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

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No se do. cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton. Ladies and germs.

Boys and girls, this is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show. This is a rare in person interview. Think this is the first time Doing a full shebang with video. Since Covid

And let's jump right to the intro. My guest today is Liv Burie. That's B O E R E E on Twitter at Live Underscore Bree. She is one of the UK's most successful poker players. Now a resident of Boston, Texas. Winning both European Poker Tour and World Series of Poker Championship titles during her professional career. Before poker, she studied astrophysics and now focuses her time as a TV host and YouTuber, specializing in game theory, futurism, and rationality. What a world we live in that you can now do that on YouTube. It's fucking amazing. It's incredible. She also gives seminars on high stakes decision making and recently spoke at the annual TED Conference about the application of poker thinking to everyday life. In two thousand fourteen, she co-founded Raising for Effective Giving.

R E G parenthetically. I try that again. She co-founded raising for effective giving in uh parentheses R E G Let me try that again. In two thousand fourteen, she co founded Raising for Effective Giving, R E G. We should keep all of those takes in. This is so bad. I need I'm trying to cut back on my caffeine and this is the price I pay. A nonprofit based upon the philosophies of effective altruism that raised more than twelve million dollars for its carefully selected list.

of maximally cost effective charities. You can find her online livebare.com, liveburry.substack.com And on all of the things, all of the socials, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, you can certainly search and find her Liv Marie. Live. Welcome to the show. It's nice to see you. Thank you for having me.

And uh 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. And that's what it was for mic cable. It was from mic cable so that I can tell which line is feeding into which input on this recorder.

And it certainly looks a lot better in audio, right? So it does have a certain clown car appearance to it when we do it in person with video, but When you said black, I said I That It's gonna be black right beforehand. And it was black. And the reason I said that is I read something about you. And Metallica.

And uh to get into the zone coming here on the drive over, I listened to Orion, the remastered choice. Yeah. Niche choice. Very, very uh Because my first Now we're really getting off track here, but that's okay. There is no track. My very first album I ever bought was on cassette tape and it was Master of Puppets. And

Can you guess why I bring up Metallica. Well, they were My Love that bordered on a unhealthy obsession from the ages of like

Sixteen to twenty two. So that's probably a I would guess why you brought it up. I don't know how you would know that though. Well, you know, we do research over here. Middle insider dot net. The Iron Maiden of the Poker World, they called you. And there's a shirt

Discussion of the unforgiven. And This led you, I guess, in some respects into guitar. Do you still play guitar? I don't. You don't, but you did for a period of time. I did, yeah. I I from like sixteen or seventeen till

twenty four, basically until poker took over. So do you then have Typically one obsession at a time. Do you ever have multiple obsessions simultaneously, or do you tend to have one obsessive fixation and that is where you Put your energy.

I used to. I used to be very A shiny new activity would come along and I would If it ticked enough boxes, I'll be like, I have to become the best at this. I would rarely become the best at it, but I would certainly go down the rabbit hole deep enough to become proficient.

And I was like that, I would say, until Some point in my probably my early thirties, some point around the age of thirty where I lost that a little bit. And

In some ways that's good because it means I can try greater breadth of things, but it comes a little bit at the cost of then not ever picking And I'm currently struggling with the fact that I'm being too much of a jack of all trades, master of none. Like not knowing what I'm am I going to be focusing on YouTube, or maybe I should just do speeches, or maybe I should actually just start a company and give up on a silly like public facing stuff. It can be a bit of a blessing and a curse, I guess. not fixating on one particular thing, but certainly as a teenager I was

I don't know, certainly with metal. Because I think, you know, with teenagers, y so often you're 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 metal head, which is part of the metalhead? Oh for sure. I'll say right. So yeah, you get it. Like and metal is so I mean I say was as if it's past tense. If I'm in the gym, I'm still a metalhead. Right, exactly. But you don't look it, you don't live it in your visual No, I mean I have like from the neck up I definitely have the sort of Early era.

Well actually no, like mid era Pantera look to me. Phil Anselmo after his vulgar display of power era or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, so I was kinda uncool until the age of sixteen 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 the really heavy shit. Like Pantera was like a that was like a nice day on the beach. You know, I'm talking like Dimu Borgir, Burzum, you know some of the Swedish black metal, or Norwegian black metal. Once you Scandinavian death metal and you've gone really deep. Yeah, exactly. But Metallica were a 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?'Cause I'm trying to overlay that on what you just said. So

I first learned to play poker Age twenty one? Mm-hmm. Yeah, it was two thousand five. I just graduated uni.

Didn't really know what I wanted to do. Thought I was going to carry on in physics. But I decided to take a gap here because I when I first started taking physics, I was like, Oh, I'm definitely doing this. This is so interesting. I love it. But then The more time I got to spend with like

PhD students or even people doing their masters, they seemed I don't know, they just didn't seem very happy and they weren't very I don't know, just personality wise, I was wondering if it was g actually w was gonna work for me. Because all I really wanted to do was go out partying and clubbing and go, you know, see ro rock shows, metal shows. And I was also still wanting to be a rock star at the time. And I was like uh I just don't know if this is gonna quite work me sitting in a lab, pl you know, fiddling around with lasers. So decided to take a gap here.

And I think I signed up. Uh oh, I was doing like random like goth modelling sometimes. And I'm gap beer. Right. Well, I you know, just any way I could make some money and I thought I don't know, I enjoyed dressing up in my heavy metal costumes as as often as possible. And I was like, if I can get paid to do that, that'd be great. I also got paid to be a cage dancer in rock clubs in London. Well, you know, I was I was admiring the the boots. on the way in. This is a this is a shoeless household, so thank you for accommodating.

This is this is not the least message sock ever. These are gray and pink striped socks with hearts all over them. So yes. It's like the heart exterior. The Goth. Death metal exterior and then like the soft, sweet inside. I'm you don't understand how much pain I'm in, actually. The fact that this is these. I have so many like most of my socks are black. I just just grabbed whatever I need to do. So goth modeling, which I also did during my gap year. Totally lying. I'm kidding. Kidding. Oh man. And I wish I I wish I could have. So goth modeling, cage dancing. Mm-hmm. And then

I think I signed up for this like website that would advertise different TV shows or modelling 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 call me the Professor. Which I most certainly do. No, I could see it. I could see it. I I was what I literally turned up in Skin tight tiger prints bandix, 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 No, I mean that wasn't genuinely how I dressed. No, it was it was my genuine appearance. As I said, I lived and breathed metal. Sounds good for TV. Right, and I think that's probably why they selected me, honestly. Like very overconfident to the point of like cocky. Twenty one year old.

Pratt, who was Unheard of with twenty one year olds. Yeah. I don't know. I just I just thought I was the smartest person in the world. And I think I even said something like that in the interview, like the audition. And they're like oh we're definitely bringing it up. This is gonna be a good one. And I didn't disappoint because I ended up having a complete meltdown on the show. So glad this is not on the internet. Basically on the final I think we played like seven

Preliminary rounds where we would The five of us would play and then like that would accumulate points. And those points were translate into chips for the final game. Well we would play with a hundred thousand. And I was winning, you know, I was leading going into that. And

Clearly I had a knack for the game, and I remember the the hosts and the Professionals that they got bought on the show to teach us were like, Oh, you're definitely gonna win, you know, you are the most talented at this. So I was so sure I was gonna 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 um I I had two black cards. And

Audibly went. Now I'm not I'm I'm no Professional, but is that what one would call a tell? Do not do that. Um and the my opponent, who's a really nice guy called Lee was like, well, I guess she doesn't have a diamond. And he was like, I'm all in. And instead of again keeping my my cool or anything, I just started crying, like melted down. The producers are high five in the back. Yeah, they were literally and and and

And I'm like, Oh Liv, what's the matter? Tell us more. And I'm just like, you know, makeup everywhere. I think I I I like run away from the table, they try and follow me with a camera. It was just, you know, classic reality TV meltdown stuff. So that was my intro to poker. But I just completely fell in love with the game. And funny enough, while I was In the during the filming of that, which took two months I went to a local card club in London. So you try and get some practice.

And Now sort of infamous this five pound rebuy. So you know, it was the cheapest tournament they had. What is a rebuy. A rebuy means that if you for the first hour or so, if you

bust out, you can just m buy back in again. So considering it was only five pound entry, you can imagine it's just pandemonium. Everyone's going in every single hand. And people will easily like spend like a hundred pounds in their entry overall, you know, twenty rebuys. Good for the house. Yeah. But I turned up with ten pounds. Because I was like, Well it's a five pound tournament. Why would I ever need more than you know, five pound for the entry and five pound to buy a drink and that'll be my my day. So you're like You're like a player in a video game with Two lives. Where everybody else has like a hundred lives. Right. Yeah. And most people were were doing that, yes.

Only for the first hour, then once after that period ends, then if you loop 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 in the first hour of the zombies. I think that'd be by once with my other five pounds, so I didn't buy a drink. And anyway, I ended up winning it. Ended up playing until five in the morning. It was like a hundred and twenty people in it. And then I came home, I remember just having this you know, they paid me out in tens and twenties, I think seven hundred and fifty pounds or something like that, which was

More money. So I've never seen that amount of cash before. Just so much money. And I remember going home to my boyfriend at the time and waking him up at five A. M and just throwing the cash on him. Like this is the this is the best thing ever. This is my game. I m and I must be the best in the world. Like, you know, it's my first ever tournament, basically, and I win it. So even though the T V 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. Trained ability is anything that comes to mind. That you think

helped in the very early nascent stages. Of that tournament. Yeah, the T V show. Right. The T V show and then I have more questions. I mean, I think the thing that was most helpful early on

For me in poker was I was just so pathologically competitive. I just had to win and like prove that I was the best in this thing. Just more practice. F 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 Well bluffing people. If you're not comfortable with bluffing someone at the poker table, which I don't think is li 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. Right. If you're if you're not willing to do that, then you're that's not the game for you. And Play chess. Right. And then you have to be I'm 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 are they naturally scared? What are the things that make them scared, et cetera? And Certainly in the beginning I was just because I didn't know anything about the actual statistical sort of the m the mechanics of the game. All I could rely on was the you know, the stuff I knew, which was r looking looking for when people are blaffing. So

looking for when people are bluffing. Okay. So let me ask you about the statistical side, because you're coming out of physics. You have, it would seem, a huge competitive advantage. Why would you not? begin to study the tables and the statistics and so on. Well I did too. You did that as well 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'cause this is two thousand or five. 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

Exactly. Really helps. Uh and all the drinking and guitar playing and Chasing after rock stars. Yeah. But it Obviously helps in any kind of strategic game. But

Honestly it The thing about poker is The beautiful thing about Pokemon Fat 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 T V 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 realise that early on in the game. In some ways, you know, uh th like winning that big tournament early on was was of not a big tournament, that the five pound rebuy. It gave me an immense amount of confidence. and love for the game, which I think had I not had, I wouldn't have then pursued it as much as I did.

But it can also delude you a little bit because I then just assumed, Okay, well, I'm going to win this. There isn't that much luck, it's just who's the best player wins. And I think that's partly why it was such a kick in the face when I screwed up and didn't win the hundred thousand. When you say you fell in love with the game Aside from things that maybe you've mentioned already. What made you fall in love with it? What was so appealing?

There's an inherent excitement to it. Right. Of course, because there's a blending of skill and chance. Yes. And money. I mean, there's stakes. Right. But actually just winning. The potential of just winning Yeah, making a living Where I don't have to go and sit in an office and I can do that. That was obviously a big uh carrot. Yeah. But There's just so many different skills that it draws upon. So there's the statistical side, you know, the scientific side.

There's the the game theory. If you really want to dive deep into math, and I mean these days you can, you know, work with simulators You know you computer science stuff basically, and go in that angle. But then you've also got this more there's like an art to it as well. you know, psychology, meant trying to mentally model what level someone is thinking at and

Be one step ahead of They're gonna zig, you're gonna zag, that kind of thing. And then also just like I mean, there's a scientific way to read body language, but sometimes you just get like a vibe that you can't explain. So there's just so many different approaches you can take to it. And like today I'm gonna work on my body language reading and today I'm gonna work on my

Pot odds or my combinatorics. And so There's never a dull moment, and there's always a new situation as well. Like even after playing for ten, fifteen years. I'll still see something crazy with like the cards run out, like Straight flash against pods, that kind of stuff. Like it these

Incredibly rare scenarios will sometimes happen, and Or people will do weird things, or some strange ruling will happen that like everyone's scratching their heads like I don't know what the right call is here. It's it's there's such depth. And complexity to the game. Okay. So I'm gonna admit something, it's embarrassing.

I've been fascinated. And drawn to poker for a very long time and I've never learned how to play properly. No way. It's true. Wow. There are many excuses I may have for this. One of them is that friends of mine like a guy named Jason Calcanis. Want me to play, but it's mostly because he wants to Take all my money.

Because he's gonna be far better than I am. And that's a compliment, Jason. And a lot of these investors Or Very confident. I know some of them certainly Particularly the quants who I've observed from afar seem to be

Pretty competent. Mm-hmm. I had A little bite of the bug. Probably five years ago when I Did an episode of a TV show

Bring it back to T V. Where I I train for a week or five days probably to play heads up. Against Whole cohort of folks. Including some pros. And I was able

And I was trained by I want to give him credit, Phil Gordon for that. And For a very short period of time. until the next skill I had to learn for the next episode pushed it right out of my head. Had a lot of fun with heads up, but one night when the filming had finished

And I was like, you know, let me go try just a regular table. And I got slaughtered. Like it did not translate. At all. Which i I expected would largely be the case, but I just got Dismembered. I mean we could heads up is a very different game to playing against eight people. Yeah, totally. So yeah, one on one a totally totally different game. But it actually brought back in a way my love of mathematics and statistics, which I lost.

Not to make this like a confessional, but I lost it in tenth grade because I had this one teacher who just had this huge ax to grind with the boys in the class, and almost all the boys ended up quitting math or avoiding it after that class. My brother had the opposite experience and then later became a PhD in statistics. So It's amazing to look at these divergent. Kind of points, right? Where you have a a fork in the path depending on your experience. So my question after all of that word salad is If you were to suggest a way of learning.

Or to teach me. An approach to learning. Mm. regular poker, w whatever that means. The type of poker I would play with my friends who were like, Let's play poker.

How might you think of approaching that? Well given that you Uh I mean you'll pretty well rounded in your personality and that you like both sort of human interactive things, but you can also nerd out really hard.

Yes. I don't think there's really a wrong way to teach you poker. Like if I was to teach my my mum or something like that. My mum is the most Sounds strange to say, but she's the least autistic person. Well she is

So Able to intuit. Social situations. Yep. And Unbelievably emotionally intelligent.

But Phobic of math. phobic of she's interested in sort of scientific concepts, but if you actually try and get into the technical weeds, she's just like I she she cannot And she, you know, her happiness like she would be in arms with Molly right now. Just like she's just a she just feels. She's a very feel based person. And

If I was to teach her the game, you know, I would take her to the table with group of fun people and You know, we would slowly just like turn the cards over and you know, talk through I'll give her the hand rankings. I 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 s 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 Yeah. He's really gonna want to take my money now, which he will probably. So let's say I had a game with Jason. And you can pick The sort of minimally viable period of time.

over which you think I could learn to be competent enough that I might have a chance. Is it Four weeks? Is it Twelve weeks? This is also not knowing how Good. Jason is, I've no idea.

'Cause I've always refused to play. But he's pretty good. Okay, great. So so let's just say You know, if luck is on my side having some Chance in hell. Well here's the thing. So You have a chance in hell. Anyway, if you ta sat down and just play it's not just gonna be Jason, it's gonna be an entire table. Well, no, but even if you were playing one on one against Jason, if you guys sat down assuming you know the basic rules of like which hand boost it was. Okay, but let's you know assume the the very basics that you know what betting chips means and how you know, whether you what w whether you have a straight on the river or not.

Assuming that. You and I could sit down. And play ten hands. And it's basically fifty fifty. Okay, let's win. Let's say we have You can pick the period of time of training. So uh however long it is. And then

Jason and I are going to play A Thousand Hands at Exactly. Yeah. A thousand hands. Your chance of beating Jason over a thousand hands probably with like Just knowing the rules is Yeah. Forty five percent.

That's how that's how crazy like that's the thing. Maybe maybe it's a bit less than that. Maybe it's sorry, Jason. Maybe it's Let's see. Thirty seven percent, maybe thirty five. Oh he's gonna get a fun call after this. But le could we get it so that it

So that you are a favorite against him. Eight weeks. Of intensive. Okay. Yeah. If we if you sat and studied game like the all the charts. Because that's what it is really these days. So poker is a no 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 9 suited

On this type of board. Against a person in this position. You will want to check raise them. thirty percent of the time and check calls seventy percent of the time or something like that. There are like answers. So what you should do in different scenarios with what frequencies.

It's all about frequencies. And so Now that we know this and and you can run simulators to give you the answers of all these fictitious scenarios, now it's changed the game. into basically who's willing to learn as many different scenarios as possible.

and like basically emulate them in their head when they go and play. So it's very different type of game. It's more like kind of almost studying chess moves. I was just gonna say it sounds a lot like studying like uh chess scenarios. And it wasn't like that even ten years ago. 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 twelve years anyway, and I I was just starting to get itchy feet naturally. But More and more time spent to at the top levels at least. 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 are both two computers that are able to play this game three optimal style, we're just breaking even against each other over infinity. Over the short time you know, if we play for a an hour, whoever gets the best cards will therefore win. But Over infinity. Uh we will press break even. And so that meant that you would have to be putting more and more time into win a sort of shrinking pot of money, essentially. Which is why I I don't now recommend to people to go out and try and be professionals in poker.

But I still absolutely recommend that people go and learn the game because It is Probably the best way. Two it's it's the best mini analogue for the type of complex decision making that you need to do in life.

And we're gonna come back to this because I do think With my very little exposure to poker. And having watched some on TV. And nonetheless having had my ass handed to me. When I tried it live.

That Particularly maybe an easy map is investing. And Poker. There are just so many variables that are similar.

Which is why I think so many investors are drawn to it. And also give a plug. All in podcast. Check it out. That's Jake Al's podcast with his butts. It is a fantastic, fantastic show. I do think it is one of the best new podcasts. new ish podcasts that I've put into my rotation. So

Don't take all my money, Jason. Eight weeks. What does the density of practice look like? Is that Two hours a day. Is it Ten hours a week. Oh no.

To be confident that you're have like a sixty forty edge on him. I would want to do Forty hours a week. At least. Okay. Oh yeah.

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Yeah. So hypothetically, let's say week one. What does the schedule and curriculum look like? So in the first week. I think we would I mean I would sit in a

just run out lots of different hands. I think in person is better than online. So you actually just get to Play with the cards, feel what it's like. You get really familiar with the betting patterns and that kind of thing. I mean but talk about the more sort of general.

Things like Why are we betting? What are we seeking to find here? Okay, we want to find information. W Get into the idea of like ranges because

Kind of a strange word, but basically We're playing a hand right now. I don't know anything about your cards. All I know is that you've got two cards out of the, you know, a thousand and Whatever the number is combination of two cards that you can have. So right now your range is a hundred percent.

And saying back at you. And then as the hand progresses, basically I want to narrow down the perceived range that I think you could have, you know, narrow gain information so I can narrow that down and put you on a hand. While meanwhile Giving away as little information about my own possible range.

So keeping it as wide open to you. So it's about maximizing deceptiveness. Sure. Well Extracting information out of your opponent. teach you about concepts like that and we would talk about ways that you can do that.

And then I think we've gone actually play a little bit in person just so you get used to the again the kind of dynamics. Yeah. We'd go to a a local I mean probably invite friends over and we'd just have some have some games. And it's so much fun anyway. Those are the best type of poker games. Bring in my card mechanic and take all their money. Exactly. Yes. And then after that, I think we would start I don't know at what stage, but you know, once you seem competent and 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, et cetera. So these kind of Pot odd calculations, that kind of stuff.

Could you just take a second and explain what you mean by pot odd calculations? So pot odds are basically, you know, like an investing to an extent. If things go well, what do you win? versus how much would you lose. So 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 twenty five percent chance of hitting the card you need. And meanwhile the pot is odd offering you five to one. Well now that's actually a profitable thing, right? Because you're getting the pot is offering you more than the odds that you need to to hit your card.

So man, I haven't talked about this stuff in ages. It's really interesting. See my brain's like, oh find the find the words. So those kind of rudimentary types of math calculations that you need to do. And then as you get more comfortable in that, then you would start doing more combination calculation. So as you're sort of narrowing down your opponent's range.

There will be a Presumably some hands that they will have that are better than your hand, you know, so what we would call value hands that they would be playing. But they would also have some bluffs in there. So you need to try and think about what are the conceivable bluffs they would have given the sort of story that's been told. You know, like pre flop they raised early. So that means they probably have stronger cards than weaker cards.

So you can narrow it down to like the top end of the cards. Like Aces, Kings, Ace King. A three suited, that kind of stuff. But then on the flop, when an ace came out, they actually slowed down. So that maybe suggests that they don't have an ace. Maybe they have more like Nines, tens, eights, you know, to a pocket pair like that. Weaving together bits of evidence to be able to narrow down people's ranges and put them on like conceivable bluffs versus conceivable strong hands. So that kind of stuff.

And then After that If you know you're seeming to grasp all that, then we would actually start looking at the the solver charts. So these are these like simulators. There's this one called Pio Solver that was at least

popular in the day when I was playing. How do you spell that? P I O P I O Pio Solver. I think it's still the main one. And At least when I was You know, using it. That was back in twenty sixteen or so, it would take

Many hours to run a SIM. So, you know, you'll be like, I want to know what the optimal play is 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 it means either. Yeah, there's so much dark in it. 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 w terms. Vocab. The vocab is is i you know, there's 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. Where if you don't have any information about your opponent that you can just follow. And know that at you know, at worst you'll be breaking even, but you'll still be beating them. But then because you know what the perfect play is, you can look for ways to exploit their screw ups. Because in reality, everyone, even the pros. are making mistakes. They aren't playing this perfect GTO style.

But You can't really know the way that they're screwing up until you know what the GTO is in the first place. So it acts as this like baseline benchmark of high quality play. So we would sit and we would study these charts and

If over that course of eight weeks I got you so that you were able to like emulate these charts to I don't know how to quantify it, but to a a good amount. That would be more than sufficient to be Jason. You know, he's not a full time pro. He's good. Like he's played a lot, and we've only played once. And I was more just like bemused at the amount of words that were coming out of his own. Well, I was gonna say if his poker is anything like his basketball, he will his ability to shit talk is actually incredible. That guy I mean world class. He's very good at getting under your skin if he wants to get under your skin. Oh yeah.

Oh yeah. Uh he's said many we've had we've been at a few parties together and he is he knows how to ruffle feathers but he's so funny. I love him. Excellent interviewer and moderator. I just want to second the recommendation that was made earlier. Let's depart from

The training for a bit. We may come back to it. But actually. Let me ask a question I haven't asked in a long time. Maybe similar. This is like we're kicking in the gears, starting the old car, trying to like to turn the key. Get it to turn over. If

You could Predict. The main reasons The failure points, the reasons I would quit in those first eight weeks. What do you think they might be?

Assuming that I had the time. Right. Right. And the interest. What are the things that might break me or cause me to walk? Give up. If for some reason you couldn't wrap your mind around What these charts mean.

I guess that would be a sort of breaking point, but I just don't see that ever happening, to be honest. So m it would be more the I think the reason why you'd walk away. is because you're like uh 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 suitable stakes. And you're like this is not worth my own. I don't care about I don't care enough about beating anyone. Exactly. That would be the only reason, I think. Because I think you would find it fun. Otherwise. Now I would have to well I wouldn't have to, but ensure that I have a certain frequency of play after putting in

Forty hours a week for eight weeks. Otherwise the decay rate would be brutal. And part of that time, by the way, in that forty it's not just studying the charts, it's also going out and actually practicing and getting real because assuming you're gonna 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. Particular with someone like Jason who is so adept at like saying things to needle. And that's a big part of the game. Getting the verbal bamboo shoots under your fingernails. Um That would be as important, particularly if you're playing for a particular you know, you're training for a big match. The mental game side of it. 'Cause ultimately you can study all the charts and think you're a GTO machine.

And like, Oh, I'm 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 gonna do? What are you gonna do, huh? You know and and just goes full Jason on you. Like y you'll forget everything. The red mist. Um I call it the white mist. There's Two mental blocks. Tilt. Exactly. If I if I'm catching the line. Yeah, tilt. Very good. For those who don't know tilt is is uh

What people do basically when their emotions get the better of them and they start playing badly. No. Is monkey tilt just an exaggerated version of that? Yes. Okay, yeah, because now Monkey Tails is just like the you know, you've got sort of the image. Now the reason that this is fresh on the mind is not too long ago I was in a

non-sober state and decided that it was the perfect time to start making stock trades. And my friend was watching me and he's like I think you may be full tilt right now, and I was like, do I look Excited? Do I look upset? I'm not Not on tilt. Those didn't work out very well. The red mist. When the red mist. But you call it the white what? Well so th there's two. There's the white noise. So the white noise is when

So redness is when you're angry. Someone has wound you up. That would probably be my Achilles heel. Right. The white noise. Yeah, and the white noise is where for whatever reason, perhaps you know, you're just really tired or you're really stressed.

But you'll go and consult your brain. And it comes about with nothing. Okay, yeah. Just beach balling. Just beachball. Yeah, just And I've had that a few times. Like I remember having it in the World Series Day four or something, day five. And It was a really big pause and I just needed to think. And then but then my brain was like Well, this is a really important decision. You know, you should really pay attention to this one. Like, are you paying at Well, I'm not sure you're paying attention. Why are you listening to me? And so it was 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 w I I you know, my system two. Are you familiar with with uh system one, system two? No. Okay. Oh wait a second. System one, system two, is this like Daniel Kahneman? Yeah, it's a Daniel Carnegie. If you could just give some context. Well, system one is like your intuitive. Like if I ask you what's five plus five. Immediately no the answer is ten. So it kinda your gut instincts. I thought you were gonna make me do multiplication tables. Well wait. Uh so that's your system one. It's just the things you immediately know an answer to, or you you know, it's like an unconscious process.

You know, if he Technically it's system one if you're driving down the street and someone cuts in front of you, you'll your your body will take over and you'll swerve. 'Cause you don't have time to do a sort of cost benefit analysis of going left or right. And in your system two.

is the like conscious thinking. So if I was to ask you what Four hundred and seventy one plus eighty eight is. It would be

Five hundred and uh sixty I even forgot the numbers now. Nine four hundred and seventy one and eighty eight. Four hundred seventy one eighty eight. What's that? I got to four hundred and seventy one. Yeah. Nine. Five.

I have five five nine, is that right? Five hundred fifty nine. I have no idea. Five is f five hundred and I can't even remember. Anyway, the thing is. You can't you can't use your gut feelings for that. Right. You have to think it through. You have to do the calculation mentally in your head. So that's your system too. And

Hoge is pretty interesting because You know I'm on five hours of sleep. I just want to buy myself a little bit of wiggle room on the mental map. And I have no excuse. So May I may make a quick aside. One of the coolest things I've ever seen was when I was fifteen as an exchange student in Japan and I got to know multiple kids because it's mandatory. That every kid learned how to use an abacus. And Something like one out of every thirty or forty kids would get so good.

that they no longer needed the physical abacus. They could see it in their minds. And so for party tricks their friends would just lob these like three digit multiplication problems at them and they could come up with the answer. It would take them a second because they actually had to physically Map it out. Map it out and move these beads and so on in their minds. But Astonishing. My partner Eagle can kinda do that.

Yeah. It was one of the ways he got me, honestly. He just you just throw numbers at him and he'll He hasn't done it in a while and he'll hate that I've mentioned this because now everyone's 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 to mental mathematics. Yeah, so those are I can't remember where I was going now. So where you were going? is we were talking about system one, system two, and that white noise moment. Yes. And that is not a time that you can rely on system two. Is that what you were gonna say? Right, exactly. System two is offline. Yes, offline. It's not do not it does not compute. There's nothing there. Hello. Four or four. Four or four. Four or four, yes. Blue screen to death. And It's bad when that happens. 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 got under your skin that will shut it off. But also just pure adrenaline and stress. You know, you're excited. Even I've had it when I had a really good hand. Yeah. And I was really I was like, Oh man, I'm gonna win a huge pot here. This is so exciting. And I'm like, well, I need to think through what the optimal bet size is. And again.

'Cause I just uh it just it's it's so hard because I think you're you're put into Well, you know this stuff better. Like uh your your sympathetic nervous system is in is in play, right? Uh so you're kind of in fight or flight. And that is not conducive to slow cognitive thought. It's conducive to immediate You know, physical stuff really useful for, but not so good for the lens. So I have in front of me some notes. Obviously you can see them. Those who are on audio only will not be able to see them. That's fine'cause 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 five hundred Euros into one Point two five million euros. Which is around one point seven million. I'm if I'm getting roughly

I believe that that math right. That was at the EPT. San Remo. And uh It was five hundred euro buy in?

Or five hundred dollars. satellite tournament. into the main event buy in which was five thousand euro. So everyone was buying in for five thousand, but I won my way in because I couldn't afford the five thousand. Yeah. I I'm on my way and throw a feeder, smaller tournament. So

A few just housekeeping questions about this. How long after That first Tournament win. After the T V show. Was this.

This was two thousand and ten, 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 No, the T V show is in two thousand and five.

I didn't actually really turn fully professional whereby I was living off it. Until Two thousand Like late two thousand and eight.

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've been I've been playing on the circuit now for like a year and a half, and I played some bigger Bayern tournaments, but I'd never made like any like really big final tables or anything. And this Italy one kinda happened by accident. It was uh 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. That volcano. Oh yeah. And then I arrived and there was this like this feeder tournament that it's called a satellite that night. Where you know it was a five hundred euro entry and one in ten people would win their ticket for the five thousand.

The main event. So I won my ticket that night at like four in the morning. And then went and played it the next day, starting at noon. And A very strange thing happened to me actually at noon before the tournament started, but that's like another topic I think we can get into later, maybe. Wait a minute. You can't leave that. Just g give us a teaser.

And then maybe we'll come back to it. My first Of A handful of completely unexplainable

borderline metaphysical experiences. And uh Uh I I I won't say what it is. 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. Doing that undescribed is what I call keeping the audience listening. Yeah, you can better keep watching. Uh for sure commercial break. I ended up being the attracting the biggest field of players of any tournament in Europe to date, at the time at least, was over like one thousand two hundred 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 Ten hours a day on average. Some days are a bit longer, some days are a bit shorter.

So you can imagine how exhausting that is. Also because the longer you're going, the more intense it gets. 'Cause in the beginning the stakes are like, Okay, I might m you lose my five thousand euro buy in, but as the tournament wears on and you know, there's less people, your your chip stack is worth more and more in terms of equity. And so your loss aversion starts to go. Vertical. By the time of the like the end of day five where we play down to the final table, the final nine. For ninth place.

I was already guaranteed, I think, ninety thousand euros. I only had like I think I have like fifty thousand pounds to my name at this point. So I was already guaranteed double my net worth for whatever happened on that final table. And first prize was the one point two five million. Uh one point seven dollars.

Um That morning. I think I got some sleep the night before. 'Cause I somewhat of an insomniac anyway. So if I have a something on the next day that's big I often will just not sleep very well. And so you can imagine this cranks it up to ten. And I was dreaming, you know, you I don't know if you ever have that where you've

been doing a lot of a particular thing, like trading or whatever, and you sort of a semi sleep and see the thing. I was playing poker. I was like I was lying there, I had pocket jacks, I had a King Queen, you know, just these fictitious hands. My brain just could not shut off. And that was my night the night before and I was just like in a complete tears because I'm like, I'm not gonna play tomorrow, like I'm a mess. I was so nervous before the final table, I like threw up three times on the way, like walking down. It was so stressful, but I don't know, once we actually started playing, once I got the cards in my hand, it was just like

And I just switched into this like mode. Uff I don't know. It was weird. Was that the first time that it happened, or that happened to you before? Not to that extent, because I think it was a perfect storm of like It's such extreme nerves and being such a mess beforehand.

And then like actually Being able to play well. I don't know, the the delta felt more than I'd ever had it before. But I had had that before where I was like able to like get into the zone very well. I wonder if you just spent all of your 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 gonna let go of the metaphysical experience. We are gonna come back to that probably quickly. But before we do For people who are not going to bank on having metaphysical

Experiences or or the feeling of being guided. What else have you learned about regulating Whether it's the white noise or especially for me of personal interest when someone is actively trying to Fuck with you. And

Disrupt. All of your systems. The best thing I found it's super simple is just Breathing. Three deep breaths.

cookie cutter, but it just works. Just Close your eyes and Inhale in, you can feel even if your heart's pounding. My heart's actually pounding a little bit now because I'm retelling this story. It's funny.

But just that. You you notice that, you feel your body, you breathe in and you breathe it into your belly. And I I imagine My favorite colour. Yeah. Which is usually a mix of like turquoise and purple, something like that. And I just I'm sucking that in.

And it pulling it down into my stomach and then it's just like this ah settling feeling. And it's Uh half of it is just like bullshitting myself. But an interrupt, it's it's an interrupt, exactly. And it just is enough to like settle Your nervous system a second, just ground you back to here. And then be like, Okay, now what's the problem?

Another thing that's helped as well is I just like laughing at myself. Oh, you're taking this one awfully seriously. Oh, silly, like like playing a silly little in my head just to like m make light of the situation a bit. But that it requires a lot of ability to sort of step out and observe the situation. Because obviously once you're in the red mist, particularly the red mist, more than the white noise. By definition, you are like animalistic. You are y you don't have the ability to step outside and observe a situation well. So

It's I think just practice, really. Practice beginning angry. You know, practice reading. I guess the way you could do it is go like go read something that you know makes you angry. Like really like reliably gets your blood pressure up. And then try and like build in some kind of

trigger that makes you do the the three breaths thing. So for ninety nine point nine percent of the Sato Masochistic users of Twitter, myself included, just go on just go on Twitter. Yeah, just go on Twitter. Every day. Just be reliably upset. For two minutes. Oh what a what a nasty neigh neighborhood that's turned into. So sad. Yeah. As you're saying this, I'm imagining I'm imagining Jason listening to this and formulating in his mind that's why I was smirking. For if he sees me taking deep breaths, he'd be like, Yeah, Timmy, take those deep breaths. Come on, buddy, you can do it. Oh sorry I've said you. Oh yeah. Yeah, no, you're doing great. Just close your eyes, don't even look at me. No, nothing to see here. He'll just go.

Yeah. All right. What the hell happened in the morning? And you can contextualize this however you want. No, I mean what happened was

I played a bunch of these tournaments not of ones quite this size. But I'd still played a lot of tournaments at this point. And I was there before before it actually started. Usually I p people turn up late, but for some reason I was there in my chair. before the first hand was dealt. And I remember they the company Poker Stars, whose event it was,

You know, they dimmed the lights of like welcome to EPT San Remo, huge, we've got incredible field, blah, blah, blah. And then they dim the lights and they put on on the screens around the room just like a promo exciting video. A promo promo video, you know. And I remember distinctly the music. It was Chemical Brothers Hey Boy, Hey Girl. Which I always loved. I always loved that song. Yeah, good choice. Yeah. And you know, I was like, Oh, this is cool, yeah, I'm excited. And while I was like listening to it. Just

Like out of nowhere this like a bolt of lightning. felt like this like And his voice in my head said. You are going to win this tournament. And it sounded like my own voice.

But what I can't remember is whether it was I am gonna win or you are gonna win. But I'm pretty sure it was you are gonna win. But it's literally sounded like my own voice. And it was sounded like your own voice. Yes. So it was like the you know, when you speak in your head, like the the voice you hear, like Most people have that right. That Tuesday voice that everyone hears. It sounded like how I would s sound in my own head to myself. And it said, You are gonna win this tournament.

And I got this rush of goosebumps. It's even happening a little bit like the hairs up on my you know, on my arms. And I remember looking around the room like that. Did I just say that out loud? Did anyone else hear this? And everyone else was just like in their phones or whatever, and I was like

Well that was freaky. And Then the lights came back up and they're like, Okay, cool, shuffle up and deal and I was still like stunned and I was like Okay, cool. And then like halfway through the day you know, and then I sort of a little bit forgot about it, but then like halfway through the day I got in a big pot and I lost half my chips.

You know, it's always a bad feeling when that happens. And I was like, Oh man, I'm nearly out of the tournament. I guess that was bullshit. You know, so like though I had like little multiple moments. Over the next few days where It clearly was a real thing because I I've like checked in on it. And I even told a friend of mine on data. You mean checked in on it? Meaning you remembered that it had happened. That it had happened. Well, because obviously the rational explanation to this is the it was just a false memory. You know, the I have retroactively remembered something that didn't really happen as a way of like constructed it. Exactly, I reconstructed it. Yes. And I even have a friend, my my my friend Melanie, who was there and I bumped into her in the in the women's bathroom on like day two.

And she's like, Oh, you got a lot of chips, it's going well. I was like, Yeah, yeah, uh that things are going well. Really weird. I feel like I'm gonna win this. In fact, I almost had a premonition that I did. And she's like, Yeah, you seem really confident. And we actually had this conversation and to the point that she, after I won it, she was like What the fuck was that? You like predicted this. I'm like, I know, I don't know. So

Yeah. I don't know how to explain it. I think you said string or series. Of experiences. Is that type of experience in poker isolated to that?

And it doesn't have to be constrained to poker. So it what was interesting was often. Uh apologize for Doing this herky jerky. Did you have any of those types of experiences when you were

younger than you recall. No. No. I was not like a weird kid that or yeah, you know, that had Sorry, I'm Let me start. You weren't like the kid from the Sixth Sense. No, I wasn't the Sixth Sense kid, no. Uh No, I did not, is to answer that question. I had not really ever had, I think, anything Like I never saw a ghost or anything like that. Don't lump me in with the ghost hunters. Come on. I want to just paint the picture of that I was a very in fact, like a deep sceptic. Right.

Well you still are a deep skeptic in a lot of ways. Right. But like certainly then, like I'd never had anything weird that I couldn't really explain in any conventional way. I've certainly not had any time loops or anything like that, or weird voices in my head. But yeah, to answer your question of like is it a sort of common thing in poker? No, not so much common thing in poker. But Have you since had more of those types of experiences? Not of like explicit premonitions. No.

I'm not nothing even close to that. I have had One really notable thing. That I am happy to talk about it. It's

If you change your mind we can cut it later. For want of a better word, I had And 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 But to it was like a sort of Low frequency

Buzzing, humming quite frequently. Like so some some kind of tinnitus. Yeah. But it was almost like a pressure. And Voices, particularly men's voices.

distorted to the point that they were Unbearable to listen to. And it was really bumming me out. It would come in like clusters. I would have it like for a few hours and it would go away and come later on in the day. And

it was m stopping me from doing any social events because any loud scenario was unbearable, but particularly men speaking. I just couldn't handle it. And This went on and off for a few months and I went and saw a doctor. multiple doctors and had hearing tests and they said, Oh, you're losing your hearing and the the the low frequencies of your of your hearing in that ear We think you have many ears disease. many as is this degenerative thing which usually people end up

Completely deaf. when they have it, where basically the nerve cells in in the inner ear start dying and they don't really know why. They think it's something to do with like salt and ion channels. And it's incurable, as far as I know. And so I was told that's what I probably have. And they're like pretty r 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 m balance problems as well. You get like these vertigo attacks and people be like vomiting and so on. And so You can imagine I was like really down in the dumps finding this out.

And then cut to Three months later or so. Go to Burning Man. And I have for the first time one of these vertico 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 vertical 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 Bun 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 I do energy healing. I'm an energy healer.

It was like I I don't know what that is, but sure, do whatever you want to do. Yeah, have a go. She's like I I can try. And After She sort of put her hand over my ear for a few minutes.

And then She says I remember saying something like There's something there, I need to get it. And she starts sucking over my ear with her mouth. Like not

Touching it, but just like phew. 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. 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 solder, so this is a slightly uh 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 little while and 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 I'm going to be able to do it It kinda just like It just blew my world open because Aside of that premonition thing, which I'd kind of forgotten about. I have not

Ever subscribe to Anything like that. I like I'm a physicist. In fact, like you know, I've 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's Something that I cannot explain. Happened. and unfortunately would be incredibly beneficial to me.

Such a blessing. So yeah. So these experiences are Particularly. Interesting to me.

direct first hand experiences. course second hand now that I'm listening, but are particularly interesting to me when I'm speaking with someone who has demonstrated A very well developed ability. Two. Use system two.

Mm-hmm. Thinking and rationality and reasoning and mathematics. And So on.

In Not just the world, but in competitive arenas, right? So you have a calibrated And also Test it ability. to use those faculties.

That you've developed. And I'm glad you're mentioning these things just because Weird shit happens and the idea that we have it all figured out. is ludicrous. Even though humans at any point in history, whether you go back to the Middle Ages, the dark ages, I'm sure you know six thousand years ago or whatever it was with the Egyptians, I'm sure they thought they had most things figured out.

And it's just So clear. when you begin to really poke and prodden as you gain more years and have more experiences, especially if you start pushing into some strange corners. Mm.

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 chalk it up to placebo effect. Right.

None the less Even if it were just placebo effect. Incredible. Yeah. The

Absurd inexplicability. Of it. With the current mechanisms that we uh understand. And That's super exciting to me. It's super exciting to me. And it doesn't mean

That you nor I would advocate that people just accept everything at face value. Of course not. There's horse shit everywhere. I mean, we're sitting in Austin, like the the world capital of spirituality. There's so much nonsense and so many charlatans. But I do pay attention. to people like you. who have demonstrated in other areas that they have the ability

Two. Think rationally. And have some grasp of a very good grasp of science and so on. Right. That's kind of one of the first litness tests for me. If someone's sharing something with me, I'm like all right.

Can they fight? logically out of a paperbag, right? Like can they can they like Have they demonstrated any ability to Use structured reasoning and other possibilities. Right, exactly. Exactly. And are they

Sceptical. In other areas. Or is it just like okay, they accept Anything as long as it's alternative but they reject like Western science for any number of reasons that don't make sense to me. If you've ever had antibiotics. Yeah, Western science may have saved your life. And there there are many other examples. I certainly wouldn't be here for more for Western medicine, let's just say, not science.

And I struggle with where to even take this'cause there's so many directions it could go that are pretty strange. But And I don't wanna co opt physics, so please give me a a slap here if this is just an amateur butchering the 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 Kako more of a science communicator, but still Has some

Fundamentals. I've had private conversation certainly with a number of physicists. And I lack the foundation of mathematics necessary to fully appreciate it, but When you even start to look at the conversations that were being had between Einstein and Bohr way back in the day.

Relative to Quantum mechanics. Putting aside even the experimental design and evidence for Quantum entanglement. that have been done, I think in the Canary Islands and in other places

Stuff is really strange. just even space time itself as an objective reality. I mean, there are there are pieces people can find online by Qualified scientists. on the death of space time. Right. And thinking about

That is almost a a UI that we have evolved to utilize, but not as the one and only user interface to Whatever we might be contending with. Well, not just Donald Hoffman. He thinks that Consciousness essentially gives rise to space. Yeah. And

While a lot of Theoretical physicists. Pooh poo 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

Whether it's on a substrate or whether it I don't know if it even needs a substrate. I'm I'm too rusty on that stuff, but it's super weird. If you dig into the fundamental structure of this reality. This is not a You know, wickin witchcraft shop with like tarot cards in the display case. Not to knock that, right? But like we're talking about some of the most esteemed scientists in a hard science with peer reviewed publications and so on. And if you just look at that stuff closely enough.

Shit's really weird. Yeah. There's a paper I was recently reading that's like digging into The Well 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. Um beyond my pay grade. So I don't know. But um I may need your I wanna I wanna send it to like Sean Carroll. I don't know if you ever had him on the side. Sean Carroll I haven't had on, but my brother introduced me to his podcast Mindscape. Is it Mindscape? Excellent podcast. So if Sean Carroll is out there listening or if anyone knows him, let him know. I'm a I'm he may not want to hear this. I don't know what his opinion will be of me. But Big fan of his podcast. He's uh

Damn fine. thinker and a damn fine communicator. And uh he had an excellent Episode. On Sort of an archaeological exploration of

Stonehenge and other artifacts as external mnemonic 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 wanna imply that. How do you integrate some of these Experiences. Into your o

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 scepticism and and cynicism.

And I think where my poker training comes in handy. Is it Hoka trains you to think. Improbabilities. 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 you know, six four suited. That missed the card it needed. So You become very comfortable in terms of holding concurrent belief states in your mind

With different weighted probabilities of those things being true. So With these like You know, these two weird unexplainable experiences that I had. You know, whether it was the ear thing was just pure placebo, which would still be crazy, because it would mean that like basically I have the ability to

heal my mind by thinking I was going through some kind of like Thing being sucked out my ear. Fine. Potentially heal your inner ear. Yeah, like I was literally told I had a degenerative thing and I was gonna go deaf. And like no one's been cured of it. And this has miraculously gone away. So whatever the hell happened. The point is. I didn't go and change my life. I didn't suddenly go and be like, That's it, I'm gonna go and practice energy healing and become a witch and so on. I continued still like I still am an adherent to the scientific method. It's just that I've now broaded my as you mentioned, you know, it's almost like people become they believe in the scientism as opposed to being scientists. A true scientist is that you are maximally curious, you do your best to devise experiments

in order to get reliable, robust results that you can use to predict the world. and you try and minimise 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 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 upset set and setting were very important and what happened there. I would assume. Anyway, I don't know that. Well, when they make the Netflix series about it and they recreate the entire environment, then you can sit down and try to recreate it. I have up weighted, you know, whereas before I would have given the probability that energy healing is a real thing. I would have given it like a

Probably if you'd asked my old like sceptical self, I would have literally said it's zero. But you know, I wasn't such a bad basine that I would give it actual zero. Maybe like one in a million. Basine. And now I have updated it, you know, with this evidence to How many orders of magnitude Do I want to go? I mean, I will give it I at least give it a one in 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 n 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 sceptical 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 it's just not the practical way to go forward. Yeah, I would also add to that that If folks want to be proper skeptics. You owe it to yourself and to the people you interact with to be an informed skeptic. So if you are going to

Invoke the name of science. And not invoke it like the name of Odin in some like Yeah, God works in mysterious ways. Kind of way.

U you need to actually, my opinion have the ability to read a study and understand a study and study design. It's not good enough to get the journalistic interpretation from the Wall Street Journal or fill in the blank online publication, that's not good enough. It's also not good enough for you to just get the gist of a few sentences in an abstract. And

Confidence intervals. Right. So confidence intervals, understanding, powering on because you also find folks who and I always been saying scientism, but I guess scientism is sort of like capital S. In either case, it has a capital S and it's not good. So if you succumb to that One of the telltale characteristics that I've come across is They'll ask if something was a controlled study or a placebo control, you know, R C T

And then say well how many How many subjects were there? Or what was the N if they get you know fancy and I might say twenty, twenty five, and they're like, Oh yeah. Small study.

Well, 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 uh Peter Tia M D, excellent series of blog posts. That's 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 one ninety four, The Magic and Power of Placebo. This is with Eric Vance, who wrote a book. Called Suggestible U, subtitled 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 are exceptional. There was a great piece in Wired magazine probably ten years ago on the Evolution of the placebo effect and how it has changed depending on the culture.

And other influences. So in certain places, say a a placebo pill in a blue capsule or a red capsule perform better than other colours. It's really one in this day and a lot. That's true. That's true. Yeah. We could pick other colours. 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 uh it's a little user unfriendly. In a lot of respects. But what were you gonna say?

I think I would recommend is some of Julia Galiff's work. Yeah, um the scout mindset. And Uh motivated reasoning. The scout mindset. Scout mindset. Yeah. I mean she did a TED talk on it, but she's just written a book on it as well. And I think she actually goes in uh if I remember rightly, she goes in. Yes.

She goes into the sort again that When I first learnt about rationality, like I read everything on less wrong if people know that, which is incredible resource for it. And it, you know, really breaks down, you know, how you get this, you know, your brain, which is like the map. to match the actual territory, which is the universe. As accurately as possible. But

where I think it's maybe lacking a little bit now because I've had some of these weirder experiences which actually where I wasn't, you know, in its classical sense rational. I uh you know, clearly went off the beaten path into some like weird land, but it was actually very beneficial to me. Even if it was like some completely useful fiction. It was still useful. Yeah. Yeah. And this idea of like useful fictions, I think, needs to be explored further. Yeah. But also add that much like poker

Science I don't think a lot of folks realize is largely A game of probabilities. You don't prove something a hundred percent most of the time. It's like well Literally never, actually. Yeah. Exactly. I mean you you can have overwhelmingly compelling. data even with say an observational

Study, say with the sort of quintessential example would be cigarette smoking causing. Lung cancer, right. But most of the time it's like this suggests with this degree of certainty that this is the case.

But when you start to look at the replication crisis, which is not just in social sciences, it's all over the place. And Especially if you start to actually roll up your sleeves and get involved in science, whether that's as a subject

I've been a subject in studies at all sorts of places. I started doing it as an undergrad. I was a subject in one of Daniel Kahneman's studies. And uh It was not very intellectually engaging. It was like space bar over time at like a Yeah, green. square popped 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. in fatigues with weights on a treadmill and a sauna to like Complete. So mental collapse. Yeah. So why do I do these things? Because I'm interested in seeing the process.

And uh 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 the religion has become So out of fashion.

that they look to the high priests of science and they're like, at least I have the confidence in this being true. So I actually want one of my next videos I wanna make on this, which is about Basically, Signaling prestige. Bad incentives that get society stuck.

These these traps, essentially. So we're stuck in one of those with the current status quo of of the way science is done, and this is not at all to knock any scientists, you know, they're doing that me uh doing their absolute best. But the s 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. 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 advanced human knowledge.

Because so many of these things don't replicate. And it's We're sort of stuck in this spiral of just like everyone's trying to please do whatever they can to get in the journal and it's There there's a name for it. So actually so there's this really incredible short online book called Inadequate Equilibria. By the guy who wrote most of the stuff on Less Wrong, Eliza Yodkowski. And I recommend inadequate equilibrium. Yes. It's it's a heavy name. Heady name. Oh man. I know it sounds it's so good. It has one of the best things. It has a a discussion. A fictitious discussion with an alien from a perfect society.

Like a b a basic person who thinks everything's explained, you know, everything that's wrong in our society is is because of like there's bad people being greedy. And then with a cynical smart economist. And they have this three way discussion talking about like reason why the US healthcare system is so expensive and it sort of goes into this meandering thing about it's so good. Like are you like you must include this in the show notes. How long would you say it is? I mean, ideally they read they could just read chapter three, honestly. It's it's I don't know, it's like a forty five minute read. Yeah, it's just a it's like a book chapter. And you can kinda read us down alone. 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 gnash equilibria. So a Nash equilibrium is when two people or multiple people are playing in a strategy where it would be bad for anyone to deviate from that strategy. It's like everyone's stuck doing that. But not all National Equilibria are actually created equal. There are some where if everyone was doing X instead of Y, everyone would be happier. They'd also be like, you know, now stuck in a new thing. So like a good example of this would be

So I just made a a video called The Beauty Wars. about this like fictitious thing called Moloch. Which I call like the demon of negative sum games, basically. It's like the god of negative sum games. It's the it's a force of bad Usually economic incentives. that make people sort of sacrifice things that they want in order to optimise for a short term goal. And the example I talk about is these beauty filter on Instagram.

I don't know if you've spent any time. 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 dumbed. Dumbfounded. They're horrifying not only in how impressively good they are at doing stuff, but also how Now the really insidious ones are the subtle ones.

Because there are some Well, you would never you'd go online and you would not be able to tell if you don't know the person, or even if you know the person, you wouldn't necessarily be able to tell. You just think it's a good picture of them. They're so subtle, but they're so effective. It seems like there is clearly just some kind of optimal face structure that, you know, w our eyes find pleasing. And it just tweaks people, it makes the eyes a little bit wider apart or a little bit bigger, or the lips that you know, just per just changes the the proportions just right, that it sets the the like, you know, the dopamine spike off in your brain. And It's gonna make online dating really hard. Oh man. Not that I'm on the field. I'm not on the playing field, but right. If I were, that sounds like a headache. Well and but also for People who use them, like so I'm a girl on Instagram, you know, I for a while certainly like made a lot of my career off the way I looked.

There's such an incentive pressure. You know, if I wanna keep playing the game of trying to grow my Instagram like a sexy picture. Yeah, it's the arms race, exactly. And that's what Moloch is. Moloch is this like The God of arms races. And it's like these these bad incentives where we could the cheap thing for me to do is just to use one of these AI filters on on on all my pictures and I know I'm gonna look good and I'm gonna get a ton of likes and it'll grow my thing. But It will make me miserable in the process. And If you poll, probably uh most particularly women on on Instagram.

They are not having a good time of these things either on themselves. Cause if you then like compare your face side to side You're just like, Man, I've you've you just it just makes you feel ugly. And so We're in this weird situation where No one wants to do stuff that makes them hate their face.

But they're doing it anyway. It's like a lower Nash equilibrium. You know, we could all be in a higher a Nash equilibrium where we're not doing it. But instead we're all stuck down there because of these bad game theoretic incentives. So this is my current obsession, this thing called Moloch. And I think about it all the time. And we'll we'll link to that in the show notes. So just to underscore this for folks, because I do suggest that everybody check out your YouTube channel. What's the best way for them to find? Your channel.

Probably the best thing is if they search for my name and then the beauty wars. Mm-hmm. That'll link to the video I just talked about. Alright. And then you can find my channel from And uh just for the spelling, everybody it's

Live L I V last Name. B-O-E-R E Which means I learned just beforehand. Drunk farmer.

So they say. And I did grow up on a farm. And I did drink a lot. So good. So good. Yeah. Ferris, you know, the best I can tell. You're a big wheel. It could be that. It also refers to Ferrous like ferrous oxide, F E R O U S. Because apparently some of My

progenitors were silversmiths. I don't know how it all fits together. Seems like a very dubious story. I'm not sure, but I want I want some story to go along with the last name. But I don't have Drunken Farmer. That's an amazing one. Uh live We should do a round two sometime. We're we're practically neighbors. We have so much we could talk about. We've got a million other things even in the notes in front of me that we could cover and should cover. I'm thinking about this training. And Are you gonna do it?

We'll see. Requires more Mezcal to make that decision. I think we could we could condense it down and we don't have to do the full eight weeks. I think com commit to Even three weeks, honestly, I think you would Jake How will still be better than you at that stage. I have to say that. No, he would be. Um Mm.

All right. Three weeks. Three weeks. I'm going to I'm going to sleep on that. I do my I do my best thinking when I'm asleep. Let me sleep on that. Is there anything else that you would like to say? Any closing comments? Places you'd like to point people. Anything at all that you like say before we before we wind this down? No, I mean I guess

Do check out My my YouTube, I'd love people to go and um I'm I'm Now I've moved to Austin and I'm like building a studio and everything. I'm gonna be ramping up production again. So I would love people to go and just sub to my channel so that They catch my stuff. Because of you know, playing the rat race. The Attention Wars. That's the name of the next video is The Attention Wars, which is about why Twitter and everything is making us so angry and hate each other. Yeah. That's a big one. Talk about a nasty game. Yeah. And Moloch. Mollloch's in that. Moloch. Moloch's all over that. Fucking Moloch. So live.

We're gonna link to everything in the show notes. People can find you at Livebare.com also, which I I would imagine has links to many things. And we'll put links to everything we've discussed, all the resources, inadequate equilibria and uh All other good things. In the show notes at Tim.blog slash podcast. And

So nice to see you. Thanks for taking the time. This is awesome. Super fun. Super fun. And for everybody listening as per usual, thanks for tuning in. And until next time, just be a little kinder to yourselves. and to others than you think is necessary and take care. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week.

It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmas, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that 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 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 8 Sleep. My god, am I in love with 8 Sleep. Good sleep is the ultimate

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