that when either one of those groups is confronted with, hey, do you realize that Donald Trump said the exact opposite to this other group? They dismiss that. And so no, no, that's not true. That's a misinterpretation. You are the evil media and you are, you are trying to screw me up. I know exactly what's going on. And that was also a brilliant move and the move of a con artist to have that fake media label so that anything he doesn't like can be dismissed with that label. And what I found, so I spent a lot of years

not just with con artist, but with their victims. Once someone buys into a con, almost nothing you say will get them to emerge from it because our egos, once again, our ego's our fragile, and we go through this process of dissonance reduction. So there's cognitive dissonance because Donald Trump is saying one thing, and then there's someone else is saying another thing,

and we realize that both of these things can't be true, and people are saying he's a con artist, hey, snap out of it, and so instead of snapping out of it, we double down on our faith in Donald Trump. That's how we protect our ego because I couldn't have been so stupid as to fall for a con artist.

No, no, I'm gonna keep believing in him. No, I think that's been the major mistake that liberals and Democrats in the media most of all have sort of done as far as their strategy goes, right? It's like they've sort of chosen the strategy of, if we can just show, it's like if I can just pile enough evidence up

that makes you, that if I can just show you beyond a shadow of a doubt that you've been con and that you've been very, not only have you been con, but it was such a stupidly obvious con that you should be ashamed for having ever fallen for it, then I will get you to abandon your support, which is, of course, the opposite of how people change their minds. Like, you never beat someone over the head with a conclusion.

You have to leave them there and then they have to come to it without feeling like they were forced to come to it without feeling like they were forced to come to it. That's absolutely right. And in fact, psychology over and over the studies have shown that if someone doesn't believe in something and you give them lots of information that tries to get them to change their mind, it's going to have the opposite effect. It's going to have a boomerang effect. And instead of making them change their mind and saying, oh yeah, you know what, you were right, I was wrong. They're going to say, you are an evil human being and this is terrible and they'll just go right back to believing what they believed before but they'll believe it even more strongly than before you tried to change their mind. And I wish that I wish that the media had

read some of this psychological work. Yes. So that so that they could reverse course. But unfortunately, that's not the way that the last three years have unfolded. So changing gears, I was writing about this this week, actually, it reminds me of sort of what you've done with this book. When I was thinking about becoming a writer, it's what I wanted to do. I got some really good advice from a writer.

He said, you have to go live an interesting life. And then you can write about that. It's your experiences that make you a good writer, he said, you have to go live an interesting life. And then you can write about that. It's your experiences that make you a good writer, not where you went to school or who you trained under or whatever. And it strikes me, that's what you've done with this book and why I think it's resonated so much is that instead of going out and saying, hey, I'm going to write a book about risk. You said, I'm going to go out and take a big risk. You know what I mean? So I'm just curious about how you think about that and maybe what you learned from the experience of taking this sort of like hard right turn in your life. Yeah, I've always been

under the impression that if I'm not scared to do something, it's probably the wrong thing, because when you are stuck in your comfort zone, you're not learning, you're not growing, you're not challenging yourself. And I was petrified of doing this. Everyone was telling me, are you insane to go on leave from the New Yorker to play poker? Like, are you a crazy person?

And part of me thought, yeah, I must be a crazy person. But the other part of me thought, you are so must be a crazy person. But the other part of me thought, you are so scared of doing this. This is a different book. This is so different. You're not a personal essayist. You're not a memoirist. And all of a sudden, you're going to write a book where you're the central character. And not only that, you're going to go and enter this entirely new world. And I said, I'm scared. So that probably means that this is an interesting thing. And at the very worst, I'm going to learn something. I'm going to learn something about myself. And how about can that be? That's actually, I think, a really wonderful thing. It's so rare that we get an opportunity to

immerse ourselves in something totally new and to try to go on that learning journey. I think we should grasp that and follow our curiosity and take advantage of it whenever we can because it's a gift. So last question, because Vegas features obviously quite heavily in the book, I'm talking to you from Texas, which looked like it was going in the right direction with COVID-19, you know, despite a lot of warnings and a lot of worst-case scenario predictions. Same thing happened in Florida, and now I'm not sure when people will be listening to this, but now that that seems to have not turned out well. I actually don't know the numbers on Vegas,

but I'm curious, like, how do you, from the study of risk that you have looked at, what do you, I guess maybe at a policy level, but also at an individual level, what do you feel like people should be thinking about in terms of, of, we're dealing with this crazy unprecedented thing, but, but at the core of it, we're having to make calculations. Do you wear a mask? Do you go outside?

Do you open your business? Do you go back to work? And it seems like we are just doing a god awful job of it. We are. We are. And, you know, as a poker player, I do not feel comfortable going anywhere near a casino. I think that no one should be right now. And I think we should just do our best going to bring our conversation full circle. Let's control what we can. And those

are decisions like, I wear a mask every single time I go outside. I think a lot of people are saying, oh, it's so out of control. So, you know, I don't really need to do anything. Why in the world, one person doesn't matter. I'm definitely not sick, you know, I'm not showing any symptoms. And they, and they don't actually look at it that way. What I would say is, look at the statistics, look at how much masks reduce your likelihood of catching it, your likelihood of passing it on. Be a good human, look at the numbers and actually do those small things because they matter. And on an individual level, that's how we're going to be able to move forward.

Focus on what you can control. And those are your actions and your decisions and make the right one where a mask be responsible. And don't go into a casino if you can possibly avoid it because places like that are not very good. Yeah, it's like, I saw a mean the other day that was like, if there was a medicine that would reduce your chances of getting COVID-19 by eight times, you would take it in two seconds,

that's what a mask is. Yep, I love that too. And people, I don't know, it's because if there is a weird thing where when the odds are so bad, people kind of throw up their hands, but it's really it's like, no, no, you can take small actions that have an enormous impact, not just collectively, but for you, like, you have a hundred percent chance of not getting it if you don't leave your house. Absolutely. Not that complicated. That's very true. Maria, thank you so much.

Thank you so much, Ryan. This has been an absolute pleasure. I'm so glad we were able to make it happen. I've been a big fan of yours. I love stoicism, and so it's a, I'm so glad we were able to make it happen. I've been a big fan of yours. I love stoicism and so it's a I'm so glad we were able to have this conversation. Awesome. Talk soon. Take care. Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or your favorite podcast app. And if you don't get the daily stoke email go to dailystoke.com slash email. slash email. podcasts.