In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, Joe talks about audiobooks and why Ting is the best way to save money on your cell phone service. Joe also talks about how much better it is to use your phone on a backbone network, and why you should get an iPhone 4 or an iPhone 5 for $95. If you're frugal, you can save $25 off of one of their outstanding devices by using the promo code Frugal25 and get a 5-year plan from Ting starting at $25. They also have a great deal on the iPhone 5, which is a steal at $99.99! You can get a 4-year deal with Ting that starts at $21 a month and includes a free trial of Ting's newest service, Ting Prime, which gives you unlimited phone service for as little as $99 a year. And if you go over that, you get penalized if you pay for what you use less than $1,000 a month. You get 25% off your phone bill, plus an additional $5 off your next bill when you upgrade to an iPhone or iPad. Thanks to our sponsor, Audible, for sponsoring the show! It's a win-win-win situation, and you get a free audiobook and 30 days of free service from Audible! Thanks, and a bunch of other awesome stuff! Enjoy! -Joe Rogan Mini Podcast! Logo by Courtney Deedee. Music by Ian Dorsch and John Rocha. We do not own the rights to any of our songs featured on the show. All credit card used in the show is credit card or other third-party credits, we are not affiliated with the show, but we are working with a good company that does not charge us a small monthly fee to make the show better listening experience. We are working on a free ad-free version of the show that is available on Audible. Thank you for supporting the show and we are looking forward to hearing from you, the listeners! and we hope you enjoy it! -- Thank you so much for all the support we can be a little bit more honest and more honest. -- Joe Rogans Podcast, we really appreciate it. -Jon Sorrentino - Thank you, Jon Rogan Podcast -- , and podcast
00:02:53.000I say it again, I sound like a douche.
00:02:55.000Like when people say that, like the beginning of comedy clubs, they do this thing where they go, alright everybody, you ready for the show?
00:03:00.000And then people clap, they go, that's not good enough, I need to, oh come on you fuckhead.
00:04:20.000And Ting, on their second year anniversary, for no reason other than the fact that they could give people a better deal, I've heard zero complaints from any of my friends that use Ting.
00:04:37.000I have zero complaints about Ting personally.
00:06:03.000O-N-N-I-T. Onnit is a human optimization website.
00:06:07.000What we sell at Onnit is essentially all things that I use.
00:06:11.000I have found over the course of my life in athletics and martial arts, I have found a bunch of things that have been shown through science, through people that are strength and conditioning experts that recommend it.
00:06:33.000Through science, through strength and conditioning experts, things that have been shown to improve physical condition, things that have been shown to improve cognitive function, which is a very controversial aspect.
00:06:45.000It means like saying something's going to improve cognitive function, meaning if you're one of the dumber people listening, that means it makes your brain work better.
00:06:51.000That sounds like it's going to make your dick bigger, right?
00:07:01.000I can't remember what I'm supposed to do.
00:07:04.000There's days that you just don't feel right.
00:07:06.000And then there's days where you feel fantastic.
00:07:10.000I believe, and it's not just me, it's been proven through science and studies that there's a bunch of different factors involved in cognitive function.
00:07:24.000Like, eight hours of sleep a night will change the way your body functions.
00:07:29.000If you can get eight hours sleep a night, your body will have the ability to recover that it just is not going to get if you're doing four.
00:07:36.000and three and five and four and three and it's just like you're breaking your body down so sleep number one nutrition huge gigantic absolutely give your brain the ability to recover give your body to the ability to recover and it's going to function better give it the nutrients it deserves and it's going to work better and some of those nutrients directly aid cognitive function and we have with alpha brain taken the ones that we have shown or that have been shown Through clinical trials,
00:08:07.000through anecdotal evidence that have been backed up by clinical trials, years and years, thousands of years for some of them, of use, of human use.
00:08:16.000And they have shown that there are some certain elements, some certain elements of nutrition that you can take that actually improve your memory, that actually improve the way your brain works.
00:08:31.000If you go to Onnit.com, click on the AlphaBrain link, and then click on the research page, it'll show you all the different tests with sources, with references that have been done on each of the individual ingredients, and then it'll also show you the AlphaBrain.
00:09:15.000It's one of the things like when you're reaching for information, when you're reaching, when you're trying to formulate sentences, that's where I feel that AlphaBrain really benefits me.
00:09:26.000It makes it easier for me to formulate sentences.
00:09:28.000It makes it easier for me to know what the fuck I'm talking about when I'm saying things.
00:10:39.000One of the things, you are a big-time poker player, travel all over the world, and there's a lot of people on my message board that are big poker fans and very excited to have you on the podcast.
00:10:50.000One of the things they asked me to differentiate, because I bring this up all the time, That a lot of poker players are gamblers.
00:10:59.000And a lot of poker players are kind of degenerate gamblers.
00:11:01.000But poker is not really a gambling thing.
00:11:06.000It's more of a game of intelligence and a game of information and a game of strategy.
00:12:39.000Probably my greatest accomplishment as a chess player is 8th place in the New York State 3rd grade and under tournament.
00:12:47.000So I played chess seriously for a while.
00:12:50.000Around 13, I reached this point in my chess career where it got really boring, where I was just really solidly the second best player in the county.
00:13:00.000And every time I'd go to a chess tournament, I knew what was going to happen.
00:13:03.000I was going to beat all these kids I was a lot better than.
00:13:06.000I was going to play this dude, Nick, in the final, and I was going to lose.
00:13:12.000He studied harder and he had a sharper chess mind than me.
00:13:16.000Something that I never really got past in chess was that it's really easy to make one small mistake and end the game.
00:13:28.000And poker is a little more forgiving of slight oversights.
00:13:32.000Like in chess, You think through a move, it looks pretty good, you make the move, and then right after you made the move, oh fuck, bishop takes knight and I lose.
00:14:19.000It's better to be an extremely good poker player than an extremely good chess player.
00:14:23.000Would it be a relevant analogy to say that playing poker is more of a game where you restart every time, whereas chess is like a sword fight.
00:14:38.000You get one chance to not get stabbed.
00:14:42.000If you get your arm cut off, you're gonna die.
00:14:44.000Yeah, that is actually a pretty good analogy.
00:14:46.000So when you play poker, are you the type of guy, like, when you, like, read a person and you have an idea that you have a big advantage, will you then take a big chance?
00:15:39.000Aren't presented with constant unlimited opportunities to get an advantage, so when you are presented with one, yeah, you have to...
00:15:49.000So there's a certain amount of courage that's involved in playing the game of poker.
00:15:53.000It's not something that you chip away at necessarily.
00:15:56.000It's something that when the opportunity presents itself and you believe that you have it, do you have like a green light that goes off in your head or do you have an instinct that you sort of rely on?
00:16:07.000In terms of like the risk management part of what you're talking about, a lot of that is actually...
00:16:37.000That's a game where losing one hand for the maximum amount isn't going to ruin my life, isn't going to have a big impact on anything.
00:16:48.000So in that context, I can go ahead and risk the full $5,000 that's in front of me on a half a percent edge because that's how you make money playing poker.
00:17:02.000You identify an edge and you exploit it.
00:17:08.000So, in terms of, like, courage and risk management, the, like, risk management thing comes in before you're actually playing a hand.
00:17:16.000And then, in the course of playing a hand, you have already made decisions that put you in a position to be comfortable taking the maximum amount of risk that you could be confronted with after that point.
00:17:31.000Is what I'm saying making sense there?
00:18:10.000But what I... Well, part of my contract with PokerStars does involve getting a certain amount of money per year that is earmarked toward buying into poker tournaments.
00:18:25.000It's not explicitly staking me in the poker tournaments.
00:18:27.000It's just my compensation for representing the company.
00:18:32.000So your compensation is essentially up to your management discretion.
00:18:35.000So when I play something like a million dollar buy-in poker tournament, what I do is I take on investors who are typically other professional poker players and they buy shares of me in the tournament.
00:18:48.000They put up a fraction of the buy-in and if I win, they get a fraction of the winnings.
00:18:58.000So if you go into a poker tournament and there's maybe 20 guys, it's conceivable that you and the guy you're playing against in the finals have a piece of each other?
00:19:10.000That's a big thing in the world of pool.
00:19:13.000But pool, they do it in billiards, professional pool, because they don't make as much money.
00:19:18.000So they kind of make a saver, that's what you call it.
00:19:24.000So say if you and I were to play in the finals and it was a major pool tournament, It depends on the agreement, but we might make a 50-50 or 60-40 split.
00:19:33.000So we would play our best, but you would know that no matter what worst case scenario, even if you lost, you were going to get 40% of the purse.
00:19:41.000The same thing also happens in poker tournaments, in addition to what I was describing where people sell action before the tournament starts.
00:19:49.000There are also often deals made toward the end of the tournament.
00:19:53.000So I was recently playing a tournament in Las Vegas, and when we got down to three players left, it was me and two other guys who I think are also really strong poker players.
00:20:03.000And we agreed that rather than play it out, we are going to just divide up the remaining prize money according to how many chips each of us have and call it a day.
00:20:21.000Is there an ethical quandary involved in that?
00:20:26.000I would say there's a vocal minority of people who are bothered by that, and that most people are not bothered by it at all.
00:20:34.000That's something you see happen everywhere from the very highest stakes tournaments in the world to a weekly $20 tournament that...
00:20:43.000At some point, people will agree to a chop.
00:20:46.000It can be a partial chop where they just take out some of the money, like the saver sort of thing you were talking about, or it can be a complete chop where they just split up the prize pool and call it a day.
00:20:55.000But the vocal minority, what is their argument?
00:21:53.000I mean, I think I'm too close to stuff like this to see it objectively because I'm friends with so many pool players and because I don't, you know...
00:22:27.000So the people that are the commentators and the spectators, like, you say, a vocal minority, is it only a small percentage of the commentators and spectators?
00:22:37.000It's hard to tell, because the people who don't object aren't saying anything about it, but I would guess, yeah, it's only a small percentage.
00:22:44.000Now, there's no rules against it, though, right?
00:22:47.000It's not like something you guys have to do on the sneak tip.
00:22:50.000There are some tournament venues that won't enforce the chop, which means at the majority of tournament venues, you say to the tournament director, we've agreed to this chop, pay each of us this amount of money.
00:23:06.000At a minority of venues, you can't do that.
00:23:09.000You say that, the tournament director says, I don't want to hear it, you have to play the tournament out.
00:23:50.000There was a really high profile one with the guy who won the World Series of Poker main event several years ago.
00:23:56.000Jamie Gold got taken to court by a guy who claimed to have a backing arrangement with him and had like voicemails saying, yeah, I'm giving you this amount of money for 50% of your winnings.
00:24:10.000And then after the fact, Jamie Gold's like, nope.
00:25:15.000It's one tournament on the order of 6,000 players, and the best player in the tournament is maybe 10 times as likely to win it as the worst player in the tournament, but it's one tournament.
00:25:30.000So, it's possible that a middling tournament player can win the World Series of Poker?
00:26:00.000I always felt like the guy who won was the best guy, or there's like a handful of best guys, and they swap positions, and it's about who's focusing more.
00:26:42.000A football game, if the Giants are playing the Falcons, you can bet the money line and you can get 2-1 on the Giants if they're the underdog,
00:27:01.000For poker tournaments, the bookmakers are not that confident that they know the right prices, and they only put up one side.
00:27:08.000If you want to bet on one guy to win the tournament...
00:27:11.000They'll give you a price, but it's a really bad price, and you're going to lose making that bet, and you can't take the other side.
00:27:20.000Betting on the outcome of poker tournaments is a pretty small market.
00:27:24.000Yeah, because that's another thing they tried with Poole, but they took...
00:27:28.000The one time they did it in Vegas, they had this big tournament, and this one guy, Mike LeBron, who's an excellent player, but was like the 40-to-1 underdog.
00:27:37.000So they all dumped to Mike LeBron, and they all bet on Mike LeBron, and Mike LeBron wound up winning the whole tournament.
00:28:09.000When you get to the small market stuff like pool where the players aren't making a lot and you can bet more on the outcome of the tournament than the tournament itself is worth, that's obviously creating a bad situation.
00:28:19.000So if World Series of Poker comes along and Vegas puts up a line, I could bet on you to win the whole thing.
00:29:46.000But then what he did was he went and got coached by Tiger Woods' coach and got really fucking good and came back and played for huge stakes against a couple of guys and smashed them.
00:30:02.000And just midway through the round, they're like, this is bullshit.
00:30:41.000I would think there's so many variables involved in golf.
00:30:44.000That, like, the courses themselves are variable, the wind is variable, there's so much going on, like, figuring out where the ball lies, and then trying to figure out the rolls of the hill, and all that jazz, and trying to get,
00:31:00.000Yeah, it seems pretty damn complicated.
00:31:02.000I haven't played in a really long time, but...
00:31:05.000Yeah, the mechanics of it seem very difficult to learn, and I understand that coaching could help that, but even just the variables.
00:31:11.000When a guy like Tiger Woods was just dominating everybody, winning like crazy, it defied my imagination, because I was always like, how could this one guy figure out this weird game Where there's so many variables, so much better than everybody else.
00:31:43.000I read this study on hedge fund managers that by far the most predictive variable of the performance of a hedge fund is whether or not the manager is currently going through a divorce.
00:32:34.000Really, for a person who's never been through it or never seen someone go through it, it's like you're being attacked by aliens that you can't see and they're stealing money from you.
00:32:46.000And just like every second of every day, thousands of dollars are leaving your bank account and you're watching yourself go broke.
00:32:54.000You're watching years of your life, all the work you put in.
00:32:57.000I had a good friend that I've talked about on the podcast before, but Yeah.
00:33:45.000So, the only way it'll be different is if she remarries, which of course she never would, because, you know, she would lose her sweet paycheck that she gets every month.
00:33:55.000I watched this guy, like, age 10 years?
00:33:59.000In two years he'd probably age 10 and just was pulling his fucking hair out and going crazy and it was never over.
00:35:59.000And at one point in time when you were in college and you were in the middle of some stupid course you didn't really give a fuck about, were you like, you know what, I think I could be a goddamn professional poker player?
00:36:39.000Second semester of my junior year, this thing started happening to me where I'd go to the computer lab and sit down to do a project and an hour would go by and I'd just still be staring at a blank screen.
00:36:57.000I think it was some subconscious part of my brain realizing ahead of the more conscious and willful part that this was not what I wanted to do long term.
00:37:24.000I think that was probably only a small part of it.
00:37:27.000I think that even if I hadn't found poker and decided to make a career of that, that I would have made myself get through undergrad computer science and somewhere around grad school or early into a career doing that,
00:37:42.000I would have realized it wasn't doing it for me.
00:37:45.000Yeah, that's something that some kids do when they're young and they're starting to try to pick a career.
00:37:50.000They look at something that they think they can do.
00:38:53.000You know, for me, I took a year off when I got out of high school, and then I went to UMass Boston for three years, but I completely half-assed it.
00:39:02.000Like, I just was doing it because I didn't want to be a loser.
00:39:06.000So I was going to school with no idea whatsoever how I was ever going to fit into any traditional work environment.
00:39:14.000And all the while, I had a sort of a career because I was teaching martial arts and I was teaching it at a high level.
00:39:20.000I was teaching it in Boston University and I had my own school and everything like that.
00:39:24.000I was still going to school and I was like, what the fuck am I doing?
00:39:28.000But at least I had some things that I was interested in.
00:39:30.000But I had friends that were going to school and they were like, well, I'm going to be an electrical engineer.
00:39:36.000I'm like, is that what you want to do?
00:40:41.000There's a lot of luck involved in a lot of different ways.
00:40:44.000There's a lot of luck involved in being American.
00:40:47.000There's a lot of luck involved in having good motor skills that you can walk and you don't have a disease and you don't have fucking cancer.
00:41:16.000So when you were 18 and you started making money doing poker and then you realized that school was kind of whack, what did your parents think about that?
00:41:24.000Well, the way that played out was, like I said, second semester of my junior year, I failed most of my classes after straight A's for five semesters.
00:42:19.000By coincidence, over the following summer, some legal rumbling started in Washington that maybe it's time to crack down on online gambling.
00:42:32.000And a bill called the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act got passed or was due to get passed that fall.
00:44:42.000The legal situation in the U.S. and worldwide is pretty complicated.
00:44:51.000The really weird thing is that No laws actually changed.
00:44:56.000How the government felt like enforcing them changed.
00:44:59.000When the law is talking about, the UIGEA passed, I didn't know this at the time I was making the decision to take the year off, but the final language of the bill says nothing about what unlawful internet gambling is.
00:45:13.000It assumes that that's something that...
00:45:17.000Somebody else already knows and provides for enforcement against the banking and credit card transactions that facilitate illegal online gambling.
00:45:26.000It's in no way clear what illegal online gambling in the US is.
00:45:45.000Treated as illegal by the Department of Justice on the basis of a law from the 60s called the Wire Act that says you can't play sports bets over Telegram.
00:47:06.000I don't actually know what union represents casino workers, but I think it's one of the bigger, like, food service sort of ones and is a big deal.
00:47:14.000Yeah, I would imagine that they would do it just to sort of strengthen their position as job holders, because, like...
00:47:21.000The UFC has a big issue with the Culinary Union.
00:47:26.000Yeah, I think that's who has a lot of the casino jobs as well.
00:51:27.000Bovada is the entity that they spun off of the main Bodog corporate entities because operating online gambling in the U.S. is so risky that they have basically set up their corporate fall guy of Bovada,
00:51:57.000So they're just kind of like setting up a straw house to blow down when the shit gets...
00:52:02.000But they're, meanwhile, taking money out of the straw house and putting it in this big stone mansion somewhere that's under a different name.
00:52:08.000And yeah, Bodog, I shouldn't say any of this too confidently.
00:52:12.000I haven't been paying close attention to it, but I think Bodog...
00:52:15.000Welcome to what we do on the podcast every day.
00:52:17.000LAUGHTER I think Bodog is continuing to operate around the world as Bodog and is Bovada only for its U.S. facing operations.
00:52:57.000If people are willing to gamble, and then they'll pay taxes on those gambling debts, or gambling profits, or whatever it was, or even losses.
00:53:06.000It seems like if the company wins money, or if the person wins money, taxes are going to be paid.
00:53:13.000It seems like that should be pretty easy to...
00:53:15.000Well, so, to go back to what I was saying about the stages that the casino lobby has gone through in their attitude on online gambling, around 2005-2006, they decided, okay, this is bad.
00:54:50.000In a lower pressure environment, I think, introduces people to the game who then go on to play in live casinos as well.
00:55:00.000Now, when you go to a live casino, how many people are like me, that don't know how to play poker at all, but are still trying to play poker?
00:55:08.000Do people get liquored up and just wander into the poker room and go, let's fucking give this a shot?
00:55:13.000Every once in a while and more at lower stakes than at higher stakes, obviously.
00:56:11.000There's no one who can sneak up on you.
00:56:13.000I mean, there are probably a few people.
00:56:16.000There are probably a handful of guys who mostly play online, turn up at a casino, and I wouldn't recognize them, but they're among the best players in the world.
00:56:28.000But for the most part, yeah, I recognize most of the top players.
00:56:34.000My friend Ari Shafir, who's a stand-up comedian, great guy, funny, hilarious motherfucker, but very smart.
00:56:40.000And when he was struggling as a stand-up comedian, he was playing poker tournaments.
00:56:45.000And he was making more money playing in casinos, playing poker, than he was doing stand-up.
00:56:50.000Yeah, I've heard Ari talk about that before.
00:56:51.000Yeah, I mean, he's making a living doing poker.
00:56:55.000And I always found that incredibly fascinating, that he was doing that, that he was just going from place to place and playing poker.
00:57:20.000It's more common, I'd say, at the mid-stakes than at the highest stakes, just because the world's too small to get away with it much at the highest stakes.
00:57:29.000Yeah, the highest stakes, how many guys are there in the world that are just elite?
00:57:35.000Dozens to hundreds, depending on how you're counting it, I guess.
00:58:22.000But they said that it's just like Vegas times 100. They said it's madness, like the amount of gambling and craziness and the majesty of it all.
01:00:08.000They detailed all these different towns that have been constructed in China that were exact replicas of famous Swiss Alps towns and stuff like that.
01:01:36.000I just can't believe that something like that can just explode.
01:01:39.000I never even heard of Macau until maybe two or three years ago.
01:01:44.000I remember peripherally reading about it online, something like that, and then I heard about boxing matches being held there.
01:01:51.000Yeah, I basically didn't know anything about it until poker took off there maybe four or five years ago.
01:01:56.000So you're 18 years old, you start playing poker, you're 21 years old, you tell your parents, you know what, fuck it, I'm going to give it a go.
01:02:03.000I'm going to try to make a million dollars in the first year.
01:02:05.000How much did you actually want to make in that first year?
01:02:18.000A couple months after I said that, I played in one of my first ever big live tournaments and finished second for like $850,000, so I got a bit of a head start.
01:05:34.000There's a bunch of companies that are selling these cognitive enhancing formulas now, especially now that AlphaBrain has become really popular.
01:05:40.000It's become super popular to sell these blends.
01:05:44.000There's different things like paracetam and choline.
01:05:47.000There's all these different things that have been shown to have positive effects on cognitive function.
01:05:51.000A friend of mine at a tournament a couple months ago gave me something called Smart Caffeine, which is just caffeine and L-theanine.
01:06:55.000Which doesn't necessarily mean it's easier.
01:06:58.000It means it's easier to get really in-depth in how you're analyzing it, and the same situations come up over and over again, because it's only two players.
01:07:08.000And if there are nine players at the table, that's nine different people who can do something different every hand, and similar situations don't come up nearly as often.
01:07:19.000Whereas when I'm playing Heads Up, Two hours into playing a guy, I can be in the spot where I'm on the button, he's in the big blind, I raise, he calls, flop comes down, he checks, I check, turn comes down,
01:07:35.000he bets, I call, river comes down, he checks, it's on me.
01:07:39.000This exact situation, not the boards that have run out, but the betting action, that situation has come up already 20 times in the match that we're playing, and...
01:07:51.000I can have a pretty clear idea of in this exact spot, this guy traps a little bit more than my average opponent.
01:07:59.000He's going to take this line with a strong hand more than some other people will, so I can't bluff him as effectively, or I can't make a value bet with quite as weak a hand as I would against some other players, and Heads Up Poker is more amenable to that sort of detailed analysis Of how your opponent is playing.
01:08:23.000By the way, I understood maybe 10 things out of 20 that you said.
01:08:30.000I don't even think 10. Button, blind, flop, all that.
01:09:08.000There's just a gut thing that happens, for sure.
01:09:11.000You just look at somebody and he just doesn't look that comfortable, or he does look comfortable, and...
01:09:19.000Often there's just a general sort of feel you get from somebody that is difficult to put words to, but that the top players aren't confident when they get those gut feelings and go with them.
01:09:33.000But there are specific things you can look for, too.
01:09:55.000I'm bumping into the mic here, but somebody will get up closer to the table when they're interested and invested in the situation.
01:10:04.000Or you can even see somebody make, like, a micro gesture of recoiling in frustration when a bad card hits the board or you make a bet that they don't like.
01:10:17.000And you can see little movements like that.
01:10:19.000You can read somebody's pulse in their neck.
01:11:03.000One thing people do is people tend to be a lot more still and tight when they're nervous and move around a little more and are more relaxed.
01:11:12.000When they're comfortable, and so when somebody is trying to just keep it together and put their poker face on, look the same way they always look,
01:11:28.000but they're actually really comfortable because they've got a great hand and they're about to win.
01:11:58.000Now that I've just said I look at people's legs while they're playing, I'm going to be playing against somebody in a couple weeks and he's going to be bluffing me on the river and he's going to start tapping his foot because I've just said that that's something I'm looking for for evidence that they're strong.
01:12:14.000A thing I used to do sometimes, I feel like I can't get away with it as much now because people know who I am and expect me to be pulling some bullshit and in control of my physical stuff.
01:12:28.000But something I would do is I would sit like this while playing in general.
01:14:26.000It could be that they're really excited about their great hand, or it could be that they're really stressed about the big bluff they're making.
01:15:23.000You know things about what's going through the mind of somebody you're sitting next to, and it's hard to tell exactly how and why you know.
01:16:14.000Like, you just interpret regular human movement, communication, behavior patterns, and such.
01:16:22.000But I would say that one of the best sort of pieces of evidence that being a psychic doesn't exist is that there's no psychics that just become poker players and start fucking cleaning up.
01:16:34.000Yeah, I mean, clearly there's nobody who can just sit across the table from you and read your mind every time accurately.
01:16:41.000Yeah, because I would think that if there were really psychics, that would be the place where it would show up as poker, right?
01:16:45.000Sure, or, I mean, any of a number of other places where you could make a killing or otherwise be very successful and powerful based on that ability.
01:17:03.000Stock market would be a good one, playing the lottery, obviously.
01:17:06.000Well, that's getting into predicting the future versus reading minds, which, I mean, I don't think anybody's doing either of those things, but reading minds seems marginally more plausible than predicting the future.
01:17:30.000They're similarly crazy powers that some people claim to have.
01:17:35.000Does, like, socially, does that, like...
01:17:37.000It seems to me that, like, the ability to read tells and the ability to be so tuned into it because it's part of the game of poker, does that carry over to social communication?
01:17:49.000Like, do you notice things more in the way people, like...
01:17:52.000We all know when someone's a bullshitter, right?
01:17:54.000We all know when someone bullshits you and tells you sorry that's like a little fucking screwy.
01:17:58.000I mean, we kind of have this weird sense just based on the data that we've accumulated over a lifetime's worth of communicating with people that something's off here.
01:18:07.000And also, if you've communicated with a bunch of bullshitters, you kind of recognize it.
01:18:13.000So we feel like being a good poker player makes you a better social reader as well?
01:18:21.000Probably not by a giant margin, but yeah, I think I'm probably a bit above average at that.
01:18:28.000I think I have a more studied and self-aware approach to it than a lot of other people do.
01:18:41.000I think I may have started from a baseline of being a bit below average at that kind of thing.
01:18:49.000Where somebody might say, that story felt kind of bullshit.
01:18:53.000I'm more likely to say, well, he said I think and equivocated on a couple of things where that's not a way you would talk about it if you weren't full of shit.
01:21:28.000I feel like with all the experience in martial arts, you would have a leg up on learning that stuff.
01:21:35.000I mean, picking up tells has some in common with looking at somebody's stance and picking up that they're about to throw a kick.
01:21:46.000Hmm, that's interesting because looking at someone's stance and whether or not they're gonna throw a kick is based on data You know like like sometimes I'll say like during a broadcast like he's about to throw a left high kick and someone will go how you know and Because there's a very small but perceptible rise in his heel like his heel came up off the back foot and Which means usually that a guy's trying to get a little bit of a head start throwing a kick with his back leg.
01:22:29.000And it's not about martial arts, but it's about just acquiring...
01:22:34.000Massive amounts of data about very specific things and then being able to see these things coming.
01:22:40.000I forget the term that they used, but it was just about that, about how for a person who doesn't have this data in their mind, it seems like, how's this guy seeing this?
01:22:49.000But for someone who has all that data, it's like, oh, there it is.
01:22:55.000Yeah, it's exactly the same thing with picking up tells in poker, because just thousands of times, I've sat across the table from a guy, I've looked at him, I've thought about whether or not I think this guy has a good hand, and then I've put out my call, and he shows me his hand, and I've just been through that routine thousands of times,
01:23:11.000and so now I find myself in that spot, and the guy's bet, and I'm looking at him and thinking about whether or not to call, and...
01:23:20.000I have a big sample of what people look like right before I call them, and then whether or not they show me the winning hand.
01:23:27.000So a guy like Doyle Brunson, who's been around for a hundred years, he would be a wizard at that shit, right?
01:25:20.000They had tried televising poker tournaments before that, but it's, especially to a casual viewer, a lot less interesting.
01:25:26.000But you see less of it, at least for the non-involved observer like myself, you see less of it on television now.
01:25:33.000In the U.S. In the U.S. It hasn't fallen off nearly the same way in other places, and the reason behind that is that In order to make a profitable TV show, you have to sell advertising space.
01:25:48.000If you're making a poker TV show, who do you want to sell advertising space to?
01:26:52.000I can only spend about half the year there for visa reasons, so I spend about half the year in Malta and do a lot of traveling around to other places as well.
01:27:04.000Hating school, trying to figure out, gets the love of his parents, fucking bolts, makes 1.6 a year the first year, and then from there on, when you got your degree, and then you decided to just dedicate yourself to being a professional poker player, how many years was it until you kind of had to make this move out of the United States?
01:30:11.000You're not doing anything sneaky or bad by playing multiple tables.
01:30:42.000That seems like, yeah, why would anybody go anywhere if you could play it online like that?
01:30:49.000The games are tougher online, because you can get so many more hands in, the best players are winning so much, that the competition to be the best player in the game online is stiffer.
01:31:50.000Do they run programs or something like that?
01:31:54.000The site has various data to work with based on what you're giving them.
01:32:02.000They're not scanning your computer to see what other programs you're running or anything like that.
01:32:09.000They're not invading your privacy in that way.
01:32:11.000But what they can do is they can keep track of your mouse movement Around the screen and the speed and timing that you're clicking on things and they can detect the difference between a human moving a mouse around the screen like a human and a computer program that just jumps from button to button and acts instantly.
01:32:37.000So, at this point, if you're running a bot that plays for you, part of your challenge is that you have to code up software to move the mouse around the screen in a convincingly human-like fashion and evade this detection.
01:33:30.000What does he have, like a bank of screens in front of him?
01:33:32.000No, I think it was just all on one screen, all the tables stacked on top of each other so that whichever table you have to act on pops to the top.
01:33:40.000And you just click, and it goes to the side, and the next one you have to act on pops to the top.
01:34:16.000But I would watch him get obsessed with that stuff, and he would watch the videos, and his eyes would light up, and his pupils would dilate.
01:34:49.000Almost athletic in the sort of speed-clicking demands.
01:34:54.000Well, 3D games are very athletic in that sense.
01:34:57.000The hand-eye coordination that are involved in playing games like Unreal or Quake or Doom or any of those crazy fast twitch games.
01:35:05.000There are quite a few competitive gamers who transitioned to poker and are now professional poker players.
01:35:12.000But imagine that people that just have this inclination towards figuring things out in a game sense, they would have that towards a lot of things.
01:35:36.000So when you live in Vegas for a little bit, hanging out with strippers and poker players and strippers and poker players, so you decide how do you go with Malta?
01:35:51.000It's a weird story, actually, how I ended up in Malta.
01:35:56.000Originally, it had a lot to do with...
01:36:35.000It looked like it was going to be when I started looking into it at the time.
01:36:40.000It was basically just, you need to pay some relatively small fees for the process.
01:36:45.000You need to fill in a bunch of paperwork, mainly stuff like...
01:36:50.000Demonstrating that you have enough money to support yourself, that you haven't been convicted of any crimes in the country you're coming from, basic stuff like that, and they will give you a permit to stay there as long as you like.
01:40:16.000Talking to my girlfriend about where we're going to move, and the idea of Malta comes up, and we decide she's going to go there by herself and check it out while I'm playing the World Series.
01:40:31.000And she's like, not really that enthusiastic about this idea at the time.
01:40:37.000She's like, we're going to go to this little shitty island in the middle of nowhere.
01:42:06.000The UIGEA passed in 2006, but it's not really even clear how much that had to do with anything.
01:42:12.000What happened right after the UIGEA passed in 2006 was that some poker sites voluntarily pulled out of the U.S. market, and that doing transactions with poker sites became more complicated.
01:42:26.000Remember what I was saying about the UIGEA? It didn't change what was illegal.
01:42:31.000It's not like online poker was legal before that and then it wasn't.
01:42:35.000It's not like online poker was clearly illegal the whole time.
01:42:41.000It's up to prosecutors to decide that they want to prosecute a case against an online gambling site on the basis of the laws that are on the books, which are pretty vague, and then courts to decide if it's fair to apply those laws to the case in question.
01:42:59.000So has anybody from the U.S. that's a poker player tried playing online poker from the United States and been prosecuted?
01:43:40.000If I'm caught, I might lose all my money, yeah.
01:43:42.000So, yeah, you have to do all sorts of identity masking bullshit to get away with playing on international poker sites from the US these days.
01:43:50.000So what's being done to try to change that?
01:44:29.000California is at the forefront and is a huge one.
01:44:33.000If California becomes an online poker state, even if you can only play against other California residents, it's a big enough state with enough money that that will be a full-fledged poker economy.
01:45:55.000I mean, I'm sure they probably have some sort of a vague idea, but unless they're going from neighborhood to neighborhood scanning, I mean, how do they know?
01:47:39.000You know how, like, you'll see a car drive by in the States, it'll have, like, a handwritten sign in the window, for sale, $15,000, call this number?
01:48:24.000There's a, there's, I've talked about this in the podcast before, people got upset at me, but there's, this, I was saying that McLarens don't sound very good, and then they said, what about, this sounds awesome.
01:48:37.000It's a million plus dollar McLaren has this amazing sound to it, but the regular McLaren that's like, I think 200 plus thousand, it doesn't sound bad.
01:49:14.000Like some of the new turbocharged cars, what they're actually doing is they're faking the sound.
01:49:19.000So there's a thing called the sound synthesizer that they use on the BMW M5. You could turn it off, praise Allah, because it's really gross.
01:49:28.000And when you have it on, it's actually pumping sounds like engine sounds through your speakers.
01:49:35.000So it uses a sound system of the car to make you think that you're making all this engine noise.
01:50:47.000So anyway, what I was saying about Monaco is that more than any other place I've ever been in the world, there's this feeling that you don't belong there and that nobody is happy about the fact that you turned up.
01:51:00.000Nobody's happy about the fact that you turned up.
01:51:03.000Like, there's one big poker tournament a year in Monaco that I have been to several times and, like, All the hotel staff and cab drivers and everybody else like that that I've interacted with there just seems like surprised and put off.
01:52:35.000A lot of it at this point has to do with foreign companies, many of them in the online gaming industry, a lot also just in banking and finance and stuff like that.
01:52:51.000Is there tricky laws there or something?
01:53:34.000If I had become a resident like I was planning to, which I never really finished that story.
01:53:41.000If I had become a resident like I was planning to, yes, I would owe taxes there.
01:53:46.000They have a tax treaty with the U.S. so I can...
01:53:49.000Deduct what I pay there against what I would owe here.
01:53:52.000You don't end up getting double taxed.
01:53:57.000But, since I'm not a resident, no, I have no tax liability anywhere other than the U.S. But if you do become a resident somewhere else, you have to give up your residence here, right?
01:54:58.000If I could live anywhere in the world and keep playing online poker, there's a decent chance I'd pick somewhere like San Francisco over Malta.
01:56:54.000But it just drives me crazy that you have to, like, leave the country to do what you do for a living because of some fucking goofy laws that were obviously put in place by criminals or people that are just shady as fuck.
01:57:26.000Yeah, there is a pretty good chance that they will be in the New Jersey market in the next year or so, because you need to get regulatory approval, and obviously the U.S.,
01:57:45.000Casino interests are trying to keep PokerStars out.
01:57:47.000It's not a company owned by Americans.
01:57:50.000They should just send donuts to that Chris Christie guy's house over and over and over again.
01:59:06.000They had already been selling cars in New Jersey.
01:59:08.000They have a law in the books that they could interpret to stop them from doing that, but they didn't for a little while and then decided they would.
01:59:14.000The company cannot sell their cars from the showroom.
02:00:04.000First of all, it doesn't make any sense.
02:00:06.000Why would you have a law like that in place?
02:00:08.000The only reason why a law like that would be in place is because someone paid somebody off.
02:00:12.000I mean, I guess in theory the idea is you should need to have a license to sell cars, otherwise you might sell people real shitty cars that fall apart and then disappear and not be accountable for selling people cars that don't work.
02:01:10.000Elon Musk, the way he said it, he said that if you believe that the law in the books protecting dealers are there for the good of consumer, then Governor Christie has a bridge closure that he wants to sell you.
02:01:24.000Which is, of course, in reference to the scandal where that slob closed down a bridge for whatever political reason that had nothing to do with safety or the health and welfare of the citizens.
02:01:38.000Governor Christie has promised that this would be put to a vote of the elected state legislature, which is the appropriate way to change the law, Musk said, when it became apparent that the auto dealer lobby...
02:01:50.000When it became apparent to the auto dealer lobby that this approach would not succeed, they cut a backroom deal with the governor to circumvent the legislative process and pass a regulation that is fundamentally contrary to the intent of the law.
02:02:04.000Okay, so he's a bullshit artist, which makes sense.
02:02:09.000So New Jersey's got a bunch of issues.
02:02:11.000This is also the same guy who's morbidly obese but said that he's going to stop Marijuana from being legal in his town that it won't be legal in his state rather on his watch because of the children How about the children looking at you as their leader,
02:02:28.000this morbidly obese person that's giving out any health-related advice whatsoever?
02:02:35.000It just drives me fucking bananas, that kind of shit.
02:03:04.000My issue became only with the marijuana thing, which is marijuana is near and dear to my heart.
02:03:11.000I think it's a fucking fantastic plant and I think it aids evolution.
02:03:14.000And so I see some non-evolved, morbidly obese person who doesn't care about his health, and he's trying to push what he's talking about it from a health perspective, you know, worrying about the children.
02:03:24.000Not only that, he's citing studies that he doesn't understand, non-biased studies that he doesn't understand at all.
02:03:30.000Yeah, the government studies on that stuff are real shady.
02:03:33.000Yeah, ignoring all the positive benefit studies that have just time and time again been pushed aside because of their agenda.
02:03:41.000I mean, in my opinion, you don't even need to demonstrate that there's anything positive about it for it to be clear that it should be legal, just from a harm reduction standpoint.
02:03:54.000People are gonna smoke weed whether or not you tell them it's legal, and if you make it illegal, then they're gonna have to deal with criminals to do it, and they're gonna be putting themselves in danger, and there's gonna be more crime, the associated crime that goes with that,
02:05:47.000That does happen in a lot of these smaller countries or countries that are just not as sophisticated.
02:05:51.000They tend to lump drugs together, and oftentimes they also tend to prosecute people based on the weight of the plant, and they pick up the pot with the plant, like the pot that grows in, the dirt, the soil itself, and they count all that as your drug.
02:06:09.000If you found someone who had marijuana plants in their house, and you weighed everything...
02:06:15.000It's like probably a few ounces of smokable marijuana, but it's like dozens of pounds of stuff associated with it.
02:07:38.000That's a tricky one, because I think that as time goes on, it does seem to be changing in making access to legal, purchasable versions of these movies and things.
02:07:49.000It seems to be much, much, much easier than it used to be a while back.
02:07:53.000And, you know, I'm not in favor of putting anyone in jail for downloading things, but you're going to have to deal with what is a downloadable copy of something.
02:09:12.000It is, but I think that there's room in this country for ethical consideration by the consumer.
02:09:19.000To put it this way, remember when Napster was around, there was a bunch of people that were downloading things for free off of Napster.
02:09:27.000They were doing the peer-to-peer thing, but...
02:09:29.000A lot of people had this sort of really cool ethical consideration where they would take, like, if they got something and they liked it, they would go buy it.
02:09:43.000You know, and they also would become fans of the band, and then they would go see the band live, which is even better for the band, because then it's more profitable for the band.
02:10:26.000My point in bringing that up wasn't that I think it's wrong that there are laws regulating what you can and can't download without paying for it, but just that it creates a fucked up situation when the laws are such that if the government decides to,
02:10:45.000they've got a reason to put fucking anyone they want in jail.
02:10:47.000Well, especially now that they're literally downloading every single voicemail that you've ever said, every single email that you send from now till fucking who knows when will be in some NSA database somewhere, and they might go look through your shit,
02:11:03.000and who knows, you might have said something completely joking, like, look, this poker shit isn't working out, so I'm going to start robbing babies and fucking, you know, whatever.
02:11:31.000They find that shit, they leak the information to the FBI or to local police, who then basically conduct a sham investigation to find the information legally so that they can use it in court,
02:11:46.000but they already know what they're looking for because the NSA got it illegally and just gave it to them.
02:12:41.000They tried to push it for a while that they were.
02:12:43.000Do you remember when they used to have those commercials where these two fucking no-nonsense guys would be eating dinner and the guy would be saying that if you buy drugs, you support terrorism.
02:16:41.000If you want to break down the root cause of addiction, where drugs come from, what is a drug, what are the effects, why does this one-term drug, why is it a blanket that we throw over things that save lives?
02:16:56.000That enhance cognitive function and productivity like caffeine and things that kill you and things that are bad for you and things that makes life more interesting.
02:17:06.000There's all together under this one big blanket called drugs.
02:17:10.000So if you're saying if you buy drugs you support terrorism, If you have a cup of coffee after your meal, I'm going to stab you.
02:17:15.000Because you're a fucking drug user, you crazy asshole.
02:17:18.000You're going to have a whiskey on the rocks like a gentleman, you piece of shit.
02:18:48.000Fucking retarded sponsorship that's all made by a partnership for a drug-free America the problem with that of course is a partnership for a drug-free America has received millions of dollars from alcohol tobacco and pharmaceutical companies yeah of course my joke was that that's like hookers making commercials against strippers that's really what it's like it's pretty much like alcohol companies making commercials against pot and There's
02:19:23.000First of all, before we talk about this, if you're interested in any of this stuff, like really in-depth, I recommend Dr. Carl Hart's work.
02:19:31.000Dr. Carl Hart, who has been a podcast guest, and what was the name of his book?
02:20:16.000The reason they exist is because they're effective.
02:20:20.000It's because we have figured out that there's ways that we can manipulate the way our mind works, the way our body works, the way our body feels.
02:29:09.000He went to this 3D virtual reality developers conference thingy, and he said the newest version of the Oculus Rift, which hasn't reached consumers.
02:29:18.000I don't think any of them have, right?
02:29:19.000Just in a low-level sense, like developers.
02:29:23.000But the newest, latest, greatest one, you go into a room and there's a guy playing piano.
02:29:28.000And the way they filmed it, apparently, they put cameras all over a person's body.
02:29:33.000And so everywhere you look, it's like you see it as if the camera, like you're looking.
02:30:25.000And based on his original one that I fucked with, which was, like I said, very pixelated, very old school, like 1990 video game-y type, it was still pretty fucking cool.
02:30:37.000Even then, they have ones now where- Yeah, Virtual Boy was fun.
02:30:48.000It's like this sort of helmet thing on top of a tripod that you lean into, and it's just like red lines on a black background, if I remember right, and there are various video games you can play, like flight simulators.
02:32:02.000Anyways, I recently made a reaction video in which I gave this contraption to a number of individuals who you might recognize, and I got some amazing reactions.
02:32:12.000So if you haven't seen that video yet, you should definitely go and check it out.
02:32:30.000This cardboard cutout that you construct into what you see here.
02:32:35.000Now you can actually make this on your own using plans via the cardboard website, so you don't need to purchase one of these.
02:32:42.000Just get your hands on some cardboard, use the plans, and you can make it yourself.
02:32:46.000Or you can buy a pre-configured cutout via Amazon if you want something that's a little bit more streamlined and closer to a finished product.
02:32:55.000It's about $10, and I'll link that down in the description.
02:32:59.000Let's cut it off here so Lou gets the hits.
02:33:01.000But it's Unbox Therapy on YouTube, and he's got that.
02:33:05.000You can see that, as well as the recent video of us shooting the iPhone 6 glass with a bow and arrow.
02:33:14.000But he got a copy or hold of the newest glass screen for the iPhone 6. It's a sapphire glass and you can bend it.
02:34:35.000Or virtual screens in front of you, Minority Report style, and you're moving them around through this Oculus Rift headset, and you're standing up while you're on this treadmill and you're walking around.
02:34:45.000That's not too far away, I don't think.
02:35:02.000Like they walk specifically and they hold on to a tape recorder while they're walking, and then they just talk, like they walk their dog or something like that, talking to a tape recorder.
02:41:24.000So, by then, you'll be living in Malta, you'll be in jail for pot, you won't be able to come back to America, where...
02:41:35.000Do you have a strategy of how many years you want to do this?
02:41:38.000Or are you just enjoying it right now?
02:41:40.000Enjoying it now, and it's just so hard to predict what the landscape of poker will look like, what making a living in poker will look like 10 years from now.
02:44:18.000And if you don't have a lot of money to pursue the case, and you don't have the wherewithal to navigate the legal system the way he did, and something like that happens to you, you're just fucked.
02:44:29.000Well, not only that, $80,000, it seems like they could be eaten up pretty quickly in legal fees.
02:44:34.000I think he ended up suing for the fees as well, so he got paid...
02:47:21.000Largest denomination that's like actually in wide circulation.
02:47:25.000I've read that international crime is mostly done in euros now because it's a lot easier to move around cash in 500 euro notes if it's giant amounts of it.
02:50:30.000So when you look at losses like that and wins, does that make you play more conservatively in upcoming events, or do you just have to play intelligently, period, and just take the losses when they come?
02:50:41.000The place where you get more conservative is your bankroll management rather than your play.
02:50:46.000The play from one hand to the next is really about...
02:50:50.000You have to put the magnitude of the numbers out of your head and try to make the best play each time...
02:53:24.000If I'm playing a tournament, I'm a favorite to have a losing day, because tournament, they pay about top 10% of the field, so if they're paying top 10% of the field, a really good player cashes 15-18% of the time.
02:54:25.000Basically just sit quietly for anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes and attend to my breathing.
02:54:33.000Just concentrating, breathing in and breathing out, just trying to stay calm.
02:54:37.000And sometimes I'll do an exercise on top of that where I'll track the thoughts that enter my mind and label them as thoughts about the future or thoughts about the past.
02:54:48.000And what that exercise does is helps to bring you into the present moment and to see that it's difficult to have Yeah.