The Tim Ferriss Show - #611: Liv Boeree, Poker and Life — Core Strategies, Turning $500 into $1.7M, Cage Dancing, Game Theory, and Metaphysical Curiosities

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Starting point is 00:04:46 The Tim Ferriss Show. Ladies and germs, boys and girls, this is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. This is a rare in-person interview. I think this is the first time doing a full shebang with video since COVID. The appearance of that little bug, you may have heard of it. And let's jump right to the intro. My guest today is Liv Burree. That's B-O-E-R-E-E on Twitter at Liv underscore Burree. She is one of the UK's most successful poker players,

Starting point is 00:05:24 now a resident of Austin, Texas, winning both European Poker Tour and World Series of Poker Championship titles during her professional career. Before poker, she studied astrophysics and now focuses her time as a TV host and YouTuber specializing in game theory, futurism, and rationality. What a world we live in that you can now do that on YouTube. It's fucking amazing. It's incredible. She also gives seminars on high-stakes decision-making and recently spoke at the annual TED conference about the application of poker thinking to everyday life. In 2014, she co-founded Raising for Effective Giving, R-E-G, parenthetically. Let me try that again.

Starting point is 00:06:01 She co-founded Raising for Effective Giving, in parentheses, R-E-G. Let me try that again. She co-founded Raising for Effective Giving in parentheses REG. Let me try that again. In 2014, she co-founded Raising for Effective Giving, REG. We should keep all of those takes in. This is so bad. I'm trying to cut back on my caffeine and this is the price I pay. A nonprofit based upon the philosophies of effective altruism that raised more than $12 million for its carefully selected list of maximally cost-effective charities. You can find her online, livebury.com, livebury.substack.com, and on all of the things, all of the socials, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, you can certainly search and find her, Liv Burry. Liv, welcome to the show. It's nice to see you.

Starting point is 00:06:43 Thank you for having me. And we can go so many different directions. I thought we would start actually maybe in an unexpected place. So I asked you before we started, what color would you prefer? Black, blue, orange, or I think it was yellow. Oh, that's what it was for? It was for mic cable? It was for mic cable so that I can tell which line is feeding into which input on this recorder. And it certainly looks a lot better in audio, right? So it does have a certain clown car appearance to it when we do it in person with video. But when you said black, I said, I bet it's going to be black right beforehand. And it was black. And the reason I said that is I read something about you and Metallica.

Starting point is 00:07:27 And to get into the zone coming here on the drive over, I listened to Orion, the remastered version. Oh, great choice. Nice choice. Very, very, yeah. Because my first, now we're really getting off track here, but that's okay. There is no track.

Starting point is 00:07:41 My very first album I ever bought was on cassette tape and it was Master of Puppets. And can you guess why I bring up Metallica? Well, they were my love that bordered on an unhealthy obsession from the ages of like 16 to 22. So that's probably a, I would guess why you you brought it up i don't know how you would know that though well you know we do research over here middleinsider.net the iron maiden of the world they called you and there's a short discussion of the unforgiven and this led you

Starting point is 00:08:22 i guess in some respects into guitar. Do you still play guitar? I don't. You don't, but you did for a period of time. I did, yeah. From like 16 or 17 till 24, basically until poker took over. So do you then have typically one obsession at a time? Do you ever have multiple obsessions simultaneously or do you tend to have one obsessive fixation and that is where you put your energy i used to i used to be very a shiny new activity would come along and i would if it ticked enough boxes i'll be like i have to become the best at this i would rarely become the

Starting point is 00:09:00 best at it but i would certainly go down the rabbit hole deep enough to become proficient. And I was like that, I would say, until some point in my, probably my early thirties, some point around the age of 30, where I lost that a little bit. And in some ways that's good because it means I can try a greater breadth of things, but it comes a little bit at the cost of then not ever picking. And I'm currently struggling with the fact that I'm being too much of a jack-of-all-trades master of none like not knowing what I'm am I going to be focusing on YouTube or maybe I should just do speeches or maybe I should actually just start a company and give up on the silly like public facing stuff it can be a bit of a blessing and a curse I guess not fixating on one particular thing but

Starting point is 00:09:45 certainly as a teenager i was i don't know certainly with metal because i think you know with teenagers so often you don't because you haven't formed your identity yet right you will form it typically around a genre of music sure i was a metalhead which is you were metalhead oh for sure oh sick right so yeah you get it like and so... I mean, I say was as if it's past tense. If I'm in the gym, I'm still a metalhead. Right. Exactly. But you don't look it. You don't live it in your visual... No. I mean, I have like from the neck up, I definitely have the sort of early era. Well, actually no, like mid era Pantera look to me. I was about to say, Phil Anselmo, like a little bit, you know, Phil Anselmo after he's

Starting point is 00:10:23 Vulgar Display of power era or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. So I was kind of uncool until the age of 16 and then metal came along and I was like, Oh, this is, this is what I was waiting for. And then I just went all out. You know, I had the piercings, red hair, black hair, blue hair, the guitar, and just would not listen to anything but metal and not just like new metal i hated new metal no corn or anything like that no i wanted a really heavy shit like pantera was like a that was like a nice day on the beach you know i'm talking like dimu borgir bosom you know there's some of the swedish black metal one norwegian black metal once you get to the scandinavian

Starting point is 00:11:01 yeah death metal and you've gone really deep. Yeah, exactly. But Metallica were a huge forming part of that. They were the one sort of classic metal band that I still was like, I just loved so deeply. All right, let's paint a picture here. What was the age range of your competitive poker career? And then we're going to back into that by going to some very early chapters. But what was the

Starting point is 00:11:25 span because i'm trying to overlay that on what you just said so i first learned to play poker age 21 yeah it was 2005 i just graduated uni didn't really know what i wanted to do i thought i was going to carry on in physics but i decided to take a gap year because when I first started taking physics, I was like, oh, I'm definitely doing this. This is so interesting. I love it. But then the more time I got to spend with like PhD students or even people doing their masters, they seemed, I don't know, they just didn't seem very happy. And they weren't very, I don't know, just personality wise, I was wondering if it actually was going to work for me because all I really wanted to do was go out partying and clubbing and go, you know, see rock shows, metal shows. And I was also still wanting to be a rock star at the time.

Starting point is 00:12:12 And I was like, eh, I just don't know if this is going to quite work me sitting in a lab, you know, fiddling around with lasers. So I decided to take a gap year and I think I signed up. Oh, I was doing like random, like goth modeling sometimes. And as one does in their gap year. Right. Well, you know, just any way I could make some money. And I thought, I don't know,

Starting point is 00:12:33 I enjoyed dressing up in my heavy metal costumes as often as possible. And I was like, if I can get paid to do that, that'd be great. I also got paid to be a cage dancer in rock clubs in London. Yeah. Well, you know, I was admiring the boots

Starting point is 00:12:46 on the way in. This is a shoeless household, so thank you for accommodating. This is not my least metal sock ever. I'm so embarrassed. These are gray and pink striped socks with hearts all over them. So yes, it's like the hard exterior, the goth death metal exterior, and then like the soft, sweet inside. You don't understand how much pain I'm in actually. The fact that this is these, I have so many, like most of my socks are black. I just, just grabbed whatever I needed to. So goth modeling, which I also did during my gap year. Totally lying. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. And I wish I, I wish I could have. so goth modeling cage dancing and then i think i

Starting point is 00:13:27 signed up for this like website that would advertise different tv shows or modeling opportunities that kind of thing and i remember seeing an ad which said something like could you use your powers of skill and deception to win a hundred thousand pounds on tv And seeing as I was rapidly getting pretty damn broke, because dancing in a rock club cage doesn't pay you anything, really. And, you know, I had some student debt mounted up and really didn't want to get a real job for, you know, my parents were like, you have to, what are you doing? You've moved to London, get a job. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna, this seems reasonable. I've always liked, I wanted to try being on TV. I like game shows. This seems like a game show. I'll apply. Turns out they wouldn't tell us what, what it was that we were applying for because they needed to keep it a secret. But turns out

Starting point is 00:14:13 it was a reality show that was looking for five beginners at poker to teach them how to play. And the sort of loose scientific premise was they were looking for five different personality types to see which is most suited for the game. So I got selected for that. What was your personality type? They called me the professor, which I much certainly was not. I mean, I could see it. I could see it. I literally turned up in skin tight tiger print spandex self-made trousers. Now, did you do that because they had put you

Starting point is 00:14:46 in the professor category was that a rebellion an active rebellion or did that just no i mean that was genuinely how i dressed style emoting no it was it was my genuine got it appearance as i said i lived and breathed metal sounds good for tv right and i think that's probably why they selected me honestly like very overconfident to the point of like cocky 21-year-old brat who was... Unheard of with 21-year-olds. Yeah. I don't know. I just thought I was the smartest person in the world.

Starting point is 00:15:15 And I think I even said something like that in the interview, like the audition. And they're like, oh, we're definitely bringing you in. Yeah, this is going to be a good one. And I didn't disappoint because I ended up having a complete meltdown on the show. I'm so glad this is not on the internet. Basically, in the final, I think we played like seven preliminary rounds where we would, the five of us would play and then like that would accumulate points. And those points would translate into chips for the final game where we would play for

Starting point is 00:15:40 the 100,000. And I was winning, you know, I was leading going into that. And clearly I had a knack for the game and I remember the the hosts and the professionals that they bought on the show to teach us were like oh you're definitely going to win you know you are the most talented at this so I was so sure I was going to win this thing and then I ended up making not to get too technical but basically I misread my hand. I misread the board. I made a straight on the river.

Starting point is 00:16:07 The opponent bet. I was so excited. I was like, I raise, which was basically all my chips. And then I looked at the board again and noticed there were four diamonds out there and I didn't have, I had two black cards and audibly went, oh! Now I'm not, I'm no professional, but is that what one would call a tell yes that is that is a tell do not do that um and the my opponent it was a really nice guy called lee it was like

Starting point is 00:16:36 well i guess she doesn't have a diamond and he was like i'm all in and instead of again keeping my my cool or anything i just started crying like melted down the producers are high-fiving in the background yeah they were literally and and and they're like oh live what's the matter tell us more and i was like you know makeup everywhere i think i i like run away from the table they try and follow me with a camera it was just you know classic reality tv meltdown stuff so that was my intro to poker but i just completely fell in love with the game and funny enough while i was in the during the filming of that which took two months i went to a local card club in london to try and get some practice and they had this

Starting point is 00:17:17 now sort of infamous this five pound rebuy so you know it was the cheapest tournament they had what is a rebuy a rebuy means that if you for the first hour or so if you bust out you can just buy back in again so considering it was only five pound entry you can imagine it's just pandemonium everyone's going in every single hand and people will easily like spend like 100 pounds in their entry overall you know 20 rebuys good for the house yeah but i turned up with 10 pounds because i was like well it's a five pound tournament why would i ever need more than you know five pound for the entry and five pound to buy a drink? And that will be my, my day.

Starting point is 00:17:48 So you're like, you're like a player in a video game with two lives where everybody else has like a hundred lives. Right. Yeah. And most people were doing that. Yes. Only for the first hour. Then once after that period ends, then if you bust out, you're out.

Starting point is 00:18:04 This is the first tournament then once after that period ends then if you bust out you're out this is the first tournament i ever play and i enter this thing somehow get through this carnage period in the in uh in the first hour the zombies i think i did keep yeah i think i did three by once with my other five pounds so i didn't buy a drink and anyway i ended up winning it ended up playing till five in the morning it was like 120 people in it and I came home I remember just having this you know they paid me out in tens and twenties I think 750 pounds or something like that which was more money so I'd never seen that amount of cash before just so much money and I remember going home to my boyfriend at the time and waking him up at 5 a.m and just throwing the cash on him like this is this is the best thing ever this is my game

Starting point is 00:18:43 and I must be the best in the world. Like, you know, it's my first ever tournament basically. And I win it. So even though the TV show did not go well and I didn't win the a hundred grand, I'd already got the bug basically from that little win. So let me weave through this and inspect a bit because I have many questions. What do you think helped you during the show itself to make it to the final table? What were some of, whether they're your characteristics, things you learned, things you observed, trained abilities, anything that comes to mind that you think helped in the very early nascent stages? Of tournament yeah the tv show right the tv show and then i have more questions i mean i think the thing that was most helpful early on

Starting point is 00:19:34 for me in poker was i was just so pathologically competitive i just had to win and like prove that i was the best in this thing. And that translated to just more study time. Just like this, like laser focus. And then there's like ruthlessness because the thing about poker is that you actually, you do have to be really ruthless in the game.

Starting point is 00:19:56 In what sense? In terms of what bluffing people, if you're not comfortable with bluffing someone at the poker table, which I don't think a lot of people say, Oh, it's lying. It's like, it's not really lying.

Starting point is 00:20:05 No, it's just a form of, it's a strategy within a game as defined by the rules of the game. It's an integral part of it. It's sanctioned lying. Right. If you're not willing to do that, then you're,

Starting point is 00:20:15 it's not the game for you. And play chess. Right. And then you have to be just willing to, I guess, just really laser in and pay deep attention to what is going on. Because technically at any given moment, even if you're not in hand, there's really valuable information being exchanged about the way people, you know, the types of cards people play, the way that their bodies move when they're uncomfortable versus comfortable. Are they a naturally aggressive person or are they naturally scared? What are the things that make them scared, etc.?

Starting point is 00:20:48 And certainly in the beginning, I was just, because I didn't know anything about the actual statistical, the mechanics of the game, all I could rely on was the stuff I knew, which was looking for when people are bluffing. So looking for when people are bluffing. Okay, so let me ask you about the statistical side because you're coming out of physics you have it would seem a huge competitive advantage why would you not begin to study the tables and the statistics and so on well i did too you did that um and the thing is that the statistics required in poker to actually you know at a high level are you're not going to learn within the first month sure right and also people didn't even really know because this is 2005 even the top players in the world back then didn't really

Starting point is 00:21:36 understand game theory like even an average player understands it today so i read all the books i could get my hands on you know so I guess my sort of physics training helped to an extent with, with being willing to just like dive in and research on this, like on a big amorphous topic and, you know, not even clear directions of where to start. That probably gave me a bit of an advantage there. And then presumably I have an higher than average IQ from physics physics dancing exactly it really helps and all the drinking and guitar playing and chasing after rock stars yeah but it which i think obviously helps in any kind of strategic game but honestly the thing about

Starting point is 00:22:18 poker is the beautiful thing about poker in fact is that if you're talking about one night, you can have the literal best player in the world, a medium player, complete beginners, and provided everyone knows the basic rules, then technically anyone can win. It's only over the long run does anything actually meaningful start happening. And so even in this TV show where we played, I think, eight different games, statistically, it's not that meaningful, the results over that time period. There's so much luck going on. And I didn't realize that early on in the game. In some ways, you know, like winning that big tournament early on was not a big tournament, the £5 rebuy, it gave me an immense amount of confidence and love for the game, which I think had I not had, I wouldn't have then pursued it as much as I did. But it can also delude you a little bit because I then just assumed,

Starting point is 00:23:13 okay, well, I'm going to win this. There isn't that much luck. It's just who's the best player wins. And I think that's partly why it was such a kick in the face when I screwed up and didn't win the 100,000. When you say you fell in love with the game, aside from things that maybe you've mentioned already, what made you fall in love with it?

Starting point is 00:23:31 What was so appealing? There's an inherent excitement to it. Right. Of course, because there's a blending of skill and chance. Yes. And money. I mean, there's stakes. Right.

Starting point is 00:23:40 Built into it. Actually just winning. The potential of just winning, making a living where I don't have to go and sit in an office and I can do that. That was obviously a big carrot. Yeah. But there's just so many different skills that it draws upon. So there's the statistical side, you know, the scientific side. There's the game theory. If you really want to dive deep into math, and I mean, these days you can work with simulators you know you computer science stuff basically and go in that angle but then you've also got this more there's like an art to it as well you know psychology meant trying to mentally model what level someone is thinking at and be one step ahead of they're gonna zig you're gonna zag

Starting point is 00:24:20 that kind of thing and then also just like i mean there's a scientific way to read body language but sometimes you just get like a vibe that you can't explain so there's just so many different approaches you can take to it and like today I'm going to work on my body language reading and today I'm going to work on my pot odds and my combinatorics and so there's never a dull moment and there's always a new situation as well. Like even after playing for 10, 15 years, I'll still see something crazy with like the cards run out, like straight flush against pods, that kind of stuff. Like these incredibly rare scenarios will sometimes happen and, or people will do weird things

Starting point is 00:24:57 or some strange ruling will happen that like everyone's scratching their heads. Like, I don't know what the right call is here. It's, there's such depth and complexity to the game. Okay. So I'm going to admit something. It's embarrassing. I've been fascinated and drawn to poker for a very long time, and I've never learned how to play properly.

Starting point is 00:25:16 No way. It's true. Wow. There are many excuses I may have for this. One of them is that friends of mine, like a guy named Jason Kalkanis, want me to play but it's mostly because he wants to take all my money because he's going to be far better than i am

Starting point is 00:25:31 and that's a compliment jason i'll teach you how to beat jason and a lot of these investors are very confident i know some of them certainly, particularly the quants who I've observed from afar seem to be pretty competent. I had a little bite of the bug probably five years ago when I did an episode of a TV show, bringing it back to TV, where I trained for a week or five days probably to play heads up against a whole cohort of folks, including some pros. And I was able, and I was trained by, I want to give him credit, Phil Gordon for that. And for a very short period of time until the next skill I had to learn for the next episode, pushed it right out of my head, had a lot of fun with heads up. But one night when the filming had finished and I was like,

Starting point is 00:26:30 you know, let me go try just a regular table. And I got slaughtered. Like it did not translate at all, which I expected would largely be the case, but I just got dismembered. I mean, heads up is a very different game

Starting point is 00:26:45 playing against eight people yeah totally so yeah one-on-one a totally totally different game but it actually brought back in a way my love of mathematics and statistics which i lost not to make this like a confessional but i lost it in 10th grade because i had this one teacher who just had this huge axe to grind with the boys in the class. And almost all the boys ended up quitting math or avoiding it after that class. My brother had the opposite experience and then later became a PhD in statistics. So it's amazing to look at these divergent kind of points, right? Where you have a fork in the path, depending on your experience. So my my question after all that word salad is if you were to suggest a way of learning or to teach me an approach to learning regular poker whatever that means the type of poker i would play with my friends who are like, let's play poker. How might you think of approaching that?

Starting point is 00:27:46 Well, given that you are, I mean, you're pretty well-rounded in your personality and that you like both sort of human interactive things, but you can also nerd out really hard. Yes. I don't think there's really a wrong way to teach you poker. Like if I was to teach my, my mom or something like that, my mom is the most sounds strange to say but she's the least autistic person in in that she is so able to intuit social situations yep and unbelievably emotionally

Starting point is 00:28:20 intelligent but phobic of math phobic of she's interested in sort of scientific concepts but if you actually try and get into the technical weeds she's like she cannot and she you know her happy it's like she would be in arms with molly right now just like she's just a she just feels she's a very feel-based person and if i was to teach her the game you know i would take her to the table with group of fun people and you know we would slowly just like turn the cards over and you know talk through i'll give her the hand rankings i'm gonna take it very steady in in terms of like this is look how the way that they're acting so they seem quite confident that you know that take a more the human approach to it but i

Starting point is 00:29:01 think with you we would want to jump sort of straight into the game theory to an extent. So let me apply some parameters if I could, just to allow us to conjure an image. So let's just say, he's really going to want to take my money now, which he will probably. So let's say I had a game with Jason and you can pick the sort of minimally viable period of time over which you think I could learn to be competent enough that I might have a chance. Is it four weeks? Is it 12 weeks? This is also not knowing how good Jason is. I have no idea because I've always refused to play. He's pretty good. Okay, great. So let's just say, you you know if luck is on my side having some chance in hell well here's the thing so you have a chance in hell anyway if you sat down and just

Starting point is 00:29:52 stuck just going to be jason it's going to be an entire table no but even if you were playing one on one against jason if you guys sat down assuming you know the basic rules of like which hand there's always a chance okay but let's you know assume the very basics you know what betting chips means and how you know whether you what whether you have a straight on the river or not assuming that you and i could sit down and play 10 hands and it's basically 50 50 okay let's let's say we have you can pick the period of time of training and so however long it is and then jason and i are going to play a thousand hands exactly yeah a thousand hands your chance of beating jason over a thousand hands probably with like just knowing the rules is 45 that's how crazy like that's the thing maybe it's a bit less than that

Starting point is 00:30:41 maybe it's sorry jason maybe it, let's say 37%, maybe 35. I'm going to get a phone call after this. But could we get it so that you are a favorite against him? Eight weeks of intensive. Okay. Yeah. If you sat and studied all the charts, because that's what it is really these days.

Starting point is 00:31:04 So poker, now that we know the studied all the charts, because that's what it is really these days. So poker, now that we know the mechanics of the game, basically there's this thing called game theory optimal solutions to different scenarios, which is basically, you know, if you have jack-nines suited on this type of board against a person in this position, you will want to check raise them 30% of the time and check call 70% of the time or something like that.

Starting point is 00:31:24 So it gives basically, there are like answers to what you should do in different scenarios with what frequencies. It's all about frequencies. And so now that we know this and you can run simulators to give you the answers of all these fictitious scenarios, now it's changed the game into basically who's willing to learn as many different scenarios as possible and like basically emulate them in their head when they go and play so it's a very different type of game it's more like kind of almost studying chess moves i was just gonna say it sounds a lot like studying like chess scenarios

Starting point is 00:31:54 and it wasn't like that even 10 years ago it was very very different i mean there was some it was more about you you'd sort of do combination calculations in your head and that kind of thing but that was kind of the limit of it and honestly it's actually one of the reasons why i in the end didn't like the game as much anymore i've been doing it for 12 years anyway and i was just starting to get itchy feet naturally but it required more and more time spent to at the top levels at least just with these incremental gains exactly diminishing returns in terms of hourly because also what it means is because it's like these game theory optimal solutions exist it means that there's technically this perfect style of play any one person can play and the more people study this style the more people are close to it and so that means there is a ceiling of how perfectly you can

Starting point is 00:32:41 play like technically if you and i are both two computers that are able to play this game theory optimal style, we're just breaking even against each other over infinity. Over the short time, you know, if we play for an hour, whoever gets the best cards will therefore win. But over infinity, we will just break even. And so that meant that you'd have to be putting more and more time in to win a sort of shrinking pot of money, essentially.

Starting point is 00:33:01 Which is why I don't now recommend to people to go out and try and be professionals in poker. But I still absolutely recommend that people go and learn the game because it is probably the best way to... It's the best mini-analog for the type of complex decision-making that you need to do in life. And we're going to come back to this because I do think with my very little exposure to poker and having watched some on TV and nonetheless having had my ass handed to me when I tried it live, that particularly maybe an easy map is investing and poker. There are just so many variables that are similar, which is why I think so many investors are drawn to it. And also, give a plug, All In Podcast, check it out. That's J. Cal's podcast with his buds.

Starting point is 00:33:52 It is a fantastic, fantastic show. I do think it is one of the best new podcasts, new-ish podcasts that I've put into my rotation. So don't take all my money, Jason. Eight weeks. What does the density of practice look like? Is that two hours a day? Is it 10 hours a week? What does the distribution look like? To be confident that you'll have like a 60-40 edge on him, I would want to do 40 hours a week at least. Okay. Oh, yeah. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Wealthfront. If you've seen the market

Starting point is 00:34:32 lately, you probably didn't like what you saw. I know I certainly didn't and I still don't. It is a mess out there. Just a complete zoo and clown car and house fire combined. It's a mess. Here's the thing, though. The trick to wealth isn't timing the market. It's time in the market. Historically, the market has always rebounded. To build wealth, you need to stay invested for the long haul. Not speculate, not try to time the bottoms or the tops, but stick around for the long haul. Wealthfront is an investing app focused on long-term wealth designed to weather any market condition, even the one we're in now. With Wealthfront, you get a pre-built diversified portfolio that spreads your investing eggs across more baskets. It's the time-tested way to build long-term compounding wealth and weather whatever

Starting point is 00:35:19 volatility might be happening in the market in the short term. Wealthfront makes it super easy to start investing, answer a few questions about your risk level and future plans, and you'll get a personalized portfolio built for the long term. Wealthfront was voted best overall robo-advisor by Investopedia, and it is already helping nearly half a million people build their wealth, with more than $27 billion in managed assets. Sign up with Wealthfront today and get your first $5,000 managed for free. If you want to invest for the long term, don't wait. Just visit and learn more at wealthfront.com slash Tim. That's wealthfront.com slash Tim. All right, 40 hours. How does that break down if we have,

Starting point is 00:36:00 you said eight weeks, right? Yeah. So hypothetically, let's say week one, what does the schedule and curriculum look like? So in the first week, I think we would, I mean, I would sit and just run out lots of different hands. I think in-person is better than online. So you actually just get to play with the cards, feel what it's like. You get really familiar with the betting patterns

Starting point is 00:36:24 and that kind of thing. And we would talk about the more sort of general things like, why are we betting? What are we seeking to find here? Okay, we want to find information. We'd get into the idea of like ranges because, kind of a strange word, but basically we're playing a hand right now. I don't know anything about your cards. All I know is that you've got two cards out of the, you know, a thousand and whatever the number is combination of two cards that you can have. So right now your range is a hundred percent and same back at you. And then as the hand progresses,

Starting point is 00:36:54 basically I want to narrow down the perceived range that I think you could have, you know, narrow gain information so I can narrow that down and put you on a hand. While meanwhile giving away as little information about my own possible range. So keeping it as wide open to you. So it's about maximizing deceptiveness while extracting information out of your opponent. So I'll teach you about concepts like that.

Starting point is 00:37:17 And we would talk about ways that you can do that. And then I think we would go and actually play a little bit in person, just so you get used to the, again, the kind of dynamics. So we would need to find a table somewhere. Yeah. We'd go to a local, I mean, probably invite friends over and we'd just have some, have some games. I mean, it's so much fun anyway. Those are the best type of poker games. Bring in my card mechanic and take all their money. Exactly. Yes. And then after that, I think we would start, I don't know at what stage,

Starting point is 00:37:43 but you know, once you seem competent and, and are able to, you're able to do sort of basic math calculations in your head about, okay, well, I have to call $100 into a pot of $400. I'm getting four to one. What does that mean? How many cards are there that I need to hit, et cetera. So these kind of pot odd calculations, that kind of stuff. Could you just take a second and explain what you mean by pot odd calculations? So pot odds are basically, you know, like an investing to an extent. If things go well, what do you win versus how much would you lose? And then how do you bet size accordingly? Right, exactly. Or like, you know, let's say you're trying to hit a flush and there are nine cards left in the deck that could help you say out of 36. So you have a 25% chance of hitting the card you need.

Starting point is 00:38:27 And meanwhile, the pot is offering you five to one. Well, now it's actually a profitable thing, right? Because you're getting the pot is offering you more than the odds that you need to hit your card. So I haven't talked about this stuff in ages. It's really interesting seeing my brain's like, oh, find the words. So those kind of rudimentary types of math calculations that you need to do and then as you get more comfortable in that then you would

Starting point is 00:38:51 start doing more combination calculations so as you're sort of narrowing down your opponent's range there will be presumably some hands that they will have that are better than your hand you know so what we would call value hands that they would be playing but they would also have some bluffs in there so you need to try and think about what are the conceivable bluffs they would have given the sort of story that's been told you know like pre-flop they raised early so that means they probably have stronger cards and weaker cards so you can narrow it down to like the top end of the cards like aces kings ace king ace three suited that kind of stuff but then on the flop when an ace came out they actually slowed down so that maybe suggests that they don't have

Starting point is 00:39:30 an ace maybe they have more like nines tens eights you know to a pocket pair like that weaving together bits of evidence to be able to narrow down people's ranges and put them on like conceivable bluffs versus conceivable strong hands so that kind of stuff and then after that if you know you're seeming to grasp all that then we would actually start looking at the the solver charts so these are these like simulators there's this one called pio solver that was at least popular in the day when i was playing how do you spell that p-i-o pio solver i think it's still the main one and at least when i I was using it, that was back in 2016 or so, it would take many hours to run a SIM. So, you know, you'd be like,

Starting point is 00:40:12 I want to know what the optimal play is with jack nine suited on a 10, eight, four rainbow board or something like that. And then let it run. Folks listening. I have no idea what that means either. I love how it sounds though. Yeah. There's so much jargon i think i need a rainbow that's actually probably where we would start we would start with glossary because there's so many there's so many terms vocab the vocab is is you know there's just so much going on there but yeah so we would start running simulations so you can see and understand like this is what the optimal solutions would be in these certain situations because once you know what the optimal solutions are then now you can you're sort of equipped with

Starting point is 00:40:50 this like really solid baseline of what the perfect play is where if you don't have any information about your opponent that you can just follow and know that you know at worst you'll be breaking even but you'll still be beating them but then because you know what the perfect play is you can look for ways to exploit their screw-ups because in reality everyone even the pros are making mistakes they aren't playing this perfect gto style but you can't really know the way that they're screwing up until you know what gto is in the first place so it acts as this like baseline benchmark of high quality play so we would sit and we would study these charts. And if over that course of eight weeks, I got you so that you were able

Starting point is 00:41:29 to like emulate these charts to, I don't know how to quantify it, but to a good amount, that would be more than sufficient to be Jason. You know, he's not a full-time pro. He's good. Like he's played a lot

Starting point is 00:41:39 and we've only played once. And I was more just like bemused at the amount of words that were coming out of his mouth. Well, I was going to say, if his poker is anything like his basketball, he will, his ability to shit talk is actually incredible. That guy is world-class.

Starting point is 00:41:53 He's very good at getting under your skin. If he wants to get under your skin. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. He's, he's, uh, he said many,

Starting point is 00:42:00 we've had, we've been at a few parties together and he has, he knows how to ruffle feathers, but he's so funny. I love him. Excellent interviewer and moderator. I just want to second the recommendation that was made earlier. Let's depart from the training for a bit.

Starting point is 00:42:15 We may come back to it. But actually, let me ask a question I haven't asked in a long time. Maybe similar. This is like kicking in the gears, starting the old car, trying to like turn the key, get it to turn over. If you could predict the main reasons, the failure points, the reasons I would quit in those first eight weeks, what do you think they might be? Assuming that I had the time and the interest, what are the things that might break me or cause me to walk, give up?

Starting point is 00:42:48 If for some reason you couldn't wrap your mind around what these charts mean, I guess that would be a sort of breaking point. But I just don't see that ever happening, to be honest. So it would be more, I think the reason why you'd walk away is because you're like, actually, this isn't that much fun

Starting point is 00:43:03 and I'm not playing for, I don't care enough about beating Jasonason you're not playing for super bowl stakes and you're like this is not for people listening i'm just using jason as a stand-in because it's fun but right i don't care i don't care enough about beating anyone exactly they're just the opportunity cost would be too high that would be the only reason i think because i think you would find it fun otherwise now i would have would have to, I wouldn't have to, but ensure that I have a certain frequency of play after putting in 40 hours a week for eight weeks.

Starting point is 00:43:31 Otherwise the decay rate would be brutal. And part of that time, by the way, in that 40, it's not just studying the charts. It's also going out and actually practicing and getting real because assuming you're going to play one-on-one in the flesh, a big part of poker that we haven't touched on yet as well is emotional control understanding yourself and your own biases not only cognitive but also the way different negative emotions will arise

Starting point is 00:43:55 which they will in the game particularly with someone like jason who is so adept at like saying things to needle and that's a big part of the game getting the verbal yeah bamboo shoots under your fingernails um that would be as important particularly if you're playing for a particular you know you're training for a big match the mental game side of it because ultimately you can study all the charts and think you're a gto machine and like oh i'm fine but then you get down there and he looks you in the eyes and it's like well you screwed up that hand tim like what are you gonna do what are you gonna do huh you know and just goes full jason on you like you'll forget everything the red mist um i call it the white mist i've never heard that okay i like the red mist descends like if there's two mental blocks and that's when one might go tilt tilt

Starting point is 00:44:40 exactly if i if i'm catching the leg yeah tilt very good uh for those who don't know tilt is is uh what people do basically when their emotions get the better of them and they start playing badly now is monkey tilt just an exaggerated version of that yes okay yeah because now monkey tilt is just like the you know you've got sort of one of the flavors. Now, the reason that this is fresh on the mind is not too long ago, I was in a non-sober state and decided that it was the perfect time to start making stock trades. And my friend was watching me and he's like, I think you may be full tilt right now. And I was like, do I look excited?

Starting point is 00:45:22 Do I look upset? I'm not on tilt. Those didn't work out very well. Those threads. But the red mist, when the red mist, but you call it the white what? Well, so there's two, there's the white noise. So the white noise is when, so red mist is when you're angry. Someone has wound you up.

Starting point is 00:45:40 That would probably be my Achilles heel. Right. The white noise. Yeah. And the white noise is where, for whatever reason, perhaps, you know, you're just really tired or you're really stressed, but you'll go and consult your brain and it comes back with nothing. Okay.

Starting point is 00:45:55 Yeah. You're just beach balling. Just beach balling. Yeah. It's just. And I've had that a few times. I remember having it in the World Series day four or something, day five. And it was

Starting point is 00:46:05 a really big pot and i just needed to think and but then my brain was like well this is a really important decision you know you just really pay attention to this one like are you paying it well i'm not sure you're paying attention why are you listening to me and so there's a little voice and then i was like okay pay attention let's count the combos of what they've got and just nothing so in the end i was like i you know my system two are you familiar with uh system one system two no okay oh wait a second system one system two is this like daniel conaman yeah it's a danny conaman if you could just give some context his thesis is that we have two modes of thinking well system one is like you're intuitive like if i ask you what's five

Starting point is 00:46:40 plus five you immediately know the answer is ten so it kind of your gut instincts shot of adrenaline so that you're gonna make me do multiplication tables well wait so that's your system one it's just the things you immediately know an answer to or you you know it's like an unconscious process you know if you technically it's system one if you're driving down the street and someone cuts in front of you your your body will take over and you'll swerve because you don't have time to do a sort of cost-benefit analysis of going left or right. And then your system two is the conscious thinking. So if I was to ask you what 471 plus 88 is?

Starting point is 00:47:16 It would be 560, I even forgot the numbers now, nine? 471 and 88. 471, 88. What's that? I can't remember. 471. Yeah. Nine, five, five, five, five, nine.

Starting point is 00:47:34 Is that right? 559. I have no idea. It's 500 and, well, I can't even remember. Anyway. Whatever that was. You can't use your gut feelings for that. Right. You have to think it through. You have to do the calculation mentally in your head. Whatever that was. You can't use your gut feelings for that. Right.

Starting point is 00:47:45 You have to think it through. You have to do the calculation mentally in your head. So that's your system too. And poker is really interesting because- You know I'm on five hours of sleep. I just want to buy myself a little bit of wiggle room on the mental math. I can't even answer my own question and I have no excuse. May I make a quick aside?

Starting point is 00:48:04 One of the coolest things I've ever seen was when I was 15 as an exchange student in Japan and I got to know multiple kids because it's mandatory that every kid learn how to use an abacus. And something like one out of every 30 or 40 kids would get so good that they no longer needed the physical abacus.

Starting point is 00:48:24 They could see it in their minds. And so for party tricks, their friends would just lob these three-digit multiplication problems at them, and they could come up with the answer. It would take them a second, because they actually had to physically map it out and move these beads and so on in their minds. But astonishing.

Starting point is 00:48:45 My partner, Igor can kind of do that. Yeah. It was one of the ways he got me, honestly. He just, you just throw numbers at him and he'll, he hasn't done it in a while and he'll hate that I've mentioned this

Starting point is 00:48:54 because now everyone's going to do it to him, but he can usually answer within like a second or two. Wow. That's fast. Yeah. It's hot. Rock stars to mental mathematics. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:49:06 So those are, I can't remember where I was going now. So where you were going is we were talking about system one, system two, and that white noise moment. Yes. And that is not a time that you can rely on system two. Is that what you were going to say?

Starting point is 00:49:17 Right. Exactly. Because system two has shut down. Yes. System two is offline. Yes. Offline. It's not,

Starting point is 00:49:22 it does not compute. No, there's nothing there. Hello. Four or four. Four or four. or four four or four yes blue screen of death and it's bad when that happens terrible yes oh and that is you know if you're playing can be various reasons it can be because if you're wound up someone's gotten under your skin that will shut it off but also just pure adrenaline and stress you know you're excited even i've had under your skin that will shut it off but also just pure adrenaline and stress you know you're excited even i've had it when i had a really good hand yeah and i was really i was like oh man i'm gonna win a huge pot here this is so exciting and i'm like well i need

Starting point is 00:49:54 to think through what the optimal bet size is and again because i just it just it's it's so hard because i think you're you're put into, you know this stuff better, like your sympathetic nervous system is in play, right? So you're kind of in fight or flight, and that is not conducive to slow cognitive thought. It's conducive to immediate, you know, physical stuff really useful for, but not so good for the mental. regulation so i have in front of me some notes obviously you can see them those who are on audio only will not be able to see them that's fine because it makes me sound more professional if you think i'm doing everything off the top of my head so at one point you turned 500 euros into 1.25 million euros which is around 1.7 million and if i'm getting roughly i believe that that math right that was at the ept san remo and it was 500 euro buy-in or 500 it was a 500 euro satellite tournament into the main event buy-in which was 5 000 euros so everyone was buying in for 5 000 but i won my way in because i couldn't afford the 5,000. I won my way in through a feeder, smaller tournament. So a few just housekeeping questions about this.

Starting point is 00:51:09 How long after that first tournament win after the TV show was this? This was 2010. So five years. Wow. All right. So five years later, this happens. Presumably in this tournament, there was less and then crying and running away from the table. Correct. Okay. So what type of self-regulation did you learn over that period of time and then subsequent to that? Oh man, that, that tournament was nuts because nuts because you know the tv show was in 2005 i didn't actually really turn fully professional whereby i was living off it until 2000 like late 2008 i was still sort of playing casually couldn't really get my act together enough to i wasn't good

Starting point is 00:52:01 enough really to be living off poker before then so So I'd been, I'd been playing on the circuit now for like a year and a half and I played some bigger buy-in tournaments, but I'd never made like any like really big final tables or anything. And this Italy one kind of happened by accident. It was, remember the volcano that went off in Iceland? Yeah, I do. And it shut down all of European airspace. I was in the South of France for something completely different and I couldn't get home. And someone, I heard that there was this tournament going on in Northern Italy and it was like a train ride away.

Starting point is 00:52:30 So I was like, all right, screw it. I'll go there. Thank God for volcanoes. Bless that volcano. Oh yeah. And then I arrived and there was this like,

Starting point is 00:52:37 this feeder tournament that's called a satellite that night where, you know, it was 500 euro entry and one in 10 people would win their ticket for the 5,000,

Starting point is 00:52:44 the main event. So I won my ticket that night, like four in 10 people would win their ticket for the 5,000, the main event. So I won my ticket that night, like four in the morning, and then went and played it the next day, starting at noon. And a very strange thing happened to me, actually, at noon before the tournament started, but that's another topic I think we can get into later, maybe. Wait a minute, you can't leave that. Just give us a teaser, and then maybe we'll come back to it i had my first of

Starting point is 00:53:07 a handful of completely unexplainable borderline metaphysical experiences in uh i won't say what it is it'll be better if we talk about we'll come back to that later but anyway so i had a very strange thing happen just before the tournament started at noon and long story short six days later it ended up being the largest tournament ever held in Europe at the time. Leaving that undescribed is what I call keeping the audience listening. Yeah, you better keep watching. And now, for a short commercial break. I ended up attracting the biggest field of players of any tournament in Europe to date, at the time at least, was over like 1,200 people.

Starting point is 00:53:44 So huge, huge tournament. And six days later, I was on the final table down to the final nine. How many hours a day are you playing? I played like 10 hours a day on average. Some days were a bit longer, some days were a bit shorter. So you can imagine how exhausting that is. Also, because the longer you're going, the more intense it gets because in the beginning the stakes are like okay i might lose my 5 000 euro buy-in but as the tournament wears on and you know there's less people your chip stack is worth more and more in terms of equity and so your loss aversion starts to oh yeah go vertical by the time of the

Starting point is 00:54:21 like the end of day five where we play down to the final table, the final nine, for ninth place, I was already guaranteed, I think, 90,000 euros. I only had like, I think I had like 50,000 pounds to my name at this point. So I was already guaranteed double my net worth for whatever happened on that final table. And first prize was the 1.25 million euros 1.7 dollars and that morning i think i got some sleep the night before because i somewhat of an insomniac anyway so if i have something on the next day that's big i often will just not sleep very well and so you can imagine this cranks it up to 10 and i was dreaming you know i don't know if you ever have that where you've been doing a lot of a particular thing like trading or whatever and you sort of semi sleep and see the thing i was playing poker i was like i was lying there i had pocket jacks i had a king queen you know just these fictitious hands my brain just could not shut off and that was my night the night before and i was just like in a complete tears because i'm like i'm gonna play tomorrow like i'm a mess i was so nervous before the final table i like

Starting point is 00:55:25 threw up three times on the way like walking down it was so stressful but i don't know once we actually started playing once i got the cards in my hand it was just like and i just switched into this like mode of i don't know it was weird was that the first time that it happened or that happened to you before not to that extent because i think it was a perfect storm of like it's such extreme nerves and being such a mess beforehand and then like actually being able to play well i don't know the delta felt more than i'd ever had it before but i had had that before where i was like able to like get into the zone very well i wonder if you just spent all of your stress calories yeah yeah you know know what I mean? Like that tank was empty. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:56:05 So you needed to switch to a different tank. Honestly, it felt like I had something guiding me that whole time. It was a very strange experience. And anyway, I won and it was great. Of course, I'm not going to let go of the metaphysical experience. We are going to come back to that probably quickly.

Starting point is 00:56:19 But before we do, for people who are not going to bank on having metaphysical experiences or the feeling of being guided, what else have you learned about regulating, whether it's the white noise or, especially for me of personal interest, when someone is actively trying to fuck with you and disrupt all of your systems. The best thing I've found, and it's super simple, is just breathing three deep breaths. It's so cookie cutter, but it just works. Just close your eyes and inhale in. You could feel, even if your heart's pounding, my heart's actually pounding a little bit now because I'm retelling the story. It's funny. that you notice that you feel your body you breathe in and you breathe it into your belly and i i imagine my favorite color yeah which is usually a mix of like turquoise and purple something like that and i just i'm sucking that in and pulling it down into my stomach and then

Starting point is 00:57:18 it's just like this settling feeling and it's half of it is just like bullshitting myself but it's an interrupt it's an interrupt exactly and it just is enough to like settle your nervous system a second just ground you back to here and then be like okay now what's the problem another thing that's helped as well is i just like laughing at myself oh you're taking this one awfully seriously oh silly like like playing a silly little in my head just to like make light of the situation a bit but that it requires a lot of ability to sort of step out and observe the situation because obviously once you're in the red mist particularly the red mist more than the white noise by definition you are like animalistic you are you don't have the ability to step outside and observe

Starting point is 00:58:00 a situation well so it's i think just practice really practice getting angry you know practice reading i guess the way you could do it is go like go read something that you know makes you angry like really like reliably gets your blood pressure up and then try and like build in some kind of trigger that makes you do the the three breaths thing so for 99.9 percent of the sadomasochistic users of twitter myself included just go on twitter yeah just go on twitter every day like you'll be reliably upset for two minutes oh man twitter oh what a what a nasty neighborhood that's turned into so sad as you're saying this i'm imagining i'm imagining j Jason listening to this and formulating in his mind.

Starting point is 00:58:45 That's why I was smirking. For if he sees me taking deep breaths, he'd be like, yeah, Timmy, take those deep breaths. Come on, buddy. You can do it. Oh, sorry. I upset you. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:58:55 No, you're doing great. Just close your eyes. Don't even look at me. Don't even look at me. Close your eyes. Don't look at me. Don't worry. No, no, nothing to see here.

Starting point is 00:59:00 You can't hear me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He'll just end this stream of words. It's not like everybody's waiting for you or anything. All right. Before I lose track, which I wouldn't, but what the hell happened in the morning?

Starting point is 00:59:12 And you can contextualize this however you want. Sure. No, I mean, what happened was I played a bunch of these tournaments, not of ones quite this size, but I'd still played a lot of tournaments at this point. And I was there before there before it actually started.

Starting point is 00:59:27 Usually people turn up late, but for some reason I was there in my chair before the first hand was dealt. And I remember the company PokerStars, whose event it was, they dimmed the lights. They're like, welcome to EPT San Remo. Huge, we've got incredible feel, blah, blah, blah.

Starting point is 00:59:40 And then they dimmed the lights and they put on the screens around the room, just like a promo, exciting. Promo video. Promo exciting promo video you know and i remember distinctly the music it was chemical brothers hey boy hey girl which i always loved i always loved that song yeah good choice yeah and you know i was like oh this is cool yeah i'm excited and while i was just like listening to it just like out of nowhere this like a bolt of lightning felt like it was like this like and this voice in my head said you are going to win this tournament and it sounded like my own voice but what i can't remember is whether it was i am gonna win or you are gonna win but i'm pretty sure it was you are gonna win but it literally sounded like my own voice and it was sounded like

Starting point is 01:00:20 your own voice yes so it was like the you know when you speak in your head like the voice you hear like most people have that right like you know that tuesday voice that everyone hears oh man i'm learning a lot out here um it sounded like how i would sound in my own head to myself and it said you are going to win this tournament and i got this rush of goosebumps it's even happening a little bit like the hairs up on my you know on my arms and I remember looking around the room like did did I just say that out loud did anyone else hear this and everyone else was just like in their phones or whatever and I was like well that was freaky and then the lights came back up and they're like okay cool shuffle up and deal and I was still like stunned and I was like okay cool and then like halfway through the day you know and then i sort of a little bit forgot

Starting point is 01:01:08 about it but then like halfway through the day i got in a big pot and i lost half my chips you know it's always a bad feeling when that happens and i was like oh man i'm nearly out the tournament i guess that was bullshit you know so like i had like little multiple moments over the next few days where it clearly was a real thing because i've like checked in on it and i even told a friend of mine on what do you mean checked in on it meaning you remembered that it had happened that it had happened well because obviously the rational explanation to this is that it was just a false memory you know that i have retroactively remembered something that didn't really happen as a way of like reconstructed it exactly but you have multiple points at which you referred to it yes and i even have a friend my my friend melanie who was there and i bumped into her in

Starting point is 01:01:50 the in the women's bathroom on like day two and she's like oh you got a lot of chips it's going well i was like yeah yeah uh things are going well really weird i feel like i'm gonna win this in fact i almost had a premonition that i did and she's like yeah you seem really confident we actually had this conversation and to the point that she after i won it she was like what the fuck was that you like predicted this i'm like i know i don't know so yeah i don't know how to explain it now i think you said string or series of experiences is that type of experience in poker isolated to that? And it doesn't have to be constrained to poker. So what was interesting was after I- Actually, may I ask, I apologize for doing this herky-jerky questioning style,

Starting point is 01:02:31 but did you have any of those types of experiences when you were younger? No. That you recall? No. No. I was not like a weird kid that had, sorry, let me start again. Weird kid. You weren't like the kid from The Sixth Sense. No, I wasn't the sixth sense kid no uh no i did not is to answer that question i had not really ever had i think anything you know like i never saw a ghost or anything like that i'm not asking about ghosts

Starting point is 01:02:57 don't lump me in with the ghost hunters come on i want to just paint the picture of that i was a very in fact like a deep skeptic right well you still are a deep skeptic in a lot of ways right but like certainly then like i'd never had anything weird that i couldn't really explain in any conventional way i've certainly not had any time loops or anything like that or weird voices in my head but yeah to answer your question of like is it a sort of common thing in poker no not so much common thing in poker but have you since had more of those types of experiences not of like explicit premonitions no i'm not nothing even close to that i have had one really notable thing that i am happy to talk about it it's if you change your mind we can cut it later exactly for want For want of a better word, I had an extreme energy healing, an almost accidental one.

Starting point is 01:03:49 So it was a few years ago and seemingly out of the blue, I started getting this very unpleasant sensation in my ear where it was like a sort of low frequency buzzing, humming quite frequently. So some kind of tinnitus, but it was almost like a sort of low frequency buzzing humming quite frequently like so some kind of tinnitus but it was almost like a pressure and voices particularly men's voices became distorted to the point that they were unbearable to listen to and it was really bumming me out it would come in like clusters i would have it like for a few hours and it would go away and come later on in the day and it was stopping me from doing any social events because any loud scenario was unbearable, but particularly men speaking, I just couldn't handle it.

Starting point is 01:04:32 And this went on and off for a few months. And I went and saw a doctor, multiple doctors, and had hearing tests. And they said, oh, you're losing your hearing and the low frequencies of your hearing in that ear. We think you have Meniere's disease. Meniere's is this degenerative thing, which usually people end up completely deaf when they have it, where basically the nerve cells in the inner ear start dying and they don't really know why. They think it's something to do with like salts and ion channels and it's incurable as far

Starting point is 01:04:58 as they know. And so I was told that's what I probably have. And they were like, it's pretty, really sorry. It's, you know, it was just bad news to find that out. And also because one of the symptoms of it is you start having balance problems as well. You get like these vertigo attacks and people be like vomiting and so on. And so you can imagine I was like really down in the dumps finding this out and then cut to three months later or so go to Burning Man. And I have for the first time, one of these vertigo attacks, one of the days, I mean, I wasn't completely sober, but it was not a good time as you can imagine having a vertigo attack while not being sober for the first time. So I was then really down in the dumps. And then

Starting point is 01:05:34 on the last night of the burn, I was talking to some friends and started talking to this girl who I kind of, I don't know that well, but she's a friend of a friend. And I mentioned about my ear and she's like, oh, well, I mentioned about my ear and she's like oh well I do energy healing I'm an energy healer I was like I don't know what that is but sure do whatever you want to do yeah have a go she's like I can try and after she sort of put her hand over my ear for a few minutes and then she says I remember saying something like there's something there I need to get it and she starts sucking over my ear with her mouth like not touching it but just like and it was really unpleasant like you can imagine that sensation of someone like

Starting point is 01:06:15 inhaling over your ear and I was like oh please stop she's like no I need to get this there's something there and she does it I don't for a few minutes, and then eventually kind of collapses in a heap on the floor crying and freezing cold going, oh my god, that was bad. I don't know what that was. That was really, really bad. Again, I was not fully sober, so this is slightly retelling, but I just remember being so shocked. I just didn't expect anything to actually happen. I didn't really feel anything other than this like unpleasant sensation of her sucking, but I was so shocked at the way she was now reacting because she was shocked. She did not seem to expect whatever had just happened to her. And she said afterwards, you know, she came around after a little while and she's like, I don't know what it was. It was like bad energy. I don't know.

Starting point is 01:07:01 It's gone. I'm very pleased to say it's fully gone and it's gone away. And I I was like well okay what does that mean for my symptoms am I cured she's like yeah yeah you'll probably have symptoms for a couple more weeks and then you'll be fine and that's exactly what happened and I haven't had any problems since it kind of just like it just blew my world open because aside of that premonition thing, which I'd kind of forgotten about, I have not ever subscribed to anything like that. Like I'm a physicist. In fact, like,

Starting point is 01:07:31 you know, I'm proud, like I kind of built a career of being a like materialist, rationalist physicist. And I don't have any time for any of that stuff. It's all nonsense. It's all confirmation bias. No one's ever actually tested it empirically or proven it.

Starting point is 01:07:44 Show me the study and i'll believe it but here i am having that experience with two what feel like pretty incontrovertible data points that something that i cannot explain happened and fortunately would be incredibly beneficial to me such a blessing so yeah so these experiences are particularly interesting to me as direct first-hand experiences of course secondhand now that i'm listening but are particularly interesting to me when i'm speaking with someone who has demonstrated a very well-developed ability to use system two thinking and rationality and reasoning and mathematics and so on in not just the world, but in competitive arenas, right?

Starting point is 01:08:41 So you have a calibrated and also tested ability to use those faculties that you've developed. And I'm glad you're mentioning these things just because weird shit happens. And the idea that we have it all figured out is ludicrous. Even though humans at any point in history, whether you go back to the middle ages the dark ages i'm sure you know 6 000 years ago or whatever it was with the egyptians i'm sure they thought they had most things figured out and it's just so clear when you begin to really poke and prodden as you gain more years and have more experiences especially if you start pushing into some strange corners that there's a lot we simply don't understand. And even if we were to, say, not chalk those up to false memories, but let's just say we chalked it up to placebo effect. Right.

Starting point is 01:09:36 Nonetheless, even if it were just placebo effect. Incredible. That doesn't diminish the absurd inexplicability of it. Exactly. With the current mechanisms that we understand. And that's super exciting to me. It's super exciting to me. And it doesn't mean that you nor I would advocate that people just accept everything at face value. Of course not.

Starting point is 01:10:02 There's horseshit everywhere. I mean, we're sitting in Austin, like the world capital of spirituality. There's so much nonsense and so many charlatans, but I do pay attention to people like you who have demonstrated in other areas that they have the ability to think rationally and have some grasp of, a very good grasp of science and so on, right? That's kind of one of the first litmus tests for me. If someone's sharing something with me, I'm like, all right,

Starting point is 01:10:34 can they fight logically out of a paper bag, right? Can they, have they demonstrated any ability to use structured reasoning in other places? Are they able to cross-examine their own beliefs? Right, exactly. Exactly. And are they skeptical in other areas? Or is it just like, okay, they accept anything as long as it's alternative, but they reject Western science for any number of reasons that don't make sense to me.

Starting point is 01:11:04 If you've ever had antibiotics, yeah, Western science may have saved your life. And there are many other examples. I certainly wouldn't be here for more for Western medicine, let's just say, not science. And I struggle with where to even take this because there's so many directions it could go that are pretty strange. But, and I don't want to co-opt physics, so please give me a slap here if this is just an amateur butchering the good name of physics. But I've had a number of cognitive scientists on the podcast, like Donald Hoffman. I've had physicists on the podcast, although some

Starting point is 01:11:40 would consider Michio Kaku more of a science communicator, but still, as some fundamentals. I've had private conversations, certainly, with a number of physicists, and I lack the foundation of mathematics necessary to fully appreciate it. But when you even start to look at the conversations that were being had between Einstein and Bohr way back in the day relative to quantum mechanics, putting aside even the experimental design and evidence for quantum entanglement that have been done, I think, in the Canary Islands and in other places, stuff is really strange. Just even space-time itself as an objective reality. I mean, there are pieces people can find online by qualified scientists on the death of space-time, right? And thinking about that as almost a UI

Starting point is 01:12:36 that we have evolved to utilize, but not as the one and only user interface to whatever we might be contending with. And like Donald Hoffman even thinks that, well, not just Donald Hoffman, he thinks that consciousness essentially gives rise to space. Yep. And while a lot of theoretical physicists poo-poo his ideas, and I think by and large they are correct too, even they would agree that it seems like space itself is an emergent property it's

Starting point is 01:13:06 not a fundamental thing you know we're not objects rattling around in a big empty box it is a thing that emerges from basically interactions of mathematical functions on some whether it's on a substrate or whether it i don't know if it even needs a substrate i'm too rusty on that stuff but it's super weird if you dig into the fundamental structure of this reality yeah this is not a you know wiccan witchcraft shop with like tarot cards in the display case not to knock that right but like we're talking about some of the most esteemed scientists in a hard science with peer-reviewed publications and so on. And if you just look at that stuff closely enough,

Starting point is 01:13:50 shit's really weird. Yeah. There's a paper I was recently reading that's like digging into the, that it seems like space-time is, well, space itself is essentially coming out of observers interacting with each other. Oh, I'd love to see it. Cons out of observers interacting with each other. Oh, I'd love to see it. Consciousness is interacting with each other. But it's really, from what I can tell, really granular, legit physics.

Starting point is 01:14:11 I mean, it's a math paper, basically. It's beyond my pay grade. So, I don't know. I may need your… I want to send it to like Sean Carroll. I don't know if you've ever had him on. Sean Carroll, I haven't had on. But my brother introduced me to his podcast mindscape

Starting point is 01:14:25 is it mindscape excellent podcast so good so if sean carroll is out there listening or if anyone knows him let him know i'm a i mean he may not want to hear this i don't know what his opinion will be of me but big fan of his podcast he's a damn fine thinker and a damn fine communicator. He really is, yeah. And he had an excellent episode on sort of an archaeological exploration of Stonehenge and other artifacts as external mnemonic devices. Super cool. So Liv, Olivia, question for you.

Starting point is 01:15:03 How do you, as someone who is a trained rationalist, materialist, although you may not identify as solely those things, I don't want to imply that, how do you integrate some of these experiences into your life, your framework, your worldview? What do you do with that?'s tricky i mean you know i think with all these things it's walking this fine line between gullibility open-mindedness whatever you want to call it and skepticism and cynicism and i think where my poker training comes in handy is that poker trains you to think in probabilities you're never certain about anything you could be bluffing me with you know you could have aces or you could be bluffing me

Starting point is 01:15:50 with you know six four suited that missed the card it needed so you become very comfortable in terms of holding concurrent belief states in your mind with different weighted probabilities of those things being true so with these like you know these two weird unexplainable experiences that i had you know whether it was the ear thing was just pure placebo which would still be crazy because it would mean that like basically i have the ability to heal my mind by thinking i was going through some kind of like thing being sucked out my ear fine and potentially here heal your inner ear yeah like like i was literally told i had a degenerative thing and i was going to go deaf and like no one's been cured of it and this has miraculously gone away so whatever the hell

Starting point is 01:16:28 happened the point is i didn't go and change my life i didn't suddenly go and be like that's it i'm gonna go and practice energy healing and become a witch and so on i continued still like i still am an adherent to the scientific method it's just that i've now broadened my as you mentioned you know it's almost like people become they believe in the scientism as opposed to being a scientist. A true scientist is that you are maximally curious. You do your best to devise experiments in order to get reliable, robust results that you can use to predict the world. And you try and minimize all the biases and things that could mess up your experiment and give you a faulty result. And so there's no reason why I can't incorporate these two data points in terms of, I mean, I haven't gone out and done any science. I really should, I guess, go and do some tests

Starting point is 01:17:14 and see if I can try and recreate that experience. But it's very difficult because it was set and setting were very important in what happened there. I would assume anyway, I don't know that. Well, when they make the Netflix series about it and they recreate the entire environment, and then you can sit down and try to recreate. Yeah. So what I guess I've done is I have up-weighted, you know, whereas before I would have given the probability that energy healing is a real thing. I would have given it like a, probably if you'd asked my old, like skeptical self, I would have literally said it's zero, but you know, I wasn't such a bad Bayesian that I would give it actual zero, maybe like

Starting point is 01:17:47 one in a million. That's good. We can't, we don't have time to unpack that. You know, I would have given it a one in a million and now I have updated it, you know, with this evidence to how many orders of magnitude do I want to go? I mean, I will give it, I at least give it a one in 100, but I think it's more likely that there is a, an explanation through what we know conventionally that is still more probable

Starting point is 01:18:17 than that. It is something completely like some completely novel thing that is untapped. But that said, you know, I've actually had a few other little ones I won't go into, but like other little data points of just like weird energy things that have happened in certain scenarios it's helped me but it's still important to keep the like skeptical hat on and extraordinary beliefs require extraordinary evidence and in order for me to like give up

Starting point is 01:18:41 everything that i know about our current understanding of the world i would need significantly more data points. And I think that's just not the practical way to go forward. Yeah, I would also add to that that if folks want to be proper skeptics, you owe it to yourself and to the people you interact with to be an informed skeptic. to invoke the name of science and not invoke it like the name of odin and some like you know god works in mysterious ways kind of way you need to actually my opinion have the ability to read a study and understand a study and study design it's not good enough to get the journalistic interpretation from the wall street journal or fill in the blank online publication that's not good enough to get the journalistic interpretation from the Wall Street Journal or fill-in-the-blank online publication. That's not good enough.

Starting point is 01:19:29 It's also not good enough for you to just get the gist of a few sentences in an abstract. Confidence intervals. Right. So confidence intervals, understanding, powering. Because you'll also find folks who, and I've been saying scientism, but I guess it's scientism, sort of like capital S. In either case, it has a capital S and it's not good. So if you come to that, one of the telltale characteristics that I've come across is they'll ask if something was a controlled study or a placebo-controlled, a randomized study, a randomized control, you know,

Starting point is 01:20:00 RCT, and they'll say, well, how many subjects were there? Or what was the N if they get fancy? And I might say 20, 25. And they're like, oh yeah, small study. Nonsense. And I'm like, it's not that simplistic. There are quite a few variables you have to take into account. So recommendations for folks who are interested. Number one, Studying the Studies by Peter Atiyah

Starting point is 01:20:26 MD. Excellent series of blog posts that take you into the fundamentals of understanding how to dissect and understand a study, which includes meta-analyses and gets into the risks of taking meta-analyses as gospel also, because garbage in, garbage out, and there's a lot to it. Another recommendation, actually a podcast that I did six years ago, I realized when I pulled this up, this is podcast number 194, The Magic and Power of Placebo. This is with Eric Vance, who wrote a book called Suggestible You, subtitled The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability

Starting point is 01:21:05 to Deceive, Transform, and Heal. And he's written very widely on placebo. It's an excellent book. Many of his feature pieces are exceptional. There was a great piece in Wired magazine probably 10 years ago on the evolution of the placebo effect and how it has changed depending on the culture and other influences so in certain

Starting point is 01:21:26 places say a placebo pill in a blue capsule or a red capsule perform better than other colors it's really you need to do don't don't do a blue or red one in this day and age that's true that's true yeah we could pick other colors but the context that surrounds that is really really interesting and then the last thing i would recommend people check out is cognitive biases and looking at both frameworks intended to avoid them and just getting a better understanding. So you can go to Wikipedia and just look up cognitive biases and get a pretty basic list. You can look at something like Poor Charlie's Almanac

Starting point is 01:21:57 with Charlie Munger, although it's a bit dense. Yeah, it's intense. It's a little user unfriendly in a lot of respects but what were you saying i think i would recommend is some of julia galef's work on um the scout mindset and motivated reasoning what was the first one the scout mindset yeah i mean she did a ted talk on it but she's just written a book on it as well and i think she actually goes in if i remember rightly her last name is g-a-L-E-F? Yes. She goes into that sort of, again,

Starting point is 01:22:29 that when I first learned about rationality, like I read everything on Less Wrong, if people know that, which is incredible resource for it. And it really breaks down how you get this, your brain, which is like the map to match the actual territory, which is the universe as accurately as possible. But where I think it's maybe lacking a little bit now because i've had some of these weirder experiences which actually

Starting point is 01:22:50 where i wasn't you know in the classical sense rational i you know clearly went off the beaten path into some like weird land but it was actually very beneficial to me even if it was like some completely useful fiction it was still useful yeah useful fiction, it was still useful. Yeah. Yeah. And this idea of like useful fictions, I think, needs to be explored further. Yeah. I'd also add that much like poker, science, I don't think a lot of folks realize, is largely a game of probabilities. You don't prove something 100% most of the time. It's like, well... Literally never, actually.

Starting point is 01:23:24 Yeah, exactly. I mean, you can have overwhelmingly compelling like, well... Literally never, actually. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you can have overwhelmingly compelling data, even with, say, an observational study, say with the sort of quintessential example would be cigarette smoking causing lung cancer, right? But most of the time it's like, this suggests with this degree of certainty that this is the case.

Starting point is 01:23:44 But when you start to look at the replication crisis, which is not just in social sciences, it's all over the place. And especially if you start to actually roll up your sleeves and get involved in science, whether that's as a subject. I've been a subject in studies at all sorts of places. I started doing it as an undergrad. I was a subject in one of Daniel Kahneman's studies.

Starting point is 01:24:07 And it was not very intellectually engaging. It was like space bar over time, like a green square popped up or something. But I needed the $7 an hour or whatever it was. And I've been a subject at Stanford with heat exhaustion experiments. That was also not terribly fun. Marching to exhaustion with like an esophageal

Starting point is 01:24:25 probe and an anal probe kind of meeting in the middle in fatigues with weights on a treadmill and a sauna to like complete collapse, mental collapse. Yeah. So why do I do these things? Because I'm interested in seeing the process and even some of the best science you could point to in the most prestigious journals, when you actually get in there, it's a lot messier than people think. But people want to have confidence in something, then religion has become so out of fashion that they look to the high priests of science

Starting point is 01:24:55 and they're like, at least I have the confidence in this being true. So I actually want, one of my next videos I want to make on this, which is about basically these signaling prestige bad incentives that get society stuck in these traps, essentially. So we're stuck in one of those with the current status quo of the way science is done. And this is not at all to knock any scientists.

Starting point is 01:25:19 They're doing their absolute best. But the way the system has been designed designed we give all the reward to the people who first make the new fancy discovery and don't give any credit to the people who then actually replicate it and verify it yeah so there's this incredible incentive to be always looking for some new novel thing in order to get that you know get your your thing published in nature and get those research dollars for the next time but it doesn't actually really advance human knowledge because so many of these things don't replicate and it's we're sort of stuck in this spiral of just like everyone's trying to please do whatever they can to get in the journal and it's there's a name for it so actually so there's this really incredible short

Starting point is 01:25:59 online book called inadequate equilibria by the guy who wrote most of the stuff on Less Wrong, Eliezer Yudkowsky. And I recommend- Inadequate Equilibria? Yes. It's a heady name. Oh man, I know it sounds, it's so good. It has one of the best things. It has a discussion, a fictitious discussion with an alien from a perfect society, like a basic person who thinks everything's explained, you know, everything that's wrong in our society is because of like, there's bad people being greedy. And then with a cynical, smart economist, and they have this three-way discussion talking about like reason why the

Starting point is 01:26:31 U S healthcare system is so expensive. And it sort of goes into this meandering thing about, that's a cool premise. It's so good. Like, like you must include this in the show notes. How long would you say it is? I mean,

Starting point is 01:26:40 ideally they read, they could just read chapter three. Honestly, it's, it's, I don't know. It's like a 45 minute read. Yeah. It's just just it's like a book chapter and you can kind of read it standalone we'll put this we'll put it in the show notes but basically it's it's talking about these

Starting point is 01:26:52 like these traps that we can get into where it gets people now speaking game theory it gets society stuck in like shitty nash equilibria so a nash equilibrium is when two people or multiple people are playing in a strategy where it would be bad for anyone to deviate from that strategy it's like everyone's stuck doing that but not all nash equilibria are actually created equal there are some where if everyone was doing x instead of y everyone would be happier they'd also be like you know now stuck in a new thing so like a good example of this would be, so I just made a video called the beauty wars about this like fictitious thing called Moloch, which I call like the demon of

Starting point is 01:27:31 negative sum games. Basically it's like the God of negative sum games. It's the, it's a force of bad, usually economic incentives that make people sort of sacrifice things that they want in order to optimize for a short term goal. And the example I talk about is these beauty filters on Instagram. I don't know if you've spent any time. They are horrifying. I mean, in how dramatic they are. I'd never seen these things before until my girlfriend showed them to me and I was dumbfounded. They're horrifying, not only in how impressively good they are at doing stuff but also how now the really insidious ones are the subtle ones because there are some where you would never you'd go online and you would not be able to tell if you don't know the person or even if you know the person you wouldn't necessarily

Starting point is 01:28:14 be able to tell you just think it's a good picture of them they're so subtle but they're so effective it seems like there is clearly just some kind of optimal face structure that you know our eyes find pleasing and it just tweaks people makes the eyes a little bit wider apart or a little bit bigger or the lips you know just just changes the proportions just right that it sets the the you know the dopamine spike off in your brain and it's gonna make online dating really hard oh man well so as a girl on instagram i'm on the field i'm not on the playing field but but right if i were that sounds like a headache well and but also for people who use them like like, so I'm a girl on Instagram, you know, I, for a while, certainly like made a lot of my career off the way I looked.

Starting point is 01:28:53 There's such an incentive pressure. You know, if I want to keep playing the game of trying to grow my Instagram, like sexy pics. Yeah. It's the arms race. Exactly. And that's what Moloch is. Moloch is this like the God of arms races. And it like these these bad incentives where we could the cheap thing for me to do is just to use one of these ai filters on on on all my pictures and i know i'm going to look good and i'm going to get a ton of likes and it will grow my thing but it will make me miserable in the process and if you poll probably most particularly women on on instagram they are not having a good time with these things either on themselves because if you then like compare your face side to side you're just like man i've you just it just makes you feel ugly and so we're in this weird situation where no one wants to do

Starting point is 01:29:34 stuff that makes them hate their face but they're doing it anyway it's like a lower nash equilibrium you know we could all be in a higher nash equilibrium where we're not doing it but instead we're all stuck down there because of these bad game theoretic incentives. So this is my current obsession, this thing called Moloch. And I think about it all the time. M-O-L-O-C-H for people wondering. And we'll link to that in the show notes.

Starting point is 01:29:54 So just to underscore this for folks, because I do suggest that everybody check out your YouTube channel. What's the best way for them to find your channel? Probably the best thing is if they search for my name and then the beauty wars that'll link to the video i just talked about all right and then you can find my channel from and just for the spelling everybody it's live l-i-v last name b-o-e-r-e-e which means i learned beforehand drunk farmer so they say so they say and i did grow up on a farm and i did drink a lot

Starting point is 01:30:30 it's so good so good yeah ferrous you know the best i can tell you're a big wheel it could be that it also refers to ferrous like ferrous oxide f-e-r-r-o-u-s because apparently some of my progenitors were silversmiths i don't know how it all fits together it seems like a very dubious story i'm not sure but i want i want some story to go along with the last name but i don't have drunken farmer that's an amazing one uh live we should do around two sometime when we're practically neighbors we have so much we could talk about we've got a million other things even in the notes in front of me that we could cover and should cover i'm thinking about this training and are you gonna do it we'll see requires more mezcal to make that decision

Starting point is 01:31:22 i think we could we could condense it down we don't have to do the full eight weeks. I think commit to even three weeks. Honestly, I think you would, J Cal will still be better than you at that stage. I have to say that. No, he would be.

Starting point is 01:31:36 All right. Three weeks, three weeks. I'm going to, I'm going to sleep on that. I do my, I do my best thinking when I'm asleep. Let me sleep on that.

Starting point is 01:31:44 Is there anything else that you would like to say? Any closing comments? Places you'd like to point people? Anything at all you'd like to say before we wind this down? I guess do check out my YouTube. I'd love people to go and now I've moved

Starting point is 01:32:00 to Austin and I'm building a studio and everything. I'm going to be ramping up production again. I would love people to go and just sub to my channel so that they catch my stuff because of, you know, playing the rat race, the attention wars. That's the name of the next video is the attention wars,

Starting point is 01:32:14 which is about why Twitter and everything is making us so angry and hate each other. Oh yeah. That's a big one. Talk about a nasty game. Yeah. And Moloch, Moloch's in that.

Starting point is 01:32:23 Moloch, Moloch's all over that. So Liv, Talk about a nasty game. Yeah. And Moloch. Moloch's in that. Moloch. Moloch's all over that. Fucking Moloch. So Liv, we're going to link to everything in the show notes. People can find you at livbury.com also, which I would imagine has links to many things. And we'll put links to everything we've discussed, all the resources, inadequate equilibria and all other good things in the show notes at Tim.blog slash podcast. And so nice to see you.

Starting point is 01:32:52 Thanks for taking the time. This is awesome. Super fun, super fun. And for everybody listening as per usual, thanks for tuning in and until next time, just be a little kinder to yourselves and to others than you think is necessary and take care. Hey guys, this is Tim again.

Starting point is 01:33:10 Just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot

Starting point is 01:33:50 of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. My God, am I in love with

Starting point is 01:34:21 Eight Sleep. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer. More than 30% of Americans struggle with sleep. And I'm a member of that sad group. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep and heat has always been my nemesis. I've suffered for decades tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, putting them back on and repeating ad nauseum. But now I am falling asleep in record time faster than ever. Why? Because I'm using a simple device called the Pod Pro Cover by 8sleep. It's the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced but most user-friendly solution on the market. I polled all of you guys on social media about the best

Starting point is 01:35:05 tools for sleep, enhancing sleep, and Eight Sleep was by far and away the crowd favorite. I mean, people were just raving fans of this. So I used it and here we are. Add the Pod Pro Cover to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55 degrees Fahrenheit or as hot as 110 degrees Fahrenheit. It also splits your bed in half so your partner can choose a totally different temperature. My girlfriend runs hot all the time. She doesn't need cooling.

Starting point is 01:35:33 She loves the heat. And we can have our own bespoke temperatures on either side, which is exactly what we're doing. Now for me, and for many people, the result, eight sleep users fall asleep up to 32% faster, reduce sleep interruptions by up to 40%, and get more restful sleep overall. I can personally attest to this because I track it in all sorts of ways. It's the total solution for enhanced recovery so you can take on the next day feeling refreshed. And good news, Eight Sleep has launched

Starting point is 01:36:01 the next generation of the pod. The new Pod 3 enables more accurate sleep and health tracking with twice the number of sensors. It's just a smoother, better experience that delivers you the best sleep on earth. At least that has been true for me. Simply add this to your existing mattress and you're all set. It is not magic, but sometimes it does feel like it. It just works. So go to eightsleep.com slash Tim and save $250 on the pod cover. That's 8sleep.com slash Tim.

Starting point is 01:36:32 All spelled out E-I-G-H-T, 8sleep.com slash Tim. 8sleep currently ships within the US, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU and Australia. You can also find the link in this episode's description. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time what I would take if I could only take one supplement. I've been asked this for years. The answer is invariably AG1 by Athletic Greens. I view it as all-in-one nutritional insurance, so you can cover your bases. If you're traveling, if you're busy, you're not sure if your meals are where they should be, it covers your bases. I've recommended

Starting point is 01:37:10 it since the 4-Hour Body, which was got eons ago, 2010, and I did not get paid to do so. With approximately 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food source ingredients, you'll be hard pressed to find a more nutrient dense formula on the market. It has a multivitamin, multimineral greens complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health, immunity formula, digestive enzymes and adaptogens. You get the idea. It is very, very comprehensive. And I do my best, of course, to focus on nutrient dense proper meals. sometimes you're busy sometimes you're traveling sometimes you just want to make sure that you are getting what you need AG one makes it easy to get a lot of nutrition when Whole Foods aren't

Starting point is 01:37:53 readily available it's also NSF certified for sport making it safe for competitive athletes as what's on the label is in the powder it's the ultimate all-in-one nutritional supplement bundle in one easy scoop. Right now, Athletic Greens is giving my audience a special offer on top of their all-in-one formula, which is a free vitamin D supplement and five free travel packs with your first subscription purchase. Many of us are deficient in vitamin D. I found that true for myself, which is usually produced in our bodies from sun exposure. So adding a vitamin D. I found that true for myself, which is usually produced in our bodies from sun exposure. So adding a vitamin D supplement to your daily routine is a great option for additional immune support. Support your immunity, gut health, and energy by visiting athleticgreens.com slash Tim.

Starting point is 01:38:36 You'll receive up to a year's supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your subscription. Again, that's athleticgreens.com slash Tim.

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