The Tim Ferriss Show - #761: General Stanley McChrystal and Liv Boeree

Episode Date: August 7, 2024

This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10-year anniversary and passed one billion downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best—some of my favorites—from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited.The episode features segments from episode #86 "General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness" and #611 "Liv Boeree, Poker and Life — Core Strategies, Turning $500 into $1.7M, Cage Dancing, Game Theory, and Metaphysical Curiosities" Please enjoy!Sponsors:AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://drinkag1.com/tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase.)LMNT electrolyte supplement: https://drinklmnt.com/Tim (free LMNT sample pack with any purchase)Helix Sleep premium mattresses: https://HelixSleep.com/Tim (20% off all mattress orders and two free pillows)Timestamps:[00:00] Start [05:57] Notes about this supercombo format.[07:01] Enter General Stanley McChrystal.[07:24] One meal a day.[08:52] Daily exercise routines and their importance.[14:04] The book most gifted.[15:15] A major course correction at West Point.[19:33] Vetting, selecting, and educating candidates for combat.[21:41] "No-win" leadership roleplaying.[25:21] Underrated military leaders.[27:17] Audiobooks.[29:13] What books make Stan's reading list?[30:29] Hopeless dilemmas and managing self-talk in high-pressure environments.[37:09] Enter Liv Boeree.[37:35] Youthful obsessions.[42:04] How poker entered the picture.[49:45] The qualities that made Liv excel at poker from the start.[55:55] Liv's advice to a newcomer wanting to learn poker.[1:04:54] What Liv's eight-week poker education curriculum might look like.[1:11:31] Failure points that might discourage someone during this curriculum.[1:13:35] Red mist, white noise, and fast math.[1:19:37] Volcano-induced tournament participation and self-regulation.[1:28:27] A skeptic's experiences with the unexplainable.[1:44:19] How does Liv rationally coexist with these experiences?[1:48:09] How to become a better skeptic.[1:54:18] Inadequate Equilibria and Moloch.[1:59:14] Parting thoughts.*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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any Element purchase at drinklmnt.com slash Tim. Be sure to also try the new Element Sparkling, a bold 16-ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water. Again, check it all out, drinkelement.com slash tim, drinklmnt.com slash tim. out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would seem an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with world-class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives. This episode is a two-for-one,

and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and passed 1 billion downloads. To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes. And internally, we've been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider stars. These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle.

Perhaps you missed an episode. Just trust me on this one. We went to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at Tim.blog slash combo. And now, without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening. First up, retired United States Army General Stanley McChrystal, former commander of Joint Special Operations Command from 2003 to 2008, and best-selling author of Risk, A User's Guide.

You can learn more about General McChrystal and his work at mchrystalgroup.com. Why one meal a day? Do you. Why one meal a day? Do you actually eat one meal a day? I do. And people ask me why. Is it some Zen connection with something? And no, what happened was when I was a lieutenant in special forces many, many years ago,

I thought I was getting fat. And I started running. And I started running distance, which I enjoyed. But I also found that my personality was such that I'm not real good at eating three or four small discipline meals. I'm better to defer gratification and then eat one meal. And for me, that's dinner. And so what I do is I sort of push myself hard all day, try to get everything done, and then sort of reward myself with dinner at night. What time do you usually eat dinner? Whenever I'm finished work, and it would be like 8 or 8.30. There's a challenge when you work really long hours because suddenly you start

to eat very late and then you go directly to bed. You feel like you're sleeping with a football in your stomach. And do you drink coffee earlier in the day? I'm just thinking with the workout and that many hours, a lot of people would fade. How do you prevent yourself from fading? Yeah, I have a tendency. I'll drink coffee. I'll drink other beverages too, water and different things. And I do find that there are certain days your body just says, eat and eat right now. And I used to keep a bin of those hard pretzels in my office in Afghanistan, and I'd grab a handful of those. And other times I might be out doing something physical in the military, like road marching, and suddenly your body communicates, eat pretty quickly, or you won't keep road marching. And I'll do that.

Let me ask a couple of routine questions, questions about routine. And then I'd love to maybe go back in history a little bit. The working out, do you work out every day? I do. What type of exercise and why? When I was younger and I got serious about working out, I was a second lieutenant. And as I mentioned, I started getting fat. And I had a first sergeant in my parachute infantry company that liked to run. So we would do loosening up exercises and then we'd run.

So I started running. And so for the first 20 or so years, I ran. I had one period when I was a captain where I ran 15 miles a day, seven days a week. Didn't vary, didn't take days off, wore lousy running shoes. It was sort of stereotypically all the mistakes you can make. As I got older and I started to have a series of shoulder surgeries and back surgeries, predictably, what I learned to do was to alternate. So I will run one day, I'll lift weight the next day, I'll bike when I'm home and have that capable so I can round out.

But for me, it's very important to do something literally every day. I'll only take a day off when I'm forced to because I've got some weird schedule thing that makes it impossible. What does your weight training, your resistance training workout look like? I will start at my home if we're at home and I go down to my basement and I do four sets of pushups, as many as I can do for four sets. And I alternate that with a series of abs exercises. So I'll do starting with a set of sit-ups and I'll do a hundred sit-ups and I'll flip over and I'll do three minutes of a plank. And then I'll do some yoga that I learned for about two or three minutes. Then I'll do another set of push-ups.

And then I'll go to my next abs thing, which is a crunch-like crossover. Then I'll do a two-and-a-half-minute plank. And then I'll do more yoga, slightly different. Then I'll do another set of push-ups. And then I'll do my third set, which is crossover sit-ups. And I'll then do a third plank of two minutes. I'm decreasing each time. Then I'll do some more yoga. And then I'll do my fourth set of push-ups. And then I'll do my fourth, which is a flutter kick, 60 flutter kicks followed by static. Then I'll do my fourth plank, which is now a minute and a half. And then I'll

come back. I've only do four sets of pushups. So the last time I don't do pushups, I then do one more set of the crunch like, and I'll flip over to my last plank, which is one minute. And then I'll do some final yoga. And that'll take me about 45 to 50 minutes. Then I'll leave my house and go to the gym because my gym opens at 5.30. It's three blocks from my house. I assume we mean a.m. Yeah. So I can do all this from 4.30. If I get up at 4, I can do all that from 4.30 to about 5.20, 5.25,

go down to my gym. And then when I get to the gym, I do four sets of pull-ups alternated with incline bench press, alternated with standing curls. And then in that, I'll also do these one-legged things, balance exercises as the break between them. I was taught that was good for balance and whatnot. And I'll do a few other things in that.

And I can do all that in 30, 35 minutes. So by 6.15, 6.20, I can be done at the gym, head back home, get cleaned up, and then be starting work. Ready to rock and roll. Yeah. And why is exercise important to you, both when you were overseas and at home? Maybe the reasons differ, but why is that routine ritual important? I think it's several things.

There's a certain self-image. I think that if I was struggling with my weight or if I was not as fit as I wanted people to perceive me and I couldn't perceive myself that way, I think my own self-esteem would suffer. And particularly over life now, whenever I'm injured and I've been in a slight period, it bothers of organizations that Chris and I were in, if you can't do those things physically, you don't have to do it better than everybody else, but you have to do it credibly and they can look up to, then I think your status in the organization is going to go down. When I was left Ranger Battalion Command in 1996, and I went off to spend a year at Harvard. And I remember one of my non-commissioned officers said, so what are you going to do at Harvard? I said, I'm going to study. He says, you're going to work out? And I said, yeah, presumably I will. And he goes, you know, you come back here with a PhD, but you're out of shape. We're going to have a word for you and it ain't going to be doctor. And I just thought that was so good. It also puts a discipline in the day.

I find that if the day is terrible or whatever, but I worked out, at the end of the day, I'd go, well, I had a good workout. No matter what happens, when the Rolling Stone article came out, it came out about 1.30 in the morning. I found out about it. I made a couple calls. I knew we had a big problem. And I went, put my clothes on, and I ran for an hour. Clear my head, stress myself. didn't make it go away. But that was something that I do in those situations. For me, I try to, it's a way of diversifying my identity in a way so that if

everything else is suffering, if I'm losing it, everything else for factors outside of my control, at least the bar doesn't care. Stan, what book or books have you gifted the most to other people? I have probably given the most copies of a book written in 1968 by Anton Myrer called Once an Eagle. It's a story of two characters, both who entered the military right during the First World War, and it follows them up through the Second World War, in fact, into the post-war years. On the one level, it's a little simplistic. There's one who is wealthy and ambitious and somewhat unscrupulous,

and the other who is a Nebraska farm boy who wins a Medal of Honor and thrifty, brave, clean, reverent, et cetera. But it's actually more complex than that because it takes them through a whole career with all the nuances of army life, the difficulties of peacetime service, slow promotions, and then the challenges of war and their personal side as well. And I gave that to a tremendous number of young officers and NCOs with whom I served because I thought it was a good window to them that the military seems like the day you're living,

but it's really a life. It's a career. And it's going to have an arc, and it's going to have ups and downs and left and rights, just like your personal life is. And so I found that really valuable. I'd love for you to just talk about your experience with Major Brado. I think it was your first meeting. If you could talk about that a bit, I think it seems to be a key turning point for you. Yeah, it really was. Several things happened. I had entered West Point and I was from an Army family and I had expectations of myself,

but my first two years at West Point were difficult. I got in a lot of trouble for discipline, my own immaturity. I didn't do well academically because I didn't know how to study and I didn't study very hard. I really't know how to study and I didn't study very hard. I really didn't take West Point very seriously. And it was also heavy on math and sciences. And so that was not my strong suit. So by the end of my sophomore year, I wasn't ready to quit, but I was having a crisis of confidence. I had gone through some things. I had applied to go to Ranger School as a cadet, which they let a small number each year. And in the spring of my sophomore year for that summer, they said, you can't because your record is your lack of discipline is bad enough.

You can't go to ranger school. And I was really crushed. So I went that summer and I went off to training and whatnot. They send you around the Army to do different things. And I came back that fall and we had changed tactical officers. Now, I'd had a nice tactical officer the first two years, but I don't really think – I mean, he tolerated my two years of problems. And is a tactical officer like a residential advisor in college or something along those lines?

A little like that. You have a commissioned officer, a captain, or a major for each company, which has about 120 cadets in it. And they don't live in the company. They're not there every day, but they are major for each company, which has about 120 cadets in it. And they don't live in the company. They're not there every day, but they are responsible for the company. So they have an office a couple hundred meters away and they're responsible for overseeing the cadet chain of command on discipline. And they'll come down and inspect things. And they're also mentors and whatnot. And so after the first couple of years, I came back and I expected to have this new tactical officer, my first in briefing and counseling.

He brings each person in together. I expected him to look at my record and then give me the riot act for, you know, all my problems and shortcomings and whatnot. And I sat down with him and he had been, he's a special forces officer. He sat down and he goes, well, I'm looking at your record here. And he says, I think you're going to be a great cadet and a great army officer. And I literally said, I think you got the files misplaced because this is Stan McChrystal. And he said, no, no, I got it. He goes, I'm looking at you.

You know, you've gone outside the boundaries a couple of times. He said, but your peer ratings are really good. My peers were reflecting confidence and whatnot. He says, I think you're going to do great. And it was amazing. It was transformational because sort of like that kid in elementary school where suddenly they start to say, you do have high potential. We just got to pull this out. And I had also started seriously dating now my wife of 38 years, dating her then. So after my first two years of

my misspent youth, I'd say, I suddenly was dating someone seriously. So I had this taku believed with me. I was going to settle down more because I was dating one person. And I could sort of see the end. And for me, West Point was this dark tunnel you went into just to go be an army officer. If it could have been done in a weekend, I'd have been happy to do that. I didn't bask in the West Point experience. I just wanted to be an army officer. And West Point seemed like the best place to do it. And suddenly I could see, it was two years out, but I could see the reality of it. Here was a special forces combat veteran who was telling me he thought I'd be good for that world.

What effect did that have on you? Well, I think it caused me, one, you don't want to let somebody down who's got faith in you. If somebody doesn't have faith in you, they say, I think you're a screw-up. You go, well, okay, if I screw up, but, you know. But if somebody says, no, I really have trust in you, I trust you're going to do really well, it gives you a new sense of loyalty to someone. You don't want to let them down. Plus, he's now put on the table in front of everybody.

You can do this. It's up to you. He didn't say it that way, but it was clear that's what he'd done. So it changed my opinion for lots of reasons, this being one of them. My grade point average skyrocketed my last two years, and I finished on the Dean's list and all, which was for me, nosebleed territory. But it was a lot because of the way people around me just started shaping my expectations. The question of selection and training is really fascinating to me. For all of these different stages in a military career or a sort of private sector career, if you had, and this may be a difficult question, but if you had, say, 100 athletes, civilian athletes, and I say athletes just to take the physical component largely out of it. This question came from reading about the nine-week ranger course

at Fort Benning, I guess. So if you had 100 athletes and had eight weeks to train 20 of them for combat, how would you select them and how would you train them? Very interesting. And just as an aside, the young man, the Yale graduate who worked with me on the memoirs you read is in his final week of Ranger school now. So he's lost a boatload of weight and he comes out and he's a specialist in

second Ranger battalion. So he read about it, studied it, and now made the decision to go do it. It'll be interesting to hear him after he comes out. If I was going to prepare people for combat, if you assume that they can do the basic skills, they can shoot a weapon, they can do first aid, they can do those things. If they can't do those, obviously you've got to teach them the things that are absolutely required. But if you assume that most people come out of basic training, initial training with those technical skills, I'd spend

times on things that do two things. The first would be to push themselves. After World War II, when they talked to organizations that had then been through combat, they said, what of your training was of value and what was of less value. They said long foot marches that forced them physically and really caused them to reach down inside themselves like distance running was invaluable. And the second was live fire training on courses that was as realistic as it could be. There was the stress. There was the sense of danger, although they were set up to inherently be safe. That required it.

To that, I would add dealing with uncertainty. I would try to put people in cases where they have to make decisions with absolutely incomplete knowledge, and they have got to live with the results of that. And often it'll be bad. And what do they do then? How do you simulate? Oh, actually, this brings up perhaps red teaming, maybe, maybe not, but how do you simulate, we'll come back to that if I'm leading us in a weird

direction, but how do you simulate that uncertainty or role play that uncertainty? Are there good ways to do that? There were a number of ways to do that, to make tough decisions and whatnot. I had a, when I was a regimental commander, a colonel of the Ranger Regiment, put together an exercise that was designed to test them with uncertainty, but also with a no-win decision. And so what we did was we went to a battalion on no notice, and we alerted them, and we took a company of Rangers, put them on airplanes, and flew them to Texas, and then did a parachute assault. And their mission was to then move from the drop zone to this town and rescue a bunch of Americans who were there working nonprofits and whatnot. And they were then to police them up, bring them out to an airfield and be extracted.

Pretty straightforward. And so they parachute in. And as they move toward this town, they're told that there are a small number of enemy forces there, 10 or so, enough they can deal with, and they develop a plan and they deal with it. Once they got into that firefight, I, in fact, reinforced that enemy with about 100. And so suddenly what happened is they get in a firefight that they can't extract from, and very quickly they have wounded of their own. And so now they're in this situation, and I'm playing higher headquarters. I'm actually on the ground watching, but through my controllers, I'm playing higher headquarters. And I say, all right, your mission is to get those students out of there, get them out, and get them to the airfield.

And they go, wait a minute, I've got 40 wounded. I can't move my wounded. I can't get them, and I'm not going to leave them. And I said, we sent you for the students, get them. And so they always try to work around. They try to say, I need more aircraft. I need more forces, something to take away the constraint. And of course you say, nope, nope, nope, won't happen. You're going to have to make the decision. You are going to pull these students out and accomplish your mission at the cost of breaking faith with your comrades,

or you're going to stay there, in which case you're probably all going to get killed and the students are not going to be rescued. So you're going to be a failure. And we would do this. And it was a fascinating situation because you saw this moral dilemma on top of all the tactical dilemmas. And then afterward, we would have these long after action reviews where we talked about it. And the fun thing is there was no right answer. I'm really loving this example. What are you hoping them to exhibit? Or what are you looking for in a scenario like that? It's hard to say.

The first thing I would say is you want them to be thoughtful. The first response from people was, okay, the Ranger Creed says, I'll never leave a fallen comrade, so I'm not leaving a fallen comrade. We're staying here, period. And then you say, wait a minute, the president of the United States sent you to rescue those American citizens. If we fail, then what's going to happen is we are going to have the loss of Americans and we're going to have this embarrassment and all of these things. So the nation that is relying on you, you're going to let down. So what's more important, your personal promise or the promise to the nation and your mission and whatnot? And it was this quandary that you're looking for them to be more thoughtful than just this automatic black and white reflexive, this is what we do because that's what we do. Interestingly, I didn't have any of the companies

leave the wounded. I'm not sure that wasn't the right answer. And I couldn't tell them afterward that it was, but none of them left them. But they agonized over it. I mean, they tried everything they could, but it was just good because I said, those are the situations you're going to be in. It's never going to be easy, this or that. That's a great example. So there's some timeless principles,

timeless practices. Obviously, things have evolved in many different ways in the military, private sector, technology, and so on. But if we're looking sort of in the rear view mirror, what military leaders come to mind who are most underrated in your opinion? That's a great question because there are people who did things for which they get huge credit. Then there are other people who changed the direction of organizations. And of course, I think Ulysses S. Grant is often underrated. He's viewed as this mechanical basher who is going to just bash the enemy into submission. And I think he was much more than that. I think he took an army that was already maturing

when he took overall command of Union forces, but he understood the absolute truth that you had to destroy the Army of the South. Capturing Richmond was interesting, but it wasn't the real point. The problem was as long as you had an existing army and that that was going to take a very focused effort that was going to be high cost and effort that was going to be high cost

and you weren't going to lower the cost by doing it more slowly. It was cumulatively had to get it done. And I think he understood the political side of it much more than people give him credit for. So I think he's a huge one. There's another, and I'm going to embarrass to say, I can't remember his name. There was a naval admiral between the first and second world war who essentially championed the development of

aircraft carriers. There were people who championed the development of air power, and that was pretty obvious. But building aircraft carriers during that period when battleships were still king was a dangerous sort of step out there. So I think those people who push change, when change is not otherwise automatically going to happen. For those people listening, I'm sure somebody listening or reading on the blog will have the answer, be able to look up that Naval Admiral. So please put them in the comments on the blog, and then I will put it into the post. So we'll have that. Stan, do you listen to audiobooks when you work out?

All the time. It's funny. I first used to listen to music, and I get bored listening to music. So I started listening to audiobooks because if you think about time management, what I found was I love to read. But particularly when we started the fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, I would have a long day. I'd have good books. I'd go back to my hooch, and I'd read about a page and a half, and then I'd wake up 20 minutes later with my head on the page. And so I realized I was going to have to get a better way. So I started putting audiobooks on my iPod, and I like history, and I like biography. And so I would put those on very eclectically.

And initially, it was eclectic because audiobooks weren't that prevalent. And so my wife would go to the library. She'd go everywhere she could, get all these audiobooks. I'd download them onto my iPod on my computer and then put them on my iPod. And so it was whatever was available. Later, as more things became available, I had a wider choice, but I found that eclectic part really good. I learned to run with audio books. My mind will stay collected on it when I'd lift weights. And I also, just because I get sort of fanatical about something, I have a little set of speakers in my bathroom. So what I do is I go in in the morning and I'm listening to one book there. I turn it on and while I brush my teeth, while I shave,

while I put my PT clothes on, because my wife's out in the bedroom, I'll listen to this book. And then I'll walk out of there to go work out and I'll have my iPod. I have another book. And I listen to that to when I work out. Now it will take me quite a while of shaving time to get through a book. Are those two separate books or the same book? Two separate books. So I just finished a book on the South African gold and diamond trade, Cecil Rhodes and whatnot, up through the Boer War. It was fascinating and it probably took me six, eight weeks of shaving time to do that. But then on these other books, I found that I go through books very, very quickly. If you're working out an hour, hour and a half a day,

you actually go through books much faster than I would if I just had reading time. And I always love to ask people who read a lot or consume many books, even in audio format, how do you choose your books? So for instance, in this case of the diamond trade and whatnot in South Africa, why did you choose that book? I go on audible.com and I buy this package deal where you get a whole bunch of credits. And I look at the history first and I look at what's trending new just to see if what's trending new. I tend to like sweeping history stories of an era that's 20, 30, 40 years or big projects

like the building of the Panama Canal, building of the Boulder Dam because they got a beginning, middle, and an end, and challenges, or biographies. And I will also do binge reading, meaning I went through a period where I read about whaling, and I read like five whaling books together. Or I'll read biographies or something about the founding fathers. And I did seven or eight George Washington, other founding fathers. And because they're all mutually overlapping, it's very interesting because suddenly you know more about the era and the new one is more

interesting because it's filling in holes. And so I'll binge on one subject for a while and then on another subject. Oh God, this gives me all sorts of ideas for how I can spend yet more time reading books. So you mentioned the hopeless dilemma earlier, where you sort of engineer putting people into a situation where none of the options are attractive. We're here in Silicon Valley, a lot of people fashion themselves warriors of one sense or another, and they read Sun Tzu, Art of War, and they think of their business as very high stakes. But ultimately in the field, I mean, you guys are dealing with life and death decisions. So I'd love to hear in the cases where something goes wrong. So you make a decision, people go out on a raid, there are more fatalities than expected, and you have to

operate rationally and effectively the next day, what would your internal self-talk sound like? And then what would you say to the team to get them ready for the next day? A little bit of historical context. If you think about it, and you can compare this to earlier times of war, but the first part of after 2001, we were worried about Al Qaeda, worried about Afghanistan. We went in. It turned out to be remarkably rapid and, relatively speaking, low cost in terms of casualties and whatnot. And then Iraq, actually the invasion turned out to be the same way. So there got to be this sense that, okay, this isn't that hard.

It's not going to take this long, and the cost will not be hard. We have a few fallen heroes, and we celebrate them, but we don't think it's going to take this long and the cost will not be hard. We have a few fallen heroes and we celebrate them, but we don't think it's going to be a grinding attrition. Then as we got into the difficulty area after fall of 2003 and got into 2004 and 2005, something different happens. One, we started to realize this was going to be very hard. Every time we lost a comrade, they were not going to be the last. And that's a different mindset because then people start to make their personal calculation. They said, how long can I do this before the roulette wheel hits me?

And is it going to even come out right? If we pay all this price, are we going to have a successful outcome? And that's a different mindset as well. What I found myself was, if you stay focused on the mission and everybody understands the cost of that, when you have an outcome where people are killed or wounded, if you let yourself freeze up with either the self-doubt that maybe you made a mistake or this sense that there's just no exit to this maze, then of course, I think it's very difficult to make those kinds of calls. You can find yourself locked up.

In the summer of 2005, I had found that we just couldn't do what we had to do without bringing more of our force over. We had a third of our force deployed all the time, and then two-thirds back training and getting ready. And that was about the tempo we could maintain for a long, long time. But we had a period when we needed two-thirds of the force in the fight. And mathematically, of course, because the last third's back on alert in the U.S., that's not indefinitely sustainable. And just at the time I made the decision to do that, we started taking a bunch of casualties.

And when you take casualties in a very elite force, it's not the nameless rifleman at the end of the squad that nobody knows. It is Chris, who I have served with for 10 years. I'm the godfather to one of his kids. I'm married to his sister. I mean, that's the effect. T.E. Lawrence writes about it as ripples in a pool that go out through these small communities, tribes, and really our forces were a tribe. So suddenly, the effect of that can cause you to be even more

impacted by. Ulysses S. Grant used to say that he didn't visit hospitals much because he found if he went and he saw the terrible carnage for which he was responsible, he'd lose his nerve to command it. So what I think happens is you don't become detached from the loss and you don't go into denial. What I found is you keep yourself focused on the objective and you say, this is what we are doing. This is important. This is attainable. And the steps we are taking to it are the best steps I can figure out. They're responsibly arrived at to the best of my ability and they are judiciously executed to the best of what we can do. So this would be potentially what you just said, what you would sort of remind yourself of in those

moments? Yeah. And of course you don't say that quite that explicitly in the organization. But the first thing you do when an organization suffers a loss is not tell them, don't let people marinate in their grief. They can grieve. When I was in Afghanistan, the German army got in a firefight and they had four of their soldiers killed. And it was the first four German soldiers killed in combat since World War II. And so I flew up to be with this company and they were literally in shock and they were all in this room trying to figure out how do you process this? Because we go to war every few years. The Germans' fathers hadn't been at war. Maybe their grandfathers had, and certainly no

one in active duty had ever had a soldier killed in combat under their command or a comrade. So they were trying to figure out how to figure this out. How to process the whole thing. Exactly. And so what I told them was, that's what happens in war. The enemy gets to do that. You get to kill him. He gets to kill you. And what you do is you get right back at it and you get right back at it right away and stay focused. And that's, I think, the best catharsis you can do, difficult as it is. Get back on the horse.

Exactly. 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 Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep is a premium mattress brand that provides tailored mattresses based on your sleep preferences. Their lineup includes 14 unique mattresses, including a collection of luxury models, a mattress for big and tall sleepers, that's not me, and even a mattress made specifically for kids. So how will you know which Helix mattress works best for you and your body? Take the Helix Sleep Quiz at helixsleep.com slash Tim and find your perfect mattress in less than two minutes. Helix mattresses are American-made and come with a 10- or 15-year warranty, depending on the model. Their newest

collection of mattresses, called Helix Elite, includes six different mattress models, each tailored for specific sleep positions and firmness preferences. Every Helix Sleep mattress comes with a 15-year manufacturer's warranty and the same 100-night trial as the rest of Helix's mattresses. And you, my dear listeners, can get 20% off of all mattress orders plus two free pillows. So go to helixsleep.com slash Tim to learn more. So take a look. With Helix, better sleep starts now. And now, Liv Bury, winner of both the European Poker Tour and World Series of Poker Championship titles, gaming theorist, futurist, philanthropist, and host of the Win-win with live bari podcast you can find live on twitter and instagram at live underscore bari live welcome to the show it's nice to see you 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 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 and to get

into the zone coming here on the drive over i listened to orion the remastered oh great choice yeah nice choice very very yeah because my first now we're really getting off track here but that's okay there is no track 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 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 poker world they called. And there's a short discussion of the unforgiven. And this led you, 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 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 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 part of- You were a metalhead? Oh, for sure. Oh, sick. Right. So yeah, you get it. Like, and metal is 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 phil anselmo like a little bit you know phil anselmo after his 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, oh, 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 Korn 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 Dimmir burzum you know there's some of the swedish black metal one ouija black metal once you get to the scandinavian yeah death metal and you've gone really deep yeah exactly um

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 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 span? Because I'm trying to overlay that on what you just said. So I first learned to play poker aged 21. Yeah 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 i mean 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. And I was like, I just don't know if this is going to quite work, in a lab you know fiddling around with lasers so 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 I you know just any way I could make some money and I thought I don't know 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 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 grabbed whatever I needed to. So goth modeling, which I also did during my gap year. Totally lying. I have so many, like most of my socks are black. I just grabbed whatever I needed to. So goth modeling, which I also did during my gap year. Totally lying. I'm kidding. And I wish I could have. So goth modeling, cage dancing. And then?

I think I signed up for this 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 £100,000 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. My parents were

like, what are you doing? You've moved to London, get a job. So I was like, okay, this seems reasonable. I've always 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 it was that we were applying for because they needed to keep it a secret. But turns out 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, you know, 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 could see it. I could see it. I was, I literally turned up in skin tight, tiger print spandex, self-made trousers. Now, did you do that because they had put you in the professor category? Was that a rebellion, an active rebellion or did that just come out of your... Genuinely how I dressed. You were 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 i just thought i was the smartest person in the world.

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. 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 on 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 the hundred thousand 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, 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 my, I had two black cards and audibly went, Oh, no, I'm not,

I'm no professional, but is that what one would call a tell? Yeah, that is, that is a tell. Do not do that. Um, and the,

my opponent, it was a really nice guy. Equally. It was like, well, I guess she doesn't have a diamond. And my opponent, who was a really nice guy called Lee, was like, well, I guess she doesn't have a diamond. And he was like, I'm all in. And instead of, again, keeping my cool or anything, I just started crying, like melted down. The producers are high-fiving in the background. Oh my God, yeah, they were literally.

And I'm like, oh, Liv, what's the matter? Tell us more. And I was like, you know, makeup everywhere. I think I run away from the table tell us more and I was like you know makeup everywhere I think 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 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 rebis 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 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. This is the first tournament I ever play. And I enter this thing, somehow get through this carnage period in the first hour. The zombies. I think I did. They just keep standing back up. Yeah, I think I did rebuy once with my other five pounds, so I didn't buy a drink. And anyway, I ended up winning it. I ended up playing till five in the morning. It was like 120 people in it.

And then 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 AM and just throwing the cash on him. Like, this is the best thing ever. This is my game. 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 abilities anything that comes to mind that you think helped in the very early nascent stages of that 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 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, yeah. More practice. Just like this like laser focus and then this like ruthlessness. Because the thing about poker is that you actually actually you do have to be really ruthless in the game 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. 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 a lot and lying right if you're not willing to do that, then it's not the game for you. 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. And certainly in the beginning, I was just, because I didn't know anything about the actual

statistical sort of the mechanics of the game, all I could rely on was the, you know, 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 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 and not even clear directions of where to start. That probably gave me a bit of an advantage there. And then presumably I have a higher than average IQ from physics. Oh, the cage dancing. Exactly. It really helps. And all the drinking and guitar playing and chasing after rock stars. Which I think obviously helps in any kind of strategic game.

But honestly, the thing about 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 was not a big tournament that the five pound 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 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? 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. We're 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. 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 the game theory if you really want to dive deep into math and i mean these days you can you know 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 know, psychology, trying to mentally model what level someone is thinking at and be one step ahead of they're going

to zig, you're going to zag, 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 the box that kind of stuff like these incredibly rare scenarios will sometimes happen and or people will do weird things 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 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. 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. 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 back 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,

the filming had finished, and I was like, you know, let me go try just a regular table. And I got slaughtered. 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 to playing against eight people. Yeah, totally. So yeah, one-on-one, 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 ax 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 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? 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 mum or something like that,

my mum is the most, sounds strange to say, but she's the least autistic person. In that she is so able to intuit social situations and unbelievably emotionally 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, she cannot. And she, you know, her happy, she would be in arms with Molly right now. Just like, she's just, 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 a 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, and we take it very steady in terms of 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 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 gonna 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 but he's pretty good okay great so so let's just say 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 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 say you can pick the period of time of training, however long it is, and then Jason and I are going to play...

A thousand hands, let's say. Exactly. A thousand hands. Your chance of beating Jason over a thousand hands, probably with just knowing the the rules is 45%. That's how crazy it is. Like that's the thing. Maybe it's a bit less than that.

Maybe it's, sorry, Jason, maybe it's, let's say 37%, maybe 35. I'm going to get a phone call after this. But could we get it so that 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. 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, if you have Jack-9 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 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 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 going to say, it sounds a lot like studying chess scenarios. 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'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 at the top levels, at least. Just very incremental gains. Exactly. Diminishing returns in terms of hourly. Because also what it means is,

because these game theory optimal solutions exist, it means that there's technically this perfect style of play. Any one person 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 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 uh we will just break even and so that meant that you would have to be putting more and more time in to win a sort of shrinking pot of money, essentially, 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

Jake Al's podcast with his buds. It is a fantastic, fantastic show. I do think it is one of the best new podcasts, newish podcasts that I've put into my rotation. So don't take all my money, Jason. Eight weeks. What is 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. Alright, 40 hours. How does that break down if we have you said 8 weeks, right? Yeah. So hypothetically, let's say week 1. What does the schedule and curriculum look like? 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 actually play a little bit in person just so you get used to the again the kind of dynamics find a table somewhere yeah we'd go to a local i mean probably invite friends over and we just have some yeah have some games and 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 but you know once you seem competent 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 basically 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 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 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 man i haven't talked about this stuff in ages it's really interesting seeing my brain's like oh find 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 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 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 And then after that, if you're seeming to grasp all that, then we would actually start looking at the solver charts. So these are these simulators. There's this one called PioSolver that was at least popular in the day when I was playing. How do you spell that? P-I-O. PioSolver. I think it's still the main one. And at least when I was using it, that was back in 2016 or so, it would take many hours to run a SIM. So you'd be like, 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 board. That's actually probably where we would start. We would start with glossary because there's so many terms. Vocab.

The vocab 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're sort of equipped with this 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 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 the GTO is in the first place.

So it acts as this 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 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 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. 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, he's so many, 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. 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? 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 that I think the reason why you'd walk away

is because you're like, actually, this isn't that much fun. And I'm not playing for, I don't care enough about beating Jason. You're not playing for Super Bowl stakes. And you're like, this is not worth my time. And for people listening, I'm just using Jason as a stand-in because it's fun. But right. I don't care enough about beating anyone.

Exactly. 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. And I 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 otherwise the decay rate would well absolutely 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, 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 bamboo shoots under your fingernails. Exactly. 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 going to do? What are you going to 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 exactly if i if i'm catching the link 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 i love the of one of the flavors. I love the image that this conjures. 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? Do I look upset? I'm not on tilt. Those didn't work out very well, those traits. 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. 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. 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 four or something day five and it was a really big pause 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 system one, system two?

Okay. Oh, wait a second. System one, system two. Is this like Daniel Kahneman? Yeah, it's a Danny Kahneman thing. 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 plus five, you immediately know the answer is 10. So it kind of, you'll got instincts. I just got a shot of adrenaline so that you were going to make me do multiplication tables. We'll wait. We'll 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, 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 like conscious thinking so if i was to ask you what 471 plus 88 is it would be 560 i didn't even forgot the numbers now nine 471 and 88 471 88 what's that i can't 471 yeah nine five five five five nine is that right 559 i have no idea five it's 500 and i can't even

remember anyway whatever that was you can't 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 so that's your system too and poke is really interesting because you know i'm on five hours i just want to buy myself a little bit of wiggle room on the i don't even answer my own question and i have no excuse so may i make a quick aside 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. They could see it in their minds and so

for party tricks their friends would just lob these like 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 map it out and move these beads and so on in their minds but astonishing 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 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 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're going to say right exactly because system two has shut down yes system two is offline yes offline it's not do not it does not compute there There's nothing there. Hello. 404. 404. 404, yes. Blue screen of death.

And it's bad when that happens in poker. It's not good at all. It's fucking terrible. Yes. And that is, you know, if you're playing, it 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 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 i'm like well i need 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 well 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. So let's talk about the regulation, the self-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 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 $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. 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 tournament was nuts because the know the tv show is 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 enough really to be living off poker before then 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 with 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. 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 this feeder tournament,

it'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, 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 like 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 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, 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 1,200 people. 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 buy-in. But as the tournament wears on and there's less people, your chip stack is worth more and more in terms of equity. So your loss aversion starts to go vertical. By the time of 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, sort of $1.7. And that morning, I think I got some sleep the night before because I'm 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 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 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. You know what I mean? Like that tank was empty. Yeah. 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. 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 is 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 funny but just 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 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'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 a situation well so it's i think just practice really practice, but getting angry, you know, practice reading, I guess a 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 three breaths thing. So for 99.9% 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 on 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 jason listening to this and formulating in his mind that's why i was working 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 no you're doing great yeah just close your eyes don't even look at me no close your eyes don't look at me don't worry no no nothing to see here you can't hear me yeah yeah he yeah, yeah. He'll just end this through the 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? 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 it actually started. 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. And then they dimmed the lights and they put on the screens around the room, just like a promo, exciting promo video 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 going to win or you are going to win, but I'm pretty sure it was, you are going to win, but it's literally sounded like my own voice. And it was so like your own voice. Yes. So it was like the, you know, when you speak in your head, like the voice 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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? 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 of a better word, I had an extreme energy healing, an almost accidental one. 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 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. 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, of your hearing in that ear. We think you have Meniere's disease. 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 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 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 was like, oh 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 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 know 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, you know, 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 was like, I don't know what it was. It was like bad energy. I don't know. It's gone. I'm very pleased to say it's fully gone and it's gone away. And 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 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 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 incredibly beneficial to me such a a blessing. So yeah.

So these experiences are particularly interesting to me as direct firsthand 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 2 thinking and rationality and reasoning and mathematics and so on in not just the world, but in competitive arenas, right?

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 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 prod and 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 up to placebo effect right nonetheless even if it were just placebo effect incredible incredible that doesn't diminish the absurd inexplicability of it exactly 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 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, can they fight logically out of a paper bag? Right. Like can they, can they like, 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. 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 that could go that are pretty strange. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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. Consciousness is interacting with each other.

But it's really, from what I can tell, really granular, legit physics. 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. Is it Mindscape?

Excellent podcast. So good. So if Sean Carroll is out there listening or if anyone knows him, let him know. 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. 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? It'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

with 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 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 cure heal your inner ear yeah like like i was literally told i had a degenerative thing and i was gonna go deaf and like no one's been cured of it.

And this has miraculously gone away. So whatever the hell 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 going to 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, 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 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, then you can sit down and try to recreate it. 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 one in a million that's good we can't we don't have time to unpack that you know i've been giving 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 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 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. So if you are going 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. It's also not good enough for you to just get the gist of a few sentences in an abstract. And... Confidence intervals. Right. So confidence intervals, understanding, powering, because you'll also find folks who... 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 succumb 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 or randomized study, randomized control, you know, RCT, and they'll say, well, how many subjects were there? Or what was the end, 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 Attia, 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 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 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 a, 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 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 going to say? I think I would recommend is some of Julia Galef's work on the scout mindset and motivated reasoning. What was the first one?

The scout mindset. 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,

when I first learned about rationality, like I read everything on Less Wrong, if people know that, which is an incredible resource for it. And it really breaks down how you get 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 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 useful. And this idea of 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. Yeah, exactly. I 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 this suggests with this degree of certainty that this is the case. 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. 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 probe and an anal probe kind of meeting in the middle. In fatigues with weights on a treadmill in a sauna to like complete 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 and they're like, at least I have the confidence in this being true. So I actually want to, 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 kind of these 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 you know they're doing that doing their absolute best but the way the

system has been 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. So there's this incredible incentive to be always looking for some new novel thing in order to get that, you know, get 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 the 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 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 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 i like you must include this in the show notes how long would you say it is i mean 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 like a book chapter. And you can kind of read it standalone. We'll put it in the show notes. But basically, it's talking about these traps that we can get into, where it gets people now speaking game theory. It gets society stuck in 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 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, 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 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. It 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, you know, the dopamine spike off in your brain. And it's going to make online dating really hard. Oh man. Well, so as a girl on Instagram, not that I'm on the field, I'm not on the playing field, but if I were, that sounds like a headache. Well, and, but also for people who use them, 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. 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's 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 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 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,

it just makes you feel ugly. And so we're in this weird situation where no one wants to do 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. 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 just beforehand drunk farmer so they say so they say and i did grow up on a farm and i did drink a lot 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-R-O-U-S. Ooh, rusty. 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 some story to go along with the last name.

But I don't have Drunken Farmer. That's an amazing one. Liv, we should do a round two sometime. 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. Are you going to do it? We'll see. Requires more mezcal to make that decision. I think we could condense it down and 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 won't be. All right, three weeks, three weeks. I'm going to sleep on that. I do my best thinking when I'm asleep.

Let me sleep on that. 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 to Austin and I'm building a studio and everything. I'm going to be ramping up production again. So 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 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 mollickoloch. 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 livbree.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. Thanks for taking the time. This is awesome. Thank you. 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. 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

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also try the new Element Sparkling, a bold 16-ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water. Again, check it all out, drinklmnt.com slash Tim, drinklmnt.com slash Tim. DrinkLMNT.com slash Tim. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I view AG1 as comprehensive nutritional insurance, and that is nothing new. I actually recommended AG1 in my 2010 bestseller more than a decade ago, The 4-Hour Body, and I did not get paid to do so. I simply loved the product and felt like it was the ultimate nutritionally dense supplement that you could use conveniently while on the run, which is for me a lot of the time. I have been using it a very, very long time indeed. And I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one

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my routine is using AG1 daily. If I'm on the road, on the run, it just makes it easy to get a lot of nutrients at once and to sleep easy knowing that I am checking a lot of important boxes. So each morning, AG1. That's just like brushing my teeth, part of the routine. It's also NSF certified for sports, so professional athletes trust it to be safe. And each pouch of AG1 contains exactly what is on the label, does not contain harmful levels of microbes or heavy metals, and is free of 280 banned substances. It's the ultimate nutritional supplement in one easy scoop. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D

and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one. drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out.