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

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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, aldrei, 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 eight or eight thirty.

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 and that you feel like you're sleeping with a football and you're 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 to have a drink coffee.

I'll drink other beverages to 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 that 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's 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 when I ran 15 miles a day, seven days a week.

Didn't vary, didn't take days off.

War 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 bite when I'm home and have that keep.

Well, so I can round out.

But for me, it's very important to do something literally every day.

I 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.

I do four sets of pushups as many as I can do for four sets.

And I alternate that with a series of absexercises.

So I'll do starting with a set of sit-ups and I'll do 100 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 pushups.

Then I'll go to my next abse 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 pushups 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 pushups 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 and I'll 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.

So we mean AM. Yeah. So I can do all this from 4.30.

I get it if I get it but 4. I can do all that from 4.30 to about 5.25, 25.

Go down to my gym. And then when I get to the gym I do four sets of pullups 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 expectation.

If you are not a physical leader in the kind of organizations at 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 nine commission officer said, so what are you doing at Harvard?

I said I'm in the 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 go well I had a good workout.

No matter what happens when the Rolling Stone article came out it came out about 130 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.

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 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 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 does a tactical officer like a residential advisor in college or something like this?

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 responsible for the company.

Save 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 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 you I think you got the files from this place because this is Stan Mcreston.

He said no no I got it he goes I'm looking at you you know you've going outside the boundaries a couple times he said but your pure 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 or 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 tackle 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 my grade point average skyrocketed by 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 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 the boatload of weight and he comes out and he's a specialist in second-range of Italian 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 2 and they talk to organizations that have been been through combat they said what of your training was a 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 in 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 I'm through the 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 a workaround they try to say I need more aircraft I need more forces secondary 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 has 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 later is more things became available I 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 lift weights and I also just because I get sort of fanatical about some 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 know when I work out now we'll take me quite a while of shaving time to get through a book those two separate books are the same two separate books so I just finished a book on this South African gold and diamond trade Cecil

Rhodes and and whatnot up through the bore what was fascinating and it probably took me you know 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 hour hour and a half a day you actually go through books much faster than I would if I just had reading and 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 dot 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 you know 20 30 40 years or big projects like the building of the Panama Canal building in the Boulder Dam because they get 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 wailing and I read like

five wailing 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 you know 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 okay this gives me all sorts of ideas for how I can spend yet more time reading books so you mentioned the hopeless dilemma earlier you should have 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 sensor another

and they read Sunsu Art of War and they think of their business is 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 they're 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 earlier times of war but the first part of after 2001 we were worried about al-Qaeda worried about Afghanistan we went in it was 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 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 difficult

area after fall of 2003 and got into 2004 and five something different happens one we started to realize this was going to be very hard and every time we lost a comrade they were not going to be the last and that's a different mindset not indefinitely sustainable and just at the time we 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 on the godfather to one of his kids I'm married to his sister I mean that's the effect he learns rights about it as ripples in a pool that go out through these small communities tribes and 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 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 in an organization suffers a loss is not tell them you know 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 their soldiers killed and it was the first four German soldiers killing 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 an 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

a 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

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so take a look with helix better sleep starts now and now live barry 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 barry podcast you can find live on twitter and instagram at live underscore barry live welcome to show so 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 you before we started what color would you prefer black blue orange or i think it was yellow that's what it was for my cable it was from my 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 o' Ryan the remastered oh okay there's no track

my very first album i ever bought was on cassette tape and it was master puppets and can you guess why i bring up metallica well they were my love that boarded on an unhealthy obsession from the ages of like 16 to 22 so that's probably i would guess why you bet it up i don't have you would know that though well you know we do research over here middle insider dot net the iron maiden

of the poker world they called you and there's a short discussion of the unforgiven and this led you i guess in some respects into you get hard you still play guitar i don't you don't 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 time do you ever have multiple obsession 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 30s some point around the age of 30 where i lost that a little bit and it's always that's good because it means i can try greater breadth of things but it comes a little bit at the cost of them 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

i'm 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 in a curse i guess not fixating on one particular thing but certainly as a teenager i was i don't it's certainly with metal because i think you know with teenagers so often you

don't because you haven't formed your identity yet right you will form it typically around a genre of music sure i was a metalhead which is you're a metalhead oh for sure oh sick right so yeah you get it like a 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 i mean you don't look at 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 i'll actually know like mid-era pantera little bit of say philance Elmo like a little bit you know philance Elmo after he's vulgar display of power area or whatever yeah yeah so i was kind of uncool until the age of 16 and then metal came along and i was like oh this is this is what i was waiting for and then

i just went all out you know i had the piercings red hair black hair blue hair the guitar and just would not listen to anything but metal and not just like new metal i hated new metal no corn or anything like that no i wanted a really heavy shit like pantera was like a that was like a nice day on the beach you know i'm talking like dimu ball gear bursum you know there's some

of the Swedish black metal one a wager black metal once you get to the skedon avian yeah yeah metal and you've gone really 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 all right let's paint a picture here what was your the age range of your competitive poker career

and then we're gonna back into that by going to some very early 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 age 21 yeah it was 2005 i just graduated uni didn't really know what i wanted to do i thought i was gonna carry on in physics but i decided to take a gap here because i mean bro when i first

started taking physics i was like oh i'm definitely doing this this is so interesting for a accommodating this is not my least message of stock ever uh these are great and pink stripes of hearts all over them so yes it's like the hard exterior the goth death metal exterior and then like the soft sweet uh yeah i'm gonna send him on to paint i mean actually the fact that this is these

i have so many like most of my socks are black and just just grabbed whatever i needed to so goth modeling which i also did during my gap here totally lying i'm kidding all right and i wish i wish i could have so goth modeling cage dancing um and then i think i signed up for this like website that would advertise different tv shows or modeling opportunities that kind of thing

and i remember seeing an ad which said something like could you use your powers of skill and deception to win a hundred thousand pounds on tv and seeing as i was rapidly getting pretty damn broke because dancing in a rock club cage doesn't pay you anything really and you know i had some student debt mounted up and really didn't want to get a real job for you know my parents

were like you have to what are you doing you've moved to London get a job so i was like okay i'm gonna this seems reasonable i've always liked i wanted to try being on tv i like game shows this seems like a game show i'll apply turns out they wouldn't tell us what what it was that we were applying for because they needed to keep it a secret but turns out 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 most certainly i know i could see it i could see it i was what 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 not i mean that was genuinely how i dressed it's style emoting no it was it was my genuine got appearance as i said i lived in breath 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 twenty one year old brat who was unheard of with twenty one year old 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 this is going to be a good one and i didn't disappoint because i ended up having a complete meltdown on the show so loud 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 an act for the game and i remember the the hosts and the professionals that they could 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 i'm i i had two black cards and audibly went oh no i'm no professional

but is that what would call a tell yes that is that is a tell do not do that um and the my opponent it was a really nice guy equidly it was like well i guess she doesn't have a diamond and he's like i'm all in and instead of again keeping my my cool or anything i just started crying like melted down the producers are high five in the background yeah they're literally and and and and i

go live what's the matter tell us more i was like you know make up everywhere i think i i 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 bokeh but i just completely fell in the 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 rebye so you know it was the cheapest tournament they had what does a rebye a rebye 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 are sour then once after that period ends then if you look bust out you're out this is the first tournament i ever play and i enter this thing somehow get through this carnage period in the in the first hour the zombies i think i did i did it i think i did it by once with my other five pounds so i didn't buy a drink and anyway i ended up winning

it ended up playing till five in the morning it was like 120 people in it and i came home i remember just having this you know they paid me out in tens and 20s i think 750 pounds or something like that which was more money so i've never seen that amount of cash before just so much money i remember going home to my boyfriend at the time and waking him up at five a.m.

and just throwing the cash on him like this is the best thing ever this is my game i'm 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 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 train 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 and poker was i was just so pathologically competitive i just had to win and like prove that i was the best in the same and that translated just more study time just yeah just like there's like laser focus and then there's like ruthlessness because the thing about poker is that you actually you do have to be

really ruthless in the game 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 tensioned line right if you're

not willing to do that then you're that's not the game for you and play chess right and and then you have to be just willing to i guess it's 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 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 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 do that and 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 not even clear directions of where to start that probably gave me a bit of an advantage there and then presumably i have an higher than average IQ from physics exactly really helps and all the drinking and guitar

playing and chasing after rock stars yeah but it which i think obviously helps in any kind of strategic game but honestly the thing about 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 of not a big tournament that the five pounder by it gave me an immense amount of confidence and love for the game which i think had i not 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 hundred thousand when you say you you fell in love with the game aside from things that maybe you've mentioned already what made you fall over 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 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 it's like 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 group of fun people and you know we would slowly just like turn

the cards over and you know talk through i'll give her the hand rankings i mean take it very steady in in terms of like this is look how the way that they're acting so they seem quite confident that you know that take a more the human approach to it but i think with you we would want to jump sort of straight into the game theory to an extent so let me apply some parameters if i

could just to allow us to conjure an image so let's just say he's really going to want to take my money now which he will probably so let's say i had a game with Jason and you can pick the sort of minimally viable period of time over which you think i could learn to be competent enough that i might have a chance is it four weeks is it 12 weeks this is also not knowing how good

Jason is i have no idea because i've always refused to play but he's pretty good okay great against him eight weeks of intensive okay yeah if you sat and studied game like all the charts because that's what it is really these days so poker is a note now that we know the mechanics of the game basically there's this thing called game theory optimal solutions to different

scenarios which is basically you know if you have jack nine 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 all 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 that's all about frequencies and so now

that we know this and you can run simulators to give you the answers of all these fictitious scenarios now it's changed the game into a 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 very different type of game is 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 ten years ago it was very very different i mean there was some it was more about you you'd sort of do combination calculations in your head and that kind of thing but that was kind of the limit of it and honestly it's actually one of the reasons why i in the end didn't like the game as much

anymore i've been doing it for 12 years anyway and i was just starting to get itchy feet naturally but it required more and more time spent to at the top levels at least with these incremental gains exactly diminishing returns in terms of hourly because also what it means is because it's like these game theory optimal solutions exist it means that there's technically

this perfect style of play any one person can play and the more people study this style the more people are close to it and so that means there is a ceiling of how perfectly you can play like technically if you and i ended to me when i tried it live that particularly maybe an easy map is investing and poker they're 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 podcasts check it out that's jkals podcast with the buds it is a fantastic fantastic show that do you think it is one of the best new podcasts new ish podcasts that i've put into my rotation so don't take all my money Jason eight weeks what is the density of practice look like is that two hours a day is it 10 hours

a week what is 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 all right 40 hours how does that break down if we have you said eight weeks right yeah so hyper thing 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 and are able to

you're able to do sort of basic math calculations in your head about okay well i have to call a hundred dollars into a pot of four hundred dollars i'm getting four to one what does that mean what how many cards are there that i need to hit etc so these kind of pot odd calculations that kind of stuff could you just take a second and explain what you mean by pot odd calculations

so pot odds are basically you know like in investing to an extent if things go well what do you win versus how much would you lose so and then how do you bet size accordingly right exactly or like you know let's say you're you're trying to hit a flush and there are nine cards left in the deck that could help you say out of thirty six so you have a 25% chance of hitting the card

you need and meanwhile the pot is odd 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 Matt and I haven't talked about the stuff in ages it's really interesting seeing my brain's like oh fine the fine 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 could be 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 nine's tens eights you know to a pocket pair like that weaving together bits of evidence to be able to narrow down people's ranges and put them on like conceivable bluffs versus conceivable strong hands so that kind

of stuff and then after that if you know you're seeming to grasp all that then we would actually start looking at the the solver charts so these are these like simulators as this one called pio solver that was at least popular in the day when I was playing how do you spell that pio pio solver I think it's still the main one and at least when I was you know using it that was back

in 2016 or so it would take many hours to run a sim so you know you'd be like I want to know what the optimal players with jack nine suited on a ten eight four rainbow board or something like that and then let it run folks listening I have no idea what I don't need to do I just I love that sounds though yeah there's so much jargon I think I need a rainbow that's actually probably

where we would start we would start with glossary because there's so many there's so many work terms 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 can you're sort of equipped with this like really solid baseline of what the perfect play is 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 soup or stakes and you're like this is not worth my time for people listening I'm just using just standing since fun but right okay I don't care enough about beating anyone exactly they're just the opportunity cost to be too high that would be the only

reason I think because I think you would find it fun otherwise now it 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 be well absolutely and 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 there's a big part of the game getting the verbal yeah bamboo shoots under your fingers 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 in like oh I'm fine but then

you get down there and he looks you in the eyes and like well you screwed up that hand Tim like what are you going to do what are you going to know huh you know and just goes for Jason on you like you'll forget everything the red mist 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'm catching the link yeah tilt very good for those who don't know tilt is what people do basically when their emotions get the better of them and they start playing badly yeah 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 image one of the flavors

on chairs now the reason that this is fresh on the mind is not too long ago I was in a non sober state excited do I look upset I'm not not on tilt those didn't work out very well 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 broke

my Achilles seal 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 about with nothing okay yeah just beach bowling just be just yeah it's just and I've had that a few times like and we're having it in the world series day four

something day five and it was really big part 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 this 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 too I you've been available with a system one system two no okay oh wait a second system one system two is this like Daniel calm down yeah so Danny can't maybe if you could just give some context his thesis is that we have two modes of thinking what system one is like your intuitive

like if I ask you what's five plus five you immediately nothing else was 10 so kind of you're got you're got you shot of adrenaline that you were going to make me do multiplication devil wait so that's your system one it's just I think wiggle room on the bottom I need also my own question yeah and I have no excuse so man I make a quick aside mm-hmm 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 out them and they could come up with the answer 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 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 gonna do it to him but he can usually answer within like a second or two that's fast yeah it's hot rock stars 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 it does not compute there's nothing there hello for for for for a point yeah it's blue screen of death and it's bad when that happens yeah it's okay it's not good and terrible yes oh and that is you know if you're playing

can be various reasons it can be because if you're wound up someone's gotten under your skin that will shut it off but also just pure adrenaline and stress you know you're excited even I've had 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 you just think through what the optimal bet size

is and again because I dress it's it's it's it's so hard because I think you're you're put into where you know the stuff better like your your your sympathetic nervous system is in is in play right so you're kind of in a 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 them so let's talk about the regulation the self-regulation so I'm for an amazing notes obviously you can see them those who are on audio only will not be able to see them that's fine because it makes me sound more professional if you think I'm doing everything off the top of my head so at one point you turned 500 euros into 1.25 million euros which is around 1.7 million and if I'm

getting roughly I believe that that math right that was at the EPT San Remo and it was 500 euro by him or $500 it was a 500 euro satellite tournament into the main event by 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 yeah 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 that tournament

was nuts because you know the TV show is in 2005 I didn't actually really turn fully professional whereby I was living off it until 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 playing on the circuit now for like a year and a half and I played some bigger

by 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 a remember the volcano that went off in Iceland yeah I do and it shut down all of European airspace I was in the south of France for something completely different and I couldn't get home and someone I heard that there was this tournament

going on in northern Italy and it was like a train ride away so I was like all right screw it I'll go there thank God for volcanoes love bless that volcano oh yeah and then I arrived and there was this like this feeder tournament that's called a satellite that night where you know it was 500 euro entry and one in ten people would win the ticket for the five thousand the main event

so I of a handful of completely unexplainable borderline metaphysical experiences in I won't say what it is about it it'll be better if we talk about that later but anyway so I had a very strange thing happen just before the tournament started at noon and long story short six days later it ended up being the largest tournament ever held in Europe at the time you mean that undescribed

is what I thought keeping the audience yeah yeah you're gonna keep watching and now for sure course we're break I ended up being the attracting the biggest field of players of any tournament in Europe today at the time at least was over like 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 five thousand euro buy-in but as the tournament wears on and you know there's less people your

chip stack is worth more and more in terms of equity and so your loss of vision starts to go not to that extent because I think it was the 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 the delto 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 under a few just spent all of your not as under calories yeah 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 if personal interest 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 yeah you'll be reliably upset for two minutes oh what a nasty neighborhood that's turned into so sad as you were saying this I'm imagining imagining Jason listening to this and formulating in his mind that's why I was sparking 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 have such a oh yeah just close your eyes don't even look at me don't look at me don't worry just a minute no you can't hear me yeah he'll just 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'd played a bunch of these tournaments not of ones quite those types of experiences and 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 even kind of later

exactly yeah for one of a better word I have 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 particularly it was like a sort of low frequency buzzing humming quite frequently like so some kind of tinnitus yeah 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 buying 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 to saw a doctor multiple doctors and had hearing tests and they said oh you're losing your hearing and the low frequencies of your hearing in that ear we think you have many ears disease many ears is this degenerative thing which usually people end up completely deaf when they have it where basically

the nerve cells in the in a ear to 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're 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 balanced 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's like oh well I do energy healing I'm an energy healer

I was like I don't know what that is but sure do whatever you want to do yeah have a go she's like I can try and after she sort of 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 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 she you know

she came around after a while she's 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 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 a side of that premonition thing which I 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 would be incredibly beneficial to me and 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

you know I'm sure you know six thousand years ago 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 it like that doesn't diminish the absurd inexplicability of it with the current mechanisms that we understand and that's super exciting to me it's super exciting to me and it doesn't mean that you

nor I would advocate that people just accept everything and face value of course not there's horseshit everywhere I mean we're sitting in Austin like the the world capital of the spirituality there's so much nonsense and so many charlatans but I do pay attention to people like you who have demonstrated in other for more for Western medicine let's just say not science

and I struggle with where to even take this because there's so many directions it could go that are pretty strange but and I don't want to co-opt physics so please give me a slap here if this is just an amateur butchering the the 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 Kalko 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 necessarily 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 had been done I think in the Canary Islands and in other places stuff is really strange just even space time itself as an objective reality I mean there are there 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 and while a lot of theoretical physicists poop who his ideas and I think by and large

they are correct to 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 yeah and if you just look at that stuff closely enough shit's really weird yeah there's

a paper on his recently reading that's like digging into the that it seems like space time is what space itself is essentially coming out of observers interacting with each other conscious 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 yeah it's beyond my pay rate

so I mean you're I want to I want to send it like Sean Carroll I don't if you've ever had him on Sean Carroll I haven't had on but my brother introduced me to his podcast mindscape is my escape excellent podcast so if Sean Carroll is out there listening or if anyone knows him let him know I'm I mean he may not want to hear this I don't know what has been you'll be of me but big

fan of his podcast he's a damn fine thinker and a damn fine communicator already is yeah and I hit an excellent episode on sort of an archaeological exploration of Stonehenge and other artifacts as external demonic devices super cool to live 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 and cynicism and I think where my poker

training comes in handy is a 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 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 they 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

heal your inner ear hurt yeah like like I was literally told I had a degenerative thing and I was going to go deaf and like no one's been cured of it and this is 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 you know it's almost like people become they believe in the scientism as opposed to being a scientist a true scientist is that you are maximally curious you do your best to device 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 a set in setting we're very important and we'll happen 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 I probably if you'd ask 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 Bayesian it's good if we can we don't have time to unpack that but yeah yeah we're like you know I would give it a one in a million and now

I have updated it you know with this evidence to how many orders of magnitude I want to go I mean I will give it at least give it a one in one hundred 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 would 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 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 film 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 senses in an abstract and confidence intervals right so confidence intervals understanding powering on because you also find folks who and I was I've been saying science sysm but I guess it's scientism sort of like capital S in either case and as a capital S and it's not good so if you come to that one of the tell tell characteristics that I've come

across is they'll ask if something was a controlled study or a civil control the randomized study randomized control you know RCT and then say well how many how many subjects were there or what was the end if they get you know fancy and I might say 20 25 and they're like oh yeah small study well 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 T.

M. D. 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 the risks of taking meta analyses as gospel also because garbage in garbage out and there's 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 subtitle the curious science of your brain's ability to deceive transform and heal and he's written very widely on placebo is an excellent book many of his feature pieces are exceptional there's a great piece in wired magazine

probably 10 years ago on the evolution of liposebo effect and how it has changed depending on the culture you need to do don't don't do a blue red on a nice day that's true that's true yeah we could pick out the 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 and it's a little user unfriendly in a lot and it's not very intellectually engaging it was like

space bar or time like a green square popped up or something but I needed the seven dollars 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 a esophageal probe and an anal probe kind of meeting in the middle infatex with weights on a treadmill in a sauna to

like complete to 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 priestess 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 yeah totally yeah so this is incredible incentive

to be always looking for some new novel thing in order to get that you know get your your thing published in nature and get those research dollars for the next time but it doesn't actually really advance human knowledge because so many of these things don't replicate and it's we're sort of stuck in the spiral of just like everyone's trying to please do whatever they

can to get in the journal and it's there there's a name for it so well actually so this is really incredible short online book called inadequate equilibria by the guy who wrote most of the stuff on less wrong ali as a you had kowski and I recommend in adequate equilibria yes it's it's a head in head head in head oh man I know it sounds it's so good it has one of the best things

it has a discussion a thick test read chapter three honesty it's it's I don't know it's like a 45 minute read yeah it's just it's like a book chapter and you can kind of read it down on it we'll put this we'll put it in the show notes but basically it's it's talking about these like these traps that we can get into where it gets people now speaking game theory it gets society

stuck in like shitty Nash equilibrium 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 equilibrium 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 mollock which I call like the demon of negative some games basically it's like the god of negative some games is the it's a force of bad usually economic incentives that make people sort of sacrifice

things that they want in order to optimize for a short term goal and the example I talk about is these beauty filters on Instagram I don't know if you've spent any time they are horrifying I mean in how dramatic they are I'd never seen these things before until my girlfriend showed them to me and I was don't worry why in the stand no I mean I guess do check out my my YouTube

I'd love people to go and I'm I'm now I've moved to Austin and I'm like 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 we're 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 yeah that's a big one talk about an astigame yeah and mollock mollock in that mollock mollock mollocks all over that so live we're going to link to everything in the show notes people can find you at livebury.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 equilibrium and uh all other good things in the show notes at Timed uplog slash podcast and so nice to see you thanks for taking the time this is awesome super fun super fun and for everybody listening as pre-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 subscribed to my free newsletter my super short newsletter called five bullet friday easy to sign up easy to cancel

it is basically a half page that I send out every friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week it's kind of like my diary of cool things it often includes articles on reading books on reading albums perhaps gadgets gizmos all sorts of tech tricks and so on they get sent to me by my friends including a lot of podcast

guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you so if that sounds fun again it's very short a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend something to think about if you'd like to try it out just go to tim.blog slash friday type that into your browser tim.blog slash friday drop in your email

and you'll get the very next one thanks for listening this episode is brought to you by element spelled LMNT what on earth is element it is a delicious sugar-free mix I've stocked up on boxes and boxes of this was one of the first things that I bought when I saw covid coming down the pike and I usually use one to two per day element is formulated to help anyone with their

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[Optimizing Performance: Routine, Resilience, and Rationality with Liv Boeree]-[#761: General Stanley McChrystal and Liv Boeree]

📋 Summary

Navigating High-Stakes Performance: Insights from Liv Boeree

The Competitive Mindset and Poker

Managing Cognitive States: The "White Noise" Phenomenon

Challenging Materialism and Rationality

Addressing Systemic Traps: Moloch and Incentives

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript