#761: General Stanley McChrystal and Liv Boeree

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5:28 My cybernetic organism living tissue over metal enough. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris 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.

5:57 This episode is a two for one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its tenth year anniversary, which is insane to think about. And past one billion downloads. To celebrate. I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favourites. From more than seven hundred episodes over the last decade.

6:15 I could not be more excited. To give you these super combo episodes, and internally we've been calling these The Super Combo episodes. Because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks. But to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider

6:32 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.

6:48 And for the bios of all guests. You can find that and more at Tim.blog slash. Combo. And now, without further ado. Please enjoy.

6:57 And thank you. For listening. First up Retired United States Army General Stanley McChrystal Former commander of Joint Special Operations Command.

7:09 From 2003 to 2008. And best selling author of Risk. A user's guide. You can learn more about General McChrystal and his work.

7:19 At McCrystal Group. Dot com Why one meal a day? Do you actually eat one meal a day? I do. And people ask me why is it some Zen connection with something? And no. What happened was when

7:34 I was a lieutenant in special forces many many years ago. I thought I was getting fat. And I started running. and uh started running distance, which I enjoyed, but I also found that my personality was such that I'm not real good at eating

7:49 three or four small discipline meals. I'm better to defer gratification. And then eat one meal. And for me that's dinner. And so what I do is I sort of Push myself hard all day, try to get everything done and then sort of reward myself with dinner at night.

8:05 What time do you usually eat dinner? Whenever I'm finished work in It would be like eight or eight thirty. There's a challenge when you work really long hours because suddenly you start to eat very late and then you go directly to bed and that you feel like you're sleeping with a football in your stomach. And do you drink coffee earlier in the day? I'm just thinking with the work out and that many hours a lot of people would Fade. How do you prevent yourself from fading? Yeah, I have a tendency, I'll drink coffee, I'll drink other beverages too, water and and different things.

8:33 And I do find that there are certain days your body just says, Eat and eat right now. And I used to keep a bin of those hard pretzels in my office in Afghanistan and I'd grab a handful of those. And other times I might be out doing something physical in the military, like road marching, and suddenly your body communicates, eat pretty quickly, or you won't keep road marching. And I'll do that. Let me ask a couple of routine questions. Questions about routine. And then I'd love to maybe go back in history a little bit.

8:59 The Working out. Do you work out every day? I do. What type of exercise and why? When I was younger and I got serious about working out, I was a second lieutenant and I as I mentioned I started getting fat and I had a first sergeant in my Parachute infantry company that like to run.

9:16 So we would do loosening up exercises and then we'd run. So I started running and so for the first twenty or so years I ran. I had a one period when I was a captain where I ran fifteen 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

9:42 What I learned to do was to alternate. So I will run one day, I'll lift weight the next day, I'll bite when I'm home and have that capable so I can round out. But for me it's very important to do something. literally every day. I'll only take a day off when I'm forced to because I've got some weird schedule thing that makes it impossible. What does your weight training your resistance training workout look like? I will start at my home, if we're at home, and I go down to my basement, I do four sets of pushups.

10:11 As many as I can do for four sets, and I alternate that with a series of abs exercises. So I'll do starting with a set of sit ups and I'll do a hundred sit ups and I'll flip over and I'll do three minutes of a plank. And then I'll do some yoga that I learned for about two or three minutes. And I'll do another set of push ups. Then I go to my next abs thing, which is a uh

10:32 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 push ups.

10:41 And then I'll do my s third set, which is crossover Set ups. And I'll then do a third plank of two minutes. I'm decreasing each time. Then I'll do some more yoga. And then I'll do my fourth set of push ups.

10:54 And then I'll do my fourth, which is a flutter kick, sixty flutter kicks followed by static. Then I'll do my fourth plank, which is now A minute and a half. And then I'll come back and I've only do four sets of push ups, so the last time I don't do push ups, I then do

11:08 One more set of the crunch like and I'll flip over to my last plank which is one minute. And then I'll do some final yoga. And that'll take me about 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. I assume we mean AM. 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.

11:32 Go down to my gym and then when I get to the gym I do four sets of pull ups. alternated with incline bench press. Alternated with Standing curls.

11:44 And then in that I'll also do these one legged things, balance exercises is the break between them. I was taught that was good for balance and whatnot. And then 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.

12:05 Start more. Ready to rock and roll. Yeah. And Why is exercise important to you? Both when you were overseas and at home. Maybe the reasons differ, but Why is that routine? Ritual important.

12:16 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

12:33 over life now, whenever I'm injured and I have even a slight period, it 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 gonna go down. When I was left Ranger Battalion Command in nineteen 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 gonna do at Harvard? I said, I'm gonna study.

13:07 He says you're gonna 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 gonna have a word for you and it ain't gonna be doctor. And I just thought that was so good. It also puts a discipline in the day. I find that if the day is terrible or whatever, but I worked out

13:30 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 one thirty in the morning, I found out about it. I made a couple calls. I knew we had a big problem and I went put my clothes on and I ran for an hour. Clear my head, stress myself.

13:47 Didn't make it go away. But that was something that I do in those situations. For me I try to It's a way of diversifying my identity in a way. So that if everything else is suffering, if I'm losing it everything else for factors outside of my control, at least The bar doesn't care.

14:04 Stan, what book or books have you gift the most to other people? I have probably given the most copies of a book written in nineteen sixty eight by Anton Meir 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

14:23 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 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 us them through a whole career With all the nuances of army life, that the difficulties of peacetime service, slow promotions, and then the

14:51 the challenges of war and their personal side as well. And I gave that to a tremendous number of young officers and NCOs with whom I serve 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 gonna have an arc and it's gonna have ups and downs and left and right, just like your personal life is.

15:12 And so I found that Really valuable. I'd love for you to just talk about Your experience. with Major Broadway, I think it was your first meeting. If you could talk about that a bit, I think it's uh

15:24 Seems to be a a key turning point for you. Yeah, it 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.

15:41 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'd applied to go to Ranger School as a cadet, which is that a small number each year, and in the spring of

16:07 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 I went that summer and I went off to training and whatnot. They send you around the army to do different things.

16:23 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. Is a tactical officer like a residential advisor in college or something along those lines? A little like that. You have a commissioned officer, a captain, or a major for each company, which has about a hundred and twenty cadets in it. And they don't live in the company, they're not there every day, but they are responsible for the company.

16:49 say an office 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 and whatnot. And so after the first couple years I came back and I expected They had this new tactical officer my first In

17:07 Briefing and counseling, he brings each person in together. I expected him to look at my record and then give me the Riot Act for, you know, all my problems and shortcomings and whatnot. And I sat down with him and he had been he's a special forces officer. He sat down and he goes, Well, I'm looking at your record here and he says, I I think you're gonna be a great cadet. And a great army officer. And I literally said, You I think you got the file misplaced'cause this is Stan McCrystal. He said, No, no, I got it. He goes, uh

17:36 I'm looking at ya. You know, you've gone outside the boundaries a couple of times, he said, but Your peer ratings are really good. My peers were reflect in confidence and whatnot. He says, I think you're gonna 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.

17:57 We just gotta pull this out. And I had also started seriously dating. Now my wife of thirty eight years. dating her then. So after my first two years of I misspent youth, I'd say. I suddenly was dating someone seriously, so I had this taccu believed with me I was gonna settle down more because I was dating one person.

18:16 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.

18:34 And suddenly I could see it was two years out, but I could see the reality of it. He was a special forces combat veteran. Who was telling me he thought I'd be good for that. World. What effect did that have on you?

18:46 Well I think it cause 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 it you know. But if somebody says no I really have Trust in you.

19:00 I trust you're gonna 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.

19:18 For lots of reasons, this being one of them, I grade point average skyrocketed my last two years and I finished on the dean's list and all, which was for me nosebleed territory. But it was a lot because of the way people around me just started shaping my expectations. The question of selection and training is really fascinating to me for all these different stages in a military career or uh

19:40 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.

19:55 At uh Fort Benning, I guess. So if you had a hundred athletes And it had eight weeks. twenty of them for combat. How would you select them and how would you train them?

20:07 Very interesting. The young man, the Yale graduate who worked with me on the memoirs you read, is in his final week of Ranger School now. So he's lost a boatload of weight and he comes out and he's a specialist in second ranger battalion. So He read about it, studied it, and now made the decision to go do it. It'll be interesting to hear after he comes out. If I was gonna 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.

20:38 If they can't do those, obviously you've gotta teach them the 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 Two when they talk to organizations

20:58 that had then been through combat, they said, What of your training was of value and what was of less value. They said long foot marches and 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.

21:15 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.

21:29 I would try to put people in cases where They have to make decisions with absolutely incomplete knowledge. And they have got to live with the results of that and often it'll be bad and what do they do then? How do you simulate Oh actually, this brings up Perhaps

21:47 Red teaming? Maybe, maybe not. But how do you simulate we'll come back to that if I'm leading us in a weird direction, but How do you simulate that uncertainty or Role play. That uncertainty. Are there good ways to do that? There were a number of ways to do that, to make tough decisions and whatnot. I I had a when I was a regimental commander, a colonel of the range regiment.

22:06 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'em 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.

22:31 And they were then to police them up, bring them out to an airfield. Pretty straightforward. And so they parachute in and as they move toward this Town.

22:42 They're told that there are a small number of enemy forces there, ten or so. Enough they can deal with and they Develop a plan and then deal with it. Once they got into that firefight, I in fact reinforced that enemy with about a hundred. And so suddenly what happened is they get in a fire fight.

22:58 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 Through the uh my controllers I'm playing higher headquarters and I say, All right, your mission is to get those students out of there, get'em out and get'em to the airfield.

23:17 And they go, Wait a minute, I've got forty wounded. I can't move my wounded. I can't get'em and I'm not gonna leave'em. And I said, We sent you for The students.

23:27 Get'em. And so they always try work around. They try to say I need more aircraft, I need more forces. Something to take away the constraint and of course you say no, nope, nope won't happen. You're gonna have to make the decision. You are going to pull these students out.

23:41 Accomplish your mission at the cost of breaking faith with your comrades. Or you gonna stay there? In which case you're probably all gonna get killed and the students Are not going to be rescued. So you're gonna 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

24:02 after action reviews where we talked about it and The fun thing is there was no right answer. I'm really loving this example. What do you Hoping them to exhibit or what are you looking for in that a scenario like that? 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.

24:26 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 gonna happen is We are gonna have the loss of Americans and we're gonna have this embarrassment and all of these things. So the nation That is relying on you. You're gonna let down. So what's more important? Your personal promise.

24:45 Or the promise to the nation and your mission and whatnot. And it was this quandary that you're looking for them to be more thoughtful than just this automatic black and white reflexive this is what we do because that's what we do. Interestingly, I didn't have any of the companies leave The wounded.

25:04 I'm not sure that wasn't the right answer. And I couldn't tell him afterward that it was, but none of them left him. But they agonized over it. I mean, they tried everything they could, but it was just good because I said, those are the situations you're going to be in. It's never going to be. Easy this or that. That's a great example. So there's some timeless principles.

25:25 Timeless practices, obviously things have evolved. in many different ways in the military, private sector, technology and so on. But if we're looking sort of in the Rear view mirror. What military leaders come to mind

25:37 who are most underrated, in your opinion. That's a great question because There are people who did things for which they get huge credit. Then there are other people who changed the direction of organizations and Of course, I think Ulysses S Grant is often underrated, he's viewed as this mechanical basher.

25:57 Who is going to just bash the enemy into submission. And I think he was much more than that. I think he took a 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

26:22 a very focused effort that was gonna be high cost and you weren't gonna 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. I'm embarrassed 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

26:48 Air power and that was pretty obvious. But building aircraft carriers during that period when battleships were still king. Step out there. So I think those people who push change when change is not otherwise automatically gonna happen.

27:05 For those people listening, I'm sure somebody listening or reading on the blog will will have the answer, be able to look up that naval admiral. So please put them in the comments on the blog and then I will put it into the post. So we'll have that. Stan, do you listen to audiobooks when you Work out. All the time. It's funny. I first used to listen to music and I get bored listening to music. So I started listening to audiobooks because if you think about time management, what I found was I love to read.

27:33 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 twenty minutes later with my head on the page. And so I realized I was gonna have to pick it a better way. So I started putting audio books 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 Audio books weren't that prevalent and so my wife would go to the library, she'd go everywhere she could, get all these audio books. I download'em onto my iPod.

28:05 on my computer and then put'em on my iPod. And so it was whatever was available. later as more things became available, I I had a wider choice, but I found that eclectic I learned to run with audio books.

28:19 my mind will stay collected on it when I 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 P T clothes on,'cause my wife's out in the bedroom, I'll listen to this book.

28:38 And then I'll walk out of there to go work out and I'll have my iPod. I have another book. And I listen to that too when I work out. Now it will take me quite a while of shaving time. To get through a book. Are those two separate books or the same book? Two separate books. So I just finished a book on the South African gold and diamond trade. Cecil Rhodes and and whatnot. up through the board war. It was fascinating and it probably took me, you know, six, eight weeks of shaving time to do that.

29:03 But then On these other books I found that I go through books very, very quickly. If you're working out hour, hour and a half a day You actually go through books much faster than I would if I just had reading had reading time. And I always love to ask people who read a lot or consume many books, even in audio format, how do you choose your books? So for instance, in this case of the diamond trade. And whatnot in South Africa. Why did you choose that book?

29:26 I go on Audible dot com and I buy this package deal where you get a whole bunch of credits and I look at the history first. And I look at what's trending new just to see if what's trending new. I tend to like Sweeping history stories. of an era that's you know twenty, thirty, forty years.

29:43 Or big projects like the building of the Panama Canal, building of the Boulder Dam,'cause 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 wailing books.

30:00 Together. Or I'll read biographies or something about the founding fathers, and I did seven or eight George Washington and other founding fathers. And because they're all you know, mutually overlapping. It's very interesting because suddenly you know more about the era and the new one is more interesting because it's filling in holes.

30:19 And so I'll binge on one subject for a while and then on another subject. Oh god, this gives me all sorts of ideas for how I can spend yet more time reading books. So you mentioned the Hopeless. dilemma earlier where you sort of engineer putting people into a situation where

30:35 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 is very high stakes, but ultimately in the field, I mean you guys are dealing with life and death decisions. So I'd I'd love to hear where something goes wrong. So you make a decision

30:56 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?

31:09 And then what would you say to the Team. To get them ready for the next day. A little bit of historical context. If you think about it and you can compare this to earlier times of war, but the first part of After two thousand one we were

31:23 Worried about Al Qaeda, worried about Afghanistan, we went and it was turned out to be remarkably rapid and relatively speaking low cost in terms of casualties and whatnot. And then Iraq actually the invasion turned out to be the same way. So there there got to be this sense that Okay, this isn't that hard. It's not gonna take this long and the cost will not be hard. We we have a few fallen heroes and we celebrate'em, but we don't think it's gonna be a grinding attrition. Then as we got into

31:52 the difficult era after fall of two thousand three and got into two thousand four and five, something different happens. One, we started to realize this was going to be very hard and every time we lost a comrade They were not gonna 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 wheats me? And

32:18 Is it gonna even come out right? If we pay all this price, are we gonna 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

32:34 have a an outcome where people are killed or wounded. If you let yourself freeze up with Either the self doubt that maybe you made a mistake or This sense that There's just no exit to this

32:48 Maze. then of course I think it it's very difficult to make those kinds of calls. You can find yourself Locked up in the In the summer of two thousand five 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.

33:05 And then two thirds back training and getting ready. And that was About the tempo we could maintain for a long, long time. But we had a period when we needed two thirds of the force in the fight. And mathematically, of course, because the last third's back on alert in the US, that's not indefinitely sustainable. And just at the time we made the dec I made the decision to do that. We started taking a bunch of casualties, and when you take casualties in a very elite force

33:31 It's not the nameless rifleman at the end of the squad that nobody knows. It is Chris who I have served with for ten years. I'm the godfather to one of his kids. I'm married to his sister. I mean that's The effective. T. E. Lawrence writes about it as ripples in a pool that go out through these small communities, tribes, and and really our forces were a tribe. So suddenly,

33:54 the effect of that can cause you to be even more impacted by Ulysses S Grant used to say that he didn't visit hospitals much. Because he found if he went and he saw the terrible carnage for which he was responsible, he'd lose his nerve to command it. So what I think happens is you don't become detached from the loss and you don't go into denial, what I found is you keep yourself focused on the objective.

34:20 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

34:31 responsibly arrived at to the best of my ability. And they are judiciously executed to the best of what we can do. Potentially what you just said, what you would sort of remind yourself of in those moments? Yeah, and of course y you don't say that quite that explicitly in the organization, but the first thing you do when an organization suffers a loss is Not tell them. You know, don't let people marinate in their

34:57 Grief. They can grieve. When I was in Afghanistan the German army Got in a fire fight. And they had four of their soldiers killed, and it was the first four German soldiers killed in combat since World War Two.

35:11 And so I flew up to be with this company and they were literally in shock and they were all in this room trying to figure out how do you process this. Because we go to war every few years. The Germans' fathers hadn't been at war. Maybe their grandfathers had, and certainly no one in active duty had ever Had a soldier killed in combat. under their command or a comrade.

35:31 So they were trying to figure out how to Figure this out. Exactly. And so what I told him was That's what happens in war. The enemy gets to do that, you get to kill him. He gets to kill you.

35:45 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. Exactly. I Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show.

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37:02 Take a look. With Helix, better sleep starts now. I And now Live Bare.

37:11 Winner of both the European poker tour And world series of poker championship titles. Gaming theorist. Futurist. Philanthropist.

37:20 and host of the Win-Win with Live Barry podcast. You can find Live on Twitter and Instagram at But Live underscore Bare. Live.

37:32 Welcome to the show. Nice to see you. Thank you for having me. And uh We can go so many different directions. I thought we would start actually maybe in an unexpected place. So I asked you before we started, what color would you prefer? Black?

37:46 Blue. orange or I think it was. Yellow was for mic cable. It was from mic cable so that I can tell which line is feeding into which input on this recorder. And it certainly looks a lot better in audio, right? So it does have a certain clown car appearance to it when we do it in person with video, but When you said black, I said. I

38:09 That It's gonna be black right beforehand. And it was black. And the reason I said that is I read something about you. And Metallica. And uh to get into the zone coming here on the driveover, I listened to Orion, the remastered. Oh great choice. Yeah. Niche choice. Very, very uh Because my first

38:28 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.

38:42 Well, they were My Love that bordered on a unhealthy obsession from the ages of like Sixteen to twenty two. So that's probably a I would guess why you brought it up. I don't know how you would know that though. Well, you know, we do research over here. Middle insider dot net.

39:02 The Iron Maiden of the Poker World, they called you. And there's a shirt Discussion of the unforgiven. And

39:12 This led you, I guess, in some respects into guitar. Do you still play guitar? I don't. You don't, but you did for a period of time. I did, yeah. I I from like sixteen or seventeen till Twenty four, basically until poker took over. So do you then have Typically one obsession at a time. Do you ever have multiple obsessions simultaneously, or do you tend to have one?

39:34 obsessive fixation and that is where you Put your energy. I used to. I used to be very A shiny new

39:43 activity would come along and I would If it ticked enough boxes, I'll be like, I have to become the best at this. I would rarely become the best at it, but I would certainly go down the rabbit hole deep enough to become proficient. And I was like that, I would say, until Some point in my probably my early thirties, some point around the age of thirty, where I lost that a little bit. And

40:08 In some ways that's good because it means I can try greater breadth of things, but it comes a little bit at the cost of then not ever picking And I'm currently struggling with the fact that I'm being too much of a jack of all trades, master of none. Like not knowing what I'm am I going to be focusing on YouTube? Or maybe I should just do speeches or Maybe I should actually just start a company and give up on their silly, like public facing stuff. It can be a bit of a blessing and a curse, I guess.

40:33 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're you don't because you haven't formed your identity yet. Right. You will form it typically around a genre of music. Sure. I was a metal head, which is probably. You were a metal head? Oh, for sure. Oh, say, right. So yeah, you get it. Like and metal is so

40:53 I mean I say was as if it's past tense. If I'm in the gym, I'm still a metalhead. Right, exactly. But you don't look it, you don't live it in your visual No, I mean I have like from the neck up I definitely have the sort of Early Arab. Well actually no, like mid era Pantera looking for it. I was about to say Fil Anselmo like a little bit Financelmo after his Vulgar Display of Power era or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, so I was kinda uncool until the age of sixteen. And then metal came along and I was like, Oh, this is this is what I was waiting for.

41:25 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

41:36 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 Borgia, Burzum, you know some of the Swedish black metal or Norwegian black metal. Once you Scandinavian and you've gone really deep. But Metallica were a a huge forming part of that. They were the one sort of classic metal band that I still was like I just loved so deeply. All right. Let's paint a picture here. What was your the age range of your competitive Poker career.

42:10 And then we're gonna back into that. By going to some very early early chapters. But what was the span?'Cause I'm trying to overlay that on what you just said. So I first learned to play poker Age twenty one?

42:24 Mm-hmm. Yeah, it was two thousand five. I just graduated uni. Didn't really know what I wanted to do. Thought I was going to carry on in physics. But

42:33 I decided to take a gap here because I when I first started taking physics, I was like, Oh, I'm definitely doing this. This is so interesting. I love it. But then The more time I got to spend with like PhD students or even people doing their masters, they seemed I don't know, they just didn't seem very happy and they weren't very

42:50 I don't know, just personality wise, I was wondering if it was g actually w was gonna work for me. Because all I really wanted to do was go out partying and clubbing and go, you know, see ro rock shows, metal shows. And I was also still wanting to be a rock star at the time. And I was like uh I just don't know if this is gonna quite work me sitting in a lab, pl you know, filling around with lasers. So decided to take a gap here. And I think I signed up Oh, I was doing like

43:14 random like goth modelling sometimes. And I as one does. Right. Well I you know, just any way I could make some money and I thought I don't know, I enjoyed dressing up in my heavy metal costumes as as often as possible. And I was like, If I can get paid to do that, that'd be great. I also got paid to be a cage dancer in rock clubs in London. Well, you know, I was I was admiring the the boots. on the way in. This is a this is a shoeless household, so thank you for accommodating. This is this is not the my least messy sock ever. These are gray and pink striped socks with hearts all over them. So yes. It's like the heart exterior.

43:52 The Goth. Death metal exterior and then like the soft, sweet. Yeah. I'm you don't understand how much pain I'm in, actually. The fact that this is these I have so many like most of my socks are black. I just just grabbed whatever I needed to. So dot modelling, which I also did during my gap year. Totally lying. I'm kidding. Kidding. Oh man. And I wish I I wish I could have. So goth modeling, cage dancing. Mm-hmm.

44:15 And then I think I signed up for this like website that would advertise different TV shows or modeling opportunities, that kind of thing. And I remember seeing an ad which said something like Could you use your powers of skill and deception to win a hundred thousand pounds on T V?

44:32 And seeing as I was rapidly getting pretty damn broke because dancing in a rock club cage doesn't pay you anything, uh, 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.

44:58 Turns out they wouldn't tell us what what it was that we were applying for because they needed to keep it a secret. But turns out it was a reality show that was looking for five beginners At poker. to teach them how to play. And the sort of loose scientific premise was they were looking for five different personality types.

45:16 To see which, you know, is most suited for the game. So I got selected for that. What was your personality type? They call me the Professor. Which I most certainly was. No, I can see it. I could see it. I I was what I literally turned up in Skin tight tiger prints bandix, self-made trousers. Now did you do that because they had put you in the professor category. Was that a rebellion, an act of rebellion, or did that just No, I mean that wasn't genuinely how I dressed. No, it was it was my genuine appearance. As I said, I lived and breathed metal. Sounds good for TV. Right, and I think that's probably why they selected me, honestly. Like very

45:55 overconfident to the point of like cocky. Twenty one year old. Brat who was Unheard of with twenty one year olds. I don't know. I just I just thought I was the smartest person in the world. And I think I even said something like that in the interview. Like the audition And they're like Oh, we're definitely bringing it up. This is gonna be a good one.

46:12 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.

46:29 Where we would play with a hundred thousand. And I was winning, you know, I was leading going into that. And Clearly I had a knack for the game. And I remember the the hosts and the Professionals that they got bought on the show to teach us were like, Oh, you're definitely gonna win, you know, you are the most talented at this. So I was so sure I was gonna win this thing. And then I ended up making not to get too technical, but basically I misread my hand.

46:54 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.

47:05 And I didn't have um I I had two black cards. And Audibly went I'm no Professional, but is that what one would call a tell? Yes. That is a tell. Do not do that. Um and the my opponent, who's a really nice guy called Lee

47:26 was like, Well, I guess she doesn't have a diamond. And he was like, I'm all in. And instead of again keeping my my cool or anything, I just started crying, like melted down. The producers are high five in the back. Yeah, they were literally and and and And I'm like, Oh Liv, what's the matter? Tell us more. And I was like, you know, makeup everywhere. I think I I I like run away from the table. They try and follow me with a camera. It was just, you know, classic reality TV meltdown stuff. So that was my intro to poker. But I just completely fell in love with the game. And funny enough, while I was In the during the filming of that, which took two months I went to a local card club in London.

48:03 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.

48:13 What is a rebuy? A rebuy means that if you for the first hour or so, if you bust out, you can just m buy back in again. So considering it was only five pound entry, you can imagine it's just pandemonium. Everyone's going in every single hand. And people will easily like spent like a hundred pounds in their entry overall, you know, twenty rebuys. Good for the house. Yeah. But I turned up with ten pounds. Because I was like, Well it's a five pound tournament. Why would I ever need more than you know, five pound for the entry and five pound to buy a drink and that'll be my my day. So you're like You're like a player in a video game with Two lives.

48:44 Where everybody else has like a hundred lives. Right. Yeah. And most people were were doing that, yes. Only for the first hour. Then once after that period ends, then if you loop bust out, you're out. This is the first tournament I ever play. And I enter this thing. Somehow get through this.

49:00 Carnage. Period. In the in the in the first hour. The zombies once with my other five pounds, so I didn't buy a drink. And anyway, I ended up winning it. Ended up playing until five in the morning. It was like a hundred and twenty people in it. And then I came home. I remember just having this

49:16 you know, they paid me out in tens and twenties, I think seven hundred and fifty pounds or something like that, which was More money. So I'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 five AM and just throwing the cash on him. Like this is the this is the best thing ever. This is my game. I m and I must be the best in the world. Like, you know, it's my first ever tournament, basically, and I win it. So even though the T V show did not go well and I didn't win the hundred grand I'd already got the bug, basically, from that little win. So let me

49:47 Weave through this and inspect a bit because I have many questions. What Do you think helped you? During

49:57 the show itself to make it to the final table. What were some of whether they're your characteristics? Things you learned. Things you observed. Trained ability is anything that comes to mind.

50:10 That you think helped in the very early nascent stages. Of that tournament. Yeah, the T V show. Right. The T V show and then I have more questions.

50:21 I mean, I think the thing that was most helpful early on For me in poker was I was just so pathologically competitive. I just had to win. And like prove that I was the best in this thing. Just more practice. F like there's like

50:40 laser focus and then there's like ruthlessness. Because the thing about poker is that you actually you do have to be really ruthless in the game. In what? Sense. In terms of Well bluffing people.

50:50 If you're not comfortable with bluffing someone at the poker table, which I don't think it' l a lot of people say, Oh, it's lying, it's like it's not really lying. No, it's just a form of It's a strategy within a game as defined by the rules of the game. It's an integral part of it. Right. If you're if you're not willing to do that, then you're that's not the game for you. And Play chess. Right. And then you have to be I'm just willing to

51:15 I guess it's really laser in and pay deep attention to what is going on. Because technically at any given moment, even if you're not in hand, There's really valuable information. being exchanged about the way people You know, the types of cards people play.

51:30 the way that their bodies move when they're uncomfortable versus comfortable. Are they a naturally aggressive person or are they naturally scared? What are the things that make them scared, et cetera? And Certainly in the beginning I was just because I didn't know anything about the actual statistical sort of the m the mechanics of the game. All I could rely on was

51:48 the you know, the stuff I knew, which was r looking looking for when people are blaffing. So looking for when people are bluffing. Okay. So let me ask you about the statistical side, because you're coming out of physics. You have, it would seem, a huge competitive advantage. Why would you not? begin to study the tables and the statistics and so on.

52:09 Well I did too. You did that as well. Um and The thing is that the statistics required in poker to actually you know, at a high level are you're not going to learn within the first month. Sure, right. And also people didn't even really know'cause this is two thousand or five. Even the top players in the world back then. didn't really understand game theory.

52:28 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

52:42 Amorphous topic. and you know not even clear directions of where to start. That probably gave me a bit of an advantage there. And then Presumably I have an higher than average IQ from

52:54 Exactly. Really helps. Uh 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.

53:07 But Honestly it The thing about poker is The beautiful thing about Pokemon fat is that If you're talking about one night.

53:15 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.

53:26 It's only over the long run does anything actually meaningful start happening. And so Even in this T V show where we played I think eight different games. statistically it's not that meaningful the results over that time period.

53:41 There's so much luck going on. And I didn't realise that early on in the game. In some ways, you know, th like winning that big tournament early on was was of not a big tournament, that the five pound rebuy. It gave me an immense amount of confidence.

53:55 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, Oh, okay, well I'm going to win this. There isn't that much luck, it's just who's the best player wins. And I think that's partly why it was such a kick in the face when I screwed up and didn't win the hundred thousand. When you say you fell in love with the game

54:17 Aside from things that maybe you've mentioned already. What made you fall in love with it? What was so appealing? There's an inherent excitement to it. Right. Of course, because there's a blending of skill and chance. Yes. And money. I mean, there's stakes. Right. But actually just winning. The potential of just winning. Yeah, making a living Where I don't have to go and sit in an office and I can do that. That was obviously a big uh carrot. Yeah. But

54:42 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.

54:58 And go in that angle. But then you've also got this more there's like an art to it as well. you know, psychology, meant trying to mentally model what level someone is thinking at and Be one step ahead of They're gonna zig, you're gonna zag, that kind of thing.

55:11 And then also just like I mean, there's a scientific way to read body language, but sometimes you just get like a vibe that you can't explain. So there's just so many different approaches you can take to it. And like today I'm gonna work on my body language reading and today I'm gonna work on my Pot odds or my combinatorics. And so

55:30 There's never a dull moment and there's always a new situation as well. Like even after playing for ten, fifteen years. I'll still see something crazy with like the cards run out, like Straight flash against fogs, that kind of stuff. Like it these Incredibly rare scenarios will sometimes happen and Or people will do weird things, or some strange ruling will happen that like everyone's scratching their heads, like I don't know what the right call is here. It's it's there's such depth.

55:53 And complexity to the game. Okay. So I'm gonna admit something, it's embarrassing. I've been fascinated. and drawn to poker for a very long time and I've never learned how to play properly. No way. It's true. Wow. There are many excuses I may have for this.

56:11 One of them is that friends of mine like a guy named Jason Calcanis who Want me to play, but it's mostly because he wants to Take all my money. Because he's gonna be far better than I am. And that's a compliment, Jason. And a lot of these investors

56:29 Or very confident. I know some of them certainly Particularly the quants who I've observed from afar seem to be Pretty competent. I had

56:42 A little bite of the bug. Probably five years ago when I Did an episode of a TV show Bring it back to T V. Where I I trained for a week or five days probably to play heads up.

56:58 Against Whole cohort of folks. Including some pros. And I was able And I was trained by I want to give him credit, Phil Gordon, for that. And

57:08 For a very short period of time. until the next skill I had to learn for the next episode pushed it right out of my head. had a lot of fun with heads up, but one night when the filming had finished, And I was like, you know, let me go try just a regular table. And I got slaughtered. Like it did not translate.

57:27 At all. Which i I expected would largely be the case, but I just got Dismembered. I mean we could. Well that's a heads up is a very different game to playing against eight people. Yeah, totally. So yeah, one on one a totally totally different game. But it actually brought back in a way my love of mathematics and statistics, which I lost. Not to make this like a confessional, but I lost it in tenth grade because I had this one teacher who just had this huge ax to grind with the boys in the class, and almost all the boys ended up quitting math or avoiding it after that class. My brother had the opposite experience and then later became a PhD in statistics. So It's amazing to look at these divergent

58:09 kind of points, right? Where you have a 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.

58:24 Mm. regular poker, w whatever that means. The type of poker I would play with my friends. Who are like, Let's play poker. How might you think of approaching that? Well given that you

58:38 Uh I mean you pretty well rounded in your personality and that you like both sort of human interactive things, but you can also nerd out really hard. Yes. I don't think there's really a wrong way to teach you poker. Like if I was to teach my my mum or something like that. My mum is

58:53 The most Sounds strange to say, but she's the least autistic person. Well, I'm not sure.

59:03 So Able to intuit Social situations. Yep. And Unbelievably emotionally intelligent.

59:11 But Phobic of math. phobic of she's interested in sort of scientific concepts, but if you actually try and get into the technical weeds, she's just like she she cannot. And she, you know, her happiness like she would be in arms with Molly right now. Just like she's just a she just feels. She's a very feel based person. And

59:30 If I was to teach her the game, you know, I would Take her to the table with Group of fun people and you know, we would slowly just like turn the cards over and you know, talk through I'll give her the hand rankings. I mean, take it very steady in in terms of like this is

59:44 Look how the way that they're acting. So they seem quite confident that you know that Take a more The human approach to it. But I think with you We would want to jump s sort of straight into the game theory to an extent. So let me apply some parameters if I could, just to allow

1:00:00 Us to conjure. an image. So let's just say Yeah. He's really gonna want to take my money now, which he will probably. So let's say I had a game with Jason. And you can pick

1:00:11 the sort of minimally viable period of time. over which you think I could learn to be competent enough that I might have a chance. Is it Four weeks? Is it Twelve weeks? This is also not knowing how Good.

1:00:26 'Cause I've always refused to play. He's pretty good. Okay, great. So so let's just say You know, if luck is on my side having some Chance in hell. Well here's the thing. So You have a chance in hell. Anyway, if you ta sat down and just play it's not just gonna be Jason, it's gonna be an entire table. Well, no, but even if you were playing one on one against Jason, if you guys sat down, uh assuming you know the basic rules of like which hand moves.

1:00:51 Okay, but let's you know assume the the very basics, you know what betting chips means and how you know whether you what we whether you have a straight on the river or not. Assuming that. You and I could sit down. And play ten hands. And it's basically fifty fifty. Okay, let's win. Let's say we have

1:01:08 You can pick the period of time of training. So uh however long it is. And then Jason and I are going to play A Thousand Hands at Exactly. Yeah. A thousand hands. Your chance of beating Jason over a thousand hands. Probably been like Just knowing the rules is

1:01:26 Forty five percent. That's how that's how crazy like that's the thing. May may maybe it's a bit less than that. Maybe it's sorry, Jason. Maybe it's Let's say Thirty seven percent, maybe thirty five. Uh he's gonna I'm gonna give a fun call after this. Um

1:01:42 But le could we get it so that it So that you are a favorite against him. Eight weeks. Of intensive. Okay. Yeah. If if you sat and studied game like the all the charts

1:01:53 Because that's what it is really these days. So poker is a no now that we know the mechanics of the game, basically there's this thing called game theory optimal solutions to different scenarios, which is basically, you know, if you have Jack 9 suited On this type of board. Against a person in this position. You will want to check raise them. thirty percent of the time and check calls seventy percent of the time or something like that. So it's basically there there are like answers.

1:02:17 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.

1:02:29 into basically who's willing to learn as many different scenarios as possible. and like basically emulate them in their head when they go and play. So it's a very different type of game. It's more like kind of almost studying chess moves. I was just gonna say it sounds a lot like studying like uh chess scenarios. And it wasn't like that even ten years ago. 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

1:02:55 Honestly, it's actually one of the reasons why I in the end didn't like the game as much anymore. I've been doing it for twelve years anyway, and I I was just starting to get itchy feet naturally. But

1:03:06 More and more time spent to at the top levels at least. Exactly. Diminishing returns in terms of hourly because also what it means is Because it's like these game theory optimal solutions exist. It means that there's technically this perfect style of play. Any one person can play.

1:03:23 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 a an hour, whoever gets the best cards will therefore win. But Over infinity.

1:03:44 Uh we will press break even. And so that meant that you would have to be putting more and more time into win a sort of shrinking pot of money, essentially. Which is why I I don't now recommend to people to go out and try and be professionals in poker. But I still absolutely recommend that people go and learn the game because It is Probably the best way.

1:04:03 Two it's it's the best mini analogue for the type of complex decision making that you need to do in life. And we're gonna come back to this because I do think With my very little exposure to poker. And having watched some on TV.

1:04:18 And nonetheless having had my ass handed to me. When I tried it live. That Particularly maybe an easy map is investing. And

1:04:31 Okay. There are just so many variables that are similar. Which is why I think so many investors are drawn to it. And also give a plug. All in podcast. Check it out. That's Jake Al's podcast with his butts. It is a fantastic, fantastic show.

1:04:45 I do think it is one of the best new podcasts. new ish podcasts that I've put into my rotation. So Don't take all my money, Jason. Eight weeks. What does the density of practice look like? Is that Two hours a day. Is it

1:05:00 Ten hours a week. Oh no. What does the distribution look like? To be confident that you're have like a sixty forty edge on him. I would want to do Forty hours a week.

1:05:11 At least. Okay. Oh yeah. All right, forty hours. How does that break down if we have Uh you said eight weeks, right? Yeah. So hypothetically, let's say week one.

1:05:25 What does the schedule and curriculum look like? So in the first week. I think we would I mean I would sit in a just run out lots of different hands. I think in person is better than online.

1:05:38 So you actually just get to Play with the cards, feel what it's like. You get really familiar with the betting patterns and that kind of thing. I mean, but talk about the more sort of general. Things like

1:05:48 Why are we betting? What are we seeking to find here? Okay, we want to find information. With get into the idea of like ranges because Kind of a strange word, but basically

1:05:58 We're playing a hand right now. I don't know anything about your cards. All I know is that you've got two cards out of the, you know, a thousand and Whatever the number is combination. of two cards that you can have. So right now your range is a hundred percent.

1:06:10 And same back at you. And then as the hand progresses, basically I want to narrow down the perceived range that I think you could have, you know, narrow gain information so I can narrow that down and put you on a hand. While meanwhile Giving away as little information about my own possible range. So keeping it as wide open to you. So it's about maximizing deceptiveness. Sure.

1:06:32 Well Extracting information out of your opponent. teach you about concepts like that and we would talk about ways that you can do that. And then I think we've gone actually

1:06:41 play a little bit in person just so you get used to the again the kind of dynamics. Yeah. We'd go to a a local I mean probably invite friends over and we'd just have some Yeah. Have some games. And it's so much fun anyway. Those are the best type of poker games. Bring in my card mechanic and take all their money. Exactly. Yes. And then after that, I think we would start I don't know at what stage, but you know, once you seem competent and 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.

1:07:20 Could you just take a second and explain what you mean by pot odd calculations? So pot odds are basically, you know, like an investing to an extent. If things go well, what do you win? Versus how much would you lose? So then how do you bet size accordingly. Right, exactly. Or like, you know, let's say you're you're trying to hit a flush.

1:07:39 And there are nine cards left in the deck that could help you. Say out of thirty six. So you have a twenty five percent chance of hitting the card you need. And meanwhile the pot is odd offering you five to one. Well now it's actually a profitable thing, right? Because you're getting the pot is offering you more than the

1:07:55 odds that you need to to hit your card. So man, I haven't talked about this stuff in ages. It's really interesting seeing my brain's like oh find the find the words. So those kind of rudimentary types of math calculations that you need to do. And then as you get more comfortable in that, then you would start doing more combination calculation. So as you're sort of narrowing down your opponent's range.

1:08:18 There will be Presumably some hands that they will have that are better than your hand, you know, so what we would call value hands that they would be playing. But they would also have some bluffs in there. So you need to try and think about what are the conceivable bluffs they would have given the sort of story that's been told, you know, like pre-flop, they raised early. So that means they probably have stronger cards than weaker cards.

1:08:38 So you can narrow it down to like the top end of the cards. Like Aces, Kings, Ace King. A three suited, that kind of stuff. But then on the flop, when an ace came out, they actually slowed down. So that maybe suggests that they don't have an ace. Maybe they have more like Nines, tens, eights, you know, to a pocket pair like that. Weaving together bits of evidence to be able to narrow down people's ranges and put them on like conceivable bluffs versus conceivable strong hands. So that kind of stuff.

1:09:03 And then After that If you know, you're seeming to grasp all that, then we would actually start looking at the the solver charts. So these are these like simulators. There's this one called Pio Solver that was at least

1:09:16 popular in the day when I was playing. How do you spell that? P I O P I O Pio Solver. I think it's still the main one. And At least when I was You know, using it. That was back in twenty sixteen or so, it would take many hours to run a SIM.

1:09:31 So, you know, you'll be like, I want to know what the optimal play is with Jack Nine suited on a Ten eight four. Rainbow board or something like that. And then let it run. Folks listening, I have no idea what it means either. Yeah, there's so much jargon in the world. I think I need a rainbow. That's actually probably where we would start. We would start with glossary. Because there's so many there's so many w terms. Vocab. The vocab is is i you know, there's there's just so much going on there. But yeah, so we would start running simulations so you can see and understand like

1:10:01 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.

1:10:14 Where if you don't have any information about your opponent that you can just follow. And know that at you know, at worst you'll be breaking even, but you'll still be beating them. But then because you know what the perfect play is, you can look for ways to exploit their screw ups. Because in reality, everyone, even the pros. are making mistakes. They aren't playing this perfect GTO style. But

1:10:33 You can't really know the way that they're screwing up until you know what the GTO is in the first place. So it acts as this like baseline benchmark of high quality play. So we would sit and we would study these charts and If over that course of eight weeks I got you so that you were able to like emulate these charts to I don't know how to quantify it, but to a a good amount.

1:10:54 That would be more than sufficient to be Jason. You know, he's not a full time pro. Yeah. He's good. Like he's played a lot and we've only played once. And I was more just like bemused at the amount of words that were coming out of his own. Well, I was gonna say if his poker is anything like his basketball, he will his ability to shit talk is actually incredible. That guy I mean world class. He's very good at getting under your skin if he wants to get under your skin. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Uh he's said many we've had we've been at a few parties together and he is he knows how to ruffle feathers but he's so funny.

1:11:25 I love him. Excellent interviewer and moderator. I just want to second the recommendation that was made earlier. Let's depart from The training for A bit. We may come back to it.

1:11:36 But actually. Let me ask a question I haven't asked in a long time. Maybe similar. This is like we're kicking in the gears, starting the old car, trying to like to turn the key, get it to turn over. If You could

1:11:51 Predict. The main reasons The failure points, the reasons I would quit in those first eight weeks. What do you think they might be? Assuming that I had the time. Right. Right. And the interest.

1:12:03 What are the things that might break me or cause me to walk? Give up. If for some reason you couldn't wrap your mind around What these charts mean. I guess that would be a sort of breaking point, but I just don't see that ever happening, to be honest. So it would be more the I think the reason why you'd walk away.

1:12:21 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 suitable stakes. And you're like, this is not worth my listening, I'm just using Jason as a standing'cause it's fun. I don't care enough about beating anyone. Exactly. That would be the only reason. I think. Because I think you would find it fun. Otherwise. Now I would have to I wouldn't have to, but ensure that I have a certain frequency of play after putting in Forty hours a week for eight weeks.

1:12:51 Otherwise the decay rate would be brutal. And part of that time, by the way, in that forty it's not just studying the charts, it's also going out and actually practicing and getting real because assuming you're gonna play one on one in the flesh. A big part of poker that we haven't touched on yet as well is Emotional control, understanding yourself. And your own biases, not only cognitive, but also the way Different

1:13:14 negative emotions will arise, which they will in the game. Particularly with someone like Jason, who is so adept at like saying things to needle. And that's a big part of the game. Getting the verbal bamboo shoots under your fingernails. Um That would be as important, particularly if you're playing for a particular you know, you're training for a big match. The mental game side of it. 'Cause ultimately you can study all the charts and think you're a GTO machine. And like, Oh, I'm I'm fine. But then you get down there and he looks you in the eyes and like, Well, you screwed up that hand, Tim. Like, what are you gonna do? What are you gonna do, huh?

1:13:45 You know and and just goes full Jason on you. Like y you'll forget everything. The red mist. Um I call it the white mist. I've never heard that. Okay. I like it. There's Two mental blocks. And that's when one might go tilt. Tilt. Exactly. If I if I'm catching the layer. Tilt, very good. For those who don't know, tilt is is uh What people do basically when their emotions get the better of them and they start playing badly. No. Is monkey tilt just an exaggerated version of that? Yes. Okay, yeah, because now

1:14:18 Monkey Tails is just like the you know, you've got sort of the image. Hunters. 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

1:14:37 I think you may be full tilt right now, and I was like, do I look Excited? Do I look upset? I'm not Not on tilt. Those didn't work out very well. Those traits. But

1:14:50 The red mist. When the red mist. But you call it the white what? Well so th there's two. There's the the white noise. So the white noise is when So redness is when you're angry. Someone has wound you up. That would probably be my Achilles seal. Right. The white noise. Yeah, and the white noise is where

1:15:06 for whatever reason, perhaps you know, you're just really tired or you're really stressed. But you'll go and consult your brain. And it comes back with nothing. Okay, yeah. Just beachball. Yeah, just And I've had that a few times. Like I remember having it in the World Series Day four or something, day five, and It was a really big pause and I just needed to think. And then but then my brain was like, Well, this is a really important decision. You know, you should really pay attention to this one. Like, are you paying at Well, I'm not sure you're paying attention. Why are you listening to me? And uh so it was this little voice and then I was like, Okay, pay attention. Let's count the combos of what they've got.

1:15:40 And just Nothing. So in the end I was like w I I you know, my system two. Are you familiar with with uh system one, system two? No. Okay. Oh wait a second. System one, system two. Is this like Daniel Carnegie? Yeah, it's a Daniel Carnegie. If you could just give some context. Like if I ask you what's five plus five. Immediately know the answer is ten.

1:16:03 So it kinda your gut instincts. You're gonna make me do multiplication tables. Uh so that's your system one. It's just the things you immediately know an answer to, or you you know, it's like an unconscious process. You know, if you technically it's system one if you're driving down the street and someone cuts in front of you, you'll your your body will take over and you'll swerve. 'Cause you don't have time to do a sort of cost benefit analysis of going left or right.

1:16:26 And then your system two. is the like conscious thinking. So if I was to ask you what Four hundred and seventy one plus eighty eight is.

1:16:36 It would be Five hundred and uh sixty I even forgot the numbers now. Nine? Four hundred seventy one and eighty eight. Four hundred seventy one eighty eight. What's that? I got four hundred and seventy one. Yeah. Nine.

1:16:51 Five. I have five five nine, is that right? Five hundred fifty nine. I've no idea. Five is f five hundred and uh I can't even remember anyway, the Whatever that was you can't you can't use your gut feelings for that. Right. You have to think it through. You have to do the calculation mentally in your head. So that's your system too.

1:17:09 And Hoke's pretty interesting because You know I'm on five hours asleep. I just want to buy myself a little bit of wiggle room on the mental menu. And I have no excuse. So May I may make a quick aside. One of the coolest things I've ever seen was when I was fifteen as an exchange student in Japan and I got to know multiple kids because it's mandatory. That every kid learned how to use an abacus. And

1:17:36 Something like one out of every thirty or forty kids would get so good. that they no longer needed the physical advocacy. They could see it in their minds. And so for party tricks their friends would just lob these like three digit multiplication problems at them and they could come up with the answer. It would take them a second because they actually had to physically Map it out. Map it out and move these beads and so on in their minds. But

1:18:04 Astonishing. My partner Eagle can kinda do that. Yeah. It was one of the ways he got me, honestly. He just you just throw numbers at him and he'll He hasn't done it in a while and he'll hate that I've mentioned this because now everyone's gonna do it to him, but he can usually answer within like a second or two. Wow. That's fast. Yeah, it's hot. Rock stars to mental mathematics. Yeah, so those are I can't remember where I was going now. So where you were going? is we were talking about system one, system two, and that white noise moment. Yes. And that is not a time that you can rely on system two. Is that what you were going to say or that's it. Right, exactly. Because system two has shut down. Yeah. System two is offline. Yes, offline. It's not do not it does not compute. There's nothing there. Hello. Four or four. Four or four. Four or four. Yes. Blue screen of death. And

1:18:49 It's bad when that happens. Terrible. Yes. Oh. And that is You know, if you're playing Can be various reasons. It can be because if you're wound up, someone's got an 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.

1:19:10 Yeah. And I was really I was like, Oh man, I'm gonna win a huge pot here. This is so exciting. I don't know when I need to think through what the optimal bet size is. And again. Ha 'Cause I'm just uh it just it's it's so hard because I think you're you're put into Well, you know this stuff better. Like uh your your sympathetic nervous system is in is in play, right? Uh so you're kind of in fight or flight.

1:19:29 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 less. So I have in front of me some notes. Obviously you can see them. Those who are on audio only will not be able to see them. That's fine because it makes me sound more professional if you think I'm doing everything off the top of my head. So at one point. You turned five hundred Euros into one

1:19:58 Point two five million euros. Which is around one point seven million. And if I'm getting roughly I believe that that math right. That was at the EPT. San Remo.

1:20:09 And It was five hundred euro buy in? Or five hundred dollar. It was a five hundred euro satellite tournament. into the main event buy in, which was five thousand euro. So everyone was buying in for five thousand, but I won my way in because I couldn't afford the five thousand. Yeah.

1:20:23 I I won my way and throw a feeder smaller tournament. So A few just housekeeping questions about this. How long after that first Tournament win.

1:20:35 After the T V show. was this. This was two thousand and ten, so five years. Wow. All right.

1:20:43 So five years later this happens. Presumably. In this tournament there was less And then Crying.

1:20:50 And running away from the table. Correct. Okay. So what Type of self regulation. Did you learn over that period of time and then Subsequent to that.

1:21:02 Oh man, that that tournament was nuts because You know, the T V show is in two thousand and five. I didn't actually really turn fully professional whereby I was living off it. Until

1:21:13 Two thousand Like late two thousand and eight. I was still sort of playing casually. couldn't really get my act together enough to I wasn't good enough really to be living off poker before then. So I've been I've been playing on the circuit now for like a year and a half, and I played some bigger Bayern tournaments, but I'd never made like any like really big final tables or anything. And this

1:21:33 Italy happened by accident. It was uh remember the volcano that went off in Iceland? Yeah, I do. And it shut down all of European airspace. I was in the south of France for something completely different. And I couldn't get home. And someone I heard that there was this tournament going on in northern Italy.

1:21:48 And it was like a train ride away. So I was like, All right, screw it, I'll go there. Thank God for volcanoes. That volcano. Oh yeah. And then I arrived and there was this like this feeder tournament that it's called a satellite that night. Where you know it was a five hundred euro entry and one in ten people would win their ticket for the five thousand. The main event. So I won my ticket that night, like four in the morning. and then went and played it the next day, starting at noon.

1:22:11 And A very strange thing happened to me actually at noon. before the tournament started, but that's like another topic I think we can get into later, maybe. Wait a minute. You can't leave that. Just g give us a teaser. And then maybe we'll come back to it. my first of

1:22:28 a handful of completely unexplainable borderline metaphysical experiences. And uh Uh uh I I won't say what it is. But anyway, so I had a very strange thing happen just before the tournament started at noon. And

1:22:44 Long story short, six days later. It ended up being the largest tournament ever held in Europe at the time. Yeah, you can better keep watching. Uh for sure commercial brand. I ended up being the attracting the biggest field of players of any tournament in Europe to date, at the time at least, was over like one thousand two hundred people. So huge, huge tournament. And Six days later. I was on the final table down to the final nine. How many hours a day are you playing? I played like

1:23:15 Ten hours a day on average. Some days are a bit longer, some days are a bit shorter. So you can imagine how exhausting that is. Also because the longer you're going, the more intense it gets. 'Cause in the beginning the stakes are like, Okay, I might make you lose my five thousand euro buy in, but as the tournament wears on and you know, there's less people, your your chip stack is worth more and more in terms of equity.

1:23:35 And so your loss aversion starts to go vertical. By the time of the like the end of day five where we play down to the final table, the final nine. For ninth place. I was already guaranteed, I think, ninety thousand euros. I only had like I think I have like fifty thousand pounds to my name at this point.

1:23:54 So I was already guaranteed double my net worth for whatever happened on that final table. And first prize was the one point two five million. Uh, one point seven dollars. Um That morning. I think I got some sleep the night before.

1:24:10 'Cause I somewhat of an insomniac anyway. So if I have a something on the next day that's big I often will just not sleep very well. And so you can imagine this cranks it up to ten. And I was dreaming, you know, you I don't know if you ever have that where you've been doing a lot of a particular thing, like trading or whatever, and you sort of a semi sleep and see the thing. I was playing poker. I was like I was lying there, I had pocket jacks, I had a King Queen, you know, just these fictitious hands. My brain just could not shut off. And that was my night the night before. And I was just like in a complete tears because I'm like, oh no, 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

1:24:48 It was so stressful, but I don't know. Once we actually started playing, once I got the cards in my hand, it was just like And I just switched into this like mode. Of I don't know. It was weird. Was that the first time that it happened or that happened you before? Not to that extent, because I think it was a perfect storm of like

1:25:05 It's such extreme nerves and being such a mess beforehand. And then like actually Being able to play well. I don't know, the the delta felt more than I'd ever had it before, but I had had that before where I was like able to like get into the zone very well. I wonder if you just spent all of your Yeah. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like that

1:25:24 tank was empty. Yeah. So you needed to switch to a different tank. Honestly, it felt like I had something guiding me that whole time. It was a very strange experience. And anyway. I won and it was great. Of course I'm not gonna let go of the metaphysical experience. We are gonna come back to that probably quickly. But before we do

1:25:41 For people who are not going to bank on having metaphysical Experiences or or the feeling of being guided. What else have you learned about regulating? Whether it's the white noise or Or especially for me of personal interest when someone is actively trying to

1:25:57 Fuck with you. And Disrupt. All of your systems. The best thing I found it's super simple is just

1:26:07 Breathing. Three deep breaths. It's so cookie cutter, but it just works. Just

1:26:15 Close your eyes and Inhale in, you can feel even if your heart's pounding, my heart's actually pounding a little bit now because I'm retelling the story. It's funny. But just that. you you notice that, you feel your body, you breathe in and you breathe it into your belly. And I I imagine My favorite colour.

1:26:30 Yeah. Which is usually a mix of like turquoise and purple or something like that. And I just I'm sucking that in. And it pulling it down into my stomach and then it's just like this ah settling feeling. And it's Uh half of it is just like bullshitting myself. But an interrupt. And it just is enough to like settle

1:26:50 Your nervous system a second, just ground you back to here. And then 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 all silly, like like playing a silly little in my head just to like m make light of the situation a bit. But that it requires a lot of

1:27:09 ability to sort of step out and observe the situation. Because obviously once you're in the red mist, particularly the red mist, more than the white noise. By definition, you are like animalistic. You are you don't have the ability to step outside and observe a situation well. So It's I think just practice, really. Practice begin angry. You know, practice reading. I guess the way you could do it is go like Go read something that you know makes you angry.

1:27:31 Like really like reliably gets your blood pressure up. And then try and like build in some kind of trigger that makes you do the the three breaths thing. So for ninety nine point nine percent of the Sado masochistic users of Twitter, myself included, just go on just go on Twitter. Yeah, just go on Twitter. Every day. For two minutes. Oh what a what a nasty neigh neighborhood that's turned into. So sad.

1:27:59 As you were saying this, I'm imagining I'm imagining Jason listening to this and formulating in his mind that's why I was smirking. For if he sees me taking deep breaths, he'd be like, Yeah, Timmy, take those deep breaths. Come on, buddy, you can do it. Oh sorry I've said you. Oh yeah. Yeah, I know you're doing great. Just close your eyes, don't even look at me. No, no, nothing to see here. He'll just go. It's not like everybody's waiting for you or anything. Yeah. All right.

1:28:30 What the hell happened in the morning? And you can contextualize this however you want. No, I mean what happened was I played a bunch of these tournaments, not of ones quite this size. But I'd still played a lot of tournaments at this point.

1:28:42 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 Poker Stars, whose event it was you know, they dimmed the lights of like welcome to EPT San Remo, huge, we've got incredible field, blah blah blah. And then they dim the lights and they put on on the screens around the room just like a promo exciting video. Promo video, you know. And I remember distinctly the music. It was Chemical Brothers Hey Boy, Hey Girl. Which I always loved. I always love that song. Yeah, good choice. Yeah.

1:29:13 And you know, I was like, Oh, this is cool, yeah, I'm excited. And while I was just like listening to it, Just Like out of nowhere this like a bolt of lightning. felt like there was like this like And his voice in my head said.

1:29:26 You are going to win this tournament. And it sounded like my own voice. But what I can't remember is whether it was I am gonna win or you are gonna win. But I'm pretty sure it was you are gonna win. But it's literally sounded like my own voice. And it was sounded like your own voice. Yes. So it was like the you know, when you speak in your head, like the the voice you hear, like

1:29:44 Most people have that right now. Well man, I'm learning learning a lot out here. Um It sounded like how I would s sound in my own head to myself. And it said, You are gonna win this tournament. And I got this rush of goosebumps. It's even happening a little bit like the

1:30:05 hairs up on my you know, on my arms. And I remember looking around the room like that. Did I just say that out loud? Did anyone else hear this? And everyone else was just like in their phones or whatever, and I was like Well that was freaky. And

1:30:19 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 a little bit forgot about it, but then like halfway through the day, I got in a big pot and I lost half my chips. You know, it's always a bad feeling when that happens. And I was like, Oh man, I'm nearly out of the tournament. I guess that was bullshit. You know, so like though I had like little multiple moments. Over the next few days where

1:30:43 It clearly was a real thing because I I've like checked in on it. And I even told a friend of mine on this. Meaning you remembered that it had happened. That it had happened. Well because obviously the rational explanation to this is the it was just a false memory. You know, the I have retroactively remembered something that didn't really happen as a way of like making it. Exactly. I reconstructed it. Yes. And I even have a friend, my my my friend Melanie, who was there and I bumped into her in the in the women's bathroom on like day two. And she's like, Oh, you got a lot of chips, it's going well. I was like, Yeah, yeah, uh things are going well. Really weird. I feel like I'm gonna win this. In fact, I almost had a premonition that I did. And she's like, Yeah, you seem really confident. I we actually had this conversation and to the point that she, after I won it, she was like

1:31:25 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.

1:31:35 I think you said string or series. of experiences. Is that type of experience in poker isolated to that? And it doesn't have to be constrained to poker. So what was interesting was often.

1:31:49 Doing this herky jerky. Question style, but Did you have any of those types of experiences when you were younger call. No. No. I was not like a weird kid that or yeah, you know, that had

1:32:00 Sorry, I'm Let me start again. You weren't like the kid from the Sixth Sense. No, I wasn't the Sixth Sense kid, no. Uh No, I did not, is to answer that question. I had not really ever had, I think, anything Like I never saw a ghost or anything like that. Don't lump me in with the ghost hunters. Come on. I want to just paint the picture of that I was a very in fact like a deep skeptic. Right. Well you still are a deep skeptic in a lot of ways. Right. But like certainly then, like I'd never had anything weird that I couldn't really explain in any conventional way. I'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? No, not so much common thing in poker. But

1:32:44 Have you since had more of those types of experiences? Not of like explicit premonitions. No. I'm not nothing even close to that. I have had

1:32:55 One really notable thing. That I am happy to talk about it. It's If you change your mind we can cut it later. For want of a better word, I had

1:33:05 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.

1:33:17 Wh It was like a sort of low frequency Buzzing, humming quite frequently. Like so some some kind of tinnitus. Yeah. But it was almost like a pressure.

1:33:28 And Voices, particularly men's voices. distorted to the point that they were Unbearable to listen to.

1:33:37 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

1:33:55 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 heirs disease. Many years is this degenerative thing which Usually people end up. Completely deaf.

1:34:09 When they have it, where basically the nerve cells in in the inner ear start dying and they don't really know why. They think it's something to do with like 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 pretty r really sorry, it's you know, it was just bad news to find that out. And also because one of the symptoms of it is you start having balance problems as well. You get like these vertigo attacks and people like vomiting and so on. And so You can imagine I was like really down in the dumps finding this out.

1:34:37 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 vertical attack while not being sober for the first time. So I was then really down in the dumps.

1:34:53 And then on the last night of the Bun I was talking to some friends and started talking to this girl who I kind of I don't know that well, but she's a friend of a friend. And I mention about my ear. And she's like, Oh well I I do energy healing. I'm an energy healer.

1:35:07 It's like I I don't know what that is, but sure, do whatever you want to do. Yeah, have a go. She's like I I can try. And After She sort of put her hand over my ear.

1:35:20 Uh 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

1:35:27 sucking over my ear with her mouth. Like not. Touching it, but just like pheas. And it was really unpleasant. So like you know, you can imagine that sensation of someone like Inhaling over your ear.

1:35:36 And I was like, Oh, please stop. She's like, No, I need to get this. There's something there. And she does it, I don't know, for a few minutes. And then eventually kinda. Yeah. collapses in a heap on the floor crying.

1:35:47 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 uh you know, retelling.

1:35:58 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.

1:36:10 Because she was shocked. She did not seem to expect whatever had just happened to her. And she said afterwards, she you know, she came around after a little while and she was like, I don't know what it was. It was like Bad energy, I don't know. It's gone. I'm very pleased to say it's fully gone and it's 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.

1:36:32 And that's exactly what happened. And I haven't had any problems since. It kinda just like It just blew my world open because Aside of that premonition thing, which I'd kind of forgotten about.

1:36:45 I have not. Ever subscribe to the anything like that. I like I'm a physicist. In fact like you know I've proud like I kind of built a career of being a like materialist, rationalist.

1:36:56 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

1:37:09 Two What feel like pretty incontrovertible data points. That something that I cannot explain. Happened.

1:37:19 And unfortunately would be incredibly beneficial to me. Such a blessing. Yeah. So yeah. So these experiences are

1:37:27 Particularly. Interesting to me. direct firsthand experiences. 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.

1:37:45 Use system two. Mm-hmm. thinking and rationality and reasoning and mathematics.

1:37:54 And So on. In Not just the world, but in competitive arenas, right? So you have a calibrated And also

1:38:05 Tested ability. to use those faculties. That you've developed. And I'm glad you're mentioning these things just because

1:38:15 Weird shit happens and the idea that we have it all figured out. is ludicrous. Even though humans at any point in history, whether you go back to the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, I'm sure you know six thousand years ago or whatever it was with the Egyptians, I'm sure they thought they had most things figured out. And it's just So clear. when you begin to really poke and prod and as you

1:38:38 gain more years and have more experiences, especially if you start pushing into some strange corners. Mm. There's a lot we simply don't understand. And Even if

1:38:49 We were to Say not chalk those up to false memories, but let's just say we chalk it up to placebo effect. Right. None the less Even if it were just placebo effect. Incredible.

1:39:01 Yeah, that doesn't diminish The Absurd inexplicability. Of it. With the current mechanisms that we uh understand.

1:39:12 And That's super exciting to me. It's super exciting to me. And it doesn't mean That You nor I would advocate that people just accept everything at face value. Of course not. There's horse shit everywhere. I mean, we're sitting in Austin, like the the world capital of spirituality. There's so much nonsense and so many charlatans. But I do pay attention.

1:39:34 to people like you. who have demonstrated in other areas that they have the ability Two. Think rationally. and have some grasp of a very good grasp of science and so on. Right. That's kind of one of the first

1:39:50 litmus tests for me. If someone's sharing something with me, I'm like all right. Can they fight logically out of a paper bag, right? Like can they can they like Have they demonstrated any ability to

1:40:03 use structured reasoning and other possible. Right, exactly. Exactly. And are they Sceptical. in other areas. Or is it just like Okay.

1:40:16 They accept. Anything as long as it's alternative but they reject like Western science for any number of reasons that don't make sense to me. If you've ever had antibiotics Yeah, Western science may have saved your life. And there are many other examples. I certainly wouldn't be here for more for Western medicine, let's just say, not science. And

1:40:36 I struggle with where to even take this'cause there's so many directions it could go that are pretty strange. But And I don't wanna co opt physics, so please give me a a slap here if this is just an amateur butchering the the the the good name of physics, but I've had a number of cognitive scientists on the podcast like

1:40:56 Donald Hoffman. I've had physicists on the podcast, although some would consider Michio Kako more of a Science communicator, but still. Has some Fundamentals.

1:41:06 I've had Private conversation, certainly, with a number of physicists. And I lack the foundation of mathematics necessary to fully appreciate it, but When you even start to look at the conversations that were being had between Einstein and Bohr way back in the day. Relative to

1:41:23 Quantum mechanics. Putting aside even the experimental design and evidence for Quantum entanglement. that have been done, I think in the Canary Islands and in other places Stuff is really strange.

1:41:39 Just even space time itself as an objective reality. I mean, there are there are pieces people can find online by Qualified scientists. on the death of space time. Right. Thinking about it.

1:41:54 That is almost a a UI that we have evolved to utilize, but not as the one and only user interface to Whatever we might be contending with. And like Donald Hoffman even thinks Well, not just Donald Hoffman. He he thinks that Consciousness essentially gives rise to space. Yeah. And

1:42:14 While a lot of Theoretical physicists. Pooh poo his ideas. And I think by and large they are Correct to Even

1:42:22 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.

1:42:38 On some Whether it's on a substrate or whether it I don't know if it even needs a substrate. I'm I'm too rusty on that stuff, but it's super weird. If you dig into the fundamental structure of this reality. You know, wickin'. witchcraft shop with like tarot cards in the display case. Not to knock that, right? But like we're talking about some of the most esteemed scientists in a hard science

1:43:04 with peer reviewed publications and so on. If you just look at that stuff closely enough. Shit's really weird. Yeah. There's a paper I was recently reading that's like digging into The Th that it seems like space time is

1:43:19 Well space itself is essentially coming out of observers interacting with each other. Conscious consciousness is interacting with each other. But it's really From what I can tell, really granular legit. Physics. I mean it's it's a math paper, basically. Yeah. It's beyond my pay rate. So I don't know. But um I may need your I wanna I wanna send it to like Sean Carroll. I don't know if you've ever had him on. Sean Carroll, I haven't had on, but my brother introduced me to his podcast, Mindscape. Is it Mindscape?

1:43:46 Excellent podcast. So if Sean Carroll is out there listening or if anyone knows him, let him know. I'm a I mean he may not want to hear this. I don't know what his opinion will be of me. But Big fan of his podcast. He's uh Damn fine. thinker and a damn fine communicator. And uh he had an excellent Episode.

1:44:06 On Sort of an archaeological exploration of Stonehenge and other artifacts as external mnemonic devices. Super cool.

1:44:19 To live. Olivia. Question for you. How do you As someone who is a

1:44:26 Trained. Rationalist materialist. Although you may not identify. As solely those things. I don't wanna imply that. How do you integrate some of these

1:44:37 Experiences. Into your own. life, your framework, your worldview. What do you do with that? It's tricky. I mean You know, I think with all these things it's

1:44:48 Walking this fine line between gullibility, open mindedness, whatever you want to call it, and scepticism and and cynicism. And I think where my poker training comes in handy. Is it

1:45:01 Hoka trains you to think. Improbabilities. You're never certain about anything. You could be Bluffing me with you know, you could have aces or you could be bluffing me with you know six four suited. That missed the card it needed. So

1:45:14 You become very comfortable in terms of Holding concurrent belief states in your mind. With different weighted probabilities of those things being true. So With these like

1:45:25 Yeah, these two weird unexplainable experiences that I had, you know, whether it was the ear thing was just pure placebo, which would still be crazy, because it would mean that like basically I have the ability to heal my mind by thinking I was going through some kind of like thing being sucked out my ear. Fine. And potentially heal your inner ear. Yeah, like I was just literally told I had a degenerative thing and I was gonna go deaf. And like no one's been cured of it. And this has miraculously gone away. So whatever the hell happened, the point is I didn't go and change my life. I didn't suddenly go and be like, that's it, I'm gonna go and practice energy healing and become a witch and so on.

1:45:56 I Continued still like I've still I'm an adherent to the scientific method. It's just that I've now broaded my as you mentioned, you know, it's almost like people become they believe in the scientism as opposed to being scientists. A true scientist is that you are maximally curious, you do your best to devise experiments. In order to get reliable, robust results that you can use to predict the world.

1:46:18 And you try and minimize all the biases and things that could mess up your experiment and give you a faulty result. And so There's no reason why I can't Incorporate These two data points in terms of I mean, I haven't gone out and done any science I I really should. I guess go and do some tests.

1:46:34 And see if I can try and recreate that experience. But it's very difficult because it was a set set and setting were very important and what happened there, I would assume. Anyway, I don't know that. Well, when they make the Netflix serious about it and they recreate the entire environment, then you can sit down and try to recreate it. Yeah. So what I 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 sceptical 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. Oh that's good.

1:47:16 And now I have updated it, you know, with this evidence to how many orders of magnitude do I want to go. I mean I will give it I at least give it a one in one hundred. But

1:47:28 I think it's more likely that there is a An explanation through what we know conventionally. that is still more probable than that it is something completely n like some completely novel thing that is untapped. But that said, you know, I've actually had a few other little ones I won't go into, but like other little data points of just like weird energy things that have happened in certain scenarios. It's helped me. But

1:47:49 It's still important to Keep the like sceptical hat on. And Extraordinary beliefs require extraordinary evidence. And

1:48:00 In order for me to like give up everything that I know about our current understanding of the world, I would need significantly more data points. And I think that would it's just not the practical way to go forward. Yeah, I would also add to that that If folks want to be proper skeptics. You owe it to yourself and to the people you interact with to be an informed skeptic. So if you are going to

1:48:20 Invoke the name of science. And not invoke it like the name of Odin in some like Yeah, God works in mysterious ways. Kind of way.

1:48:32 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

1:48:55 Confidence intervals. Right. So confidence intervals, understanding, powering un because you also find folks who and I always I've been saying scientism, but I guess it's scientism is sort of like capital S. In either case, it has a capital S and it's not good. So if you succumb to that one of the telltale characteristics that I've come across is They'll ask if something was a controlled study or a placebo control, a randomized study, randomized control, you know, R C T

1:49:21 And then say, Well, how many How many subjects were there? Or what was the N if they get you know fancy and I might say twenty, twenty five, and they're like, Oh yeah. Small study.

1:49:31 Well, nonsense. And I'm like It's not that Simplistic. There are quite a few variables you have to take into account. So recommendations for folks.

1:49:41 Who were interested. Number one Study the studies by uh Peter Tia M D excellent series of blog posts. That's take you into the fundamentals of understanding How to dissect and understand a study.

1:49:56 Which includes meta analyses and gets into the the risks of taking meta analyses as gospel also, because garbage in, garbage out, and there's there's a lot to it. Another recommendation, actually a podcast that I did six years ago, I realized when I pulled this up. This is podcast number one ninety four, The Magic and Power of Placebo. This is with Eric Vance, who wrote a book. Called Suggestible U, subtitled The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal.

1:50:27 And he's written very widely on placebo is an excellent book. Many of his feature pieces are are exceptional. There's a great piece in Wired magazine probably ten years ago on the evolution of the placebo effect and how it has changed depending on the culture.

1:50:44 And other influences. So in certain places, say a a placebo pill and a blue capsule or a red capsule perform better than other colours. It's really don't do a blue or red one in this day and age. That's true. That is true. Yeah. We can pick other colours. But The context that surrounds that is really, really interesting. And then the last thing I would recommend people check out. Is cognitive biases and looking at both frameworks intended to avoid them and just getting a better understanding. So you can go to Wikipedia and just look up cognitive biases and get a pretty basic list. You can look at something like poor Charlie's almanac with Charlie Munger, although it's a bit dense and it's a little user unfriendly. In a lot of respects. But what were you gonna say?

1:51:26 I think I would recommend is some of Julian Gaelief's work. Yeah, um the scout mindset. And Uh motivated reasoning. What was the first one? The scout mindset. Scout mindset. Yeah. I mean, she did a TED talk on it, but she's just written a book on it as well. And I think she actually goes in, uh if I remember rightly, she goes in. Yes.

1:51:45 She goes into that sort of again that When I first learned about rationality, like I read everything on less wrong if people know that, which is incredible resource for it. And it, you know, really breaks down You know, how you get this you know, your brain, which is like the map. To match the actual territory, which is the universe. As accurately as possible.

1:52:04 But Where I think it's maybe lacking a little bit now because I've had some of these weirder experiences, which actually where I wasn't, you know, in its class classical sense rational. I uh you know, clearly went off the beaten path into some like weird land, but it was actually very beneficial to me, even if it was like some completely useful fiction. It was still useful. Yeah. Yeah. And this idea of like useful fictions, I think, needs to be explored further. Yeah. But also add that much like poker.

1:52:31 Science I don't think a lot of folks realize is largely A game of probabilities. You don't prove something a hundred percent most of the time. It's like well Literally never, actually. Yeah. Exactly. I mean you you can have overwhelmingly compelling.

1:52:48 data even with say an observational Study, say with the sort of quintessential example would be cigarette smoking causing. Lung cancer, right. But most of the time it's like this suggests

1:53:01 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

1:53:16 roll up your sleeves and get involved in science, whether that's as a subject. I've been a subject in studies at all sorts of places. I started doing it as an undergrad. I was a subject in one of Daniel Kahneman's studies. And uh It was not very intellectually engaging. It was like space bar over time at like a Yeah, green. square popped or something, but I needed the seven dollars an hour or whatever it was.

1:53:37 And I've been a subject at Stanford with heat exhaustion experiments. That was also not terribly fun. marching to exhaustion with like a esophageal probe and an anal probe kind of meeting in the middle. In fatigues with weights on a treadmill and a sauna to like Complete. Collapse. Mental collapse. Yeah. So why do I do these things? Because I'm interested in seeing the process.

1:53:58 And uh even some of the best science you could point to in the most prestigious journals, when you actually get in there. It's a lot messier than people think. But people want to have confidence in something, then the religion has become So out of fashion.

1:54:12 that they look to the high priests of science and they're like, At least I have the confidence in this being true. So I actually wanna one of my next videos I wanna make on this, which is about Basically, Signalling prestige. bad incentives that get society stuck.

1:54:29 In these kind of These these traps, essentially. So we're stuck in one of those with the current status quo of of the way science is done, and this is not at all to knock any scientists, you know, they're doing that doing their absolute best. But the s the way the system has been designed, we Give all the reward to the people who First make the new fancy discovery.

1:54:48 And don't give it any credit to the people who then actually replicate it and verify it. Yeah, totally. incredible incentive to be always looking for some new novel thing. In order to get that, you know, get your your thing published in Nature and get those research dollars for the next time. But it doesn't actually really advance human knowledge. Because so many of these things don't replicate. And it's

1:55:10 We're sort of stuck in this spiral of just like everyone's trying to please do whatever they can to get in the journal and it's There there's a name for it. So actually so there's this really incredible short online book called Inadequate Equilibria. By the guy who wrote most of the stuff on Less Wrong, Eliasa Yodkowski. And I recommend inadequate equilibrium. Yes. It's it's it's a heavy name. Heavy name. Oh man. I know it sounds it's so good. It has one of the best things. It has a a discussion, a fictitious discussion with an alien from a perfect society. Like a b a basic person who thinks everything's explained, you know, everything that's wrong in our society is is because of like there's bad people being greedy. And then with a cynical smart economist. And they have this three way discussion talking about like

1:55:50 reason why the US healthcare system is so expensive and it sort of goes into this meandering thing about That's a cool premise. It's so good. Like are you like you must include this in the show notes. How long would you say it is? I mean ideally they read they could just read chapter three, honestly. It's it's I don't know, it's like a forty five minute read. Yeah, it's just a it's like a book chapter. And you can kinda read it stand alone. We'll put this, we'll put it in the show notes. But basically it's it's talking about these like these traps that we can get into where it gets people now speaking, game theory. It gets society stuck in like shitty gnash equilibria. So a Nash equilibrium is when two people or multiple people are playing in a strategy where It would be bad for anyone to deviate from that strategy. It's like everyone's stuck doing that. But not all Nash equilibria are actually created equal. There are some where if everyone was doing

1:56:36 X instead of Y, everyone would be happier. They'd also be like, you know, now stuck in a new thing. So like a good example of this would be So I just made a a video called The Beauty Wars. about this like fictitious thing called Moloch. Which I call like the demon of negative sum games, basically. It's like the god of negative sum games. It's the it's a force of bad

1:56:57 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. We 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 dumbed. Dumbfounded. They're horrifying not only in how impressively good they are at doing stuff, but also how

1:57:24 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, w 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 that you know, just per just changes the the proportions just right, that it sets the the like, you know, the dopamine spike off in your brain. And It's gonna make online dating really hard. Oh man. Not that I'm on the field. I'm not on the playing field, but right. If I were, that sounds like a headache. Well and but also for

1:58:05 People who use them. Like so I'm a girl on Instagram, you know, I for a while certainly like made a lot of my career off the way I looked. There's such an incentive pressure. You know, if I wanna keep playing the game of trying to grow my Instagram like sexy pig, yeah, it's the arms race, exactly. And that's what Moloch is. Moloch is this like The God of arms races. And it's like these these bad incentives where we could the cheap thing for me to do is just to use one of these AI filters on on on all my pictures. And I know I'm gonna look good and I'm gonna get a ton of likes and it'll grow my thing. But It will make me miserable in the process. And If you poll, probably uh most particularly women on on Instagram.

1:58:42 They are not having a good time of these things either on themselves, because if you then like compare your face side to side You're just like, Man, I've you've you just it just makes you feel ugly. And so We're in this weird situation where No one wants to do stuff that makes them hate their face.

1:58:55 But they're doing it anyway. It's like a lower Nash equilibrium. You know, we could all be in a higher Nash equilibrium where we're not doing it. But instead we're all stuck down there because of these bad game theoretic incentives. So this is my current obsession, this thing called Moloch. And I think about it all the time. M O L O C H for people wondering. And we'll 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.

1:59:21 Probably the best thing is if they search for my name and then the beauty wars. Mm-hmm. That'll link to the video I just talked about. Alright. And then you can find my channel from And uh just for the spelling, everybody it's Live L I V last Name.

1:59:35 B-O-E-R E Which means I learned just beforehand. Drunk farmer.

1:59:43 So they say. And I did grow up on a farm. And I did drink a lot. So good. So good. Yeah. Ferris, you know, the best I can tell. You're a big wheel. It could be that. It also refers to Ferrous like ferrous oxide, F E R O U S. Ooh, R because apparently some of My

2:00:09 progenitors were silversmiths. I don't know how it all fits together. Seems like a very dubious story. I'm not sure, but I want I want some story to go along with the last name. But I don't have Drunken Farmer. That's an amazing one. Uh live. We should do a round two sometime. We're we're practically neighbors. We have so much we could talk about. We've got a million other things even in the notes in front of me that we could cover and should cover. I'm thinking about this training. And Are you gonna do it?

2:00:39 We'll see. Requires more Mezcal to make that decision. I think we could we could condense it down and we don't have to do the full eight weeks. I think com commit to Even three weeks, honestly, I think you would Jake Al would still be better than you at that stage. I have to say that. No, he would be. Um Mm.

2:00:56 All right. Three weeks. Three weeks. I'm going to I'm gonna sleep on that. I do my I do my best thinking when I'm asleep. Let me sleep on that. Is there anything else that you would like to say? Any closing comments? Places you'd like to point people. Anything at all that you like to say before we before we wind this down? No, I mean I guess

2:01:15 Do check out My my YouTube. I'd love people to go and um I'm I'm Now I've moved to Austin and I'm like building a studio and everything. I'm gonna be ramping up production again. So I would love people to go and just sub to my channel so that They didn't catch my stuff. Because of you know, playing the rat race. The Attention Wars. That's the name of the next video is The Attention Wars. Which is about why Twitter and everything is making us so angry and hate each other. Yeah. That's a big one. Talk about a nasty game. Yeah. And Moloch. Mollloch's in that. Moloch. Mollloch's all over that. So live.

2:01:48 We're gonna link to everything in the show notes. People can find you at Livebare.com also, which I I would imagine has links to many things. And we'll put links to everything we've discussed, all the resources, inadequate equilibria, and uh All other good things. In the show notes at Tim.blog slash podcast. And

2:02:10 So nice to see you. Thanks for taking the time. This is awesome. Super fun. Super fun. And for everybody listening as per usual, thanks for tuning in. And until next time, just be a little kinder to yourselves. and to others than you think is necessary and take care. Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bold 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.

2:02:57 It's kinda 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 podcasts. guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun again it's very short a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday. Type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash. Friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.

2:03:38 This episode is brought to you by Element, spelled LMNT. 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.

2:04:22 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 LMNT, 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, 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 jujitsu coaches turned him on to electrolytes as a performance enhancer, things clicked, and bam, company was born. 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 be 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.

2:05:34 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 slash Tim. Be sure to also try the new Element Sparkling. a bold sixteen ounce can of sparkling electrolyte water. Again, check it all out. Drink Element Dot com slash Tim, drink L M N T dot com slash Tim. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. IBU AG1 as comprehensive nutritional insurance and that is nothing new. I actually recommended AG1 in my 2010

2:06:21 bestseller more than a decade ago, the four hour body, and I did not get paid to do so. I simply love the product and felt like it was the ultimate nutritionally dense supplement. that you could use conveniently while on 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. 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 source nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut,

2:07:05 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 manage stress. Now I do my best always to eat nutrient dense meals. That is the basic, basic, basic, basic requirement. 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.

2:08:05 That's just like brushing my teeth. part of the routine. It's also NSF certified for sport, so professional athletes trust it to be safe. And each pouch of AG1 contains exactly what is on the label, does not contain harmful levels of microbes or heavy metals, and is free of 280 band substances. It's the ultimate nutritional supplement in one easy scoop. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's DrinkAG1, the number one. DrinkAG1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim.

2:08:51 Check it out.

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