The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 264: Liv Boeree - The Three Life Lessons From The Poker Table

Episode Date: July 1, 2018

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk Episode #264: Liv Boeree - The Three Life Lessons From The Poker Table Liv Boeree is a poker player, television presenter and speaker. She is a World Series of Poker and 2010 European Poker Tour champion, and is the only female player in history to hold both titles. Born in Kent, Boeree studied at Ashford School before going on to earn a First Class Honours degree in Physics with Astrophysics at the University of Manchester. Livis a three time winner of the Global Poker Index European Female Player of the year and currently sits at #5 on the female all-time live poker winnings list. We are hosting a workshop on developing YOUR personal excellence as a leader.  For details and availability, go to RyanHawk.me  The Learning Leader Show "Our instincts are built off our life experiences." Show Notes: Sustaining excellence: Humility to continue question themselves Growth mindset Confidence Curiosity to try new things "My hyper competitive mindset propelled me to do well in school... Even though I wasn't as naturally smart as others.  I had to work at it." There are two people that exist in the world: Those who are humble and those who are about to be humbled. Why poker? "I wanted to be a musician and a rock star, but I wasn't good enough.  Poker was even better.  I'm able to play a great game and travel the world." The mental framework of Poker: The foundation: Rational decision making Communication skill Read LessWrong.com How does poker thinking apply to life? "Our instincts are built off our life experiences" -- The Jesse Itzler model for decision making (trust your gut) vs the analytical approach... They are more similar than you think How can you tell when someone is bluffing? (lying) "It's rare that people have physical tells" Most of the time it's based on the math and your knowledge of how that person has played in the past (you see what they have played) How poker relates to the interview process... How can you spot when someone isn't telling the truth in a job interview? "Ask them to re-tell their career story... But this time do it backwards" --- It's hard to do this unless you are telling the truth Look for baseline behaviors when you meet someone and they don't feel like they are in the "interview process" yet Walking in from their car, checking in, going to happy hour, dinner Thoughtfulness -- Are they willing to admit a mistake Three life lessons from the poker table: Quantifying - Increase granularity in thinking. Willingness to work in uncertainty. What action will achieve the best response? Intuition can be great with lots of data, but it's not magic Don't let a run of good luck make you think you're good But how can you know the difference? -- Find a great set of peers who will tell you the truth Advice to an amateur player in the World Series main event of poker Recognize the other players at the table. Who is great? Who isn't? Watch closely when you are not in the hands to see the showdown value and gain information.  Balance your play based on who is in the hand with you Read WaitButWhy.com from Tim Urban "There is no other leader than The Learning Leader." Use the "Get To Know You Document" "If you don't keep growing, you will become irrelevant." Social Media: See why over 130,00 people follow Liv on Twitter: @Liv_Boeree Connect with me on LinkedIn Join our Facebook Group: The Learning Leader Community To Follow Me on Twitter: @RyanHawk12

In instances where our intuitions are have a ton of experience and therefore can be finally honed, then our intuitions are great to listen to and can often come to these fantastic conclusions that our slow sort of conscious thought processes just aren't able to come to. Because our slow conscious thought process isn't sort of filing through everything as effectively as our gut instincts. You know, they are dialed into our memory banks. This episode is brought to you by Gusto. Gusto is making payroll benefits in HR easy for small businesses. Modern technology does the heavy lifting, so it's easy to get things right.

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Thanks so much for being here. We are hosting a workshop on developing personal excellence as a leader. Over the course of two days, we're putting everything we've got into this personal excellence workshop, including a few surprise guest speakers. It's going to be a lot of fun, very engaging, a great small group of people. go to Ryanhawk.me for dates and availability and sign up before it sells out. We're already more than halfway there. Go to Ryanhawk.

Dot me. It's going to be a lot of fun. Now, on a night's featured leader, it's with the incredibly intelligent Liv Borese. She is a professional poker player, world series of poker tag team champion, the number one ranked female UK player, a four-time European female player of the year. also is an astrophysicist. Yes, she is insanely smart. Gives speeches all over the world on rationality and decision making.

It has a great TED talk. I encourage you to watch. A few of the topics that we discussed. Liv shares her three life lessons from the poker table and how they apply to you. And then how to know when someone is bluffing and or lying to you. And then using your intuition verse analytics. how to make the correct decision. This one, again, was so good.

I really enjoyed it. It's Liv Boree. All right, Liv. Thank you so much for joining me here on the Learning Leaders Show. Welcome. Thank you. It's very nice to be here. I'm very curious because I'm a fan of your work on a number of levels.

And so it's a joy for me to get a chance to talk to you. But I'm curious from your perspective. You've lived a life of excellence. You've also spent time around others who have sustained excellence. And whether it's on the poker tables or off on the TED stage, there's so many different areas we can get to. But I'm curious, what have you found to be the commonalities amongst the people who sustain excellence? I guess the overriding factor between people who, you know, not just achieve excellence, because we can all have these small little peaks of, yeah, I did something great. And then, you know, then regression to the mean, you know, everything returns sort of back to average.

but the ones who stay excellent and the ones who have, I guess, the humility to continue questioning themselves. I guess it's like, you know, the classic growth versus fixed mindset by, I'm sure you read it, Carol Dwegg, where, you know, a fixed mindset person is basically, oh, I was, I was born good at math and therefore I'm good at math, or I was born not good at math, therefore I'll never become good at math, whereas a growth mindset person is someone who sort of accepts that you have to learn in order to become highly skilled at something. It's not something you're just either born with or not. And so they'll have this, not only this humility in terms of like constantly questioning

their strategies, their approaches and so on, but they'll also have this, I guess, and they'll have the confidence to try new things. and most importantly, they'll have the curiosity, like, to sort of do experimentation and so on. You know, the best poker players are ones who are constantly experimenting and then updating their strategies. Oh, you know, I think maybe I should actually be check raising these type of boards more often and they'll try it, whereas, you know, a fixed mindset person is like, no, I'm, I know that this is, I did this strategy one time and it worked and therefore I'll stick with it. So, yeah, I think that's the most fundamental thing is having this, this, this, this, this, this, this

curious mindset that is open to the idea of growth and learning and therefore willing to put in the hard work. I'm curious in this nature versus nurture talk, you are someone who excels when it comes to mathematics. How much of that is developed versus how much of that was a part of your being, for lack of a better phrase? That's a really good question, actually. So I think when I was first, I was someone who was actually fell into the fixed mindset from a young age.

I'd say for the first 12 or 13 years of my life, I think just from a combination of, you know, maybe being in a good school where I just happened to be sort of towards the top of my class. I was by no means, you know, a math prodigy. But I usually was sort of one of the first one. I was hyper competitive and I think that's what sort of got me to like, I would consistently. do well in exams and therefore I assumed that I was just born with it and was fairly arrogant in my in terms of like my academic prowess. I thought I was just super smart and I was just you know it was my great jeans etc etc and then when I remember in math classes they started getting a little harder around like age 14 and it didn't just come immediately to me I actually had to start

doing work you know if you're going to do calculus it's I mean yes sure there's a very small subset of people who are just intuitively get differentiation and integration, but the vast majority of even talented mathematicians don't just get it. And so now I had to actually really start doing work to keep up. And it was like a huge kick in the ass because I remember my math teacher going, well, what's, Olivia, what's going on here? Come on, you like, you usually have good results. And I was like, oh, I don't know, it's just some random thing.

And it took like a few, like a few months for it to really kick in like, shit, maybe I'm not as naturally talented at this as I thought and really had to then knuckle down. And then I got for the first time the first taste of like, oh, look, look, how much joy you got out of studying and now you understand it and now it clicks. So, yeah, I went through this weird journey of sort of being forced to eat some humble pie. But I wasn't by any means like massively talented at mathematics. So I was probably above the curve, but it was, I guess there's like a sort of limit in my brain. You know, my brain was decent to the stuff for 10-year-olds.

But after that, then I needed to do some work. And then it all figured out. It's interesting, Liv. I've found there are two types of people in the world, those who are humble and those who are about to be humbled. And it feels to me like that moment that you needed to be humbled a bit in order to be pushed to working at it and then developing your math skill. Yes, exactly.

And I had the same thing with poker. When I first started playing, I, things pretty much for the first couple of years in my career went fairly well. I won the first proper tournament I ever played. It was like a 120-person, five-pound rebuye. And I don't know really what the hell I was doing, but obviously I just got absurdly lucky. and end up winning this tournament. And so I just thought I was the B's knees for the next year or so.

I was like, oh, this game's easy, look at this. And to be honest, I still, every time I started then, you know, luck caught up with me a little bit and things returned back to normal. I'd have another big win. And this continued up until, I'd say, 2012, sort of from 2006 to 2012, the first few years of me playing. Well, in fact, yeah, 2011, where, like in 2010, I won this huge. tournament where again, like hadn't really gotten that good at the game yet, but I just had variance on my side. And then it took like a couple of years of then really not having things

go well to have everything to for me to be like, shit, maybe I'm not as good as I think. And you know, starting to ask my, my, my peers and my friends, oh, what did you think about this hand and having them say live? That's terrible. Why did you play like that? Yeah. And it took quite a few instances of that for me to really like catch up and be like, Okay, maybe I'm not anywhere near as good as I think I am. Okay, time to get to work. What made you choose poker as a profession? So at the time, I'm trying to think.

So it was around 2000, I guess I turned pro, so to speak, around 2007. And I at the time really wanted to be a musician and a rock star. I wanted to travel the world, be my own boss. and do something very thrilling like that. But I wasn't especially talented at guitar. And then poker came along and I was like, wait, this game's even better. I get to still travel the world, kind of live like a rock star. I met Annie Duke and Phil Helmuth and all those folks who would like just see superstars having a great time.

And then playing this awesome game where girls and boys can play on an even playing field. And it's hyper competitive and there's all these different skill sets that it draws on. And I was just like, this seems like the best job ever. So I remember sometime around early 2007, just like really making it my goal. I was like, I want to be the best female poker player in the world and I want to become a poker superstar. And so I just sort of threw everything at it. Why did you label the best female player in the world instead of the best player in the world? Very good question.

I wish I hadn't because honestly I think it was a thing that I think it's because I felt well this is going to be an easier goal to attain. It still seems like a really good goal to attain but it's going to be easier because of course there is just less women playing. But in retrospect I really wish I hadn't done that because there was no reason why I shouldn't just aim as high as possible and become the best player. And so, yeah, it was a silly, self-limiting thing that I did, I think, to give myself, I guess, an easier goal to attain. And, yeah, I don't know exactly why I did that other than that's the only sort of explanation I can come up with.

But, yeah, I think that was a big mistake. So I assume you've tweeted because you, I believe you won the female Player of the Year award for European Poco Awards in, what, 2014, 2015, 2016, and all the research I've you've got to hit that goal it feels like to me I watch a lot of poker on TV so I obviously seen you play I'm a big fan I've had Annie Duke on this show before we've we I like the mental agility it takes to become successful at poker long term not just short term not just the lucking your way through a tournament or something like that so that that's why I'm fascinated by poker players and the fact that you've taken what you've learned from the from the poker table to the TED stage and you're I would imagine you're probably going to write books. I mean, there seems to be a lot that you do. How have you used that platform to then do more with it? I know there's also some philanthropic work you do, so there's a lot going on in your life. I'm curious how you balance all of it.

And it will poker always be the foundation from everything that's built from. Yeah, I expect it will. because it's sort of, I mean, I've spent the best part of my adult life thinking around it and living with the game surrounded by poker players. You know, I'm not married, but effectively married to one. So it's definitely going to be in my blood, I think, for a long time. But it's not, I mean, I'm not playing that like this, this year. I've really not played that much at all.

And as you said, yeah, I'm trying to focus on, on a, on. number of other things, which to be honest, are all built off this mental framework that poker teaches, of rational thinking, rational decision-making. And so, yeah, what I'm trying to branch out now into is sort of being a communicator of rationality. And, you know, I don't want to go out and say, hey, everyone learn poker so that you can make better decision-making. Poker is just one vehicle to rationality. You know, science, science is another vehicle. If you, if you, you know, if you're being a mathematician or working in finance, that is, or even, you know, there's, there's sort of, I mean, listening to podcasts like this, I imagine you have a lot of

some experts in rationality in general, Annie Dukas one, you've had Tim Urban, all these folks. So, yeah, I'm, I'd like to just kind of continue learning as much as I can about the fields of rationality through a big fan of less wrong.com, which I expect to some of your listeners. have read and if anyone hasn't I highly recommend going on that website and just reading anything and everything that you can find there's a lot of material there sorry where was the question going

no I know you're answering it I think of how poker then propels to other areas and other things that you do yeah I mean it's I mean one thing I'm sort of thinking about I'm thinking about some book ideas of like how you know how poker thinking applies

to life and particularly an area that I found most personally useful is this idea of like quantification. You know, a poker player doesn't just sit there and go, oh, when we're facing a big bet on the river, we don't just go, oh, they're probably bluffing. Or, yeah, I guess, yeah, most of the time I have the best hand to it. We'll actually try and quantify it. We'll estimate, I think, between 70 and 90% of the time this, or even with more granularity, or 65% of the time I have the best hand.

And that's a skill that it takes a lot of practice, but is extremely useful because, I mean, we live in this world, sort of built, I mean, fundamentally sort of acts in probability distributions. You know, if we think, is it going to rain tomorrow? It's not, you know, it's from this point in time, looking forward, it's a probability distribution. It's somewhere between zero and 100 percent,

and depending on the region and the weather patterns at the time, it might be somewhere around 10% of the time or 80% etc. And so whenever we're like thinking forward, we're trying to make a decision about something in the future, we should think of it in terms of probabilities. And with practice, this is a skill that you can hone. And poker is one way to do that.

Sorry, you're good. Yeah, you're good. I talked to, so this is interesting because I spoke recently with Jesse Itzler and Jesse started Markey Jet and sold it and done some other things in his wife. Sarah Blakely created Spanx is still the full 100% owner of Spanx, one of the youngest self-made female billionaires ever. And Sarah told Jesse one of the ways both of them she feels have been, they have sustained excellence is because she feels like they have developed great intuition and great gut instinct. And I feel like this is potentially the opposite of what you're talking about. And I like this is what's good about the show is having these different types of conversations so that we can learn and make the best decisions for ourselves.

Where Sarah's advice suggests he is don't ever lose that gut instinct, don't ever lose an intuition because both of us have been successful because we've trusted our gut. And you have a quote, I believe it's why should we assume our intuitions are better calibrated than slow, proper. analysis, they don't have any data to be based off. So I'd be curious for you to, uh, to, what you think when you hear someone like Sarah and Jesse say that verse, what you've, your, your experiences have been. Well, so there, there is definitely some truth in, in what Sarah and Jesse are saying, because there are instances where our gut is just better suited for things. But what my, what my quote is referring to is we try, you know, basically our, our instincts ultimately built off life experience.

So just to bring it back to poker, you know, when someone first starts out playing poker, they haven't seen many situations, they haven't, you know, they haven't played many hands, they haven't seen how humans react in different poker situations that much. So for that person to sit there and go,

oh, I think my gut's really good at knowing whether or not my hand is best in this situation, as opposed to say if they had the ability to do the mathematical calculation, I mean, that's just wrong. If they can compare themselves from when they first start playing, the quality of their gut instincts when they first start playing, to say if 10 years later in their career where they played five million hands, obviously that later version of themselves is going to have better instincts.

They're going to have better intuitions. And why is that? Well, because their gut has built up a dataset to be able to be able to, to draw a conclusion from. It's got lots and lots of experience based off. So in instances where our intuitions are, have a ton of experience and therefore can be finally honed, then our intuitions are great to listen to

and can often come to these fantastic conclusions that are slow, sort of conscious thought processes just aren't able to come to because our slow conscious thought process isn't sort of filing through everything as effectively as our gut instincts. You know, they are dialed into our memory banks as far as we can tell. But what then annoys me is that when people come out and like, in my TED talk, it's not up yet.

But I sort of started it off with these three memes that I just saw on Facebook where people are like, never, ever second guess your gut instincts. Your intuition is always right, always trust it. And I'm just like, no, this is just. terrible, terrible advice. You're basically saying, hey, if you're in a complex problem and you don't quite know the answer, don't bother thinking about it. Just go with whatever, the first thing that comes to mind. Like, it's just terrible advice because your instincts very rarely have a lot of stuff to be built up. Now, in situations, say, where you're dealing with an upset friend,

they're your friend. You've seen them many times. You've interacted with them and other humans. So maybe your instincts are well honed to that. But if it's something of like, I'm buying, I'm buying a stock on the market. I, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to start dabbling in some investing. Oh, I feel drawn to this company. I don't know why, but I just do. I'm going to buy some. Like that, like, no, no good investor would ever recommend you do that because you, you're, again, unless you've been like somehow listening to the market movements in your sleep and without realizing it. You're not going to have this data set for your instincts to be built off. So, yeah, I think the key thing I try to put out there when it comes to this whole intuition versus

slow thinking thing is ideally use both and think about what is the decision you're trying to make. Is it something that you have lots and lots of experience in? And you really have to be like critical and honest with yourself, but that's the case because we always try to go, oh, actually, yeah, I sure I do. But like, no, do I have enough to effectively be beating the market between myself and my instincts and my, my, my, my slow thinking. Or is it something that actually I just need to sit down and crunch the numbers and really do the slow logic thinking stuff? Because often people just use it as an excuse to be mentally lazy when they're facing a tough decision. How much at the poker table, how much of the physical actions do you take into account

to decide if somebody's got it? So I think of like I told you I'm a big fan of rounders. And I get why they have to play up the Oreo thing as the tell for Teddy KGB and Matt Damon's character at the end. I understand it makes for a better movie and a better story. But as someone who played poker, it doesn't really make any sense. But I'm curious from your perspective, a professional who's won millions of dollars over the course of your career, how much of it do you look at somebody and say, I have a tell or there are tells on those people or what percentage of it is just purely the math or on the river you're saying, It just doesn't make sense.

This just doesn't add up based on the actions leading up to this. It's pretty rare to have, basically, if it's like, it's this tradeoff between, if the math is saying, if you have like a pretty bad hand compared to the range of all hands that you could conceivably have in a situation, if you're in, say, the bottom 20% of hands that you could have. So the math is quite, and you're facing a big bet, the math there, is saying, okay, I need to be calling with the top 30% of my hands and you're not in that, you're far away from that range. Well, now you've got a very clear mathematical answer. That's what the sort of the logic is telling you. But then on the other side, you're looking at this

person and you're not sure why, but you're getting a very strong feeling that actually they're bluffing. Well, now it's, this is where the real like art and science of poker comes in. It's like going, okay, the math is strongly saying to do X, but this physical tell that I'm getting from someone. And it can be a sort of instinctive feeling that you're having about them, or it's, again, you've actually noticed something that you're consciously aware of and you know why you think they're bluffing. But it's about sort of assigning probability, like confidence, strength. Like if you're so confident on that, then that might override very, like, strong confidence of what the maths is telling you to do. But the point is is that that is pretty rare, because

our instincts can be biased and so can our slow reasoning. And if we're in a situation where we really, really want them to be bluffing, then we'll be looking for everything that confirms that they're bluffing and subconsciously ignoring all the information that says that they might not be. I've had plenty of times where I'm like, I noticed one time that someone was bluffing

and that their breathing seemed kind of like raggedy. They were like breathing in a sort of like stilted way. I wasn't in the hand and I was like made a mental note for later like oh that means that they did that when they were bluffing so I've got to keep an eye out for that and then I was in a hand with them a little bit later and they were doing it again and I had but I had a very bad hand like literally some bottom bottom 20 descent of my whole range where mathematically I should be throwing it away every time um but I was like oh they're doing this raggedy breathing oh and I didn't stop to think of like the the things that would suggest that maybe there's another reason for them to

have a raggedy breathing. Maybe they do it when they're excited too, not just when they're nervous and so on. And so I end up like making this big call because I was proud of myself of, you know, noticing this tell from earlier and, and then seeing it again and being like, yeah, I've got them. And I was completely wrong. They were just super excited because they had a really strong hand. And so it's, you have to be really careful with this. I mean, confirmation bias. I'm sure everyone's familiar with is one of the most dangerous things in, in almost anything we do around decision making or belief building because we really, really want to be right. We really, really, really want a particular outcome.

And so we'll look for all the ways to suggest that outcome X is more likely or is true and discount the evidence that counters it or like downplay it. And so that's, yeah, that's one of the most dangerous biases poker players have in particular and one I would recommend everyone keep an eye out for. How would you rate your ability to tell if somebody, is lying. Not necessarily a poker table, but there and off the poker table. Just basic communication skill for you look at somebody. They tell you a story or they give you an answer and you're thinking they're not telling me the truth. What would you rate your ability at that? Honestly, I can't

give a fair answer because I've never been anybody else to to know how good the average person is. That's the thing. Like, you know, my ego wants to say, oh, obviously I'm one of the better ones because, you know, I've been a pro poker player for this long, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But honestly, like, I don't know because I haven't got like a control to compare it against. I don't have an average benchmark of what the average, I don't know how good say you are at it. But do you feel confident in your abilities in regards to that? And basic, the reason I bring this up, Liv, is because I want to get to, I think of, for example, there's a lot of people listening, Liv, who do, they hire people for their companies. Okay. Let's say they're in a hiring role.

And there's a ton of those all over the world. And something they could potentially pull from this conversation, because I think I'm fascinated by poker and everything. But if I'm thinking about the person who said, this is great and I love the stories. However, I don't play poker. I have to make good hires for a living. And one of the ways it could potentially relate is that I can't get fooled in the interview process. I need to know if I'm getting the truth because people will bring their best selves to that one hour, two hours of the interview. you, how can I tell if they're telling me a story and they're putting me on and not being

truthful. I'm curious of, that's where I'm kind of wanted to get to when it comes to somebody like you who sees some of the physical things, hear people talk, right? You watch on TV and some people, well, there's Daniel O'Grano or others, they really like to get people talking to see that they'll give something away, that they'll mix that math with the intuitive feeling of, is this person telling me the truth? Do they have it or not? So that's really what I'm thinking about.

I mean, a classic one, I've never actually tried it on anyone, but if you really think that someone is telling you a tall story, is to get them to repeat it backwards. Apparently, that works really well. Yeah. Wait, okay, how would that play out? Get them to say, hey, how did you, if you think someone is lying to you about their process of getting to the, current, you know, of going through a job, you think that they're actually making up a job that they did. And, you know, they're like, oh, so I graduated university and then I did, I worked for my friend's dad's thing. And then, and then, oh, I actually worked for this incredible company for a little

while where I got promoted to this and then I was this. And, you know, they're like, they get, you know, they've sort of given you stages of how it went. But you think that that actually, it's a bunch of horseshit, get them to go, oh, wait, so, so from now, you're doing this. You're doing this. So what did you do before that and do before that and get them to like play the whole the whole story? And supposedly if someone is making up a story, it's very, very hard to do it backwards because it's not actually, it's not a thing they're calling from memory. It's a thing that they're sort of creating.

That said, if someone is sort of dedicated enough to come to a job interview and truly lie about the timeline of their life, then they might be aware of this. But that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, thing. But I mean, as a general rule of thumb, I think I look for someone's baseline, look for baseline behaviors when you meet someone, not necessarily once they're in the interview because they're already on their, on best behavior, they're already very aware of the, the image they're projecting, but perhaps if you see them, you know, before they arrive, in the waiting room or how they carry themselves going to the bathroom when they think no one's looking, like,

look for people's baseline body language behaviours and then see how they deviate from them when they're when they're under pressure. I mean, obviously people always get a little bit nervous in a job interview. Like, that's always to be expected. But if you notice like a really inconsistent thing, like if someone's super animated and confident seeming when they're asked a question, but then actually when they're not thinking, they actually seem really, really nervous, well, that's a sign of inconsistency and just like possibly something to be you know just to be mindful of um but i mean otherwise like if i was like to be hiring someone like i'm thinking about getting a personal assistant right now i've never actually hired someone before but i mean obviously honesty is is an integral part of

anyone that you hire but also i just you want to you want to find a way to ask some kind of like general not so much knowledge based questions i mean depends on the role some things you just require them to have a certain subset of not But more, you're going to look for someone who, again, who's good at rational thinking, like, perhaps, you know, see how, you ask them one of those general questions, like, how many, how many piano tuners are there in this, in, in the city? And it seems kind of random, but, like, it's a really good way to see how someone thinks about a problem. Some people will just be like, oh, I, I don't know, 40, or some will be extremely confident and be like, oh, it's definitely this. But the ones that you actually want to look for are the people who will break down the problem and go, okay, well, let's think maybe how many square miles are there in this city, let's say,

100, and then within that, well, how many pianos do I think there are? And, okay, there's a thousand pianos. How many piano tuners does that require, et cetera, et cetera? And it's not at all about the answer that they come to. It's the way that they think about the problem. And their willingness to just like try and break it down into these little parts and put best efforts into having a go. And sort of showing humility in their answer, but also just a degree of confidence in their reasoning. Those are the sort of questions that, you know, like classically, like Google ask their employees, potential employees.

And it's not looking for people who have really, really good knowledge or even good math skills. It's just about people willing to try and break the problem down into, reasonable logical parts. Quality. Yeah. Qualities and people that I've found that have been good. I've had hiring roles for more than 10 years live in. And I found that people who have the combination of curiosity and humility,

thoughtfulness, those who, when you would ask a question like that, they would be willing and have enough confidence to pause to the room who might get silent for a bit and they're not, they don't get uncomfortable. they think and then they think out loud a little bit with you. And you can hear their process. And those are the ones who I've found over time have a better chance to sustain some sort of excellence than the ones who either, as you said, say, oh, my God, I have no idea. Or the ones who would just try to randomly say a number without really thinking. And so for me, I found I want really thought.

I want to be surrounded by really thoughtful people. And that's a big word. it's one of my favorite words to describe somebody, it's a biggest compliment I could give is that they are a thoughtful person about their approach to really everything that they do because I found that leads to increasing the odds of success in anything and really anything that you're going to do. Absolutely. And also willingness to admit a mistake.

Right. Like if I was interviewing someone and they started on that question like that and then go, wait, wait, wait, actually, I think I'm thinking about this wrong. and then taking a second to break it down and go, maybe actually this is the way I should think about it. And like that, to be able to sort of have the confidence in front of, you know, in a high stress environment,

to say, actually I think I was making a mistake here. And even if they then say, actually, look, I think this is perhaps a way of doing it, but I'm not 100% sure. I would love to know really how you would do it.

That, to me, would speak volumes about the person. Because it's their, their willingness to sort of open up and, and say, I don't know, please, please, A, teach me. But yeah, and sort of just like, but it requires a certain degree of self-confidence in order to do that. And that's the right kind of confidence. So at the TED conference in Vancouver, I saw that you did a TED unplugged session.

And the topic was three life lessons from the poker table. I'm curious, what are the three life lessons you could teach us from the poker table? The three life lessons are, so the first one is the importance of quantifying, which we sort of touched on a bit, and the willingness to try and increase the granularity in our thinking, not just going, yes, I think this thing will happen or no, it won't go, I think this will happen with a probability of, say, 30%. And sort of, and a willingness to work with uncertainty and understand. understand that we live in this gray scale world, or at least our certainty can only be a gray scale thing and not just have black and white thinking. I don't want to, I'll interrupt real quick. I want to get together too. But that part right there is very important to me because I've talked to a lot of people who,

not a lot of people, but I've talked to some people, friends of mine that we've gotten arguments about this where they say, look, you set rules and you're black and white. And that's it. And my response is always like, that's not the way the world works. regardless, even at a business, a company, I mean, there are certain things, yeah, like, don't steal, don't do stupid things like that. But for the most part, the world is so gray. It's impossible to say anything's black or white unless it's something just truly egregious. But I think that's the part that, again, the thoughtful people realize that aspect of it. And it's hard and not very wise

to make black and white rules. Right. I mean, we, the time when rules-based, thinking is good is when you need to simplify something. So, for example, you know, that's why we have laws, right? We have, thou shalt not murder, etc. Murder is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, is, a safer, society. Society functions better. That said, there should still be some, like, ethical instances where you might want to question that, say if there's an axe murderer breaking into your family home and they are going to kill you and your family unless you do something which may well kill them first. Well, now, I think we all agree that actually that's where that rule breaks down. So people who are still just like, no, this is the rule and this is

how it has to always be. I mean, if you want to call it in philosophical terms, it's called like deontological thinking basically. Like there are rules of the, you. universe that are ethically, morally good and therefore have to be abided by at all times. And a true deontologist would say, you can't kill that act to murder because you're breaking the moral rule of law, which is thou shall never murder. You know, and that seems a bit wrong to me. And so another like a sort of more approach you can take is more like the consequentialist approach, which is what action will.

achieve the best good on net. And there are some like clear situations where, you know, where those consequences are very clear and therefore you would, you will, you will just abide by that and sort of throw those rules out the window, I guess. And as sort of we, as on knowledge, is it, like back in, back in like the middle ages, people kind of had to just like live by these, these kind of arbitrary rules that were made up, these moral rights and wrongs, et cetera, because we just didn't understand

how the world worked very well. So we weren't able to assess the consequences of our actions. But as like we're getting more and more data, we're getting more and more scientific understanding of this world that we live in, then it's getting easier to actually to predict the consequences of our actions and therefore we should try and adopt this more consequential thinking.

And how did this time with you question? Yeah. So we're not, no, no, I was just talking about the world, those who view it in black and white and those who view it in gray. And why in the importance of, in my opinion, it's gray. And it's, it's better for everybody to think of it in that regard as you just so, you described it better than I did. but I think with good examples, that makes sense. Yes, exactly. And then it gives you some more, like,

you just have more flexibility in your thinking as well. And you're also going to be surprised less often. Right. Okay. Yeah. There's all these, like, random little events that can happen that, you know, if we're like, oh, that will never happen. And then, like, sure, most of the time they don't,

like they might only happen like one in a thousand, but you live through enough of life. You're going to see these one and one in a thousand events and one in all these crazy little weird things happen that some of which we might consider really unlucky. And so if you live in this black and white mindset of, oh, this, these things aren't true or this will never happen. Then when they do happen, your whole worldview is going to get shattered and you're going to really suffer and that's bad.

So that's why thinking about things, even the little tail risk probabilities, just being aware of them and understanding that things are more sort of effectively gray scale, tends to just lead to a better outcomes and also just less emotional upset. Okay. Yeah. So three life lessons for the poker table. I interrupted after one. So that one was quantified.

So two. Two is that your intuitions can be great in certain situations when they've got lots and lots of data to be built off, but they aren't magic. And I think that's the thing. Some people think they're like, oh, no, I can just dial into this all-knowing, godly source of information, which will give me the perfect answer, if only I just listen hard enough. I mean, again, I'm going to keep some epistemic humility and say there might be some truth to that,

but for all intents and purposes, it's pretty unlikely. And so don't just use the idea of like, that your intuitions are magic and will always give you the perfect answer as an excuse to be intellectually lazy and not actually think a problem through and consider, you know, weigh the cost and benefits and the actual consequences of things in a sort of methodical calculating way.

So, yeah, just don't like over-rely on your intuitions for tough problems. Gotcha. It's lesson number two. And the third one is don't let a run of good luck make you think that you're doing everything perfectly because basically it's just a whole like life is a combination you know the things that we achieve in life are a combination both of our skills and our good decision making but also there's a ton of luck involved how do we let's this is interesting okay how do i know if i'm lucky or just really skilled how do how does one how does one know that that's the

a million dollar question. Okay. The key thing, I guess, is to look at sample size. Okay. So if you are doing a particular thing, you know, say you're trading on the stock market and you don't just, you know, I don't know how many trades the average person, like who's a full-time trader does in a year, but let's pick some numbers that say you do 100 trades in one year and you have an incredible winning year.

Sure, that could be because you're actually just. unbelievably good and you're somehow beating the market or it could be that you just got lucky or it could be somewhere on that on that spectrum anywhere in between but if you now have a winning year the next year well now you can nudge the needle a little bit more to go okay well this strengthens the argument for for skill another year another year another year and you know if over like 25 years or you're like basically Warren buffeted it up and like he can probably be highly He can be highly confident that his decision making is far above the curve. Or conversely in the other way.

So that's the key thing. It's just about sample sites. The more instances you have, the more decisions that you've made, which is a function of time, but also just like the density of decisions you make in every given unit of time, then you can get a sort of a better idea of how good those decisions are, depending on. on the results. But often with things like poker, particularly if you're just playing live tournaments and so on, well, you actually might not play more than 50 to 60 live tournaments in a given year.

So the best player in the world, if they're only playing that, can easily have a very losing year and come away thinking that they're bad at poker or the worst player in the world can still have a very winning year and come away thinking they're great. But again, so you need to just find a way to make more and more of those decisions.

and build up the sample size. That's the fundamental thing. Gotcha. Yeah, I mean, that's the really the easiest way, I guess. I think the practice there is, again, spend moments of reflection and try to understand. One of the questions I like to ask, let's say I used to work in sales for many years, live, and one of the questions I would ask other sales leaders, peers of mine, let's say they had a great year or two. I would say, well, what specifically was it that led to this great year?

And I would listen very carefully to the answer. And the one who, if you look over time, people who kept been able to perform at high levels over many years, those are the ones who were able to have very specific reasoning behind why they were good. Usually there's some sort of market conditions. There was some sort of hiring that they did. There was some sort of programs they had in place. There was some sort of product advantage. I mean, they were able to understand all the facets that went into their successful year

versus some of the ones who had these roller coaster type sales careers where they'd say, I don't know, man, but it was great. You know, like, I'm not really sure, but I'll take it. You know, those are the ones where you're like, well, you're going to go down on the roller coaster next year probably. And I think that's the difference between the ones who sustain it is that they've put deep thought, they understand it. And then they try to optimize for that. year after year as opposed to just kind of crossing their fingers. Absolutely. And, and actually,

yeah, and so another way you can sort of check in to see whether your strategies are actually good. If there's, you know, because if you don't have the luxury of time to build up a bigger data set, is to basically do peer review. Ask people for who's thinking and results who you respect. You know, they've had good results, but also they seem to have good thinking processes in general. ask them what their strategies are, and compare your strategies to theirs, ask them to review your processes, etc. If you find that your strategies are vastly different to theirs,

or that could be a red flag, that maybe you are just sort of falling into the lucky category right now and you actually, you know, you might need to update. That's, again, like certainly what helped me with that, you know, that awkward spot in my poker career. where I started having a bunch of losing years after some many great winning ones. It was because I sort of started to be like, maybe, maybe I think I did this right. But let's just check.

And I asked a few friends and they were like, live, that's terrible. Why? Like, no, you're like making a fundamental mistake in your thinking here. And I was like, what? Oh, my God. I've been doing this for a long time. And so that was a way to like sort of quickly update. So, yeah, like finding, finding peers who.

who, or superiors as well, whose thought processes that you respect and, and bouncing your strategies off them is integral. Interesting. Okay. I have a few quicker questions that I've been dying to ask you. So let's say I bought into the World Series of Poker Main Event and I can self-assess that I'm going to probably in the bottom 15%, 20% of skill level of people who enter that. I would highly doubt that.

Okay, because there's probably a lot of bad players in the main event. Yeah. Okay. So maybe a little bit higher. Yeah. But I have a two-minute meeting with you to say, Liv, what is my strategy? You know, this is where I view myself in relation to the field. Do we just try to just get lucky?

I mean, I'm curious, what strategy would you give to the average player, not a professional, but the average player who's going to a tournament like that or any tournament really. I would, I think one of the most important things when you're going to be in a tournament like that where sometimes you'll be drawn at a table where you're going to have a bunch of amateurs around you. And sometimes you're going to have two, three, four, even five really good professionals at your table. The important thing is to be able to recognize whether you're at a good or a bad table. A lot of people just don't know that and they don't know how to do that. So I would actually recommend when you sit down and you think you recognize someone,

look them up online, see who they are, see if they do have actually a big track record and are good. And then adjust your play accordingly. So if you're at a bad table, particularly where you've got a bunch of good players to your left, so they're going to be acting behind you, then you really want to tighten up the range of hands that you play. and sort of play more within basically your comfort zone and be less speculative. But conversely, they're going to be times when you're at amazing tables where you might be the best or the second best player at the table.

And then you want to take advantage of that and actually look for these spots, like really pay attention to like ways to exploit. Because I mean, the whole point of these bad players is that they're exploitable because they're telegraphing. they make it very obvious the kind of hands that they're playing in certain situations, not just through their body language, but just from like, literally just you can watch and see a few showdowns and get an idea, okay, they are, they only play aces and kings from early position and so on. And it'd be amazed how much quality information you can get just from watching people for like an hour. So, yeah, I would just really make an effort to go, okay, I'm at, I'm at a tough table right now, so I'm going to sort of lock it down.

a little bit and just play a bit more conservatively. That said, you should still always try and balance, you know, by looking it down, if you now become that person who only plays aces, kings and queens, et cetera, now you're going to be super obvious as well. So you should always still try and just some of the time have a few, like, fun hands that still have some equity, like seven-eight suited, six-seven suited, etc. that you perhaps raise in, you know, in certain situations, 20% of the time or something like that. But, yeah, I mean, the key thing is just be aware of your table and, and try and figure out whether or not you can be the boss of it or whether you should just shut down and wait for a little while.

Because these, you know, these tournaments are a long slog and you're only, you might be at one table. I mean, maximum you're only going to be at that, a bad table for one day. But usually these players will bust each other and new players will come in, et cetera, et cetera. So it's this constant sort of revolving door of characters. And you need to be able to sort of put your foot on the gas pedal or put it on the brake pedal as and when necessary. And the quality players know and they can figure that out probably quicker than most. Definitely. Yes.

Yeah, exactly. So be observant, watch, obviously pay close attention even when you're folding, making sure that you're watching everything. Totally. Yeah. Like particularly if you're only playing like one or two tournaments a year, I mean, A, just for the like, you should try and be as involved as possible at all times. But yeah, when you're not in a hand, really pay attention because you'll see, you know, if there's a showdown and you get to see how someone played Ace King on an Ace High Board

and, you know, they played really conservatively, well, that's really useful information because that means that they're just a conservative player. Or you see someone run a nuts bluff, you know, really, really aggressive bluff. Well, now you can, you've got some info that this person's capable of that. So yeah, paying attention at all times, paying attention to your table type, and then being aware of position as well. I think people underestimate just how valuable that is, like how, you know, when you're in the late positions of like the cutoff and the button, you can play a much wider range of hands more profitably than you can if you're in the blinds or in under the gun, you know, these early positions. Yeah. The one thing I never understand, and maybe you could help me with this and this could be my.

of limited skill is as an amateur player, I don't think I would ever, ever show my hand unless I'm forced to. So why do amateurs ever, why would you ever show your hand? As a pro, maybe there's strategy, but as an amateur, why would you ever give more information than you need to? I completely agree. Okay. As a start to do that, unless, unless, like, you have a very, very specific plan that

say you, you, like, kind of look like someone who, So you look like kind of an old, scared-looking person. Because I typically... So you'd show a bluff then, maybe. No, no, no. I would want to further cement. If I, like, say if I'm playing somewhere, no one knows who I am. So they see this, like, I'm this little girl, etc.

People tend to think girls are more passive, less inclined to bluff and more easily, you know, they can push them around, et cetera. I can't really do that anymore because people usually recognize me. But let's assume that no one recognizes me. I don't think anyone will. And so this is the preconceived image, I think they'll all think of me anyway. And then I have a situation to further cement that image and maybe like, you know, I had play a big hand and I don't have to show that I, that I had aces. I might show it anyway, just be like, look, see, I had aces.

And like, and they'll be like, yep, yeah, yeah, we knew it. And of course you did. And like, people just can't help that. They'll just be like, yep, she fits with a stereotype, even stronger. Great. So I might want to show that to just further establish that image that they have. that I think they already have of me. But again,

most good players are aware of that kind of like intentional telegraphing. So only do that if you're like highly confident that this sort of fake telegraphing will work. Otherwise, just yeah, don't turn your hand to do that. You have to, I mean, be willing

then to bluff at some point too, right? You're setting them up for to be able to bluff them because they're going to say, well, live only plays when she's got aces. So I guess I have to fold and then you can pull off big bluffs. Exactly. Then you can get away with murder. Yeah, yeah, I got you. Um, okay. Um, exactly. But yeah, generally speaking, the whole point of, if you think that you're an amateur and you're surrounded by better players, what you're effectively saying is these better players are better at processing information relating to poker than I am. Right. So why would you give them more

information and, uh, particularly for free? So yeah. Gotcha. Okay. Okay. One other thing that you're, I know you're, you're big on is, um, so I was reading more about, uh, the, uh, this raising for effective giving. And some of your philanthropic work, and this is intense, I mean, you've been able to help raise millions of dollars. And I'd love to hear some of what it is about this, why you do it, and when you got started and how it works. Sure.

So it was around 2014. and my partner, Igor, who's another poker player and a couple of other poker players, we're all sort of feeling a little bit itchy feet about, you know, we've been extremely lucky, we're playing this beautiful game, but it's a zero-sum game, you know, in order to, for us to win, someone else has to lose.

And I think that, you know, that kind of, it's fun in an isolated game setting, but as a general, like, approach to life, it's not only bad, but it's just unnecessary because the world does not have to be a zero-something. In fact, it's quite the opposite. You know, like we can have positive sum trade deals, contrary to what certain politicians think, but these things can exist. And they do exist.

And if, you know, it requires, you know, the world can very much be a positive something where some people's quality of life can improve and everyone else can too. And so I think, you know, we were like, is there a way we can, continue playing poker and, you know, continue having this, you're playing this beautiful game, but also make a positive impact on the world, like a clearly positive impact. And we had actually met these, this, so that it's, they're called, it's the, the organ, the movement is called effect of altruism. Basically, there were these, uh, Swiss philanthropists and philosophers who, um, sort of their whole mission objective is to figure out how to achieve the

most good in the world, you know, the most effective and efficient way, like the most cost-effective way. And they sort of told us about, like, look, there are ways that we can, we think that poker players will get this philosophy really well, and we think we can raise a bunch of money to these highly effective organizations from within the poker community. So we started reg raising for effective giving, you know, the pun with the whole raising word, etc. And And yeah, and we sort of had this like model where basically public players would pledge to give a percentage of their winnings each quarter to a handful of charities. They could choose which charity it went to. But it was out of a very carefully selected list of about 10 organizations, which are known to be the most cost effective or have the biggest positive expectation in terms of reducing suffering and improving the quality of the world.

So, yeah, we started that in 2014. And yeah, it's now raised about over $6.5 million, which, six and a half million dollars, by the way, which would not have very unlikely to have been raised, particularly for these most effective charities. they would not have happened probably if we had not done this. So that's usually a good marker of, you know, am I doing a good thing and am I doing the best thing is to think, well, would it have happened if we hadn't done it? And in this instance, the answer was no. So yeah, it's been a fascinating, you know, steep learning curve to learn about, you know, not only philanthropy, but how to do philanthropy in the most effective way.

And yeah, it's really cool. Very cool. Liv, this has been fascinating. I know we went a little long, but you have so much going on. I have a lot of words today. I love to hear how you think about things. That's how we all learn is to hear how a really intelligent person thinks. And that's what I really enjoyed.

So thank you so much for being here. I'd love to continue our dialogue as we both progress. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, where would you send my listeners to learn more about you online? Um, I did a, well, particularly about the, if you're interested to read more about the philanthropy stuff. There's a Huffington Post interview I did a year or so ago. If you just search my name and Huffington Post, you should find it. I'll also just go to R.EG-charity.org to learn a bit more about the whole, you know, what we're trying to do with that.

Otherwise, yeah, watch my TEDx. It would be great. Yeah. I shared your TEDx talk about a month ago or a few weeks ago to all my email list and I watched it and I reached out to you around the same time because it's such an enlightening TED talk. I highly recommended again for those who haven't had a chance to watch it yet. So it's really good. But Liv, thanks again for being here. Like I said, I look forward to to continue the dialogue as we both progress.

Yeah, thank you. This has been brilliant. All right. Big thank you to Live for joining me. I really enjoy speaking with people who make me think and live definitely does that. And I think she could help all of us in our decision making and rationality. I find her fascinating. And I'm a poker fan too, so I've seen her success on TV too.

So I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, I would love it if you would write a review, subscribe to the show and rate it in iTunes, Apple Podcast. That's write to review, subscribe and rate the show, hopefully five stars. and iTunes Apple Podcasts. It really helps spread the message all over the world and continues to give me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity.

I thoroughly enjoy it. I'll be back next week. Can't wait. This episode is brought to you by Gusto. Gusto is making payroll benefits and HR easy for small businesses. Modern technology does the heavy lifting, so it's easy to get things right. PC MAG and fit small business have called Gusto the best payroll for small businesses.

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paperwork. And to help support the Learning Leader show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive limited time deal. Sign up today and you'll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to gusto.com slash leader. That's G-U-S-T-O.com slash leader. Okay, so there? All right. Thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate it. It was fun. Yeah, I loved it. I hope I didn't. I sometimes go into like excited fast talking mode. And I think I've picked into that a couple of times. So apologies. Well, no, that's good. That's what it's about. I think the cool thing about podcast is that you get the opportunity to go deep and ask follow up questions. And I mean, I try to bring up counterpoints too. I think that's interesting. I think that's interesting. I listen to some shows where it's like, oh, yes, that's awesome. Okay, next. Oh, that's awesome. Okay, next. And that's not as interesting is, okay, how are the ways that we think about this? And then how do we relate the poker table to people who are in the process of hiring a team?

You know, I think that's what I try to do is weave them back and forth. And you obviously were great in that. So I really appreciate it. Oh, thank you. I love the way you, like your actual, yeah, or your line of questioning. Because it must be so hard to know when to sort of interject with the guest and not, I don't know. You just seem to have that stuff down. Thank you.

I think it's like, like you mentioned at the poker table, you got to get a lot of reps. And the repetitions are what help in pretty much anything you do. It's certainly with doing these types of having these types of conversations is understanding. And sometimes I just can't help it. If it's really interesting or you bring something up that I don't want to forget or lose our place. And I know we can get back to it. Like I think I cut you off after number one of the TED talk or the TED Unplug talk of three life lessons for the poker table. I couldn't help help it.

And I think that that's good. I mean, people, they want to hear that too. And from what I've gathered, from a lot of feedback and from mentors who listen, they say, hey, you've got to be you. And if you're genuinely curious, you can't go wrong. So I think that's their approach. Awesome. Thank you so much.

Thank you. I'll make sure to send you a note when this goes live. Yeah. Do you know roughly how long until it will? It'll be within two to three weeks. Cool. Cool. All right.

All right. Thanks, Lyft. Bye and bye.