#761: General Stanley McChrystal and Liv Boeree

This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10-year anniversary and passed one billion downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best—some of my favorites—from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited. The episode features segments from episode #86 "General Stan McChrystal on Eating One Meal Per Day, Special Ops, and Mental Toughness https://tim.blog/2015/07/05/stanley-mcchrystal/" and #611 "Liv Boeree, Poker and Life — Core Strategies, Turning $500 into $1.7M, Cage Dancing, Game Theory, and Metaphysical Curiosities https://tim.blog/2022/07/28/liv-boeree/" Please enjoy! Sponsors: AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://drinkag1.com/tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase.) LMNT https://drinklmnt.com/tim electrolyte supplement: https://drinklmnt.com/Tim (free LMNT sample pack with any purchase) Helix Sleep https://helixsleep.com/tim premium mattresses: https://HelixSleep.com/Tim https://helixsleep.com/tim (20% off all mattress orders and two free pillows) Timestamps: [00:00] Start [05:57] Notes about this supercombo format. [07:01] Enter General Stanley McChrystal. [07:24] One meal a day. [08:52] Daily exercise routines and their importance. [14:04] The book most gifted. [15:15] A major course correction at West Point. [19:33] Vetting, selecting, and educating candidates for combat. [21:41] "No-win" leadership roleplaying. [25:21] Underrated military leaders. [27:17] Audiobooks. [29:13] What books make Stan's reading list? [30:29] Hopeless dilemmas and managing self-talk in high-pressure environments. [37:09] Enter Liv Boeree. [37:35] Youthful obsessions. [42:04] How poker entered the picture. [49:45] The qualities that made Liv excel at poker from the start. [55:55] Liv's advice to a newcomer wanting to learn poker. [1:04:54] What Liv's eight-week poker education curriculum might look like. [1:11:31] Failure points that might discourage someone during this curriculum. [1:13:35] Red mist, white noise, and fast math. [1:19:37] Volcano-induced tournament participation and self-regulation. [1:28:27] A skeptic's experiences with the unexplainable. [1:44:19] How does Liv rationally coexist with these experiences? [1:48:09] How to become a better skeptic. [1:54:18] Inadequate Equilibria and Moloch. [1:59:14] Parting thoughts. * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors https://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts https://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books https://tim.blog/books. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I view AG1 as comprehensive nutritional insurance, and that is nothing new. I actually recommended AG1 in my 2010 best seller, more than a decade ago, The 4-Hour Body, and I did not get paid to do so. I simply loved the product and felt like it was the ultimate nutritionally dense supplement that you could use conveniently while on the run, which is for me a lot of the time. I have been using it a very, very long time indeed. And I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases.

• 0:42Tim Ferriss?

  I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? What is this stuff? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. Since 2010, they have improved the formula 52 times in pursuit of making the best foundational nutrition supplement possible, using rigorous standards and high-quality ingredients. How many ingredients? 75. And you would be hard-pressed to find a more nutrient-dense formula on the market. It has a multivitamin, multi-mineral superfood complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut

• 1:23Tim Ferriss?

  health, an antioxidant immune support formula, digestive enzymes, and adaptogens to help manage stress. Now, I do my best, always, to eat nutrient-dense meals. That is the basic, basic, basic, basic requirement, right? That is why things are called supplements. Of course, that's what I focus on, but it is not always possible. It is not always easy. So, part of my routine is using AG1 daily. If I'm on the road, on the run, it just makes it easy to get a lot of nutrients at once and to sleep easy knowing that I am checking a lot of important boxes. So, each morning, AG1. That's just, like brushing my teeth, part of the routine. It's also NSF certified for sports, so professional athletes trust it to be safe.

• 2:07Tim Ferriss?

  And each pouch of AG1 contains exactly what is on the market. Label does not contain harmful levels of microbes or heavy metals and is free of 280 banned substances. It's the ultimate nutritional supplement in one easy scoop. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out, go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drinkag1, the number one, drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out.

• 2:49Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Element, spelled L-M-N-T. What on earth is Element? It is a delicious, sugar-free electrolyte drink mix. I've stocked up on boxes and boxes of this. It was one of the first things that I bought when I saw COVID coming down the pike, and I usually use one to two per day. Element is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs and perfectly suited to folks following a keto, low carb, or paleo diet. Or if you drink a ton of water and you might not have the right balance, that's often when I drink it, or if you're doing any type of endurance exercise, mountain biking, et cetera, another application. If you've ever struggled to feel good on keto, low carb, or paleo, it's most likely because even if you're consciously consuming electrolytes, you're just not getting enough.

• 3:33Tim Ferriss?

  And it relates to a bunch of stuff like a hormone called aldosterone, blah, blah, blah, when insulin is low. But suffice to say, this is where Element, again spelled L-M-N-T, can help. My favorite flavor by far is citrus salt, which, as a side note, you can also use to make a kick-ass, no-sugar margarita, but for special occasions, obviously. You're probably already familiar with one of the names behind it, Rob Wolf, R-O-B-B, Rob Wolf, who is a former research biochemist and two-time New York Times bestselling author of The Paleo Solution and Wired to Eat. Rob created Element by scratching his own itch. That's how it got started. His Brazilian jiu-jitsu coaches turned him on to electrolytes as a performance enhancer. Things clicked and bam, company was born.

• 4:17Tim Ferriss?

  So if you're on a low carb diet or fasting- Electrolytes play a key role in relieving hunger, cramps, headaches, tiredness and dizziness. Sugar, artificial ingredients, coloring, all that's garbage, unneeded. There's none of that in Element. And a lot of names you might recognize are already using Element. It was recommended to me by one of my favorite athlete friends. Three Navy SEAL teams, as prescribed by their Master Chief, Marine units, FBI sniper teams, at least five NFL teams who have subscriptions. They are the exclusive hydration partner to Team USA weightlifting and on and on. You can try it risk free. If you don't like it, Element will give you your money back, no questions asked. They have extremely low return rates. Get your free sample pack with any Element purchase at drinklmnt.com/tim.

• 5:02Tim Ferriss?

  Be sure to also try the new Element Sparkling, a bold 16 ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water. Again, check it all out. Drink element.com/tim. Drink LMNT.com/tim.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 5:24Speaker 03

  Now would be an inappropriate time.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 5:41Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with world-class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives. This episode is a two for one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and passed 1 billion downloads. To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes. And internally, we've been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names,

• 6:26Tim Ferriss?

  the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to Lesser known people I consider stars. These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle, perhaps you missed an episode. Just trust me on this one. We went to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at tim.blog/combo. And now, without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  First up, retired United States Army General Stanley McChrystal, former commander of Joint Special Operations Command from 2003 to 2008, and bestselling author of Risk: A User's Guide. You can learn more about General McChrystal and his work at mcchrystalgroup.com.

• 7:24Tim Ferriss?

  Why one meal a day? Do you actually eat one meal a day?

• 7:27Speaker 03

  I do. And people ask me why. Is it some zen connection with something? And no, what happened was when I was a lieutenant in special forces many, many years ago, I thought I was getting fat and I started running and started running distance, which I enjoyed. But I also found that my personality was such that I'm not real good at eating three or four small disciplined meals. I'm better to defer gratification and then eat one meal. And for me, that's dinner. And so what I do is I sort of push myself hard all day, try to get everything done and then sort of reward myself with dinner at night.

• 8:05Tim Ferriss?

  What time do you usually eat dinner?

• 8:07Speaker 03

  Whenever I'm finished work and it would be like eight or 8:30. There's a challenge when you work really long hours because suddenly you start to eat very late and then you go directly to bed and that you feel like you're sleeping with a football in your stomach.

• 8:19Tim Ferriss?

  And do you drink coffee earlier in the day? I'm just thinking with the workout and that many hours, a lot of people would fade. How do you prevent yourself from fading?

• 8:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, I have a tendency. I'll drink coffee. I'll drink other beverages too, water and different things. And I do find that there are certain days your body just says eat and eat right now. And I used to keep a bin of those hard Pretzels in my office in Afghanistan and I'd grab a handful of those. And other times I might be out doing something physical in the military like road marching. And suddenly your body communicates, eat pretty quickly or you won't keep road marching. And I'll do that.

• 8:52Tim Ferriss?

  Let me ask a couple of routine questions, questions about routine. And then I'd love to maybe go back in history a little bit. The working out, do you work out every day?

• 9:03Speaker 03

  I do.

• 9:04Tim Ferriss?

  What type of exercise and why?

• 9:07Speaker 03

  When I was younger and I got serious about working out, I was a second lieutenant and I, as I mentioned, I started getting fat. And I had a first sergeant in my parachute infantry company that liked to run. So we would do loosening up exercises and then we'd run. So I started running and so for the first 20 or so years I ran. I had a one period when I was a captain when I ran 15 miles a day, seven days a week. Didn't vary, didn't take days off, wore lousy running shoes. It was sort of stereotypically all the mistakes you can make. As I got older and I started to have a series of shoulder surgeries and back surgeries predictably. What I learned to do was to alternate. So I will run one day, I'll lift weight the next day, I'll bike when I'm home and have that capable so I can round out.

• 9:52Speaker 03

  But for me, it's very important to do something literally every day. I'll only take a day off when I'm forced to because I've got some weird schedule thing that makes it impossible.

• 10:01Tim Ferriss?

  What does your weight training, your resistance training workout look like?

• 10:04Speaker 03

  I will start at my home, if we're at home and I go down to my basement, I do four sets of pushups. As many as I can do for four sets. And I alternate that with a series of abs exercises. So I'll do, starting with a set of situps and I'll do 100 situps and I'll flip over and I'll do three minutes of a plank. And then I'll do some yoga that I learned for about two or three minutes. Then I'll do another set of pushups. Then I'll go to my next abs thing, which is a crunch like crossover. Then I'll do a two and a half minute plank and then I'll do more yoga, slightly different. And I'll do another set of pushups. And then I'll do my third set, which is crossover situps. And I'll then do a third plank of two minutes, I'm decreasing each time.

• 10:49Speaker 03

  Then I'll do some more yoga. And then I'll do my fourth set of pushups. And then I'll do my fourth, which is a flutter kick, 60 flutter kicks followed by static. Then I'll do my fourth plank, which is now a minute and a half. And then I'll come back. I've only do four sets of pushups. So the last time I don't do pushups, I then do one more set of the crunch like and I'll flip over, do my last plank, which is one minute. And then I'll do some final yoga and that'll take me about forty five to fifty minutes. Then I'll leave my house and go to the gym because my gym opens at five thirty. It's three blocks from my house.

• 11:24Tim Ferriss?

  I assume you mean AM.

• 11:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I can do all this from four thirty. I get it. If I get up at four, I can do all that from four thirty to about five twenty, five twenty-five. Go down to my gym and then when I get to the gym, I do four sets of pullups alternated with incline bench press, alternated with standing curls. And then in that, I'll also do these one-legged things, balance exercises as the break between them. I was taught that was good for balance and whatnot. And I'll do a few other things in that. And I can do all that in thirty, thirty-five minutes. So by six fifteen, six twenty, I can be done at the gym, head back home, get cleaned up and then be starting work.

• 12:05Tim Ferriss?

  Ready to rock and roll.

• 12:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:07Tim Ferriss?

  And why is exercise important to you? Both when you were overseas and at home? Maybe the reasons differ, but why is that routine ritual important?

• 12:16Speaker 03

  I think it's several things. There's a certain self-image, you know? I think that if I was struggling with my weight, or if I was not as fit as I wanted people to perceive me and I couldn't perceive myself that way, I think my own self-esteem would suffer. And particularly over life now, whenever I'm injured and I have even a slight period, it bothers me a lot. So I think that's part of it. Second is the military. There's an expectation. If you are not a physical leader in the kind of organizations that Chris and I were in, if you can't do those things physically, you don't have to do it better than everybody else, but you have to do it credibly and they can look up to, then I think your status in the organization is going to go down. When I was left Ranger Battalion Command in nineteen

• 12:59Speaker 03

  ninety-six and I went off to spend a year at Harvard, and I remember one of my non-commission officers said, "Sir, what are you going to do at Harvard?" I said, "I'm going to study." He says, "You're going to work out?" And I said, "Yeah, presumably I will." And he goes, "You know, you come back here with a PhD, but you're out of shape. We're going to have a word for you and it ain't going to be doctor."

• 13:20Speaker 03

  And I just thought that was so good. It also puts a discipline in the day. I find that if the day is terrible or whatever, but I worked out, at the end of the day, I'd go, well, I had a good workout. No matter what happens, when the Rolling Stone article came out, it came out about 1:30 in the morning, I found out about it. I made a couple of calls. I knew we had a big problem and I went, put my clothes on and I ran for an hour. Clear my head, stress myself, didn't make it go away. But that was something that I do in those situations.

• 13:52Tim Ferriss?

  For me, I try to, it's a way of diversifying my identity in a way. So that if everything else is suffering, if I'm losing it, everything else for factors outside of my control, at least the bar doesn't care. Stan, what book or books have you gifted the most to other people?

• 14:09Speaker 03

  I have probably given the most copies of a book written in 1968 by Anton Myhrer called Once an Eagle. It's a story of two characters, both who entered the military right during the First World War, and it follows them up through the Second World War and in fact into the post-war years. On the one level, it's a little simplistic. There's one who is wealthy and ambitious and somewhat unscrupulous and the other who is a Nebraska farm boy who wins a Medal of Honor and thrifty, brave, clean, reverent, et cetera. But it's actually more complex than that because it takes them through a whole career with all the nuances of army life, that the difficulties of peacetime service, slow promotions, and then the challenges of war and their personal side as well.

• 14:54Speaker 03

  And I gave that to a tremendous number of young officers and NCOs with whom I served because I thought it was a good window to them that the military seems like the day you're living, but it's really a life, it's a career and it's going to have an arc and it's going to have ups and downs and left and rights, just like your personal life is. And so I found that really valuable.

• 15:15Tim Ferriss?

  I'd love for you to just talk about your experience with Major Brado. I think it was your first meeting. If you could talk about that a bit, I think it's seems to be a key turning point for you.

• 15:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, it really was. Several things happened. I had entered West Point and I was from an Army family and I had expectations of myself. But my first two years at West Point were difficult. I got in a lot of trouble for discipline, my own immaturity. I didn't do well academically because I didn't know how to study and I didn't study very hard. I really didn't take West Point very seriously and it was also heavy on math and sciences. And so that was not my strong suit. So by the end of my sophomore year, I wasn't ready to quit, but I was having a crisis of confidence. I had gone through some things. I had applied to go to Ranger School as a cadet, which they let a small number each year.

• 16:05Speaker 03

  And in the spring of my sophomore year, for that summer, they said, you can't because your record is, your lack of discipline is bad enough. You can't go to Ranger School and I was really crushed. So I went that summer and I went off to training and whatnot. They send you around the Army to do different things. And I came back that fall and we had changed tactical officers. Now, I'd had a nice tactical officer the first two years, but I don't really think, I mean, he tolerated my two years of problems.

• 16:33Tim Ferriss?

  And is a tactical officer like a residential advisor in college or something along those lines?

• 16:37Speaker 03

  A little like that. You have a commissioned officer, a captain or a major for each company, which has about 120 cadets in it. And they don't live in the company. They're not there every day, but they are responsible for the company. So they have an office a couple hundred meters away and they're responsible for overseeing the cadet chain of command on discipline and they'll come down and inspect things. And they're also mentors and whatnot. And so after the first couple of years, I came back and I expected to have this new tactical officer, my first in briefing and counseling. He brings each person in together. I expected him to look at my record and then give me the riot act for, you know, all my problems and shortcomings and whatnot. And I sat down with him and he'd been, he's a special forces officer. He sat down and he goes, well, I'm looking at your record here.

• 17:22Speaker 03

  And he says, I think you're going to be a great cadet. And a great army officer. And I literally said, I think you got the files misplaced because this is Stan McChrystal. And he said, no, no, I got it. He goes, I'm looking at you. You know, you've gone outside the boundaries a couple of times. He said, but your peer ratings are really good. My peers were reflecting confidence and whatnot. He says, I think you're going to do great. And it was amazing. It was transformational because sort of like that kid in elementary school where suddenly they start to say, you do have high potential. We just got to pull this out. And I had also started seriously dating now my wife of 38 years, dating her then.

• 18:05Speaker 03

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

• 18:44Tim Ferriss?

  What effect did that have on you?

• 18:46Speaker 03

  Well, I think it caused me, one, you don't want to let somebody down who's got faith in you. If somebody doesn't have faith in you, they say, I think you're a screw up. You go, well, okay, if I screw up, then, you know. But if somebody says, no, I really have trust in you. I trust you're going to do really well. It gives you a new sense of loyalty to someone. You don't want to let them down. Plus, he's now put on the table in front of everybody. You can do this. It's up to you. He didn't say it that way, but it was clear that's what he'd done. So it changed my opinion for lots of reasons, this being one of them. My grade point average skyrocketed my last two years and I finished on the dean's list and all, which was for me nosebleed territory.

• 19:28Speaker 03

  But it was a lot because of the way people around me just started shaping my expectations.

• 19:33Tim Ferriss?

  The question of selection in training is really fascinating to me for all of these different stages in a military career or a sort of private sector career. If you had, and this may be a difficult question, but if you had, say, A hundred athletes, civilian athletes, and I say athletes just to take the physical component largely out of it. This question came from reading about the nine-week Ranger course at Fort Benning, I guess. So if you had a hundred athletes and had eight weeks to train twenty of them for combat, how would you select them and how would you train them?

• 20:07Speaker 03

  Very interesting. And just as an aside, the young man, the Yale graduate who worked with me on the memoirs you read is in his final week of Ranger school now.

• 20:15Tim Ferriss?

  Well, good luck, good luck.

• 20:17Speaker 03

  So he's lost a boatload of weight and he comes out and he's a specialist in Second Ranger Battalion. So he read about it, studied it, and now made the decision to go do it. It'll be interesting to hear after he comes out. If I was going to prepare people for combat, if you assume that they can do the basic skills, they can shoot a weapon, they can do first aid, they can do those things. If they can't do those, obviously you've got to teach them the things that are absolutely required. But if you assume that most people come out of basic training, initial training with those technical skills, I'd spend time on things that do two things. The first would be to push themselves. After World War II, when they talked to organizations that had then been through combat, they said,

• 21:00Speaker 03

  what of your training was of value and what was of less value? They said long foot marches that forced them physically and really caused them to reach down inside themselves like distance running was invaluable. And the second was live-fire training on courses that was as realistic as it could be. There was the stress, there was the sense of danger, although they were set up to inherently be safe. That required it. To that, I would add dealing with uncertainty. I would try to put people in cases where they have to make decisions with absolutely incomplete knowledge and they have got to live with the results of that and often it'll be bad. And what do they do then?

• 21:41Tim Ferriss?

  How do you simulate? Oh, actually, this brings up... Perhaps red teaming, maybe, maybe not. But how do you simulate, we'll come back to that if I'm leading us in a weird direction. But how do you simulate that uncertainty or role play that uncertainty? Are there good ways to do that?

• 21:58Speaker 03

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

• 22:42Speaker 03

  they're told that there are a small number of enemy forces there, 10 or so, enough they can deal with and they develop a plan and they deal with it. Once they got into that firefight, I in fact reinforced that enemy with about 100. And so suddenly what happened is they get in a firefight that they can't extract from and very quickly they have wounded of their own. And so now they're in this situation and I'm playing higher headquarters. I'm actually on the ground watching, but I'm through the, my controllers, I'm playing higher headquarters and I say, all right, your mission is to get those students out of there. Get them out and get them to the airfield. And they go, wait a minute, I've got 40 wounded. I can't move my wounded. I can't get them and I'm not going to leave them. And I said, we sent you for the students. Get them.

• 23:28Speaker 03

  And so they always try a workaround. They try to say, I need more aircraft, I need more forces, something to take away the constraint. And of course say, nope, nope, nope, won't happen. You're going to have to make the decision. You are going to pull these students out and accomplish your mission at the cost of breaking faith with your comrades, or you're going to stay there, in which case you're probably all going to get killed and the students are not going to be rescued. So you're going to be a failure. And we would do this and it was a fascinating situation because you saw this moral dilemma on top of all the tactical dilemmas. And then afterward, we would have these long after-action reviews where we talked about it. The fun thing is, there was no right answer.

• 24:07Tim Ferriss?

  I'm really loving this example. What are you hoping them to exhibit? Or what are you looking for in that scenario like that?

• 24:13Speaker 03

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

• 24:54Speaker 03

  automatic, black and white, reflexive, this is what we do because that's what we do. Interestingly, I didn't have any of the companies leave the wounded. I'm not sure that wasn't the right answer, and I couldn't tell them afterward that it was, but none of them left them. But they agonized over it. I mean, they tried everything they could, but it was just good because I said, those are the situations you're going to be in. It's never going to be easy, this or that.

• 25:22Tim Ferriss?

  That's a great example. So there's some timeless principles, timeless practices. Obviously, things have evolved in many different ways, in the military, private sector, technology, and so on. But if we're looking sort of in the rearview mirror, what military leaders come to mind who are most underrated, in your opinion?

• 25:39Speaker 03

  That's a great question, because there are people who did things for which they get huge credit, and then there are other people who changed the direction of organizations. And of course, I think Ulysses S. Grant is often underrated. He's viewed as this mechanical basher who is going to just bash the enemy into submission. And I think he was much more than that. I think he took an army that was already maturing, when he took overall command of Union forces, but he understood the absolute truth that you had to destroy the Army of the South. Capturing Richmond was interesting, but it wasn't the real point. The problem was, as long as you had an existing army, and that that was going to take...

• 26:22Speaker 03

  A very focused effort that was going to be high cost and you weren't going to lower the cost by doing it more slowly. It was cumulatively had to get it done. And I think he understood the political side of it much more than people give him credit for. So I think he's a huge one. There's another, and I'm going to embarrass to say I can't remember his name. There was a naval admiral between the first and second world war, who essentially championed the development of aircraft carriers. There were people who championed the development of air power, and that was pretty obvious. But building aircraft carriers during that period when battleships were still king was a dangerous sort of step out there. So I think those people who push change, when change is not otherwise automatically going to happen.

• 27:05Tim Ferriss?

  For those people listening, I'm sure somebody listening or reading on the blog will have the answer, be able to look up that naval admiral. So please put them in the comments on the blog and then I will put it into the post. So we'll have that. Stan, do you listen to audiobooks when you work out?

• 27:21Speaker 03

  All the time. It's funny, I first used to listen to music and I get bored listening to music. So I started listening to audiobooks because if you think about time management, what I found was I loved to read. But particularly when we started the fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, I would have a long day. I'd have good books. I'd go back to my hooch and I'd read about a page and a half and then I'd wake up 20 minutes later with my head on the page. And so I realized I was going to have to get a better way. So I started putting audiobooks on my iPod. And I like history and I like biography. And so I would put those on very eclectically. And initially, it was eclectic because audiobooks weren't that prevalent. And so my wife would go to the library. She'd go everywhere she could get all these audiobooks.

• 28:03Speaker 03

  I'd download them onto my iPod on my computer and then put them on my iPod. And so it was whatever was available. Later, as more things became available, I had a wider choice. But I found that eclectic part really good. I learned to run with audiobooks. My mind will stay collected on it when I'd lift weights. And I also, just because I get sort of fanatical about something, I have a little set of speakers in my bathroom. So what I do is I go in in the morning and I'm listening to one book there. I turn it on and while I brush my teeth, while I shave, while I put my PT clothes on, because my wife's out in the bedroom, I'll listen to this book. And then I'll walk out of there to go work out and I'll have my iPod. I have another book. And I'll listen to that to know when I work out. Now, it will take me quite a while of shaving time to get through a book.

• 28:48Tim Ferriss?

  Are those two separate books or the same?

• 28:49Speaker 03

  Two separate books. So I just finished a book on this South African gold and diamond trade, Cecil Rhodes and whatnot, up through the Boer War. It was fascinating and it probably took me, you know, six, eight weeks of shaving time to do that. But then on these other books, I found that I go through books very, very quickly. If you're working out an hour, hour and a half a day, you actually go through books much faster than I would if I just had reading, had reading time.

• 29:13Tim Ferriss?

  And I always love to ask people who read a lot or consume many books, even in audio format, how do you choose your books? So for instance, in this case of the diamond trade and whatnot in South Africa, why did you choose that book?

• 29:25Speaker 03

  I go on audible.com and I buy this package deal where you get a whole bunch of credits. And I look at the history first and I look at what's trending new, just to see if what's trending new. I tend to like sweeping history stories of an era that's, you know, 20, 30, 40 years, or big projects like the building of the Panama Canal, building of the Boulder Dam, because they got a beginning, middle and an end and challenges, or biographies. And I will also do binge reading, meaning I went through a period where I read about whaling and I read like five whaling books together. Or I'll read biographies or something about the founding fathers and I did seven or eight George Washington, other founding

• 30:08Speaker 03

  fathers. And because they're all, you know, mutually overlapping, it's very interesting because suddenly you know more about the era and the new one is more interesting because it's filling in holes. And so I'll binge on one subject for a while and then on another subject.

• 30:23Tim Ferriss?

  Oh God, this gives me all sorts of ideas for how I can spend yet more time reading books.

• 30:29Tim Ferriss?

  So you mentioned the hopeless dilemma earlier where you sort of engineer putting people into a situation where none of the options are attractive. We're here in Silicon Valley, a lot of people fashion themselves warriors of one sense or another, and they read Sun Tzu, Art of War, and they think of their business as very high stakes. But ultimately, in the field, I mean, you guys are dealing with life and death decisions. So I'd love to hear, in the cases where something goes wrong. So you make a decision, people go out on a raid, there are more fatalities than expected, and you have to operate rationally and effectively the next day. What would your internal self-talk sound like? And then what would you say to the team to get them ready for the next day?

• 31:14Speaker 03

  A little bit of historical context. If you think about it, and you can compare this to earlier times of war, but the first part of after 2001, we were worried about Al Qaeda, worried about Afghanistan. We went in, it turned out to be remarkably rapid, and relatively speaking, low cost in terms of casualties and whatnot. And then Iraq, actually, the invasion turned out to be the same way. So there got to be this sense that, okay, this isn't that hard. It's not going to take this long, and the cost will not be hard. We have a few fallen heroes, and we celebrate them, but we don't think it's going to be a grinding attrition. Then, as we got into the difficulty era after fall

• 31:54Speaker 03

  of 2003 and got into 2004 and 5, something different happens. One, we started to realize this was going to be very hard. And every time we lost a comrade, they were not going to be the last. And that's a different mindset, because then people start to make their personal calculation. They said, how long can I do this before the roulette wheel hits me? And is it going to even come out right? If we pay all this price, are we going to have a successful outcome? And that's a different mindset as well. What I found myself was... If you stay focused on the mission and everybody understands the cost of that, when you have a, an outcome where people are killed or wounded,

• 32:38Speaker 03

  if you let yourself freeze up with either the self doubt that maybe you made a mistake, or this sense that there's just no exit to this maze, then of course, I think it's very difficult to make those kinds of calls. You can find yourself locked up. In the, the summer of 2005, I had found that we just couldn't do what we had to do without bringing more of our force over. We had a third of our force deployed all the time, and then two thirds back training and getting ready. And that was about the tempo we could maintain for a long, long time. But we hit a period when we needed two thirds of the force in the fight. And mathematically, of course, because the last thirds back on alert in the US, that's not indefinitely sustainable.

• 33:22Speaker 03

  And just at the time we made the deci- I made the decision to do that, we started taking a bunch of casualties. And when you take casualties in a very elite force, it's not the nameless rifleman at the end of the squad that nobody knows. It is Chris, who I have served with for 10 years. I'm the godfather to one of his kids. I'm married to his sister. I mean, that's the effect. T E Lawrence writes about it as ripples in a pool that go out through these small communities, tribes, and really our forces were a tribe. So suddenly, the effect of that can cause you to be even more impacted by. Ulysses S. Grant used to say that he didn't visit hospitals much,

• 34:04Speaker 03

  because he found if he went and he saw the terrible carnage for which he was responsible, he'd lose his nerve to command it. So what I think happens is you don't become detached from the loss and you don't go into denial. What I found is you keep yourself focused on the objective. And you say, this is what we are doing. This is important. This is attainable. And the steps we are taking to it are the best steps I can figure out. They're responsibly arrived at to the best of my ability, and they are judiciously executed to the best of what we can do.

• 34:38Tim Ferriss?

  So this would be potentially what you just said, what you would sort of remind yourself of in those moments?

• 34:43Speaker 03

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

• 35:28Speaker 03

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

• 35:59Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep is a premium mattress brand that provides tailored mattresses based on your sleep preferences. Their lineup includes 14 unique mattresses, including a collection of luxury models, a mattress for big and tall sleepers, that's not me, and even a mattress made specifically for kids. So how will you know which Helix mattress works best for you and your body? Take the Helix Sleep Quiz at helixsleep.com/tim and find your perfect mattress in less than two minutes. Helix mattresses are American made and come with a 10 or 15 year warranty, depending on the model. Their newest collection of mattresses called Helix Elite includes six different mattress models, each tailored for specific sleep positions

• 36:42Tim Ferriss?

  and firmness preferences. Every Helix Sleep mattress comes with a 15 year manufacturer's warranty and the same 100 night trial as the rest of Helix's mattresses. And you, my dear listeners, can get 20% off of all mattress orders plus two free pillows. So go to helixsleep.com/tim to learn more. So take a look. With Helix, better sleep starts now.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  And now, Liv Bari, winner of both the European Poker Tour and World Series of Poker Championship titles, gaming theorist, futurist, philanthropist, and host of the Win Win with Liv Bari podcast. You can find Liv on Twitter and Instagram at @liv underscore Bari.

• 37:31Tim Ferriss?

  Liv, welcome to the show. It's nice to see you.

• 37:33Speaker 04

  Thank you for having me.

• 37:35Tim Ferriss?

  And we can go so many different directions. I thought we would start, actually, maybe in an unexpected place. So I asked you before we started, what color would you prefer? Black, blue, orange, I think it was, yellow?

• 37:49Speaker 04

  Oh, that's what it was for, it was for mic cable?

• 37:50Tim Ferriss?

  It was for mic cable so that I can tell which line is feeding into which input on this recorder. And it certainly looks a lot better in audio, right? So it does have a certain clown car appearance to it when we do it in person with video. But when you said black, I said, I bet it's going to be black right beforehand. And it was black. And the reason I said that is I read something about you and Metallica. And to get into the zone coming here on the drive over, I listened to Orion, the remastered.

• 38:23Speaker 04

  Oh, great choice. Nice choice.

• 38:25Tim Ferriss?

  Very, very, yeah. Because my first, now we're really getting off track here, but that's okay. There is no track. My very first album I ever bought was on cassette tape and it was Master of Puppets. And can you guess why I bring up Metallica?

• 38:42Speaker 04

  Well, they were my love that bordered on an unhealthy obsession from the ages of like 16 to 22. So that's probably a, I would guess why you brought it up. I don't know how you would know that, though.

• 38:58Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you know, we do research over here. Metalinsider.net.

• 39:03Tim Ferriss?

  The Iron Maiden of the poker world, they called you. And there was a short discussion of the unforgiven. And this led you, I guess, in some respects into guitar. Do you still play guitar?

• 39:17Speaker 04

  I don't.

• 39:18Tim Ferriss?

  You don't, but you did for a period of time.

• 39:19Speaker 04

  I did, yeah, from like 16 or 17 till 24, basically until poker took over.

• 39:25Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 39:39Speaker 04

  I used to. I used to be very, a shiny new activity would come along and I would, if it ticked enough boxes, I'll be like, I have to become the best at this. I would rarely become the best at it, but I would certainly go down the rabbit hole deep enough to become proficient. And I was like that, I would say, until some point in my, probably my early 30s, some point around the age of 30, where I lost that a little bit. And 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 men 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?

• 40:23Speaker 04

  Or maybe I should just do speeches or maybe I should actually just start a company and give up on this 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. Cause I think, you know, with teenagers, so often you don't, because you haven't formed your identity yet.

• 40:43Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 40:44Speaker 04

  You will form it typically around a genre of music.

• 40:47Tim Ferriss?

  Sure, I was a metalhead, which is.

• 40:49Speaker 04

  You were a metalhead?

• 40:49Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, for sure.

• 40:50Speaker 04

  Oh, sick, right. So, yeah, you get it, like, and metal is so.

• 40:53Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, I say was as if it's past tense. If I'm in the gym, I'm still a metalhead.

• 40:58Speaker 04

  Right, exactly. But you don't look it, you don't live it in your visual.

• 41:03Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 41:10Speaker 04

  I was about to say, Phil Anselmo, like a little bit, you know, Phil Anselmo after his vulgar display of power era, whatever, yeah. Yeah, so I was kind of 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, Bersum, you know, there's some of the Swedish, Swedish black metal, Norwegian black metal.

• 41:50Tim Ferriss?

  Once you get to the Scandinavian death metal and you've gone really deep.

• 41:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. But Metallica were a huge forming part of that. They were the one sort of classic metal band that I still was like, I just loved so deeply.

• 42:04Tim Ferriss?

  All right, let's paint a picture here. What was your, the age range of your competitive poker career? And then we're going to 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.

• 42:18Speaker 04

  So I first learnt to play poker aged twenty one. Yeah, it was two thousand and five. I'd 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 year because

• 42:36Speaker 04

  when I first started taking physics, I was like, oh, I'm definitely doing this. This is so interesting. I love it. But then the more time I got to spend with like PhD students or even people doing their masters, they seemed, I don't know, they just didn't seem very happy and they weren't very, I don't know, just personality wise. I was wondering if it actually was going to work for me because all I really wanted to do was go out partying and clubbing and go, you know, see rock shows, metal shows. And I was also still wanting to be a rock star at the time. And I was like, ah, I just don't know if this is gonna quite work, me sitting in a lab, you know, fiddling around with lasers. So decided to take a gap year and I think I signed up, oh, I was doing like. Random like goth modeling sometimes.

• 43:17Tim Ferriss?

  And I. As one does in their gap year.

• 43:19Speaker 04

  Right. Well, I, you know, just any way I could make some money. And I thought, I don't know, I enjoyed dressing up in my heavy metal costumes as often as possible. And I was like, if I can get paid to do that, that'd be great. I also got paid to be a cage dancer in rock clubs in London.

• 43:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Well, you know, I was admiring the boots on the way in. This is a, this is a shoeless household. So thank you for accommodating.

• 43:41Speaker 04

  This is not my least metal sock ever. I'm so embarrassed.

• 43:46Tim Ferriss?

  These are gray and pink striped socks with hearts all over them. So yes, it's like the hard exterior, the goth death metal exterior, and then like the soft, sweet.

• 43:57Speaker 04

  Inside. I don't understand how much pain I'm in. Actually, the fact that this is these, I have so many, like most of my socks are black. I just, just grabbed whatever I needed to.

• 44:05Tim Ferriss?

  So goth modeling, which I also did during my gap year, totally lying. I'm kidding, kidding.

• 44:10Speaker 04

  Oh, man.

• 44:11Tim Ferriss?

  And I wish I, I wish I could have. So goth modeling, cage dancing.

• 44:14Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 44:15Tim Ferriss?

  And then?

• 44:17Speaker 04

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

• 45:01Speaker 04

  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.

• 45:21Tim Ferriss?

  What was your personality type?

• 45:22Speaker 04

  They called me the professor, which I much certainly was not.

• 45:25Tim Ferriss?

  I could see it. I could see it.

• 45:27Speaker 04

  I was, I literally turned up in skin tight Tiger Prince band-axe self-made trousers.

• 45:33Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 45:42Speaker 04

  No, I mean, that wasn't genuinely how I dressed.

• 45:44Tim Ferriss?

  Your style emoting.

• 45:45Speaker 04

  No, it was, it was my genuine.

• 45:47Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 45:47Speaker 04

  Appearance. As I said, I lived and breathed metal.

• 45:50Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds good for TV.

• 45:51Speaker 04

  Right. And I think that's probably why they selected me, honestly, like very overconfident to the point of like cocky 21-year-old brat who was.

• 46:00Tim Ferriss?

  Unheard of with 21-year-olds.

• 46:02Speaker 04

  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.

• 46:08Tim Ferriss?

  And they're like, oh, we're definitely bringing you in.

• 46:10Speaker 04

  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 would translate into chips for the final game where we would play for the hundred thousand. And I was winning, you know, I was leading going into that. And clearly I had a knack for the game. And I remember the, the hosts and the professionals that they bought on the show to teach us were like, oh, you're definitely 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

• 46:52Speaker 04

  technical, but basically I misread my hand. I misread the board. I made a straight on the river. The opponent bet. I was so excited. I was like, I raise, which was basically all my chips. And then I looked at the board again and noticed there were four diamonds out there and I didn't have, I had two black cards and audibly went, oh.

• 47:13Tim Ferriss?

  Now, I'm not, I'm no professional, but is that what one would call a tell?

• 47:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, that is, that is a tell. Do not do that. And the, my opponent, it was a really nice guy called Lee. It 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.

• 47:36Tim Ferriss?

  The producers are high fiving in the background.

• 47:38Speaker 04

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

• 48:13Tim Ferriss?

  What is a rebuy?

• 48:13Speaker 04

  A rebuy means that if you, for the first hour or so, if you bust out, you can just buy back in again. So considering it was only five pound entry, you can imagine it's just pandemonium. Everyone's going in every single hand. And people were easily like spent like a hundred pounds in their entry overall, you know, 20 rebuys.

• 48:29Tim Ferriss?

  Good for the house.

• 48:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, but I turned up with 10 pounds because I was like, well, it's a five pound tournament. Why would I ever need more than, you know, five pound for the entry and five pound to buy a drink? And that will be my, my day.

• 48:39Tim Ferriss?

  So you're like, you're like a player in a video game with two lives where everybody else has like a hundred lives.

• 48:46Speaker 04

  Right. Yeah. And most people were, were doing that. Yes. Only for the first hour. Then once after that period ends, then if you bust out, you're out. This is the first tournament I ever played. And I entered this thing, somehow get through this carnage period in the, in the first hour.

• 49:03Tim Ferriss?

  The zombies that just keep standing back up.

• 49:06Speaker 04

  Once with my other five pounds, so I didn't buy a drink. And anyway, I ended up winning it. Ended up playing till five in the morning. It was like 120 people in it. And then I came home, I remember just having this, you know, they paid me out in tens and twenties, I think 750 pounds or something like that, which was more money. So I'd never seen that amount of cash before, just so much money. And I remember going home to my boyfriend at the time and waking him up at 5am and just throwing the cash on him. Like this is, 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 TV show did not go well, and I didn't win the hundred grand, I'd already got the bug, basically, from that little win.

• 49:45Tim Ferriss?

  So let me weave through this and inspect a bit because I have many questions.

• 49:53Tim Ferriss?

  What do you think helped you during the show itself to make it to the final table? What were some of, whether they're your characteristics, things you learned, things you observed, trained abilities, anything that comes to mind that you think helped in the very early nascent stages?

• 50:14Speaker 04

  Of that tournament?

• 50:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, the TV show.

• 50:16Speaker 04

  Right.

• 50:17Tim Ferriss?

  The TV show, and then I have more questions.

• 50:21Speaker 04

  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.

• 50:35Tim Ferriss?

  And that translated to just more study time.

• 50:37Speaker 04

  Just, yeah, just like this, like laser focus. And then there's like ruthlessness. Because the thing about poker is that you actually, you do have to be really ruthless in the game.

• 50:46Tim Ferriss?

  In what sense?

• 50:48Speaker 04

  In terms of, well, bluffing people. If you're not comfortable with bluffing someone at the poker table, which I don't think, a lot of people say, oh, it's lying. It's like, it's not really lying. No, it's just a form of, it's a strategy within a game as defined by the rules of the game. It's an integral part of it.

• 51:02Tim Ferriss?

  It's sanctioned lying.

• 51:03Speaker 04

  Right. If you're not willing to do that, then you're, it's not the game for you. And

• 51:08Tim Ferriss?

  Play chess.

• 51:09Speaker 04

  Right. And then you have to be just willing to, I guess, just really laser in and pay deep attention to what is going on. Because technically, at any given moment, even if you're not in hand, there's really valuable information. Being exchanged about the way people, you know, the types of cards people play, the way that their bodies move when they're uncomfortable versus comfortable. Are they a naturally aggressive person or are they naturally scared? What are the things that make them scared, et cetera? And certainly in the beginning, I was just, because I didn't know anything about the actual statistical, sort of the mechanics of the game. All I could rely on was the, you know, the stuff I knew, which was looking, looking for when people are bluffing.

• 51:51Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 52:09Speaker 04

  Well, I did too.

• 52:09Tim Ferriss?

  You did that as well.

• 52:11Speaker 04

  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.

• 52:19Tim Ferriss?

  Sure, right.

• 52:20Speaker 04

  And also people didn't even really know, because this is 2005. Even the top players in the world back then didn't really understand game theory. Like even an average player understands it today. So I read all the books I could get my hands on. You know, so I guess my sort of physics training helped to an extent with, with being willing to just like dive in and research on this, like on a big amorphous topic and, you know, not even clear directions of where to start. That probably gave me a bit of an advantage there. And then presumably I have a higher than average IQ from.

• 52:54Tim Ferriss?

  All the cage dancing.

• 52:55Speaker 04

  Exactly, it really helps. And all the drinking and guitar playing and chasing after rock stars. Yeah, but it, which I think obviously helps in any kind of strategic game. But honestly, the thing about poker is, the beautiful thing about poker in fact, is that if you're talking about one night, you can have the literal best player in the world, a medium player, complete beginners, and provided everyone knows the basic rules, then technically anyone can win. It's only over the long run does anything actually meaningful start happening. And so even in this TV show where we played, I think, eight different games, statistically, it's not that meaningful, the results over that time period.

• 53:41Speaker 04

  There's so much luck going on and I didn't realise that early on in the game. In some ways, you know, like winning that big tournament early on was, was not a big tournament, that the five pound rebuy. It gave me an immense amount of confidence and love for the game, which I think had I not had, I wouldn't have then pursued it as much as I did. But it can also delude you a little bit because I then just assumed, okay, well, I'm going to win this. There isn't that much luck. It's just who's the best player wins. And I think that's partly why it was such a kick in the face when I screwed up and didn't win the hundred thousand.

• 54:13Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 54:25Speaker 04

  Right.

• 54:25Tim Ferriss?

  Of course, because there's a blending of skill and chance.

• 54:27Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 54:28Tim Ferriss?

  And money. I mean, there's stakes.

• 54:30Speaker 04

  Right. We're actually just winning, the potential of just winning, you know, making a living where I don't have to go and sit in an office and I can do that. That was obviously a big carrot.

• 54:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 54:40Speaker 04

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

• 55:25Speaker 04

  on my pot odds and my combinatorics. And so there's never a dull moment and there's always a new situation as well. Like even after playing for 10, 15 years, I'll still see something crazy with like the cards run out, like straight flush against pogs, that kind of stuff. Like these incredibly rare scenarios will sometimes happen and, or people will do weird things or some strange ruling will happen that like everyone's scratching their heads. Like, I don't know what the right call is here. It's, it's, there's such depth and complexity to the game.

• 55:55Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so I'm going to admit something, it's embarrassing. I have been fascinated and drawn to poker for a very long time and I've never learned how to play properly.

• 56:06Speaker 04

  No way.

• 56:07Tim Ferriss?

  It's true.

• 56:07Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 56:08Tim Ferriss?

  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 going to be far better than I am. And that's a compliment, Jason.

• 56:26Speaker 04

  I'll teach you how to beat Jason.

• 56:27Tim Ferriss?

  And a lot of these investors are very confident. I know some of them certainly, particularly the quants who have observed from afar, seem to be pretty competent. I had a little bite of the bug probably five years ago when I did an episode of a TV show, Bringing Back TV, where I trained for a week or five days probably to play heads up against a whole cohort of folks, including some pros. And I was able, and I was trained by, I want to give him credit, Phil Gordon, for that. And for a very short period of time,

• 57:10Tim Ferriss?

  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. It did not translate at all, which I expected would largely be the case, but I just got dismembered. I mean,

• 57:33Speaker 04

  Well, heads up is a very different game to playing against eight people.

• 57:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, totally. So, yeah, one on one, a totally, totally different game. But it's actually brought back in a way my love of mathematics and statistics, which I lost. Not to make this like a confessional, but I lost it in 10th grade because I had this one teacher who just had this huge axe to grind with the boys in the class. And almost all the boys ended up quitting math or avoiding it after that class. My brother had the opposite experience and then later became a PhD in statistics. So it's amazing to look at these divergent.

• 58:09Tim Ferriss?

  Kind of points, right? Where you have a fork in the path, depending on your experience. So my question, after all that word salad, is if you were to suggest a way of learning or to teach me an approach to learning,

• 58:26Tim Ferriss?

  regular poker, whatever that means, the type of poker I would play with my friends who are like, let's play poker. How might you think of approaching that?

• 58:36Speaker 04

  Well, given that you are, I mean, you're pretty well rounded in your personality and that you like both sort of human, interactive things, but you can also nerd out really hard.

• 58:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yes.

• 58:48Speaker 04

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

• 59:00Speaker 04

  In that she is so able to intuit social situations.

• 59:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 59:08Speaker 04

  And unbelievably emotionally intelligent, but phobic of math, phobic of, she's interested in sort of scientific concepts, but if you actually try and get into the technical weeds, she's like, she cannot. And she, you know, her happy, it's like, she would be in arms with Molly right now. Just like, she's just, she just feels, she's a very feel based person. And if I was to teach her the game, you know, I would take her to the table with a group of fun people and, you know, we would slowly just like turn the cards over and, you know, talk through, I'll give her the hand rankings. 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

• 59:49Speaker 04

  approach to it. But I think with you, we would want to jump sort of straight into the game theory to an extent.

• 59:55Tim Ferriss?

  So let me apply some parameters, if I could, just to allow us to conjure an image. So let's just say, he's really going to want to take my money now, which he will probably. So let's say I had a game with Jason and you can pick the sort of minimally viable period of time over which you think I could learn to be competent enough that I might have a chance. Is it four weeks? Is it? 12 weeks? This is also not knowing how good Jason is. I have no idea because I've always refused to play.

• 1:00:30Speaker 04

  He's pretty good.

• 1:00:31Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, great. So, so let's just say, you know, if luck is on my side, having some chance in hell.

• 1:00:37Speaker 04

  Well, here's the thing. So you have a chance in hell. Anyway, if you sat down and just play-

• 1:00:42Tim Ferriss?

  Because it's not just gonna be Jason, it's gonna be an entire table.

• 1:00:44Speaker 04

  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 beat which one.

• 1:00:51Tim Ferriss?

  There's always a chance.

• 1:00:51Speaker 04

  Okay, but let's, you know, assume the very basics, you know what betting chips means and how, you know, whether you, whether you have a straight on the river or not. Assuming that, you and I could sit down and play 10 hands and it's basically 50 50.

• 1:01:06Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, let's, let's say we have, you can pick the period of time of training, right?

• 1:01:10Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:01:11Tim Ferriss?

  However long it is, and then Jason and I are going to play-

• 1:01:15Speaker 04

  A thousand hands, let's say.

• 1:01:16Tim Ferriss?

  Exactly.

• 1:01:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, a thousand hands. Your chance of beating Jason over a thousand hands, probably with like just knowing the rules, is 45%? That's how crazy, like, that's the thing. Maybe, maybe it's a bit less than that. Maybe it's, sorry, Jason, maybe it's, let's say 37%, maybe 35. I'm gonna get a phone call after this.

• 1:01:42Speaker 04

  But could we get it so that it, so that you are a favorite against him? Eight weeks of intensive?

• 1:01:49Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:01:49Speaker 04

  Yeah. If you sat and studied game, like all the charts? Because that's what it is really these days. So poker is, now that we know the mechanics of the game, basically there's this thing called game theory optimal solutions to different scenarios, which is basically, you know, if you have Jack nine suited on this type of board against a person in this position, you will want to check raise them 30% of the time and check call 70% of the time or something like that. It's basically, there are like answers to what you should do in different scenarios with what frequencies. It's all about frequencies. And so now that we know this and, 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

• 1:02:31Speaker 04

  learn as many different scenarios as possible and like basically emulate them in their head when they go and play. So it's a very different type of game. It's more like kind of almost studying chess moves.

• 1:02:40Tim Ferriss?

  I was just gonna say, it sounds a lot like studying chess scenarios.

• 1:02:44Speaker 04

  And it wasn't like that even 10 years ago. It was very, very different. I mean, there was some, it was more about you, you'd sort of do combination calculations in your head and that kind of thing, but that was kind of the limit of it. And honestly, it's actually one of the reasons why I, in the end, didn't like the game as much anymore. I've been doing it for 12 years anyway, and I was just starting to get itchy feet naturally, but it required more and more time spent to, at the top levels at least.

• 1:03:10Tim Ferriss?

  Just very incremental gains.

• 1:03:12Speaker 04

  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 theory optimal style, we're just breaking even against each other over infinity. Over the short time, you know, if we play for an hour, whoever gets the best cards will therefore win, but over infinity, we will just break even. And so that meant that you would have to be putting more and more time in to win a sort of shrinking pot of money, essentially. Which is why I don't now recommend to people to go out and try and be professionals in poker.

• 1:03:56Speaker 04

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

• 1:04:09Tim Ferriss?

  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 L's podcast with his buds. It is a fantastic, fantastic show. I do think it is one of the best new podcasts, newish podcasts that I've put into my rotation. So, don't take all my money, Jason.

• 1:04:54Tim Ferriss?

  Eight weeks. What does the density of practice look like? Is that two hours a day? Is it 10 hours a week?

• 1:05:01Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 1:05:02Tim Ferriss?

  What does the distribution look like?

• 1:05:04Speaker 04

  To be confident that you have like a 60/40 edge on him, I would want to do 40 hours a week, at least.

• 1:05:11Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:05:12Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:05:16Tim Ferriss?

  All right, 40 hours. How does that break down? If we have, you said eight weeks, right?

• 1:05:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:05:22Tim Ferriss?

  So hypothetically, let's say week one, what does the schedule and curriculum look like?

• 1:05:28Speaker 04

  So in the first week, I think we would, I mean, I would sit and just run out lots of different hands. I think in-person is better than online. So you actually just get to play with the cards, feel what it's like. You get really familiar with the betting patterns and that kind of thing. And we would talk about the more sort of general things like, why are we betting? What are we seeking to find here? Okay, we want to find information. We'd get into the idea of 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, 1,000 and whatever the number is, a combination of two cards that you can have. So right now, your range is 100% and same back at you.

• 1:06:12Speaker 04

  And then as the hand progresses, basically, I want to narrow down the perceived range that I think you could have, you know, now 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.

• 1:06:31Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 1:06:32Speaker 04

  While extracting information out of your opponent. So I'd teach you about concepts like that, and we would talk about ways that you can do that. And then I think we would go and actually play a little bit in person, just so you get used to the, again, the kind of dynamics.

• 1:06:44Tim Ferriss?

  Find a table somewhere.

• 1:06:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, we'd go to a local, I mean, probably invite friends over and we'd just have some, have some games. I mean, it's so much fun, anyway. Those are the best type of poker games.

• 1:06:54Tim Ferriss?

  Bring in my card mechanic and take all their money.

• 1:06:55Speaker 04

  Exactly, yes.

• 1:06:59Speaker 04

  And then after that, I think we would start, I don't know at what stage, but you know, once you seem competent and are able to, you're able to do sort of basic math calculations in your head about, okay, well, I have to call 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.

• 1:07:20Tim Ferriss?

  Could you just take a second and explain what you mean by pot odd calculations?

• 1:07:24Speaker 04

  So pot odds are basically, you know, like in investing to an extent, if things go well, what do you win versus how much would you lose?

• 1:07:32Tim Ferriss?

  And then how do you bet size accordingly?

• 1:07:35Speaker 04

  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 offering you five to one. Well, now it's actually a profitable thing, right? Because you're getting, the pot is offering you more than the odds that you need to hit your card. So Matt, 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 calculations. So as you're sort of narrowing down your opponent's range, there will be presumably some hands that they will have

• 1:08:20Speaker 04

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

• 1:09:05Speaker 04

  After that, if you know, you're seeming to grasp all that, then we would actually start looking at the solver charts. So these are these like simulators. There's this one called Pyosolver that was at least popular in the day when I was playing.

• 1:09:18Tim Ferriss?

  How do you spell that?

• 1:09:19Speaker 04

  P I O.

• 1:09:20Tim Ferriss?

  P I O.

• 1:09:20Speaker 04

  Pyosolver. I think it's still the main one. And at least when I was, you know, using it, that was back in 2016 or so, it would take many hours to run a sim. So, you know, you'd be like, I want to know what the optimal play is with Jack nine suited on a 10 8 4 Rainbow board or something like that. And then let it run.

• 1:09:40Tim Ferriss?

  Folks listening, I have no idea what I mean either.

• 1:09:41Speaker 04

  I know. I don't know how technical to go.

• 1:09:43Tim Ferriss?

  I love how it sounds, though.

• 1:09:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's so much jargon in poker.

• 1:09:46Tim Ferriss?

  I think I need a Rainbow board.

• 1:09:47Speaker 04

  That's actually probably where we would start. We would start with glossary because there's so many, there's so many terms.

• 1:09:53Tim Ferriss?

  vocab.

• 1:09:53Speaker 04

  The vocab is, is, 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, 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

• 1:10:36Speaker 04

  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 good amount, that would be more than sufficient to be Jason. You know, he's not a full time pro.

• 1:10:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:58Speaker 04

  He's good. Like, he's played a lot and we've only played once. And I was more just like bemused at the amount of words that were coming out of his mouth.

• 1:11:04Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I was gonna say, if his poker is anything like his basketball, he will, his ability to shit talk

• 1:11:09Speaker 04

  Oh, man.

• 1:11:09Tim Ferriss?

  is actually incredible.

• 1:11:11Speaker 04

  That guy is world class.

• 1:11:12Tim Ferriss?

  He's very good at getting under your skin if he wants to get under your skin.

• 1:11:15Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. He's, he's, he's so many, we've had, we've been at a few parties together and he has, he knows how to ruffle feathers, but he's so funny. I love him.

• 1:11:27Tim Ferriss?

  Excellent interviewer and moderator. I just wanna second the recommendation that was made earlier. Let's depart from the training for a bit. We may come back to it. But actually, let me ask a question I haven't asked in a long time. Maybe similar, this is like kicking in the gears, starting the old car, trying to like turn the key, get it to turn over. If you could predict the main reasons, the failure points, the reasons I would quit in those first eight weeks, what do you think they might be? Assuming that I had the time.

• 1:12:01Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:12:02Tim Ferriss?

  Right? And the interest, what are the things that might break me or cause me to walk, give up?

• 1:12:07Speaker 04

  If for some reason you couldn't wrap your mind around what these charts mean, I guess that would be a sort of breaking point, but I just don't see that ever happening, to be honest. So it would be more that, I think the reason why you'd walk away is because you're like, ah, actually, this isn't that much fun and I'm not playing for, I don't care enough about beating Jason. You're not playing for Super Bowl stakes. And you're like, this is not worth my time.

• 1:12:29Tim Ferriss?

  For people listening, I'm just using Jason as a stand because it's fun. But right, I don't care, I don't care enough about beating anyone.

• 1:12:35Speaker 04

  Exactly. Like, just the opportunity cost would be too high. That would be the only reason, I think. Because I think you would find it fun, otherwise.

• 1:12:42Tim Ferriss?

  Now, I would have to, I wouldn't have to, but ensure that I have a certain frequency of play after putting in 40 hours a week for eight weeks. Otherwise, the decay rate would

• 1:12:53Speaker 04

  Well, absolutely.

• 1:12:53Tim Ferriss?

  be brutal.

• 1:12:54Speaker 04

  And part of that time, by the way, in that 40, it's not just studying the charts. It's also going out and actually practicing and getting real, because assuming you're 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, particularly with someone like Jason, who is so adept at like saying things to Needle. And that's a big part of the game.

• 1:13:22Tim Ferriss?

  Getting the verbal bamboo shoots under your fingernails.

• 1:13:25Speaker 04

  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 it's like, well, you screwed up that hand, Tim. Like, what are you gonna do? What are you gonna do? Huh? You know, and just goes full Jason on you. Like you'll forget everything. The red mist. Um, I call it the white noise.

• 1:13:51Tim Ferriss?

  Mist. I've never heard that. Okay. I like it.

• 1:13:53Speaker 04

  The red mist descends. Like if there's two mental blocks.

• 1:13:58Tim Ferriss?

  And that's when one might go tilt.

• 1:13:59Speaker 04

  Tilt. Exactly.

• 1:14:00Tim Ferriss?

  If I, if I'm catching the lingo.

• 1:14:02Speaker 04

  Yeah. Tilt. Very good. Uh, for those who don't know, tilt is, is, uh, what people do basically when their emotions get the better of them and they start playing badly.

• 1:14:11Tim Ferriss?

  Now, is monkey tilt just an exaggerated version of that?

• 1:14:16Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:14:16Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. Yeah. Cause now.

• 1:14:18Speaker 04

  Monkey tilt is just like the, you know, you've got sort of.

• 1:14:20Tim Ferriss?

  I love the image.

• 1:14:21Speaker 04

  One of the flavors.

• 1:14:24Tim Ferriss?

  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, I'm not on tilt. Those didn't work out very well, those trades. But the red mist, when the red mist, but you call it the white what?

• 1:14:52Speaker 04

  Well, so there's two. There's the white noise. So the white noise is when, so red mist is when you're angry. Someone has wound you up.

• 1:14:59Tim Ferriss?

  That would probably be my Achilles heel.

• 1:15:02Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:15:02Tim Ferriss?

  The white noise.

• 1:15:04Speaker 04

  Yeah. And the white noise is where, for whatever reason, perhaps, you know, you're just really tired or you're really stressed, but you'll go and consult your brain and it comes back with nothing.

• 1:15:14Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. Yeah. You're just beach balling.

• 1:15:16Speaker 04

  Just beach balling. Yes.

• 1:15:18Speaker 04

  And I've had that a few times. I remember having it in the World Series, day four or something, day five, and it was a really big pot and I just needed to think. And then, but then my brain was like, well, this is a really important decision. You know, you just really pay attention to this one. Like, are you paying it? Well, I'm not sure you're paying attention. Why are you listening to me? And so there's a little voice. And then I was like, okay, pay attention. Let's count the combos of what they've got and just nothing. So in the end, I was like, I, you know, my system two, are you familiar with a system one, system two?

• 1:15:47Tim Ferriss?

  No.

• 1:15:47Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:15:48Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, wait a second. System one, system two. Is this like Daniel Kahneman?

• 1:15:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a Danny Kahneman thing.

• 1:15:52Tim Ferriss?

  If you could just give some context.

• 1:15:54Speaker 04

  His thesis is that we have two modes of thinking. Well, system one is like your intuitive. Like if I ask you, what's five plus five, you immediately know the answer is 10. So it kind of your gut instinct.

• 1:16:05Tim Ferriss?

  I just got a shot of a drilling set that you were gonna make me do multiplication tables.

• 1:16:08Speaker 04

  Well, wait, well, wait. So that's your system one. It's just the things you immediately know an answer to, or you, you know, it's like an unconscious process. You know, if you technically it's system one, if you're driving down the street and someone cuts in front of you, your, your, your body will take over and you'll swerve because you don't have time to do a sort of cost benefit analysis of going left or right. And then your system two is the like conscious thinking. So if I was to ask you what 471 plus 88 is?

• 1:16:36Tim Ferriss?

  It would be 560. I even forgot the numbers now. Nine?

• 1:16:42Speaker 04

  471 and 88.

• 1:16:44Tim Ferriss?

  471, 88. What's that?

• 1:16:46Speaker 04

  I can't.

• 1:16:47Tim Ferriss?

  471. Yeah. Nine, five, five, five, five, nine. Is that right? 559? I have no idea.

• 1:16:57Speaker 04

  Five is 500. I can't even remember. Anyway.

• 1:17:00Tim Ferriss?

  Whatever that was, you can't, you can't use your gut feelings for that.

• 1:17:04Speaker 04

  Right. You have to think it through. You have to do the calculation mentally in your head. So that's your system two. And poker's really interesting because.

• 1:17:11Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I'm on five hours of sleep. I just want to buy myself a little bit of.

• 1:17:17Tim Ferriss?

  Wiggle room on the mental math.

• 1:17:18Speaker 04

  I didn't even answer my own question and I have no excuse. So.

• 1:17:21Tim Ferriss?

  May I make a quick aside? One of the coolest things I've ever seen was when I was 15 as an exchange student in Japan and I got to know multiple kids because it's mandatory that every kid learn how to use an abacus. And something like one out of every 30 or 40 kids would get so good that they no longer needed the physical abacus. They could see it in their minds. And so for party tricks, their friends would just lob these like three-digit multiplication problems at them and they could come up with the answer. It would take them a second because they actually had to physically.

• 1:17:58Speaker 04

  Map it out.

• 1:17:59Tim Ferriss?

  Map it out and move these beads and so on in their minds, but astonishing.

• 1:18:05Speaker 04

  My partner Igor can kind of do that.

• 1:18:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:07Speaker 04

  It was one of the ways he got me, honestly. He just, you just throw numbers at him and he'll, he hasn't done it in a while and he'll hate that I've mentioned this because now everyone's going to do it to him. But he can usually answer within like a second or two.

• 1:18:17Tim Ferriss?

  Wow, that's fast.

• 1:18:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's hot.

• 1:18:22Tim Ferriss?

  Rock stars to mental mathematics.

• 1:18:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, so those are, I can't remember where I was going now.

• 1:18:28Tim Ferriss?

  So where you were going is we were talking about system one, system two, and that white noise moment.

• 1:18:33Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:18:33Tim Ferriss?

  And that is not a time that you can rely on system two. Is that what you were going to say?

• 1:18:37Speaker 04

  Right, exactly. Because system two has shut down.

• 1:18:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, system two's offline.

• 1:18:41Speaker 04

  Yes, offline. It's not, it does not compute. There's nothing there. Hello?

• 1:18:45Tim Ferriss?

  404, 404.

• 1:18:46Speaker 04

  404, yeah, lose screen to death. And it's bad when that happens in poker. It's no good at all.

• 1:18:52Tim Ferriss?

  Fucking terrible.

• 1:18:52Speaker 04

  Yes. And that is, you know, if you're playing, it can be various reasons. It can be because if you're wound up, someone's gotten under your skin, that will shut it off. But also just pure adrenaline and stress. You know, you're excited. Even, I've had it when I had a really good hand.

• 1:19:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:10Speaker 04

  And I was really, I was like, oh man, I'm going to 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.

• 1:19:18Speaker 04

  Because I just, it's so hard because I think you're put into, well, you know this stuff better, like your sympathetic nervous system is in is in play, right? So you're kind of in fight or flight and that is not conducive to slow cognitive thought. It's conducive to immediate, you know, physical stuff really useful for, but not so good for the mental.

• 1:19:39Tim Ferriss?

  So let's talk about the regulation, the self-regulation. So I've made some notes, obviously you can see them, those who are on audio only will not be able to see them, that's fine because it makes me sound more professional if you think I'm doing everything off the top of my head. So at one point, you turned 500 euros into 1.25 million euros, which is around 1.7 million, if I'm getting roughly, I believe that that math right, that was at the EPT San Remo. And it was 500 euro buy-in or 500 dollar.

• 1:20:13Speaker 04

  It was a 500 euro satellite tournament into the main event buy-in, which was 5,000 euros. So everyone was buying in for 5,000, but I won my way in because I couldn't afford the 5,000.

• 1:20:23Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:24Speaker 04

  I won my way in through a feeder, smaller tournament.

• 1:20:25Tim Ferriss?

  So a few just housekeeping questions about this. How long after that first tournament win after the TV show was this?

• 1:20:37Speaker 04

  This was 2010, so five years.

• 1:20:41Tim Ferriss?

  Wow. All right. So five years later, this happens, presumably in this tournament, there was less huh and then crying and running away from the table.

• 1:20:52Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 1:20:53Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. So what type of self-regulation did you learn over that period of time and then subsequent to that?

• 1:21:02Speaker 04

  Oh, man, that tournament was nuts because, you know, the TV show was in 2005. I didn't actually really turn fully professional whereby I was living off it until 2000, like late 2008, I was still sort of playing casually. Couldn't really get my act together enough to, I wasn't good enough really to be living off poker before then. So I'd been, I'd been playing on the circuit now for like a year and a half and I played some bigger buy-in tournaments, but I'd never made like any like really big final tables or anything. And this Italy one kind of happened by accident. It was a, remember the volcano that went off in Iceland?

• 1:21:38Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I do.

• 1:21:38Speaker 04

  And it shut down all of European airspace. I was in the south of France with something completely different and I couldn't get home. And someone, I heard that there was this tournament going on in northern Italy and it was like a train ride away. So I was like, all right, screw it. I'll go there.

• 1:21:51Tim Ferriss?

  Thank God for volcanoes.

• 1:21:52Speaker 04

  Bless that volcano. Oh yeah. And then I arrived and there was this like this feeder tournament. It's called a satellite that night where, you know, it was 500 euro entry and one in 10 people would win their ticket for the 5,000, the main event. So I won my ticket that night, like four in the morning and then went and played it the next day, starting at noon. And a very strange thing happened to me actually at noon before the tournament started, but that's like another topic I think we can get into later, maybe.

• 1:22:17Tim Ferriss?

  Wait a minute. You can't leave that. Just give us a teaser and then maybe we'll come back to it.

• 1:22:23Speaker 04

  I had my first of a handful of completely unexplainable borderline metaphysical experiences. And I, I won't say what it is now.

• 1:22:37Tim Ferriss?

  We'll come back to that.

• 1:22:37Speaker 04

  It'll be better if we talk about it later.

• 1:22:38Tim Ferriss?

  We'll come back to that later.

• 1:22:39Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:22:48Tim Ferriss?

  Leaving that undescribed is what I call keeping the audience listening.

• 1:22:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, you better keep watching.

• 1:22:54Tim Ferriss?

  And now for a short commercial break. That's good.

• 1:22:56Speaker 04

  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 1,200 people. So huge, huge tournament. And six days later, I was on the final table, down to the final nine.

• 1:23:11Tim Ferriss?

  How many hours a day are you playing?

• 1:23:13Speaker 04

  I played like. 10 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. Because in the beginning, the stakes are like, okay, I might lose my 5,000 euro buy-in. But as the tournament wears on and, you know, there's less people, your chip stack is worth more and more in terms of equity.

• 1:23:35Tim Ferriss?

  And So your loss aversion starts to

• 1:23:38Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:23:38Tim Ferriss?

  Go vertical.

• 1:23:40Speaker 04

  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, 90,000 euros. I only had like, I think I had like 50,000 pounds to my name at this point. So I was already guaranteed double my net worth for whatever happened on that final table. And first prize was the 1.25 million euros, so like 1.7 dollars. And that morning, I think I got some sleep the night before. Because I'm somewhat of an insomniac anyway. So if I have something on the next day that's big, I often will just not sleep very well. And so you can imagine this cranks it up to 10. And I was dreaming, you know, I don't know if you ever have that, where you've been doing a lot of a particular thing, like trading or whatever,

• 1:24:24Speaker 04

  and you sort of semi-asleep and see the thing.

• 1:24:27Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:24:27Speaker 04

  I was playing poker. I was like, I was lying there, but 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 don't know, we're gonna play tomorrow. Like, I'm a mess. I was so nervous before the final table. I like threw up three times on the way, like walking down. It was so stressful, but I don't know. Once we actually started playing, once I got the cards in my hand, it was just like, and I just switched into this like mode of, I don't know, it was weird.

• 1:24:58Tim Ferriss?

  Was that the first time that it happened or did that happen to you before?

• 1:25:02Speaker 04

  Not to that extent, because I think it was a perfect storm of like, it's such extreme nerves and being such a mess beforehand. And then like actually being able to play well. I don't know, the delta felt more than I'd ever had it before. But I had had that before where I was like able to like get into the zone very well.

• 1:25:18Tim Ferriss?

  I wonder if you just spent all of your

• 1:25:21Speaker 04

  Stress calories.

• 1:25:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:25:23Tim Ferriss?

  You know what I mean? Like that tank was empty.

• 1:25:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:25:25Tim Ferriss?

  So you needed to switch to a different tank.

• 1:25:28Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:25:34Tim Ferriss?

  Of course, I'm not going to let go of the metaphysical experience. We are going to come back to that probably quickly. But before we do, for people who are not going to bank on having metaphysical experiences or the feeling of being guided, what else have you learned about regulating, whether it's the white noise, or especially for me, of personal interest, when someone is actively trying to fuck with you and disrupt all of your systems?

• 1:26:03Speaker 04

  The best thing I found, and it's super simple, is just breathing. Three deep breaths. It's so cookie cutter, but it just works. Just close your eyes and inhale in. You could feel, even if your heart's pounding, my heart's actually pounding a little bit now because I'm retelling the story. It's funny. But just that, you notice that, you feel your body, you breathe in and you breathe it into your belly. And I imagine my favorite color, which is usually a mix of turquoise and purple, something like that. And I just, I'm sucking that in and pulling it down into my stomach. And then it's just like this settling feeling. And it's, half of it is just like bullshitting myself.

• 1:26:44Tim Ferriss?

  But it's an interrupt.

• 1:26:45Speaker 04

  But 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 playing a silly little in my head just to like make light of the situation a bit. But that, it requires a lot of ability to sort of step out and observe the situation. Because obviously, once you're in the red mist, particularly the red mist, more than the white noise, by definition, you are like animalistic. You don't have the ability to step outside and observe a situation well. So it's, I think, just practice, really. Practice becoming angry, you know, practice reading. I guess a way you could do it is go like, go read something that you know

• 1:27:29Speaker 04

  makes you angry. Like really reliably gets your blood pressure up. And then try and like build in some kind of trigger that makes you do the three breaths thing.

• 1:27:41Tim Ferriss?

  So for 99.9% of the sadomasochistic users of Twitter, myself included, just go on Twitter.

• 1:27:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, just go on Twitter. Every day. You'll be reliably upset.

• 1:27:51Tim Ferriss?

  For two minutes.

• 1:27:52Speaker 04

  Oh, man, Twitter.

• 1:27:54Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, what a nasty neighborhood that's turned into.

• 1:27:57Speaker 04

  Oh, so sad.

• 1:27:59Tim Ferriss?

  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 upset you. Oh, yeah."

• 1:28:15Speaker 04

  I really got to you, huh? Yeah, just close your eyes. Don't even look at me.

• 1:28:17Tim Ferriss?

  No, close your eyes. Don't look at me. Don't worry. No, no, nothing to see here.

• 1:28:20Speaker 04

  You can't hear me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He'll just endless stream of words.

• 1:28:22Tim Ferriss?

  It's not like everybody's waiting for you or anything.

• 1:28:27Tim Ferriss?

  All right, before I lose track, which I wouldn't, but what the hell happened in the morning? And you can contextualize this however you want.

• 1:28:34Speaker 04

  Sure. No, I mean, what happened was I played a bunch of these tournaments, not of ones quite this size, but I'd still played a lot of tournaments at this point. And I was there before, before it actually started. Usually I, 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 Pokerstars, whose event it was, you know, they dimmed the lights. They're like, "Welcome to EBT San Remo. Huge. We've got incredible feel, blah, blah, blah." And then they dimmed the lights and they put on, on the screens around the room, just like a promo, exciting.

• 1:29:05Tim Ferriss?

  Promo video.

• 1:29:05Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:29:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, good choice.

• 1:29:12Speaker 04

  Yeah. And, you know, I was like, "Oh, this is cool. Yeah, I'm excited." And while I was just like, listening to it, just like out of nowhere, this, it's like a bolt of lightning, felt like. It was like this, like, and this voice in my head said, "You are going to win this tournament." And it sounded like my own voice, but what I can't remember is whether it was, "I am gonna win," or "you are gonna win." But I'm pretty sure it was "you are gonna win," but it literally sounded like my own voice. And it was so-

• 1:29:39Tim Ferriss?

  Sounded like your own voice?

• 1:29:40Speaker 04

  Yes. So it was like, you know, when you speak in your head, like the, the voice you hear, like, most people have that, right?

• 1:29:47Tim Ferriss?

  You know, that Tuesday voice that everyone hears.

• 1:29:51Speaker 04

  Oh, man, I'm letting a lot out here. Um, it sounded like how I would sound in my own head.

• 1:29:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, I understand.

• 1:29:58Speaker 04

  And it said, you are going to win this tournament. And I got this rush of goosebumps. It's even happening a little bit like the hairs up on my, you know, on my arms. And I remember looking around the room like, did I just say that out loud? Did anyone else hear this? And everyone else was just like in their phones or whatever. And I was like, well, that was freaky. And then the lights came back up and they're like, okay, cool shuffle up and deal. And I was still like stunned and I was like, okay, cool. And then like halfway through the day, you know, and then I sort of a little bit forgot about it. But then like halfway through the day, I got in a big pot and I lost half my chips. You know, it's always a bad feeling when that happens. And I was like, oh, man, I'm nearly out the tournament. I guess that was bullshit, you know? So like, I had like little multiple moments over the next few days where it clearly was a real thing.

• 1:30:43Speaker 04

  Because I like checked in on it and I even told a friend of mine on date.

• 1:30:46Tim Ferriss?

  What do you mean checked in on it? Meaning you remembered that it had happened?

• 1:30:50Speaker 04

  That it had happened, but because obviously the rational explanation to this is that it was just a false memory. You know, that I have retroactively remembered something that didn't really happen as a way of like making.

• 1:31:00Tim Ferriss?

  You reconstructed it.

• 1:31:01Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:31:01Tim Ferriss?

  But you have multiple points at which you referred to it.

• 1:31:04Speaker 04

  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 was like, oh, you got a lot of chips. It's going well. I was like, yeah, uh, things are going well. Really weird. I feel like I'm going to 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.

• 1:31:34Tim Ferriss?

  Now, I think you said string or series of experiences. Is that type of experience in poker isolated to that? And it doesn't have to be constrained to poker.

• 1:31:45Speaker 04

  So what was interesting was after I.

• 1:31:46Tim Ferriss?

  I may ask, uh, an apologist for doing this herky jerky questioning style. But did you have any of those types of experiences when you were younger?

• 1:31:55Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:31:55Tim Ferriss?

  That you recall? No?

• 1:31:56Speaker 04

  No, I was not like a weird kid or, you know, that had. Sorry.

• 1:32:01Tim Ferriss?

  You weird kid. You weren't like the kid from The Sixth Sense.

• 1:32:04Speaker 04

  No, I wasn't the Sixth Sense kid, no.

• 1:32:07Speaker 04

  No, I did not, is to answer that question. I had not really ever had, I think, anything. You know, I never saw a ghost or anything like that.

• 1:32:15Tim Ferriss?

  I'm not asking about ghosts. Don't lump me in with the ghost hunters, come on.

• 1:32:21Speaker 04

  I want to just paint the picture of that I was a very, in fact, like a deep skeptic.

• 1:32:25Tim Ferriss?

  Right. Well, you still are a deep skeptic in a lot of ways.

• 1:32:28Speaker 04

  Right, right. But like certainly then, like I'd never had anything weird that I couldn't really explain in any conventional way. I'd 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?

• 1:32:41Tim Ferriss?

  No, not so much a common thing in poker, but have you since had more of those types of experiences?

• 1:32:49Speaker 04

  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-

• 1:33:00Tim Ferriss?

  If you change your mind, we can cut it later.

• 1:33:01Speaker 04

  Exactly. For want of a better word, I had an extreme energy healing, an almost accidental one. So it was a few years ago and seemingly out of the blue, I started getting this very unpleasant sensation in my ear where particularly, it was like a sort of low frequency buzzing, humming quite frequently, like so some, some kind of tinnitus.

• 1:33:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:26Speaker 04

  But it was almost like a pressure and voices, particularly men's voices, became distorted to the point that they were unbearable to listen to. And it was really bumming me out. It would come in like clusters. I would have it like for a few hours and it would go away and come later on in the day. And it was stopping me from doing any social events because any loud scenario was unbearable, but particularly men speaking, I just couldn't handle it. And this went on and off for a few months and I went and saw a doctor, multiple doctors, and had hearing tests and they said, oh, you're losing your hearing and the, the low frequencies of your, of your hearing in that ear, we think you have many ears disease. Many ears is this degenerative thing, which usually people end up completely deaf when

• 1:34:09Speaker 04

  they have it, where basically the nerve cells in, in the, in an ear start dying and they don't really know why. They think it's something to do with like salts and ion channels. And it's incurable, as far as I know. And so I was told that's what I probably have. And they're like, it's pretty, really sorry. It's, you know, it was just bad news to find that out. And also because one of the symptoms of it is you start having balance problems as well. You get like these vertigo attacks and people be like vomiting and so on. And so you can imagine, I was like really down in the dumps finding this out. And then cut to three months later or so, go to Burning Man, and I have for the first time, one of these vertigo attacks, one of the days. I mean, I wasn't completely sober, but it was not a good time, as you can imagine, having a vertigo attack while not being sober for the first time. So I was then really down in the dumps.

• 1:34:53Speaker 04

  And then on the last night of the burn, I was talking to some friends and started talking to this girl, who I kind of, I don't know that well, but she's a friend of a friend. And I mentioned about my ear. And she's like, oh, well, I do energy healing. I'm an energy healer. I was like, I don't know what that is, but sure, do whatever you want to do. Yeah, have a go. She's like, I can try. And after, she sort of put her hand over my ear for a few minutes. And then she says, I remember saying something like, there's something there, I need to get it. And she starts sucking over my ear with her mouth, like not touching it, but just like, and it was really unpleasant. Like, you can imagine that sensation of someone like inhaling over your ear. And I was like, oh, please stop. She's like, no, I need to get this.

• 1:35:38Speaker 04

  There's something there. And she does it, I don't know, for a few minutes. And then eventually kind of collapses in a heap on the floor, crying and freezing cold, going, oh, my God, that was, that was bad. I don't know what that was. That was really, really bad. Again, I was not fully sober. So this is a slightly, you know, retelling. But I just remember being so shocked. I just didn't expect anything to actually happen. I didn't really feel anything other than this like unpleasant sensation of her sucking. But I was so shocked at the way she was now reacting. Because she was shocked. She did not seem to expect whatever had just happened to her. And she said afterwards, you know, she came around after a little while and she'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

• 1:36:23Speaker 04

  it's fully gone and it's, it's gone away. And I was like, well, okay, what does that mean for my symptoms? Am I cured? She's like, yeah, yeah, you'll probably have symptoms for a couple more weeks and then you'll be fine. And that's exactly what happened. And I haven't had any problems since. It kind of just like.

• 1:36:39Speaker 04

  It just blew my world open because aside of that premonition thing, which I'd kind of forgotten about, I have not ever subscribed to anything like that. I like, I'm a physicist. In fact, like, you know, I'm proud, like, I kind of built a career of being a like, materialist, rationalist physicist. And I don't have any time for any of that stuff. It's all nonsense. It's all confirmation bias. No one's ever actually tested it empirically or proven it. Show me the study and I'll believe it. But here I am, having that experience with two, what feel like pretty incontrovertible data points, that something that I cannot explain, happened and fortunately would be incredibly beneficial to me. Such a blessing. So, yeah.

• 1:37:24Tim Ferriss?

  So, these experiences are particularly interesting to me as direct firsthand experiences. Of course, secondhand now that I'm listening, but are particularly interesting to me when I'm speaking with someone who has demonstrated a very well-developed ability to use system two, thinking and rationality and reasoning and mathematics and so on, in not just the world, but in competitive arenas, right? So you have a calibrated and also tested ability

• 1:38:06Tim Ferriss?

  to use those faculties that you've developed. And I'm glad you're mentioning these things just because weird shit happens. And the idea that we have it all figured out is ludicrous. Even though humans at any point in history, whether you go back to the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, you know, I'm sure, you know, 6,000 years ago, or whatever it was with the Egyptians, I'm sure they thought they had most things figured out. And it's just so clear when you begin to really poke and prod and as you gain more years and have more experiences, especially if you start pushing into some strange corners, that there's

• 1:38:45Tim Ferriss?

  a lot we simply don't understand. And even if we were to, say, not chalk those up to false memories, but let's just say we chalked it up to placebo effect.

• 1:38:54Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:38:55Tim Ferriss?

  Nonetheless, even if it were just placebo effect.

• 1:38:59Speaker 04

  Incredible.

• 1:39:00Tim Ferriss?

  That doesn't diminish the.

• 1:39:05Tim Ferriss?

  Absurd inexplicability of it.

• 1:39:08Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:39:09Tim Ferriss?

  With the current mechanisms that we understand. And that's super exciting to me. It's super exciting to me. And it doesn't mean that you nor I would advocate that people just accept everything at face value. Of course not. There's horse shit everywhere. I mean, we're sitting in Austin, like the world capital of spirituality. There's so much nonsense and so many charlatans. But I do pay attention to people like you, who have demonstrated in other areas that they have the ability to think rationally and have some grasp of, a very good grasp of science and so on. Right? That's kind of one of the first litmus tests for me. If someone's sharing something with me, I'm like, all right.

• 1:39:54Tim Ferriss?

  Can they fight logically out of a paper bag? Right? Like, can they?

• 1:40:00Tim Ferriss?

  Have they demonstrated any ability to use structured reasoning in other places?

• 1:40:05Speaker 04

  Are they able to cross examine their own beliefs?

• 1:40:07Tim Ferriss?

  Right? Exactly. Exactly. And are they skeptical in other areas? Or is it just like, okay, they accept anything as long as it's alternative, but they reject, you know, 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 are many other examples. I certainly wouldn't be here for more for Western medicine, let's just say, not science. And I struggle with where to even take this because there's so many directions it could go that are pretty strange. But, and I don't want to co-opt physics, so please give me a slap here if this is just an amateur butchering the good name of physics.

• 1:40:51Tim Ferriss?

  But I've had a number of cognitive scientists on the podcast, like Donald Hoffman. I've had physicists on the podcast, although some would consider Michio Kaku more of a science communicator, but still, as some fundamentals. I've had private conversations certainly with a number of physicists. And I lack the foundation of mathematics necessary to fully appreciate it. But when you even start to look at the conversations that were being had between Einstein and Bohr way back in the day, relative to quantum mechanics.

• 1:41:26Tim Ferriss?

  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 spacetime itself as an objective reality. I mean, there are pieces people can find online by qualified scientists on the depth of spacetime, right? And thinking about that as almost a UI that we have evolved to utilize, but not as the one and only user interface to whatever we might be contending with.

• 1:42:04Speaker 04

  And like Donald Hoffman even thinks that, well, not just Donald Hoffman, he thinks that consciousness essentially gives rise to space.

• 1:42:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:13Speaker 04

  And while a lot of theoretical physicists poo-poo his ideas, and I think by and large they are correct too, even they would agree that it seems like space itself is an emergent property. It's not a fundamental thing. You know, we're not objects rattling around in a big empty box. It is a thing that emerges from basically interactions of mathematical functions on some, whether it's on a substrate or whether it, I don't know if it even needs a substrate, I'm too rusty on that stuff. But it's super weird if you dig into the fundamental structure of this reality.

• 1:42:48Tim Ferriss?

  And this is not like, this is not a, you know, Wiccan witchcraft shop with like tarot cards in the display case, not to knock that, right? But like, we're talking about some of the most esteemed scientists in a hard science with peer-reviewed publications and so on. And if you just look at that stuff closely enough, shit's really weird.

• 1:43:11Speaker 04

  Yeah. There's a paper I was recently reading that's like digging into the, that it seems like spacetime is, well, space itself is essentially coming out of observers interacting with each other.

• 1:43:24Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I love this.

• 1:43:25Speaker 04

  Consciousnesses 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.

• 1:43:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:33Speaker 04

  It's beyond my pay grade. So I don't know.

• 1:43:36Tim Ferriss?

  But I may need your.

• 1:43:37Speaker 04

  I want to, I want to send it to like Sean Carroll. I don't know if you've ever had him on.

• 1:43:40Tim Ferriss?

  Sean Carroll, I haven't had on, but my brother introduced me to his podcast Mindscape. Is it Mindscape? Excellent podcast.

• 1:43:47Speaker 04

  So good.

• 1:43:47Tim Ferriss?

  So if Sean Carroll is out there listening, or if anyone knows him, let him know I'm a, he may not want to hear this. I don't know what his opinion will be of me. But big fan of his podcast. He's a damn fine thinker and a damn fine communicator.

• 1:44:01Speaker 04

  He really is, yeah.

• 1:44:02Tim Ferriss?

  And he had an excellent episode on sort of archaeological exploration of Stonehenge and other artifacts as external mnemonic devices. Super cool. So Liv, Olivia, question for you. How do you, as someone who is a trained rationalist materialist, although you may not identify as solely those things, I don't want to imply that, how do you integrate some of these experiences into your life, your framework, your worldview? What do you do with that?

• 1:44:44Speaker 04

  It's tricky. I mean, you know, I think with all these things, it's walking this fine line between gullibility, open mindedness, whatever you want to call it, and skepticism and cynicism. And I think where my poker training comes in handy is that poker trains you to think in probabilities. You're never certain about anything. You could be bluffing me with, you know, you could have aces, or you could be bluffing me with six, four suited that missed the card it needed. So you become very comfortable in terms of holding concurrent belief states in your mind with different weighted probabilities of those things being true.

• 1:45:22Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:45:39Tim Ferriss?

  Potentially here, heal your inner ear.

• 1:45:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, like, like I was literally told I had a degenerative thing and I was going to go deaf and like, no one's been cured of it. And this has miraculously gone away. So whatever the hell happened, the point is, I didn't go and change my life. I didn't suddenly go and be like, that's it. I'm going to go and practice energy healing and become a witch and so on. I. Continued still like I'm still I'm an adherent to the scientific method. It's just that I've now broadened my, as you mentioned, you know, it's almost like people become, they believe in the scientism as opposed to being a scientist. A true scientist is that you are maximally curious. You do your best to devise experiments in order to get reliable, robust results that you can use to predict the world. And you try and minimize all the biases and things that could mess up your experiment and give you a faulty result.

• 1:46:23Speaker 04

  And so there's no reason why I can't incorporate these two data points in terms of, I mean, I haven't gone out and done any science. I really should, I guess, go and do some tests and see if I can try and recreate that experience. But it's very difficult because it was a set and setting were very important in what happened there. I would assume, anyway, I don't know that.

• 1:46:44Tim Ferriss?

  Well, when they make the Netflix series about it and they recreate the entire environment, then you can sit down and try to recreate.

• 1:46:49Speaker 04

  Yeah. So what I guess I've done is I have upweighted, you know, whereas before I would have given the probability that energy healing is a real thing. I would have given it like a, probably if you'd asked my old like skeptical self, I would have literally said it's zero. But, you know, I wasn't such a bad Bayesian that I would give it actual zero. Maybe like one in a million.

• 1:47:09Tim Ferriss?

  Bad Bayesian. Oh, that's good. We can't, we don't have time to unpack that.

• 1:47:13Speaker 04

  No, no, but yeah. It would be like, you know, I would have given it a one in a million. And now I have updated it, you know, with this evidence to, how many orders of magnitude do I want to go? I mean, I will give it, I at least give it a one in 100. But I think it's more likely that there is a, an explanation through what we know conventionally that is still more probable than that it is something completely, like some completely novel thing that is untapped. But that said, you know, I've actually had a few other little ones I won't go into, but like other little data points of just like weird energy things that have happened in certain scenarios, it's helped me. But it's still important to keep the like skeptical hat on. And extraordinary beliefs require extraordinary evidence.

• 1:47:58Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:48:09Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:48:54Speaker 04

  Confidence intervals.

• 1:48:56Tim Ferriss?

  Right. So confidence intervals, understanding, powering, because you'll also find folks who, and I was, I've been saying scientism, but I guess it's scientism, the sort of like capital S. In either case, it has a capital S and it's not good. So if you come to that, one of the telltale characteristics that I've come across is they'll ask if something was a controlled study or a placebo-controlled randomized study, randomized control, you know, RCT, and they'll say, well, how many, how many subjects were there? Or what was the N? If they get fancy and I might say 20, 25, and they're like, oh, yeah, small study.

• 1:49:31Speaker 04

  Nonsense.

• 1:49:32Tim Ferriss?

  And I'm like, it's not that simplistic. There are quite a few variables you have to take into account. So recommendations for folks who are interested. Number one, Studying the Studies by Peter Attia, M.D., excellent series of blog posts that take you into the fundamentals of understanding how to dissect and understand a study, which includes meta-analyses and gets into the, the risks of taking meta-analyses as gospel also, because garbage in, garbage out, and there's, there's a lot to it. Another recommendation, actually a podcast that I did six years ago, I realized when I pulled this up, this is

• 1:50:14Tim Ferriss?

  podcast number 194, The Magic and Power of Placebo. This is with Eric Vance, who wrote a book called Suggestible You, subtitle, The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal. And he's written very widely on placebos, an excellent book. Many of his feature pieces are Exceptional. There was a great piece in Wired Magazine, probably 10 years ago, on the evolution of the placebo effect and how it has changed depending on the culture and other influences. So in certain places, say, a placebo pill in a blue capsule or a red capsule perform better than other colors. It's really-

• 1:50:52Speaker 04

  You need to do, don't do a blue or red one in this day and age.

• 1:50:55Tim Ferriss?

  That's true. That is true. Yeah, we could pick other colors. But the context that surrounds that is really, really interesting. And then the last thing I would recommend people check out is cognitive biases and looking at both frameworks intended to avoid them and just getting a better understanding. So you can go to Wikipedia and just look up cognitive biases and get a pretty basic list. You can look at something like Poor Charlie's Almanac with Charlie Munger, although it's a bit dense and it's a little user unfriendly in a lot of respects. But what were you gonna say?

• 1:51:26Speaker 04

  I think I would recommend is some of Julia Galif's work on the Scout Mindset and Motivated Reasoning.

• 1:51:34Tim Ferriss?

  What was the first one?

• 1:51:35Speaker 04

  The Scout Mindset. Yeah. I mean, she did a TED Talk on it, but she's just written a book on it as well. And I think she actually goes in, if I remember rightly-

• 1:51:42Tim Ferriss?

  And her last name is G A L E F?

• 1:51:44Speaker 04

  Yes. She goes into that sort of, 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 really breaks down how you get this, your brain, which is like the map to match the actual territory, which is the universe, as accurately as possible. But where I think it's maybe lacking a little bit now, because I've had some of these weirder experiences, which actually where I wasn't, in the classical sense, rational, I clearly went off the beaten path into some weird land, but it was actually very beneficial to me, even if it was like some completely useful fiction, it was still useful.

• 1:52:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:52:25Speaker 04

  And this idea of useful fictions, I think, needs to be explored further.

• 1:52:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. I'd also add that much like poker, science, I don't think a lot of folks realize, is largely a game of probabilities. You don't prove something 100% most of the time. It's like, well-

• 1:52:42Speaker 04

  Literally never, actually.

• 1:52:43Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, you can have overwhelmingly compelling data, even with, say, an observational study, say with the sort of quintessential example, it'd be cigarette smoking causing lung cancer, right?

• 1:52:57Tim Ferriss?

  But most of the times, 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 it was not very intellectually engaging. It was like spacebar every time like a green square popped up or something, but I needed the seven dollars an hour, whatever it was. And I've been a subject at Stanford with

• 1:53:39Tim Ferriss?

  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

• 1:53:52Speaker 04

  Collapse.

• 1:53:53Tim Ferriss?

  Mental collapse. Yeah. So why do I do these things? Because I'm interested in seeing the process. And even some of the best science you could point to in the most prestigious journals, when you actually get in there, it's a lot messier than people think. But people want to have confidence in something, then religion has become so out of fashion that they look to the high priests of science and they're like, at least I have the confidence in this being true.

• 1:54:18Speaker 04

  So I actually want, one of my next videos I want to make on this, which is about basically these signaling prestige, bad incentives that get society stuck in these kind of these, these traps essentially. So we're stuck in one of those with the current status quo of the way science is done. And this is not at all to knock any scientists, you know, they're doing, they're doing their absolute best. But the way the system has been designed, we give all the rewards 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.

• 1:54:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, totally true.

• 1:54:52Speaker 04

  So there's this incredible incentive to be always looking for some new novel thing. In order to get that, you know, get your, your thing published in Nature and get those research dollars for the next time, but it doesn't actually really advance human knowledge because so many of these things don't replicate. And it's, we're sort of stuck in this spiral of just like, everyone's trying to please do whatever they can to get in the journal. And it's, there, there's a name for it. So there's this really incredible short online book called Inadequate Equilibria by the guy who wrote most of the stuff on Less Wrong, Eliezer Yudkowsky. And I recommend-

• 1:55:26Tim Ferriss?

  Inadequate Equilibria.

• 1:55:27Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:55:28Tim Ferriss?

  It's a heady name.

• 1:55:30Speaker 04

  Oh, man. I know it sounds, it's so good. It has one of the best things. It has a discussion, a fictitious discussion with an alien from a perfect society, like a basic person who thinks everything's explained, you know, everything that's wrong in our society is because of like, there's bad people being greedy. And then with a cynical, smart economist. And they have this three-way discussion talking about like, reason why the US healthcare system is so expensive. And it sort of goes into this meandering thing about-

• 1:55:54Tim Ferriss?

  That's a cool premise.

• 1:55:55Speaker 04

  It's so good. Like, you must include this in the show notes.

• 1:55:59Tim Ferriss?

  How long would you say it is?

• 1:56:00Speaker 04

  I mean, ideally, they read, they could just read chapter three, honestly. It's, I don't know, it's like a 45 minute read. Yeah. It's just, it's like a book chapter. And you can kind of read it standalone.

• 1:56:09Tim Ferriss?

  We'll put this, we'll put it in the show notes.

• 1:56:10Speaker 04

  But basically, it's, it's talking about these like, these traps that we can get into where it gets people now speaking game theory. It gets society stuck in like shitty Nash equilibrium. So a Nash equilibrium is when two people or multiple people are playing in a strategy where it would be bad for anyone to deviate from that strategy. It's like, everyone's stuck doing that. But not all Nash equilibrium are actually created equal. There are some where if everyone was doing X instead of Y, everyone would be happier. They'd also be like, you know, now stuck in a new thing. So like, a good example of this would be, so I just made a video called The Beauty Wars about this like fictitious thing called Moloch, which I call like, the demon of negative sum games, basically. It's

• 1:56:52Speaker 04

  like, the god of negative sum games. It's the, it's a force of bad, usually economic incentives that make people sort of sacrifice things that they want in order to optimize for a short-term goal. And the example I talk about is these beauty filters on Instagram. I don't know if you've spent any time-

• 1:57:09Tim Ferriss?

  They are- Horrifying. I mean, in how dramatic they are. I'd never seen these things before until my girlfriend showed them to me and I was dumbfounded.

• 1:57:19Speaker 04

  They're horrifying, not only in how impressively good they are at doing stuff, but also how now the really insidious ones are the subtle ones. Because there are some where you would never, you'd go online and you would not be able to tell. If you don't know the person, or even if you know the person, you wouldn't necessarily be able to tell. You just think it's a good picture of them. They're so subtle, but they're so effective. It seems like there is clearly just some kind of optimal face structure that, you know, our eyes find pleasing and it just tweaks people, makes the eyes a little bit wider apart or a little bit bigger or the lips, you know, just, just changes the proportions just right that it sets the, you know, the dopamine spike off in your brain. And

• 1:57:56Tim Ferriss?

  It's gonna make online dating really hard.

• 1:57:57Speaker 04

  Oh, man. Well, so as a girl on Instagram-

• 1:58:00Tim Ferriss?

  Not that I'm on the field. I'm not on the playing field, but if I were, that sounds like a headache.

• 1:58:04Speaker 04

  Well, and but also for people who use them, like, so I'm a girl on Instagram. You know, I, for a while, certainly like made a lot of my career off the way I looked. There's such an incentive pressure, you know, if I want to keep playing the game of trying to grow my Instagram, like sexy pic, 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 most particularly women on, on Instagram, they are not having a good time with these things either on themselves. Because if you then like compare your face side to side, you're just like, man, you just, it just makes you feel ugly.

• 1:58:50Speaker 04

  And so we're in this weird situation where no one wants to do stuff that makes them hate their face, but they're doing it anyway. It's like a lower Nash equilibrium. You know, we could all be in a higher Nash equilibrium where we're not doing it, but instead we're all stuck down there because of these bad game theoretic incentives. So this is my current obsession, this thing called Moloch, and I think about it all the time.

• 1:59:09Tim Ferriss?

  M O L O C H for people wondering, 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?

• 1:59:21Speaker 04

  Probably the best thing is if they search for my name and then the beauty bore. That'll link to the video I just talked about.

• 1:59:28Tim Ferriss?

  All right.

• 1:59:29Speaker 04

  And then you can find my channel from.

• 1:59:30Tim Ferriss?

  And just for the spelling, everybody, it's Liv, L I V, last name, B O E R E E. Which means I learned just beforehand.

• 1:59:41Speaker 04

  Drunk farmer.

• 1:59:44Speaker 04

  So they say.

• 1:59:45Tim Ferriss?

  So they say.

• 1:59:46Speaker 04

  And I did grow up on a farm. And I did drink a lot.

• 1:59:50Tim Ferriss?

  It's so good. So good. Yeah. Ferris, you know, the best I can tell.

• 1:59:55Speaker 04

  You're a big wheel.

• 1:59:57Tim Ferriss?

  It could be that. It also refers to Ferris, like Ferris oxide, F E R R O U S.

• 2:00:03Speaker 04

  Ooh, rusty.

• 2:00:04Tim Ferriss?

  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. Liv, we should do a round two sometime. We're practically neighbors. We have so much we could talk about. We've got a million other things, even in the notes in front of me that we could cover and should cover. I'm thinking about this training and.

• 2:00:36Speaker 04

  Are you gonna do it?

• 2:00:38Tim Ferriss?

  We'll see. Requires more mezcal to make that decision.

• 2:00:42Speaker 04

  I think we could, we could condense it down. We don't have to do the full eight weeks. I think commit to even three weeks. Honestly, I think you would. J K will still be better than you at that stage. I have to say that. No, he won't be.

• 2:00:56Tim Ferriss?

  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 you'd like to say before we, before we wind this down?

• 2:01:13Speaker 04

  No, I mean, I guess do check out my, my YouTube. I'd love people to go and I'm, I'm now I've moved to Austin and I'm like building a studio and everything. I'm going to be ramping up production again, so I would love people to go and just sub to my channel so that they catch my stuff. Because 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.

• 2:01:38Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:39Speaker 04

  That's a big one.

• 2:01:39Tim Ferriss?

  Talk about a nasty game.

• 2:01:41Speaker 04

  Yeah. And Moloch, Moloch's in that.

• 2:01:43Tim Ferriss?

  Moloch, Moloch's all over that.

• 2:01:44Speaker 04

  Fucking Moloch.

• 2:01:46Tim Ferriss?

  So Liv, we're going to link to everything in the show notes. People can find you at livboree.com also, which I would imagine has links to many things. And we'll put links to everything we've discussed, all the resources, inadequate equilibria, and all other good things in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast. And so nice to see you. Thanks for taking the time.

• 2:02:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is awesome.

• 2:02:13Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 2:02:29Tim Ferriss?

  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, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.

• 2:03:11Tim Ferriss?

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

• 2:03:38Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Element, spelled L-M-N-T. What on earth is Element? It is a delicious, sugar-free electrolyte drink mix. I've stocked up on boxes and boxes of this. It was one of the first things that I bought when I saw COVID coming down the pike, and I usually use one to two per day. Element is formulated to help anyone with their electrolyte needs and perfectly suited to folks following a keto, low-carb, or paleo diet. Or if you drink a ton of water and you might not have the right balance, that's often when I drink it, or if you're doing any type of endurance exercise, mountain biking, et cetera, another application. If you've ever struggled to feel good on keto, low-carb, or paleo, it's most likely because even if you're consciously consuming electrolytes, you're just not getting enough.

• 2:04:22Tim Ferriss?

  And it relates to a bunch of stuff like a hormone called adenosine, blah, blah, blah, when insulin is low, but suffice to say, this is where Element, again spelled L-M-N-T, can help. My favorite flavor by far is citrus salt, which, as a side note, you can also use to make a kick-ass, no-sugar margarita, but for special occasions, obviously. You're probably already familiar with one of the names behind it, Rob Wolf, R-O-B-B, Rob Wolf, who is a former research biochemist and two-time New York Times bestselling author of The Paleo Solution and Wired to Eat. Rob created Element by scratching his own itch. That's how it got started. His Brazilian jiu-jitsu coaches turned him on to electrolytes as a performance enhancer. Things clicked, and bam, company was born.

• 2:05:06Tim Ferriss?

  So if you're on a low-carb diet or fasting, electrolytes play a key role in relieving hunger, cramps, headaches, tiredness, and dizziness. Sugar, artificial ingredients, coloring, all that's garbage, unneeded, there's none of that in Element. And a lot of names you might recognize are already using Element. It was recommended to me by one of my favorite athlete friends, three Navy SEAL teams as prescribed by their Master Chief, marine units, FBI sniper teams, at least five NFL teams who have subscriptions. They are the exclusive hydration partner to Team USA weightlifting, and on and on. You can try it risk-free. If you don't like it, Element will give you your money back, no questions asked. They have extremely low return rates. Get your free sample pack with any Element purchase at drinklmnt.com/tim.

• 2:05:50Tim Ferriss?

  Be sure to also try the new Element Sparkling, a bold 16-ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water. Again, check it all out, drinklmnt.com/tim. Drinklmnt.com/tim.

• 2:06:06Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I view AG1 as comprehensive nutritional insurance, and that is nothing new. I actually recommended AG1 in my 2010 best seller, more than a decade ago, The 4-Hour Body, and I did not get paid to do so. I simply loved the product and felt like it was the ultimate nutritionally dense supplement that you could use conveniently while on the run, which is, for me, a lot of the time. I have been using it a very, very long time indeed. And I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases.

• 2:06:49Tim Ferriss?

  I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? What is this stuff? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. Since 2010, they have improved the formula 52 times in pursuit of making the best foundational nutrition supplement possible, using rigorous standards and high-quality ingredients. How many ingredients? 75. And you would be hard-pressed to find a more nutrient-dense formula on the market. It has a multivitamin, multi-mineral, superfood complex, probiotics and prebiotics for gut health, an antioxidant immune support formula, digestive enzymes, and adaptogens to help

• 2:07:34Tim Ferriss?

  manage stress. Now, I do my best, always, to eat nutrient-dense meals. That is the basic, basic, basic, basic requirement, right? That is why things are called supplements. Of course, that's what I focus on, but it is not always possible. It is not always easy. So, part of my routine is using AG1 daily. If I'm on the road, on the run, it just makes it easy to get a lot of nutrients at once and to sleep easy knowing that I am checking a lot of important boxes. So, each morning, AG1. That's just, like brushing my teeth, part of the routine. It's also NSF certified for sports, so professional athletes trust it to be safe. And each pouch of AG1 contains exactly-

• 2:08:15Tim Ferriss?

  What is on the label does not contain harmful levels of microbes or heavy metals and is free of 280 banned substances. It's the ultimate nutritional supplement in one easy scoop. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drinkag1, the number one. Drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out.