#89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry | The Knowledge Project

One of the most important things that the reflection process can teach you is to force you to actually gain perspective and to imagine that the situation is like a puzzle and there are all these different puzzle pieces and you can get so wrapped up in figuring out where does this specific piece fit,

that you forget what the full puzzle looks like and it can help you solve it much faster.

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Today I'm talking with Maria Konikova.

Maria is a writer, psychologist, and professional poker player.

Her newest book, The Biggest Bluff, tells the incredible story of how she commits one of the best poker players in the world, Eric Seidel, to teach her how to play.

This episode is an exploration of learning something new, making decisions in environments of uncertainty, how you learn to cool down your emotions when they get out of control, what we can learn from Sherlock Holmes, and so much more.

It's time to listen and learn.

I have to ask, I got an advanced copy of The Biggest Bluff, which is a phenomenal book.

You're an amazing writer, but how did you go from New Yorker writer to full time poker player?

Isn't that the question that absolutely everyone, including my family, is asking?

It was a series of chance events.

The funny thing is that the book is at its core about chance.

When I look back at my life, a lot of the things that look so premeditated and look like I really planned it out were really a lot of different circumstances coming together at the right moment in my life to push me in a certain direction.

With poker, I have never been a games player.

There are people who love playing board games growing up, who play cards in their household.

Not my household, not me.

My parents never did that.

We read books, they read books to me.

So this was never something that was an interest for me.

And I actually had never played poker in my life.

I didn't know the rules.

I didn't know anything.

When I first met the person who would end up becoming my coach and my mentor for many years and is one of the central characters of The Biggest Love, Eric Seidel, I shocked him by not knowing how many cards were in a deck.

I said, well, you know, I know there are 54 cards in a deck and he just kind of gave me this look.

I was like, wait, what did I say?

And he still, to this day, he still jokes with me that when the two jokers finally pop out of the deck and in a poker game, that's when I'm going to win the World Series and win the major title because there will finally be 54 cards in the deck.

So that's a long preface to say, you know, this was definitely not a natural transition in any way, shape or form.

I went through a period in my life a few years back that wasn't the rosiest, so to speak.

I had a number of health issues.

And to this day, we actually have no idea what it was.

It was just some autoimmune thing where my immune system just went haywire and I became allergic to everything.

And my hormone levels were completely out of whack.

And I went to all of these specialists, they put me on just horse doses of steroids, like I was falling asleep, I couldn't function.

And I could, there were times when I couldn't go outside, because my entire body was just covered in hives and I basically couldn't wear any clothes that touched my body in any way.

I couldn't wear jeans, it was awful.

And we didn't know, it really was and we didn't know what was happening.

And in the end, it ended up kind of resolving eventually and they just called it idiopathic, which really means that we don't know the cause.

And around the same time that this was happening, my grandmother died, and she had been healthy, living by herself, everything was fine.

And she just slipped in the night when she was getting up to go to the bathroom or to take some pills, whatever it was, and hit her head and never really woke up.

And that was really difficult because we hadn't really prepared for it.

She was perfectly healthy, perfectly self dependent.

The day that she was taken to the hospital, she had bread starter in the kitchen because she was baking bread, she'd baked her own bread her whole life long before baking bread was a fad.

So she was just kind of going on with her day.

And that happened. My mom lost her job.

My husband lost his job.

Just all of these things were going on.

And it made me really pause and say, wow, you think that you can be successful if you work hard, if you just kind of take control of things, if you just really put your all into it.

I earned where I am.

I went to Harvard. I worked hard to get to Harvard.

I did this, I did that.

And something like this starts happening.

And you say, oh my God, I just got so damn lucky.

Of course I worked hard, but I've also, I've had good health.

I've had all of these things go right.

And then you suddenly realize just how big a role chance plays in our day to day lives, in our success, in things that we just take for granted.

And you don't really question it when everything's going well.

You think, I've earned this.

I deserve this. I've really worked hard.

All of these phrases that we just throw around, and we don't realize just how lucky we are that, hey, I'm healthy.

Hey, I have a job. I'm able to do this.

I'm able to do that.

And there are just factors completely outside our control.

And chance is variance.

It doesn't care if you're a good person.

It doesn't care how hard you've worked.

It doesn't care about anything.

I mean, it's just random stuff that happens.

So when all of this started happening and I started reflecting on chance, I said, you know what?

This is what I want my next book to be about.

The confidence game had just come out, and I was ready to think about my next project.

And I said, I want to write about luck.

I want to write about the role that luck plays in life.

But that's not a book.

I mean, that's like a philosophical inquiry that's not really going to go anywhere.

So I needed a book.

I needed a subject.

I needed a plot. I needed something.

And so I just immersed myself in reading about chance because that's what I actually, that's my process for anything that I write, whether it's a book or a magazine piece or a short article.

Before I write a single word, I read and read and read and read.

So I started reading about chance.

And someone, when they heard that I was doing, you know, this deep dive into chance said, you know, check out John von Neumann.

If you haven't, he invented game theory, you're going to get a lot out of it.

And I thought, oh, you know, that's interesting.

So I picked up a theory of games, which is the foundational text of game theory.

It was not a riveting book, I have to say.

However, I learned that game theory came from poker, that John von Neumann was a huge poker player that, like me, he actually didn't like games.

He played all of them.

But he thought that games like chess were actually, in the end, pretty boring, because there was always a right answer.

And he, you know, he was also one of the fathers of the computer.

So he, you know, he had a mind that was just constantly calculating, he's like, Oh, well, I can figure out a way to solve chess.

So that's not quite interesting.

And he hated gambling, in the sense of games of chance, because once again, you just can't do anything, it's kind of the opposite of chess.

There's nothing to solve, you know, it's just, it's just gambling.

But he loved poker, because he the way he described it was that poker was the perfect game of incomplete information.

There's information that I have, there's information that you have, there's information we have in common.

And we have to play each other.

It's not just about the cards, it's about what he called these little tactics of deception, of trying to figure out what does this man think I mean to do.

And this is what games are about in my theory.

So that's a quote that really just struck me from the book.

And he decided that if he could actually solve poker, he'd have a rubric for solving the most complex strategic decisions in the world.

And at this time, you know, he was advising the US government, he was working on the hydrogen bomb.

So this is a guy who is really in the thick of it.

And who thinks basically poker is going to prevent nuclear holocaust that it's going to bring world peace if he can figure out a way to solve this game.

And he didn't, he didn't solve it.

Poker actually no limit hold him is still unsolved.

But he created game theory.

And when I read all of this, I was like, Oh, wow, this is fascinating.

What is this poker thing, I should really take a look at it.

And so I started reading about poker, and something just clicked, I said, Oh, my God, you know, this this guy von Neumann wasn't an idiot, he was on to something, maybe I should learn the game and use that as a way to explore these themes of chance and skill.

You know, because poker does have elements that you can control, you control how you play, you control your strategy.

And then ultimately, there's an element of chance as well, because you don't control the cards, you don't what card is coming next.

And if my new one thinks it's a great proxy for life, well, hell, you know, why don't I why don't I try this myself.

And that was kind of the germ of the idea that brought me into the world of poker.

When I decided this is what my next book is going to be.

Before we get to your meeting with Eric, there's just want to push back slightly on that and hear your take on this, which is, I think it's this seemed to lab, he sort of has a theory that we can't use games as models for real life.

Yes. And I actually that's the the title of the last chapter of my book is the Luddock fallacy.

And I actually addressed to lab head on.

And the takeaway is that yeah, he's absolutely right.

And poker is not going to be a perfect model for life, because it's a game, and it's cleaner.

And life is much messier.

But because of that, it's a perfect decision tool and teaching tool, because it teaches you to deal with uncertainty in an environment that's controlled, where you're not going to die.

You know, the uncertainty in real life is much messier.

The worst thing that can happen at the poker table is use a lot of money.

And you know, that's it.

And then you either, you know, get more money and play again, or you don't.

And in real life, the worst thing that can happen is you're not alive anymore, you get sick, all of these horrible things can happen.

So of course, it's not a perfect model.

But I think that it's beauty, why von Neumann decided to use it kind of as a basis to think about complicated strategic decision making is that the lack of outside noise makes you able to question your decision process in a way that you can't in real life, if we even just take kind of an analogy that's

often used, which is investing, that people say that poker can really help you in the stock market.

And I think that that's true.

And the reason it can help you become a better investor and make better decisions is the stock market is so damn noisy that when you make bad decisions, there's always something you can blame it on.

You can always say, well, you know, this component of this company, this stock, this global event, you know, this macroeconomic thing, this microeconomic thing, on and on and on, it can you can always deflect the blame to someone else or to something else, and not question your own decision process

and say, Well, I'm a brilliant investor.

The reason this went wrong is because of all these other things.

In poker, you just have such a clear goal and such a clear, such clear evidence when you're doing poorly.

And sure, you can lose money in the short term.

So variance, you know, in the short term, the worst player can win.

But in the long term, the more skilled player is going to win.

And so you actually don't you can't blame poor decisions on Oh, well, you know, China announced this new policy that I couldn't have possibly foreseen.

And so you have to go back through your own decision process and ask the questions, you know, okay, am I making the right decisions?

Is my decision process solid, regardless of the outcome?

And I think that's why poker is such a valuable tool.

Not because it's an exact analogy for life.

I mean, I think it's ludicrous to think that any game can be an exact analogy for life.

I appreciate you going into so we're going to get more detailed in terms of the decision making the lessons that we can extract from poker and how they apply to life.

But before we get there, we have to how did you pick Eric as your mentor prefer even knew you?

I mean, you picked him before he even knew who you were.

And then how did you convince him one of the best poker players in the world who's never taught anybody or had any students ever that you were the one that he was going to teach?

So this there's a few different elements here, including luck.

So first, when I decided that I was going to undertake this project, I thought, you know, I need a mentor, I need a coach, I need someone who's really good to teach me, because I know a lot about learning, I've written a lot about learning.

And I know that one of the best ways to learn, especially if you want to get very good at something quickly, is to be taught by someone who's very good at what they do.

And I know how important mentorship is, I know how important those relationships are.

So so I thought, Okay, I need someone, how in the world am I going to find someone given that I don't know anything about poker, and I don't really know this world.

So I started watching there's, there's a lot of poker content online.

So my first kind of stop was to look at rankings of players and to be like, Okay, these are the people who are considered great.

And a lot of different names came up.

You know, Eric was one of them.

But you also have people like Phil Ivy and Daniel Negrano, and Phil Helmut and Joel Brunson, and just on and on and on, people have arguments for why different players are the best.

And Eric actually, even in those statistics stood out to me, because he started playing in the 80s.

And if you look at how he's done, he was actually the only player I could find who's still making final tables and winning events to this day.

I mean, the guy seemed unstoppable when you looked at those statistics, and there was no one comparable in terms of longevity.

So right away, I kind of flagged that and I said, Oh, okay, this seems interesting.

But there were other players who I'd flagged for different reasons as well.

And then I started watching videos.

And honestly, like he just seemed like a really nice guy.

He was always quiet.

And when he was playing, he wasn't an asshole.

A lot of poker players have these very brash personalities that really come out.

And maybe they're not actually like that in real life, but they really ham it up for the cameras.

And I didn't want someone like that, because this was going to be someone with whom I'd be spending a lot of time.

And Eric just kind of he had this very quiet, studied aura around him.

And he didn't he always was kind of shying away from the limelight.

And I really liked that as well.

Because that to me spoke of someone who was just a more private person and someone who was probably a good human being on some level.

And you know, I could have been completely wrong, by the way, he could have ended up being a complete jerk.

I wasn't wrong, luckily.

But that's that's how he struck me.

And the other thing that I was looking for, there are kind of two approaches to poker.

And I don't want to I don't want to set it up as like a diametrically opposed battle, because the best players use elements of both.

But that said, there are two approaches for kind of your general way of thinking about the game and what you think is just like the most important thing and what you stress.

The dominant one right now is very heavily quantitative and mathematical game theory optimal GTO.

And you know, how do I play a game theoretically so that I can't be taken advantage of, you know, let me let me crunch these numbers, let me run these solvers, let me do all these simulations and have the exact strategy that would be the best approximation in every single situation, and on and on and on.

And then there's a more psychological approach, kind of the, all right, you know, yes, there's math.

Yes, there are pod odds.

Yes, there's all this basic stuff that you need to know.

But ultimately, especially if you're playing live poker, which is what I was going to be doing, then you need to know people and you need to understand dynamics, and you need to understand emotions, and you need to approach it from that perspective.

And that's what's going to give you your biggest edge in live games.

And Eric came from that school, that's kind of considered the old school, in a way.

And like I said, of course, he also does the math and the math people don't totally dismiss all of the psychology.

But there is a difference in emphasis.

And obviously, my background is psychology, I have a PhD in psychology, that's where I come from.

I studied self control, I studied emotional regulation, I studied risky decision making kind of from a psychological perspective.

So because I wanted to learn something new and ramp up quickly, I figured it was going to be best to play to my strengths.

And math is not my strength.

You know, the last time I took a math course was in high school, I felt like I couldn't choose someone to coach me who was going to be very heavily mathematical, because it was just too different from my background, and too different from the things that could make me a stronger player that could distinguish

me as a player. So that's the first part of it.

So I all of those things came together.

And I was like, Eric Seidel is my first choice.

I won't say who my second choice was, just because I never had to go there.

And I'm so glad I did.

But he was my first choice.

So I actually reached out to him on Twitter, of all places, just, I didn't have an email, but I'm a journalist, and I'm very persistent when I need to contact someone.

And he actually responded.

And the way I reached out, as I said, Hey, you know, I'm a writer for The New Yorker.

I'm working on a new project.

And I'd like to talk to you about it.

I think it may be something that you're interested in.

And he wrote back and I actually had no idea that he also lived in New York.

I thought he just lived in Vegas.

And he said, I'm actually in New York if you wanted to meet in person.

I was like, Oh, my God, he wants to meet in person.

This is incredible.

So I said, Yes, of course, let's do it.

And so we arranged a meeting, we arranged to have breakfast.

And I was, I was very nervous.

I was like, this is going to be such an important sales pitch for me.

And he had no idea what it was going to be about.

It was a little bit of an ambush, because obviously, I told him I'm working on a project that I think you might be interested in.

But I didn't say, Hey, I'm about to ask you to basically let me shadow you for the next year or so.

And I want you to teach me to play this game that you're so good at.

That's a tough pitch, you know, on like the best day to anybody, let alone one of the top poker players in the world, you guys know history of like taking on students.

Yep. And I actually at that point, I did not know that he'd never taken on a student.

So I learned that after that might have discouraged me a little bit.

But you know, sometimes what you don't know can save you, right?

It makes you a little bit, it gives you that extra confidence boost that would have gone away had you know the full picture.

So when I met him, I explained everything.

And I said, Look, you know, I don't know anything about poker.

This is where the 52 versus 54 cards came up.

But I'm a psychologist, I'm a writer, you know, this is why I want you to coach me.

And I kind of gave him the same pitch that I gave you in terms of his longevity in terms of the psychological approach.

So again, I want to know if I can, you know, I can make this work.

And to him, what was interesting about it was that I wasn't like a poker player coming to him asking for lessons.

I was someone with just a totally clean slate with from a totally different background.

And I wanted to start from scratch at a late point in my life, speaking as a poker player, most poker players start in their teens.

So, so for me to approach him and just say, I'm starting from scratch, that was intriguing.

The fact that I'm have a psychology background was really intriguing to him in decision making.

Yes, exactly. That decision making your your ground advisor was the marshmallow guy, right?

He was. Yes. Walter Michelle, I was his final graduate student.

And he I mean, he was an incredible, incredible man.

And he took me on knowing that I wanted to be a full time writer.

And then I had no interest in academia.

I still remember this, he told me, you know what, good for you.

If I were deciding right now, I wouldn't want to go into academia either.

It's a terrible choice.

And so he was he was wonderful.

But we studied what I did my graduate work on was self control and hot and cool decision making specifically in conditions of uncertainty.

And specifically, we looked at risk and risk taking and actually had people play stock market games.

I actually told Eric a little bit about about the work and the studies.

And he's like, wow, this is so perfect for poker.

And I he's actually somebody who has incredibly wide ranging interests.

He knew exactly who Walter Michelle was.

He knew all about the marshmallow studies.

He was excited that I came from this world because it's a world that he reads about, that he's interested in.

I mean, he loves the New Yorker, he reads the New Yorker every single week, he listens to the New Yorker radio, he probably knows more about the New Yorker than I do.

So so it was, it was it was fortuitous.

Because I actually didn't know about those elements of his personality.

And I think for him, it was also intriguing that I was going to be writing for a popular audience.

And he just, if you get to know Eric, you will realize that he loves poker.

I mean, he is passionate about it.

He thinks it's just the greatest game in the world, and a game that can offer so much to so many people.

And he wants it to be popularized correctly.

He wants the misconceptions that abound about poker to go away.

He wants someone to actually write about the beauty of the game as it is, and why it's such an important game.

He wanted someone who could say poker is not gambling, and explain exactly why poker wasn't gambling.

And so I think he was intrigued that this was going to be a very different project, not from the poker world that I was coming from the outside, and that he'd have a chance to really kind of prove his philosophy, which I think is also important.

I mean, it's really hard to be considered one of the greatest players of all time, and to be following such a different approach from all of the young, great players and to have people say, Oh, well, maybe your time has passed.

And people have said that about Eric over and over and over and then he goes and he beats them again.

And he wins another title.

And they say, Oh, whoops, I guess he's still competitive at the highest levels.

But I think it's something that he really wanted to prove to himself and to everyone else.

And so he didn't actually agree to be like, Oh, you know, I'm going to be your coach for the next year.

He said, This sounds interesting.

Let's try it out. Let's see if it works.

And this is when he also told me, No, I've never coached anyone.

I don't know how I don't think I'm going to be a good coach.

But we can see if our minds kind of think in similar ways.

And he said, everything that you're saying about decision making makes a lot of sense to me.

And I think it's going to be very useful and poker.

So I think there's a chance it's going to work.

So let's try it out.

So we tried it out and it worked.

And that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

So many thoughts there.

You know, people have said that Buffett's lost it too.

And every time you know that that popular sort of sentiment rears its head.

He tends to show them just how wrong they are.

You know, and he's done it consistently.

There's a lot in that.

What was Eric's like lesson plan for you?

Like, how did this?

How did this manifest itself?

He didn't have one.

Because he has never really taught anyone, he didn't even know kind of how to begin.

And he just said, Well, you know, I'm really good friends with this guy, Dan Harrington.

And he wrote books that I think are very good.

So maybe you want to read those.

And he I'm not sure maybe they're going to be too advanced for you.

But you know, maybe start there.

And so he kind of gave me a little reading list starting with Dan Harrington's books, and said, Okay, you know, whenever you have a question, jot it down.

And we'll talk about it.

And we'll just take it from there and kind of see what happens.

So I read, I read Harrington on hold them the first two volumes, which are the two relevant volumes.

And it took me a long time.

I mean, they were hard.

And every time I realized, Okay, I don't even have this basic knowledge, I'd go online, it's a great time to learn anything, any new skill these days, because everything is online, or not everything, but a lot of things are online.

So I was able to get kind of the basics of the game, you know, how do I how do I play?

You know, how does it work?

What are the what are the different elements?

So I was able to get that from from online videos, you know, Eric's not someone who sits me down and says, okay, you're going to be dealt two cards, those are called your whole cards.

We never had lessons like that.

That was kind of on me.

He said, Okay, ramp up a little bit and then and then we'll talk.

And so the way that I read Harrington was incredibly active reading.

So I would read and reread every chapter multiple times, I'd underline, I'd write all over the margins, I mean, my copies of the book, I'm just looking at them on my bookshelf right now.

And they are so tattered.

It's not even funny.

I just read those books to pieces.

And I would write down every question I had, including ones that I thought, Okay, you know, these, this might be stupid, but I'm just going to ask because I don't understand that.

And Eric and I would have conversations.

So it wasn't kind of a formal lesson.

Like today, we're going to be talking about three betting ranges.

I mean, at that point, I didn't even know what three betting meant.

And we didn't have, you know, most tutors were talking to somebody who's never actually played a hand at poker.

So so I'm talking to me before Eric, you're talking to me, three betting.

I've never, I've never played a hand.

So I'm so glad that we that we come from a similar place.

But yeah, three betting and ends up is just a fancy way to say if someone raises you raise over that you raise a second time.

So it's just it's a way of explaining that someone has already raised and you decided you wanted to raise even more.

We didn't have lessons like that.

Instead, it was really guided by what I was reading, where my questions were, and kind of what the issues were that I wasn't getting.

And actually, Eric, because Eric knows everyone, he said that, you know, maybe we can introduce you to someone who can go through some of the basics with you, because my expertise is more in kind of the higher level strategy stuff.

Dan Harrington is going to be in New York.

How about you guys get together?

And one of the things that Eric did for me, and one of the reasons I was so incredibly lucky that he was my coach, is he actually did this throughout he kept doing it, you know, up until a year ago, when we were actively working together to kind of get me to to play poker.

Well, he would just he knows everyone.

And he knows who's good at specific things.

And he would just send me to them.

So he sent me to Dan Harrington.

And Dan Harrington is the one who wrote the books that I was reading to pieces.

And he talked me through some of that early stuff.

A year later, when I was getting much more advanced and needed help with kind of the more mathematical stuff and using solvers, he sent me to Jason Kuhn, who was one of the most well -respected tournament players who is really, really mathematical.

And he just knows solvers like the back of his hand, like that's what he does.

And so Jason helped me with that.

So I think what a great coach does is know who specializes in the different elements that you need, and is able to make those connections.

And I think it really helped that Eric has so much humility that he's so humble about everything.

I mean, honestly, he could have taught me most of this himself.

But he thinks that there's always someone who knows better than he does.

And he just his own lack of ego, I keep having to tell him, you know, I want your opinion.

I want to know what you think.

Because he keeps saying, well, you know, I'm not quite sure.

But here are the people who really know a lot.

So that's, that's a lot of what he did.

And the lessons that he and I had, so the way that it eventually evolved once I kind of read enough to understand at least basic strategy, is that I started playing, and I started playing online first.

So even though I was going to be playing live poker, that's what I wanted to do.

Online is an easy way to learn because of the sheer volume of hands, you have a computer dealing hands.

So it's just it's really quick.

So whereas in live poker, you know, in an hour, you might play I don't know, 30 hands, maybe even fewer, depending on the table you're sitting at, you know, one slow player.

And suddenly, you're playing 10 hands an hour.

But online, it's hundreds.

And so you just get a lot of experience quickly, because you see all these situations unfolding before you, I did not enjoy playing online, did not make me want to become an online player.

But it did allow me to get more experience quickly.

And it also allowed me a really important tool that Eric and I could use because I could record myself playing.

So we actually were able to go through my games.

And he could explain what things I was doing wrong, what things I was doing right, what I could change about my thinking, because the way that he approached it is he never said this is a mistake, you would say, What are you thinking here?

Why did you do this?

And that's how he taught me.

It was not a prescriptive, this is what you do here.

It was a, Why did you do this?

What motivated you?

What were you thinking?

That's fascinating because you're getting a lot of iterations, and you're getting feedback.

But what you're really getting is reflection, like by making you walk through your thought process, you're reflecting on what you were thinking given the information at hand.

Exactly, exactly. And just you can't underestimate how important that is.

One of the things that I suddenly realized after we did this a few times was that I started thinking better because I just started thinking in advance, what am I going to tell Eric?

And that made me actually stop and reflect for that extra second, whereas before I would have just acted because, well, you know, let's do this and it seems right.

Now I'd say, Okay, if I say that to Eric, he's going to say, Well, that's not good enough.

That's not a decision process.

That means that this is a mistake.

Even if you did the right thing, it's still a mistake.

So one of the things that he really taught me is that you have to distinguish the action and the outcome from the thought process.

As long as your thought process is solid, as long as you're thinking through things correctly, then you did well, even if you ended up coming to the wrong conclusion, because that means that eventually with better inputs, you'll come to the right conclusion.

And even if you came to the right conclusion, but then the cards went against you, and you were you had a bad outcome in both of those cases, as long as your thought process is solid, then you've won basically, then that's all you need.

And so forcing me to actually think through, what am I going to tell Eric forced me to start thinking and to start thinking better and to start reflecting on elements of my thought process, that I didn't even realize were there because I would just kind of do things.

And it really, let me tell you it transferred out of poker very quickly.

And I found myself doing this in all sorts of situations.

But at the time, it was just helping me become a more thoughtful player, and through being more thoughtful, a better player, not necessarily a player who was winning right away, because I didn't know enough, I didn't have enough experience, all of those input variables weren't there.

But the player who was building kind of creating the building blocks that would enable me to be a successful player down the line, I want to double click on two things you said there.

First, the thought process, like how do we know we have a good thought process?

Especially if you're a novice and do you need a mentor or coach?

Or can you like ascertain that for yourself?

And then how did you apply that to life?

Like outside of that?

Well, yeah, I do think you need someone to tell you if you're a complete novice.

I mean, I would have had no way of knowing what I should be paying attention to what I should be thinking through what I should be doing if I didn't have Eric to direct me.

I mean, I could have gotten some level of that from online tutorials, online videos, but it just would not have been the same.

The fact that it was personalized, the fact that it was directed at me, at how I was playing, at how I was thinking, and that it was kind of this direct feedback, I think that was crucial in enabling me to improve as rapidly as I did, and to actually appreciate what was going on.

So sure, you can get some of those tools elsewhere.

But I do think it's very important to have someone else actually think this is true of everything, not just poker.

I mean, the way that I became a better psychologist is because I had great mentors who were able to talk me through my thought process.

Along the way, the way I improved as a writer, was obviously doing it myself.

And you have to with all of these things, nothing will supplement or nothing will completely override the need to just do it and do it and do it and practice and kind of get better that way.

But I also had amazing writing mentors.

I had people who really helped me learn, how do I think through pieces?

How do I think through writing?

How do I think through all of this?

People who taught me to take apart other people's books, so that I could figure out how they did what they were doing, and how I could apply that to my own writing.

So I think in everything in my life, that was incredibly important.

And I think that, you know, my first book was about Sherlock Holmes.

And I think that one of the really interesting things people talk about the Sherlock Watson relationship as, you know, Watson being this foil for Holmes, and that's true.

But Watson also plays an incredibly important role in forcing Holmes to think better, to be actually a better detective, to be better at his job, to have a clear thought process, because he asks questions.

And Holmes needs to respond to him and needs to bring him through his thought process and tell him how he arrived at a certain conclusion.

And doing that helps Holmes see flaws in his logic that he didn't see before.

And I think he actually becomes a much better detective through their friendship and through kind of that evolution that happens only because he had to talk things through with Watson.

So I'm, I mean, I'm someone who works by myself, I'm a writer, and in poker, I, you know, I play by myself, no one else is playing my cards for me.

But I do think that forming those relationships, having someone to talk to, being able to verbalize your thought process, I just think it's so crucial in becoming a good thinker, no matter what you're doing.

I think that's really insightful.

And poker gives you sort of like the added component of you have something at stake, right?

Didn't Immanuel Kant say something about the role of betting in his critique of pure reason?

Yes, he did. He did.

And I was so excited when I found that section of critique of pure reason, and was able to apply it to poker.

Kant says that betting actually forms an integral part to improving your decision process and improving your level of certainty in something because people can say all sorts of stuff and just make all sorts of pronouncements if they're not held accountable for it.

However, if you're forced to put a monetary value on your opinion on how certain you are of something you're saying, on how certain you are about, you know, if you're a doctor, how certain you are about your diagnosis, if you have to bet on it, all of a sudden it forces you to stop for a second and think,

okay, am I really this sure?

How much do I value it?

And Kant even proposes a thought experiment to start upping the values, you know, would I would I say this and stand by it for $10?

Yeah, sure. What about for 100?

Okay, yeah, that seems reasonable.

1000. Okay, well, maybe I need to look through some of my assumptions.

Give me a second. A million?

Okay, okay, right. I'm not I'm not that sure anymore.

I really need to figure it out.

Or, you know, a million?

Yes, I will bet even a million.

I'll bet everything because that is how certain I am that I'm right.

It really forces you to take a step back and reflect because all of a sudden you have something very, very tangible on the line.

And Kant uses this as an experiment for, you know, how to how to make people reason better, how to make people better thinkers, how to make people actually stop to consider what they're saying, rather than just spewing stuff and being experts.

And you know, when I when I was reading this, and working on rereading Kant and thinking through all of this, it just made me realize how relevant he is to the modern world and to social media, and to the internet, where when suddenly, you know, everyone's an expert on everything.

And everyone is so certain about everything.

And you have all of these amplified opinions online.

And I just wish all of them would just do that thought exercise and be forced to, you know, actually forced to go through with it, that we had some mechanism by saying, Okay, before you tweet something out, you know, how much money are you willing to bet on the fact that what you're saying is actually correct?

I think that could lead to some pretty interesting results.

It's definitely it forces you to think about not only your thought process, but but sort of like, how confident am I that this is?

So how did that just thought process like explore this with me a little bit in terms of how that changed outside of poker?

Did you find yourself thinking out loud and like self critiquing your thought process?

Or did you go to somebody and you're like, here, I want you to hear my thought process on this and then point out.

So I started critiquing myself a lot more.

And I started being my own fact checker a lot more than I had been used to doing in the past.

So now I'm someone who does that mean your own fact checker?

Yeah. So I'm someone who is a fairly opinionated person.

And I'm also prone to exaggeration, especially when I speak.

And it's just kind of for rhetorical effect.

And I never really I've never really thought about it.

It's just something that I do.

But all of a sudden, I actually started saying, okay, well, if this isn't accurate, maybe I shouldn't say it.

And maybe I should verify the accuracy.

Before saying it, you know, let me start fact checking myself a little bit.

And if I'm offering an opinion, so there was a really, really funny thing that happened when I was pretty, pretty young, maybe 15 years old or so.

My mom and I were taking a walk.

And I grew up in the Boston suburbs, and we were in the city visiting and walking around, and we got a little bit lost.

And I just so confidently said I knew where to go.

And really thought I did and just got us further and further lost.

And at some point, this was obviously before smartphones, this was before everyone had a GPS on them.

All of a sudden, we just we were deep in Chinatown and had no idea where we were, or how to get anywhere.

And my mom had actually kind of known where we were before, but I was so confident that she just deferred to me.

And I've done things like that a few times, not a few, a number of times in my life in the past, where I think I know something.

And so I just confidently do it.

And poker and thinking about things in this more metacognitive way where you have to think about your thinking.

And not just think, Oh, I think I know what this is.

And I'm pretty confident in it.

It actually, I think, made examples like that much less likely to occur.

These days, I'm actually much less confident in any of my opinions and in any, even my opinion of which way we should turn in order to get back to where we were trying to go.

You know, something as simple as that.

I've learned to really tone it down and to really question myself every single time and say, Okay, wait, why am I sure?

Why am I so confident in this?

Is the data reliable?

Is it something that I can trust or not?

You know, where is that confidence coming from?

Because one of the things I learned in psychology is that we have intuitions all the time.

And we are actually horrible, horrible, horrible at being able to tell the correct intuitions from the wrong intuitions.

We're about 50, 50.

And that's a really bad track record.

And sometimes our intuitions are spot on.

And sometimes they're completely wrong, but we can't tell the difference.

And poker really thing forced me to go deeper into that.

And to figure out why can't we tell the difference?

And how can you become more confident in your intuitions?

Well, you have to go back and say, Do I have a basis for this?

Do I have the experience in this?

Do I have, you know, is there a reason my intuition should be right?

Because what correct intuition is, is all of this experience that we've accumulated in something that we don't necessarily have conscious access to the process of acquiring.

And so your intuition should only be trusted if you're an expert in this area, if there's a reason why you should be confident here.

And learning to kind of disentangle that, and learning to spot false confidence for what it is, I think is a crucial skill just in absolutely anything.

How do, like, if you factor in a continuum between rational and emotional, how does that factor into your thought process and how you're thinking about something?

I think that we are all necessarily emotional if we're human.

I mean, even Sherlock Holmes was someone who experienced emotions, even though people think of him as this kind of almost computer like person.

What he did, and this is, it's interesting, there are actually a lot of ways that writing about Sherlock Holmes helped me become a better poker player, because a lot of things overlap there.

And this rational, emotional thing is one of them.

So what Sherlock Holmes does is he acknowledges his emotions, he recognizes that they exist, and then he dismisses them if they're irrelevant to the decision.

So he says, you know, sure, you know, I feel sympathy for this woman.

Sure, I see that she's, you know, a really good person.

But now I'm going to dismiss all of that because it's irrelevant to the decision.

So I feel the emotion, I experience it, and then I put it away, and do not use it when I'm coming to a decision, because it's not relevant.

In poker, there's this idea called tilt, which Eric introduced me to, in which it's just, it became one of my favorite words in the world.

I use it all the time now.

Another way that poker has filtered its way into my life, is that now I say that I'm tilted, and things put me on tilt, and that something is tilting all the time without even thinking about it, because it's such a, such a convenient word.

What tilt means is that you've let emotion into your thought process, irrelevant emotion into your thought process.

Usually, it's negative.

So, and by negative, I mean, negative emotion.

So, for instance, you lose a really big pot, so you lose a lot of money, and you get angry, or you get, you know, really frustrated.

And so that affects how you're playing, because you start making decisions, not because that's the right decision to make, but because you want to get those trips back, or you want to punish the person who took them from you, because you think that he's being a jerk, or whatever it is.

But it can also be positive.

So sometimes they're positive emotions that also are irrelevant to your decision process.

So in poker, the, the example would be, you've won a lot of money, you've won a number of pots, and all of a sudden, you think you're invincible.

And so you have kind of this very, you're feeling great, you're feeling so confident, and then you start maybe taking risks you shouldn't take, and making decisions in a way you shouldn't be making decisions, because you're letting that emotion seep in to your decision process.

So when you say something is tilting, it means it's something that's getting under your skin, making you emotional.

When you say that you're on tilt, it means, oh, you're emotional, you're not thinking as rationally, you're not thinking as clearly anymore.

What the goal should be, and this actually also relates directly to what I did my PhD on because Walter Michelle, what he studied with the marshmallow kids was self control and hot and cool decision making.

How do we in the face of a marshmallow, which we can use just as a symbol for anything that is enticing, anything that we want, kind of this, this craving this hot condition in the face of that, how do we resist?

How do we cool it down?

How do we let rational thought processes prevail when we're four years old and we just want to eat the marshmallow?

And all of his work was basically centered on how do you teach self control?

How do you teach people to cool down hot processes?

How do you go off tilt?

How do you actually learn to cool down your emotions so that you can make the correct decision in the case of the marshmallow, don't eat the thing, wait for your second marshmallow.

Or in the case of poker, you know, maybe I should fold this hand or whatever it is, you can make the analogy to basically any decision that you want to make where you're being emotional.

So all of these things kind of came together and helped me understand that you can't ever be purely rational because you're always going to experience emotion and yet what you can do is learn, this goes back to the being kind of more self -reflective and going through your thought process, learning to

be more mindful about the emotions you experience to say, okay, I am experiencing this emotion right now.

Why? What made me experience it?

Because sometimes emotions are actually incredibly relevant to a decision.

It's the relevant emotions that you that you need to get rid of.

There's psychological work that shows that people who can't experience certain emotions like fear because they have neural damage, they actually make really bad gambling decisions and they go broke because they just don't care.

They have no risk aversion whatsoever.

Well, that's also not good, right?

They're completely not emotional.

But in that particular case, the fear was important.

It was integral to the decision and they no longer had that emotional feedback.

So what you need to learn is to identify the emotion, figure out that you're experiencing it.

Because a lot of times you don't even realize, you know, you don't realize your anger, you don't realize you're frustrated, you don't realize you're hungry, you don't realize that all these things are going on.

So first you identify it, then you try to identify the root cause.

Is this something that's totally incidental?

Or is this something that's actually integral?

More often than not, it's incidental.

And then you say, Okay, now I need to dismiss it, figure out how does this normally affect my decision process?

And how do I correct for that?

How do I actually take it out of the decision process?

And the funny thing is, just the very process of identifying and kind of going through that thought process tends to cool you down.

Because all of a sudden, you've kind of distanced yourself from the immediacy of the event.

All of a sudden, you're actually thinking about it in a different way.

And so by the time you even get there, you're already calmer, you're already more rational, so it helps in more ways than one.

So that sounds like a very rational approach to emotions, which is identify the emotion, you know, identify the root cause of the emotion and then take corrective action.

Yes. How do you learn to identify your emotions?

It's like with anything else in life.

It's a long process that I don't think is ever a complete I would like to think of myself as someone who is better than average at doing this, at someone who doesn't tilt very much as someone who's been studying this for many, many years and is very well aware of it and can be in control.

And yet it still happens.

And it happens on and off the poker table.

I think poker has made me a little bit better, but it still happens.

And it's going to happen.

And that's okay. A lot of people then tilt even more because they get mad at themselves for failing to identify the emotion and failing to take corrective action.

So I think that first you need just need to realize, okay, you know, this is going to happen and sometimes I'm not going to be in control.

And that's okay. I need to kind of make my piece with that.

It doesn't mean that I'm not making progress.

It doesn't mean I'm a bad human being.

It doesn't mean anything except that in this particular case, I'm still emotional.

And then it's practice.

It's being, I think, more in touch with yourself and learning to stop and to actually just reflect and to make this a natural part of your day to day life.

My first book, Mastermind was actually, it was about Sherlock Holmes, but it was really about mindfulness.

It was really about kind of this process of learning to pause and to reflect and to be more deliberate.

As Holmes put it, it's the difference between merely seeing and both seeing and observing.

And so a lot of the book was about learning how to both see and observe how to be more mindful.

And I think that that really gets to the heart of how you become better at identifying your emotions.

It's practice being with yourself, practice kind of taking a step back and trying to sift through your own mind.

And at first, you're going to be wrong.

And at first, it's going to be hard.

But over time, it gets easier.

And I actually realized that I needed help with this partway through my poker journey, despite the fact that this is what I studied, despite my background, despite the fact that I knew all of this.

So I actually got a mental game coach as well, someone named Jared Tendler.

And he helped me. He was, I don't want to say he was my Watson, because he was someone who was a specialist in this.

But he helped me actually learn how to do that in a way that really applied to me.

And once again, I think that basically, people need help with everything.

And to think that you are self sufficient and good at something.

And so you don't need any help.

I think that's very hubristic.

And I, you know, I fell for that when it came to emotion management.

And I think I became a much better player after I realized that maybe, hey, I do need help in identifying my emotions.

I do need help in identifying my triggers.

I do need someone who actually pushes me to sit down, and write things down and reflect and keep a decision journal and do all of these things that I suggest to other people, but never have actually bothered to do myself.

Tell me more about what you learned from Jared.

Jared taught me a lot about what went on in my head, and what was tilting for me.

I think what people need to kind of understand about tilt and about emotion is that there's nothing universal about how we react to things.

So emotions are universal.

But what triggers specific emotions, that's very specific to a person that's very individual.

So most people, you know, they go on tilt after they lose a big hand, because they think, Oh, man, I've lost a big hand.

This is terrible. I need to really kind of I need to do something about it.

And right now, we can be talking about not poker, but anything else after you have something bad happen in your life, you know, after you lose a big hand, after you lose a negotiation after you know, you lose an argument, whatever it is, you you get really angry.

For me, that wasn't actually a big tilting factor.

Like, I was always pretty fine after that.

That's why I thought, Oh, I don't tilt.

Because in that situation, I was like, Okay, you know, I've lost a big hand.

Moving on, like, let's let's go on from this.

But there were other things that aren't triggers for other people that were really kind of that really bothered me.

For instance, something that Jared really helped me put into words that I think I realized it on some level, but I've never verbalized it because I didn't want to because it was something I didn't want to acknowledge about myself or the way that I thought was how internalized certain gender stereotypes

were in my mind, and how I would actually sometimes play into the role of being female, when I was surrounded by all of these men.

Because let's just do a little caveat here to say that poker professional poker is about 97 % male.

So a woman being a woman in poker is being a huge outlier means 3 % of you in any given tournament field.

So I went through most of my time without ever playing with another female.

And sometimes people would say things like, there's one thing that really stuck out that really bothered me at the time, but I didn't actually realize how much it bothered me or why.

When someone started calling me little girl at the table and just kept calling me little girl over and over and over.

And I just and I busted out of the tournament after being with this player for not that long at all.

And I was until he made me really make bad decisions.

And I didn't really realize it, or and I didn't realize why.

Because it's not like sometimes people are really horrible to you, and they call you things that are much worse than little girl.

And that's a little bit easier to identify because you're like, okay, you're being an ass.

And I can't believe you just called me that little girl, like it seems like it was fine more or less.

But it wasn't. And all of a sudden, like my decision quality deteriorated to the point where this guy is the one who busted me out of the tournament, which means he's the one who took all my chips, and I had to go home.

And that really was not what I wanted to have happen.

And incidents like that just peppered my poker experience.

And I never really realized what was going on or why.

And I never realized just how, how much I let this gender thing get to me and how much it actually influenced my decisions.

And Jared helped me identify things like that, like what my specific triggers were, what I was responding to and how.

Because I also learned that even though I might feel like, you know, a successful female, a lot of things, a lot of my insecurities would actually come out at the poker table, you know, I didn't want to be too aggressive, because I didn't want people to think I was mean, I didn't want people to call

me a bitch, which they did anyway, but you know, I didn't want them to.

So I would just be more passive, I'd kind of be nicer.

And I would make decisions that were wrong, because I didn't want to have kind of this other image.

And I just acknowledging that to myself was really painful, because that's not, that's not the mental image that I want to have of myself.

And it ends up that my mental image of myself was not in line with reality.

I needed someone from the outside to help me come to that conclusion and to help me kind of make my peace with it so that I could then improve and become a better player and I think a stronger person just in general.

That's really deep and insightful.

I appreciate that. Talk to me about reflecting.

What have you learned about reflecting better?

I've learned just how important it is to really take kind of a pause from life, to take a pause from everything that's going on and to make that kind of a regular part of your day.

What I mean by that is that, you know, I'm always doing something, I always have a million projects going on at once.

I love being busy. And you know, I'm someone who's just never bored, there's always something to do.

And I've written before about the importance of, you know, mindfulness, the importance of reflection.

But even though I do yoga every day, and have been doing that for over a decade, and will meditate a little in the morning, it was always I actually didn't put two and two together.

And I didn't use those techniques when it came to thinking through my own thought process, reflecting about myself, reflecting about what was going on.

I never kept, you know, I would tell people, Oh, you know, to make better decisions, you should, you know, you should write things down, you should do this, you should have kind of this little decision journal, so that you can then think back, and look back and see what you were actually thinking, so that you're

not tied to the outcome.

And all of these things that I would suggest to other people, but I didn't do any of them myself, because I didn't think I needed them.

And so what I learned is just the importance of taking moments where you're not doing anything.

So turning off the computer, turning your phone to silent, you know, just actually finding pockets of time, where you sit with yourself, and you have kind of a daily check in and reflection about what you're thinking how you're doing, kind of what's going on.

And I've actually, you know, do that during poker tournaments on on breaks.

Jared actually taught me to have this reflection routine, where I take time to just pause and not do anything, and not think about anything, and not stress about anything, not worry about the hands, not worry that I'm wasting time, because I'm not being productive to just actually kind of do what he

called brain dump, just kind of think about, okay, you know, what have I been thinking?

What am I doing? Is there anything that I need to dump out of my brain, and write it down so that it's no longer occupying mental space, so that I can be free to make better decisions in the future, so that then I can go back to that and reflect on it for real.

Because I've already kind of done that preparatory work, I know this is something that I need to think about.

It's so easy to just keep going and just move on from one moment to the next and not stop and not reflect and not take those moments to say, hey, let me just pause right now.

And just think back.

And I'm guilty of doing that a lot.

And I've really tried to become better, because I think it makes me a better decision maker, it makes me a better person.

It makes me actually just happier, because I'm much more in touch with what I'm going through, what I'm experiencing, and I'm better able to address it so that it doesn't become an issue.

And I think that that's something that you can't take for granted, no matter how well you think you normally emotionally regulate, no matter how good you think that you know, you know, that you are at knowing yourself, at knowing your mind.

Taking those moments will make you that much better, and that much more emotionally regulated, and that much more just in touch with what's going on with you.

What information do you find most helpful about a situation or decision when you're reflecting?

It depends. But I think, in general, I try to think about the emotional elements.

So how am I feeling kind of what you and I were talking about earlier to try to deconstruct why I'm feeling a certain way, but also kind of what were the what are the factors of the situation, who are the people, you know, what do I know about these people?

Is there something that's actually affecting me that I didn't realize because of the people involved?

What are the stakes kind of what am I even doing?

What do I hope to accomplish?

It's so funny how often you lose sight of what your actual goal is, because you have so many intermediate goals, and you forget what you're actually trying to do.

And then you get, you know, caught up in petty arguments or side things and kind of these emotional little dramas, where if you take a step back to reflect, you're like, wait, this is the big picture.

This is where I'm getting to.

This is what I want to do.

All of this stuff is actually not important.

So yeah, I can compromise here, even though I didn't think I could compromise here, just to put everything in perspective.

I think that that's actually one of the most important things that the reflection process can teach you is to it's to force you to actually gain perspective and to imagine that the situation is like a puzzle, and there are all these different puzzle pieces, and you can get so wrapped up in figuring

out where does this specific piece fit that you forget what, you know, the full puzzle looks like.

And you don't even remember what the picture is because you've been so enmeshed in kind of this specific element of it, and it can help you solve it much faster.

We've come a long way from Sherlock Holmes to this.

Can we go back? I want to hear some of the more lessons that you learned from Sherlock Holmes.

Mastermind, just for context, was my first real exposure to your work, and it was like this beautiful book.

And I was like, oh, this is like so great.

So Sherlock Holmes still has, Sherlock Holmes has always had a very special part in my life, unlike poker, which came to my life very late.

Sherlock Holmes is one of my fondest memories from childhood.

My dad would read us Sherlock Holmes stories when I was growing up, we'd have one a week, and I would look forward to that Sunday night reading every single week.

So they were definitely kind of in my subconscious this whole time.

And when I started working on Mastermind, I actually hadn't read the Holmes stories in years, not since I was a kid.

So after they were read out loud to me, I then went back and read them all myself.

But then I hadn't really revisited them.

And the reason that I came back to him was that I was writing an article about mindfulness.

And this was back before everyone knew what mindfulness was.

I think this was, let's call it like 2010, something around then.

So mindfulness wasn't about a buzzword.

And people didn't really weren't sure what it entailed.

So I was trying to I was writing about some psychology studies about mindfulness.

And I was trying to figure out, well, what's the way I can illustrate this?

What's the way that I can really bring it home to people so that they understand the essence of mindfulness.

And in popped Sherlock Holmes just completely unbidden.

And it was the scene that I alluded to a little bit earlier in our conversation.

When Holmes asks Watson, how many steps lead up to 221 B Baker Street?

And Watson doesn't know.

And Holmes says, Well, that's the difference between us.

You only see I both see and observe.

And those words actually just came back to me.

And I didn't remember what story it was from.

Didn't remember much about it, but I just Googled it to try to figure it out.

And there it was. And I read it.

And I thought, Oh, my God, this is perfect.

That's exactly what mindfulness is this difference between seeing and seeing and observing.

And so I wrote the article.

And I liked the story so much that I thought, you know what, I'm going to go back to all the Sherlock Holmes stories, I just want to reread them for pleasure, started reading them.

And it was just it was one of these light bulb moments where I thought, Oh, my God, this is just such a treasure trove of psychological insight.

It's not just about mindfulness.

It's about creativity.

It's about rational thinking.

I mean, it's about observation.

It's about all of these different elements.

And so that became the first book.

But I think it's really interesting that I came back to Holmes when I was trying to explain a psychology concept, and that I suddenly realized the stories were just peppered with insights.

You know, there are things like the fact that people think of Sherlock Holmes as kind of someone who is a very, very rational ABC decision making guru, you know, someone who you should look at as just the model of hyper rationality.

And yet when you start reading the stories, you see that one of the real lessons is just how creative it is, and how creative his thought processes, that he doesn't go from A to B to C, that he is capable of taking all of these leaps that standard minds don't take.

And that he has all these techniques for how you can attain creative insight, that he has, you know, his three pipe problem, for instance, which is taken from one of my favorite stories, The Adventures of the Red Headed League, where everyone wants to just jump in and solve this case of this red headed

guy who's been given a job just because he's a redhead, and he thinks it's a little strange.

And Holmes agrees that it's strange.

So he decides to take this case on.

And the red headed man wants to take him to his place of work.

And Holmes says, No, you know, go away, I'll get back to you when I want to.

And Watson says, Oh, Holmes, you know, what are you thinking?

Let's do this. Let's do that.

Watson is very active.

He just wants to do.

And Holmes says, one of my favorite lines from Sherlock Holmes, this is quite the three pipe problem.

And he sits down and he smokes three pipes.

And at the end of it, he solved the case without ever having left the apartment.

And there are lessons like that peppered throughout, which is it's not just a beautiful line, which it is this is quite the three pipe problem.

It just contains so much insight into what hundreds of studies about creativity have taught us that sometimes you need to actually take a step back and reflect and smoke the proverbial three pipes in order to be able to see the full picture in order to be able to let your mind work so that you can see

where the solution might lie.

Whereas a traditional detective would basically just jump right in and start kind of playing around and trying to solve the problem.

Holmes realizes that no, first you need to smoke your pipes, only then will you be able to really see what the problem even is.

And so there were just moments like that that were popping up all over the place that just really helped inform a lot of my thinking and helped me think more deeply about psychology, because when I was seeing it through the lens of Conan Doyle, I had to try to basically do what Holmes does with Watson,

try to explain it, try to talk through it, try to figure out why does this work?

How realistic is this?

Because obviously Holmes is a fictional character.

And in that, I really, I think, learned more about thinking than I had up to that point in my education in psychology.

And by the way, I do want to point out that Holmes was based on a real person.

So even though he's fictional, he was based on a doctor who was a mentor to Arthur Conan Doyle when he was in medical school at the University of Scotland.

So Conan Doyle was also a doctor, not a very good one.

Otherwise, he wouldn't have written Sherlock Holmes.

So we're lucky about that.

And Joseph Bell, who was a brilliant doctor was the model for Sherlock Holmes.

So even though Holmes is fictional, his approach to things was taken from someone who's very real.

Peter Bellen wrote a book on Sherlock Holmes too, a few lessons from Sherlock Holmes, which I thought was really good as well.

I think there's a lot that we can take away from Sherlock.

You said in poker in your book that delusion is punished.

Can you walk me through that?

Absolutely. So poker is a wonderful teaching tool because you have immediate feedback in the sense of, you know, do you win or do you lose?

Now you need to be careful because as I said before, you need to learn to separate thought process from outcome.

So sometimes you make the right decision, but you still lose.

But if you have that caveat, then you do kind of start seeing right away what the outcomes of your actions are and whether you're actually learning whether you're playing correctly, because over time you'll either be losing money or winning money.

If you are deluded and you think you're better than you actually are, and you play at a higher level than you should be playing, poker is going to punish you because it's going to take away all of your money and you'll be broke.

But you won't know that on one hand.

You'll just know it over an aggregate.

Yes, it's all in aggregate.

I think the other point that the game teaches you, which I think is a really important insight into life in general, is that any given hand, anything can happen.

But over the long term, skill does emerge triumphant as long as you never got incredibly unlucky to begin with.

So I think that there are probably a lot of people who could have been brilliant poker players who had a horrible run of luck at the beginning and just quit because they were broke.

And so I think that you start realizing that delusion is punished in the long term, but in the immediate term, you could be deluded and win lots of money.

But if in the immediate term you're not deluded, then you're actually quite good, but you're being punished because the variance is against you.

You might never see the long term.

So I think that that's actually really important to remember for life that luck, in any given hand, anyone can win, usually over the long term, skill emerges, and yet luck can be a real bitch.

And if it really just pummels you at the beginning the wrong way, then you might never have the chance to realize your potential.

I think that that sort of realization makes you a lot less judgmental about people because you realize how much of your life just ends up being luck of birth and luck of just early circumstances that you didn't really have much control over, and that can really set the scene for a lot of things to come.

So a lot of the best poker players also got incredibly lucky at the beginning as well.

I think Warren Buffett calls that the ovarian lottery, right?

Yep, that's a great way of putting it.

How much do you think, as you're talking about this one thing that just keeps going through my head, and correct me, this is a working hypothesis, but how much do you think that just exposing your thought process, testing that thought process accurately and honestly exposing your thought process through

reflection, testing that either with more experienced players or people or outcomes, is actually that is the key to improvement?

Oh, I think that that's absolutely accurate.

That is the key to improvement.

I think I was able to improve at poker and become a much better player because I had a teacher who always, that's what he stressed.

That's what he taught me.

He was always teaching me how to think, how to test my thought process, how to go through those building blocks.

He was never telling me what to do or what was a mistake or what wasn't a mistake.

It was never prescriptive in that way.

And I think that that made me a much better player, even though I would get so mad.

There were times when I just wanted to, well, when I did say, Eric, just tell me how to play this hand, what would you have done here?

And he would actually say, it doesn't matter what I would have done here because you're not me.

And you need to realize that, and you need to realize that people are playing differently against you than they would be against me because I'm me and you're you.

And I can't give you an answer.

And it's frustrating when that's happening because I would think things like, I'm never going to become a good player if you don't tell me what to do.

You don't just tell me how to play this hand.

And yet, because he kept pushing me to examine my thought process and to be honest about it, because he was not someone who just always patted me on the head and said, great job.

He would actually tell me when he thought that there were problems and the biggest problems were always in my thought process.

I remember one tournament where we were texting back and forth and he pulled me aside during a break and he said, I'm really worried about your thinking.

The way you're describing hands right now is you're telling me, you know, this happened to me and this happened to me and this happened to me.

And that really worries me because that means that your head is not in the right place because things you should not be thinking of things that's happening to you.

You need to be going through your own thought process and what you can control.

And he was right. My head was just in a completely the wrong place and having him point that out and actually kind of scold me for it and say, Hey, stop doing this.

Do not keep telling me what's happening.

Because I would say things like, Oh man, I can't believe you know, my aces got cracked again, which means I had pocket aces, which is the best starting hand you can have.

And if someone cracks your aces, it means that a worse hand ended up beating you in the end because of the run out of the cards.

And that happens. And you know what, it's supposed to happen.

And if you look at the numbers, it's going to happen about a quarter of the time and pocket aces aren't necessarily going to win.

And it's going to happen even more frequently if there's more than one player playing against you.

And so when I was sending him texts like, Oh man, you know, my aces got cracked again, I was not thinking about my own decision process.

And how I played the hand, I was just being mad at the fact that this happened and this happened to me.

And he just, he really, I still remember this conversation so well, because it hit home.

He was like, you stopped describing things this way.

This is bad. And the fact that you're describing it this way means that's how you're experiencing it, which means that you're not capable of thinking clearly right now.

And it just a switch flipped.

And, you know, I played so much better from that moment on because I remembered that what I was supposed to be focusing on was my thought process.

And it's funny that there's no kind of moment where I was like, Oh, I'm becoming a better poker player.

But there were just suddenly there were these, there were games, there were tournaments, there were just moments of reflection where I thought, Oh wow, Eric has actually taught me a lot.

I know how to play this hand.

I know what I should be doing because I have the building blocks, I have the thought process.

And it all just kind of came together.

Because I was learning the whole time.

Even though I was never given a blueprint for like, no, these are the hands that you play from this position.

This is your opening range, which means like, this is the chart of the hands that you're allowed to start playing with start opening the pot with.

If you're sitting here or if you're sitting there, Eric never gave me any of that.

And I think that eventually, I just kind of figured it out because instead of giving me the specific charts and telling me, okay, you should play, you know, this and this and this.

And if you get these two cards, you fold.

Instead, he taught me to always ask, okay, why would I play this?

Why wouldn't I play this?

How would I think about it?

Let me think through this entire decision.

Moving forward, based on where I'm sitting, based on who's at my table, based on what people think of me, based on what I think of other people, based on what I've been observing for the last however many hours.

And having that, having those tools of reflection, having knowledge into kind of what I should be paying attention to, that's what made me a much better player, not knowing which two cards to play or when to raise or when to fold.

I think that just going back to the passive versus active mindset, I think that's super important in life, right?

And I sort of define the passive mindset as an attitude or assumption that life's happening to you and you're not responsible.

People who say things like, why does this always happen to me?

What you're doing is you're describing life in a passive way and you convince yourself eventually that nothing is your responsibility because an active attitude means ownership, right?

And ownership in a sense of, sorry, I should have planned for traffic.

I'll consider that next time you're owning it.

You're not excusing it.

Absolutely. The difference is hugely important over a long life.

And I want to come back to something else you said, which is we tend to just want the answers, right?

Like we want the recipe.

We want the like, tell me what to do in part because like, I think we hit on this a little earlier, like life is moving so fast.

We're so busy. We're just like, okay, I just need a break.

So tell me this thing.

But it's like the illusion of knowledge when somebody does that, because if somebody who has primary experience or firsthand experience is telling you something, what I think is happening is I'm going to tell you this experience and you're not reflecting on it, but I'm going to give you my sort of like

my, the result of my reflection.

And that's going to be your heuristic for how to act in the future.

But if you haven't done the reflecting, you don't know when it works or when it doesn't work or what the limits to it are or where it's going to break or what if the environment changes, how that's going to affect things, you can only sort of like replicate that knowledge of everything is the exact

same. So I think it actually makes us overconfident too.

And it makes us want to like, we take unwarranted risks.

For sure, for sure.

One of the things that Eric taught me, well, told me actually, and taught me very early on is he described this conversation that he had with an incredibly good player.

I obviously won't say who it was, but they were having this conversation and this player just very confidently was saying how you're supposed to play a hand.

And Eric was just kind of quietly listening.

And then he just said, less certainty, more inquiry.

And the player got really mad.

He got really upset.

He did not take that well, because he thought that kind of Eric was criticizing him.

And Eric was in a way, but very gently, he was saying, you know, you can't ever there's no way you're supposed to play, or there's no that's kind of the I think that's the drawback of the people who are too focused on kind of the mathematical model.

And well, the simulation says that I'm supposed to do this x percent of the time, so I'm just going to do it like a robot.

And the best players realize that you can't do that, less certainty, more inquiry, you have to inquire, you have to ask, you have to probe, you have to think is that action applicable in the specific circumstance, even if the solver tells me I should be doing this all the time, maybe at this table,

I shouldn't, you know, maybe there's actually something that I need to think through right here.

And one of the things that you know, I think is one of the most valuable lessons that Eric has taught me is less certainty, more inquiry, always be less certain, and always inquire and ask questions and think through things for yourself.

And if anyone is ever telling you, you know, this is what you have to do here.

This is what you should be doing.

No, this is always a fold.

No, this is always a call, then you need to actually be skeptical of that person and definitely don't don't think unthinkingly follow that advice.

And that's really I think that's such a helpful way to go through life just keeping that lesson in your mind at all times.

And it's, you know, it also helps explain why Eric is just so humble, and so incredibly self -effacing, because that really is how he lives his life.

And so he always questions and he always questions himself, and he always questions whether he's good enough.

And that's why he stays good enough, because he keeps questioning, and he's never overconfident.

He just, he keeps asking, he keeps asking questions, and he keeps learning, and he keeps changing and evolving and adapting how he plays based on what he's seeing.

And so he plays very differently now than he played 20 years ago.

A lot of people are incapable of that sort of adjustment in any realm of life.

I mean, if you think about academia, where I came from, right, you have all of these old guard professors who have tenure, who made their reputation on some big theory, and then something newer comes along that actually forces them to reconsider some of their ideas.

And it's the rare person who's actually able to say, Oh, yeah, things have changed.

I was this is wrong, I've got to update it.

A lot of times, they just double down and scream and get very mad at the newcomers.

And that comes from the fact that they don't have less certainty, more inquiry as one of their life guiding mottos.

I like that. I want to switch gears just a little bit before we end the interview, because I've wanted to ask you about your reading habits for a long time.

I know you're a voracious reader.

How do you filter what you read?

And you mentioned sort of like Dan's book being recommended to you, but then you mentioned you actively read it.

So I want to talk about how you filter what you read, and then how do you go about reading a book for knowledge acquisition?

What does that process look like?

Are you like start to finish?

Is there highlights?

Like how does that work?

Yeah. So I read a lot.

I read nonfiction. I read fiction.

I read poetry. And I'm actually I'm a huge, huge believer that everyone should be reading fiction and poetry.

There are so many people who I really admire who just say, Oh, I only read nonfiction, because all the other stuff doesn't teach me anything.

And I just, I've had this conversation so many times where I try to convince them about the value of reading fiction, the value of reading poetry, the fact that all of these things have different, different lessons to teach us and that you can learn from all of them.

So I filter by a number of things.

So recommendations, definitely one, if you're someone I admire, whose opinion I admire, and especially if I know you, and you know me, I'm much more likely to take your recommendation.

Sometimes I actually one of my favorite things, a number of years ago, kind of must be over 10 years ago now, I bought the collected Paris review interviews.

And it's this boxed set of all of the interviews that the Paris review has ever done.

And the Paris review has this wonderful thing where they interview writers, and thinkers, and they ask them just a lot of different questions.

And in these interviews, they inevitably talk about books that they read books that have been influential for them, authors that they like.

And that's actually how I often will go through my reading.

You know, I went through a phase where I read everything that Joseph Brodsky had written, because I really love his poetry, and I love his prose.

And he has lists of books that he recommends and things that he read.

And so that got me into kind of areas of reading that I never considered before, because he really, you know, he's a huge fan of Plutarch's Lives.

I've never read Plutarch's Lives.

So I went and I started reading Plutarch's Lives.

By the way, I recommend that everyone buys the Paris review interviews and just reads them and uses that as a lot of book recommendations, because they're so damn good.

I mean, some are better than others, but you have insight into just some of the greatest writers of the last century.

It's a beautiful resource.

And I also feel very, very free to put books down.

If I open something and I'm not enjoying it, and I don't think that I'm going to like it, and if there's no reason to keep reading, I'm just going to stop.

And I don't think that that's, you know, there are people who will finish a book once they start it.

To me in my mind, there are way too many books.

I'm already not going to be able to read all the books I want to read in my life.

So why spend it reading something I don't want to read?

I like the idea of the Paris review.

I'm going to have to go through that now.

I've been meaning to do that for a while.

And you just reminded me.

How do you, when you pick up a book, like, are you a high letter?

Do you underline? Like, how do you take those things that you're reading and distill them into something that's usable for you?

So it depends. If it's nonfiction, I'm going to be underlining and writing in the margins.

So all of my nonfiction books are written in.

For the most part, I have some really beautiful hardcover editions that I would never in a million years write in.

So I have, you know, I definitely have books that I won't touch.

Fiction, I don't write in the first time I read it.

If I then go back to it, like my, I have a version of Sherlock Holmes that's pristine, because I wanted this beautiful Sherlock Holmes box set, but then I have a version of Sherlock Holmes that is just completely, you know, defaced.

I've written over every single chapter because I was really analyzing those stories and really trying to take everything from it.

And I have, so for some of my favorite books, so one of my favorite poets is W .H.

Auden, and I've read all of his poetry many times.

And I actually have two copies of his collected poems.

One that's just a really nice hardcover that I don't write in.

And then I have a softcover where I've underlined and written.

So I have kind of both one that's nice when I just want to read and have a very pretty pristine reading experience, and one that I've really engaged in.

And it's actually really interesting to me.

I like writing in books because it doesn't just help you process things and make sure that you're going through them in a thoughtful way, and actually kind of synthesizing thoughts and thinking as you're reading, as opposed to being just passively absorbing it, or not absorbing it, that's the case,

it usually is when you're passively reading.

But it actually also enables me to visit my past versions of myself.

Sometimes I'll read a book, and I'll read this comment in the margin.

I said, fascinating.

That the me of five years ago, or whenever I read this book, Last Thought This at that point in time.

And that's a really interesting experience, because you're in your own mind all the time.

It's your mind. And this is a way that you can actually see it from the outside and see how you've changed and see what's different and kind of revisit ways that you used to think that you might not think now.

And I think that that's such an important and fascinating and helpful and eye opening sometimes experience.

I like marginalia a lot because it's also like an active sort of, not only are you actively reading, so you're more engaged, but you're sort of like reflecting in some way, or questioning, and I think that that makes the learning so much more powerful.

So often, we just forget to go back and like take that out of the book and like do something with it, either like think about it or have some way to access that knowledge in the future.

For sure, for sure.

And the books that have meant the most to me that I end up going back to the most times, you always see that there's tons of marginalia in them, they're underlined, there's just, there's a lot going on there.

And I think that that works both ways.

I go back to them because I process them much more deeply.

And I process them deeply, because I was actually going through and thinking and reflecting, and I have all this marginalia.

So it's at this reciprocal relationship.

Maybe there was a book that I read at some point that could have become a really central book for me, but I was distracted and didn't actually read it carefully.

So I didn't sit the same way.

And if I were to revisit it right now, I would probably say, Oh, my God, I can't believe that this isn't kind of one of my books, and then it would become more written in.

But I sometimes wonder how many got away because you can't always be on, you know, sometimes you do read passively.

I don't think that's avoidable, at least for me, maybe for someone it is.

Oh, totally. Yeah, of course.

And Maria, this has been a phenomenal conversation.

I want to thank you so much for your time.

Thank you. It has been really interesting and thought provoking.

You've asked questions that nobody has ever asked me.

Hey, one more thing before we say goodbye.

The Knowledge Project is produced by the team at Frontump Street.

I want to make this the best podcast you listen to, and I'd love to get your feedback.

If you have comments, ideas for future shows or topics, or just feedback in general, you can email me at Shane at fs .blog or follow me on Twitter at Shane A.

Parrish. You can learn more about the show and find past episodes at fs .blog slash podcast.

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[The Art of Decision-Making: Lessons from Poker, Psychology, and Sherlock Holmes]-[#89 Maria Konnikova: Less Certainty, More Inquiry]

📋 Summary

Master Your Mind: Strategic Lessons from Maria Konikova

The Role of Chance and the "Ludic Fallacy"

Mentorship and the Power of Inquiry

Mastering Emotions and "Tilt"

The Importance of "Less Certainty, More Inquiry"

Reading for Knowledge Acquisition

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript