Intuition vs. Reason with poker champion Liv Boeree

0:05I love talking to people who are smarter than me. And Liv Bury is a lot smarter than me. She is a retired champion poker player with a background, get this, in astrophysics. Now she's a media personality and podcaster who loves digging into topics like AI, game theory, and more. And that's what we talked about, a whole bunch of things. But the root was all about competition, and more importantly, how we can prevent our own desires to compete and excel from actually working against us. This is a bit of optimism.

0:47How do you define yourself? Because you are a Jane of all trades. Yeah. I mean, I have here that I didn't even know this all about you. This is great. You were a guitar player in metal bands. You were a cage dancer in clubs. You were a game show contestant, an astrophysicist, a professional poker player. Like the craziest path. I'll ask you the dreaded question. If you're at a bar and you meet somebody or sitting next to someone on a plane, Liv, what do you do? I am someone who is trying to understand how we have a healthier relationship with competition and generate more win-win scenarios in the world and also help figure out how we align the things that we do in our work with the good of the whole.

1:35That tends to lead you down the path of things like AI safety, how to make business practices more aligned with what's actually sustainable for humanity and so on. See, I can't answer the question. It's a very long-winded thing. But basically, yeah, I guess I'm like a, I don't know, science communicator? Well, I'm going to come back to this. I'm not letting you off the hook. There's something that I find very interesting about you and how you describe yourself, which is, and I want to make sure I get the word right, which is you call yourself pathologically competitive, right? This is interesting to me because I am not that.

2:14I'm competitive in different ways. I am curious, A, what does that mean and how you define that? And then we're going to go down this rabbit hole. Well, I should caveat that with I used to be pathologically competitive. Well, if it's pathological. You can cure pathologies or you can outgrow things. You can morph over time. People are changeable. So let's, okay. So you used to be. Yes. From what age did this begin? The moment I could think and reason and speak and do, I think. So you wanted to be out of the womb quicker than all the other kids in the ward. I had to be the first. I had to be the best.

2:51I was competitive in the classic sense that I wanted to win. But the pathological was that it was sort of like my default state of being. It would often manifest, I would say, in sort of unhealthy ways. Now that I've got this like the luxury of time and maturity and so on, I can look back and be like, yeah, you know what, that probably wasn't optimal. Give me an example of when it was suboptimal, which is an ironic term to use when you're talking about pathological competitiveness. So when it would like manifest in things like jealousy. Give me an example. When I was like starting out in poker, I would feel literally, I mean, there's no better word for it, jealousy.

3:25When another woman who was of the same like sort of, you know, if she was young, especially if she was kind of attractive, if she had a success in a tournament, even though it made no difference to me, like I would feel this deep jealousy. And even. In a tournament you weren't even in. Well, yeah. Or I'd already busted out of or whatever. And I'd be like paying attention like, oh, God, I hope she doesn't make the final table, which is just like I look back on that. I'm like, what on earth? You know? And that's that was this like this unhealthy competitiveness. It was just like the reason why I would like this, this ego, this shitty part of my ego would feel threatened by her is because actually she fit the same demographic as me.

4:04If she was an older woman or like a dude, like I didn't feel any jealousy towards a dude when they won. You know, I bet like 98 percent of people in poker tournaments are men. So was there an event that helped you overcome this pathology or was it more subtle or it was just age that, you know, you sort of at one point woke up and people were like, that's like, you look back and be like, that was stupid. Or was there actually something that slapped you around that made you realize? No, there was no sudden like wake up, but it was just over time as I got older, I was like, this doesn't seem, you know, and like speaking to performance coaches and people like that, you know, they're like, you know, focus on yourself.

4:40It's all about the process. The only person you should be competitive with, especially in poker, is yourself. How did I perform against myself two months ago, a year ago, or whatever? So all these little tidbits of general wisdom that I slowly started accumulating helped sort of mellow it. Also, then I got, you know, when I had more success, it made it a little bit easier. But even when I was like, sort of peak of my poker career and success, it was still in there somehow. It's like this deep... Insecurity. Yeah, insecurity or something. Yeah. You know, I've talked about this and I've written about this as well.

5:11And I can empathize almost to a T with what you're saying. You know, there's somebody else who does what I do, who writes books, gives talks, all that stuff. And I would regularly log on to Amazon and check his book rankings. And if he was ahead of me, I had an anger. There's no other way to describe it. I'd sit by myself staring at the Amazon ranking with anger, you know. And if I was ahead in the book rankings that arbitrary day that I happened to check, I'd sort of be really full of myself. You know, this sort of like, huh, there you go. That's correct. You know? All is right with the world.

5:46All is right with the world. I'm clearly ahead in the rankings. So was this guy also kind of in the similar realm? Yeah, yeah. We speak at the same conferences and we know each other. We were always very polite to each other. Same as you. I never did anything to him. Nothing ever happened. I never sort of said anything. I never undermined him. But like when people would bring up his name in polite conversation, and I would seethe. I'd be like, oh, yeah, he's so smart. And inside I'd be like, you know. I would seethe at the very mention of his name. We were invited to speak at the same conference.

6:20And not like me in the morning, him in the afternoon, but we were going to be interviewed together on the same stage. And the interviewer decided that instead of introducing us, we should introduce each other. And I went first. and I turned to him and instead of sort of like telling the audience like who he was, I turned to him and I said, you make me really insecure. Wow. I said, you make me really uncomfortable. I said, every time your name comes up, I get really uncomfortable and it's because all of your strengths are all of my weaknesses. And he turned to me and said, funny, I think the same about you.

6:58Interesting. It was in that moment that I learned that all of my anger, seething, you know, contempt, pride, all of those had nothing to do with him. It had everything to do with me. It's his mere existence reminded me of my failings or my weaknesses. And it was much easier to take it out at him or on him than it was for me to simply deal and focus on myself. and like you in poker, like multiple people can win multiple tournaments. Turns out people can buy more than one book. I'm competing against absolutely nothing. I'm competing against my imagination. But I have found that that pathological competition, which is when you're trying to beat someone in a running race, you have at it.

7:44I mean, that is actually the goal, which is to outrun them. But when I'm trying to beat someone in a game that literally has no end, like promotions at work, compliments from boss book sales like literally there is no finish line and no one could ever be declared a winner it's a stupid game that that is where I found a competitive spirit to be incredibly unhealthy because you can actually find yourself doing things to destroy them or destroy yourself it's a false zero sumness it's a false zero sumness you're seeing something as a fixed pie that if they get a chunk of it then that means less for you but actually in reality especially in something like being an author or a speaker it's such a you're literally creating something out of nothing.

8:25I love talking to you about things like competing in competition, A, because you are competitive and a high performer, but your opinions and points of view on competition I find really interesting. In particular, I've heard you talk about the changing nature of poker as computers and mathematics have been introduced to this. And so what was poker like before computers showed up? Like who are the good poker players? What made them good? If you want to go really back prior to online poker in any way, almost uniformly the best players, with the exception of maybe this guy Stu Unger, who was younger, and Phil Helmuth.

9:03The younger Unger? Yeah, the ones who were celebrated as the best players were typically older. They were very much kind of casino hustlers. Cowboys. Yeah, cowboys. Sometimes they even look like cowboys. Yeah, exactly. Like Doyle Brunson, classic actual cowboy, or at least he always wore a cowboy hat. and you know these were guys who had just spent so much time hustling in casinos playing against all different sort of characters they developed really good intuitions about human behavior and i think a lot of these sort of great plays they would make i don't think they would even understand them themselves they wouldn't be able to explain and break down through logic why they did the play they did they just had such good intuitions that that was sufficient to outplay everyone else right but then once online poker came along and certainly a bit later on sort of after 2010, we started seeing analysis software.

9:53So you can now run statistics. Exactly. Through the analysis and say, you should have played this hand or you should have waited or whatever. Right, you can see sort of like, oh, in the small blind, I tend to be losing more than expectation. I'm playing these positions well, but these ones not so well. So you can start to pinpoint. And then from 2015 onwards, we then had what are called simulators. Basically, you could input a sort of fictitious situation or a real situation actually, and then press play and it would run for, let's say, eight hours to find the optimal solutions. Wow. This was a game changer because now you actually could find out what the mathematically optimal solutions are and then whoever was willing to sit and memorize those could incorporate them into their game when they then go and play.

10:35So did you play gut or did you memorize the mathematics? I tried to do both. You can't really learn how to exploit your opponents unless you know what optimal play is in the first place. and so you need to know that stuff and then develop good understanding of what people do when they are deviating from that so that you can figure out how to exploit them so i forgot which book it was but there was a book that talked about like the importance of experience and gut and they gave a few different incredible examples and i remember one of them which was and it's true so it was a true story as a case study of a group of firefighters like um i think they were sort of forest firefighters.

11:12And they were out in the field and one of them was the senior one, the older one, and the rest of them were young guys. And a wind had picked up and a wall of fire was burning the dry grass and approaching them at an incredible speed. There was panic. They all dropped their equipment and started running. And they could just slightly outrun the fire if they ran at full pace. And the problem was the older guy looked ahead and they were coming up to a hill. And he starts screaming at them, duck down, duck down, duck down, stop running, duck down. And they all ignored him because when there's a fire coming at you, stopping is not the thing you want to do.

11:52But the old guy stopped, got on the ground, covered his head and just lay there. And the fire was going so quickly that it just ran right over him, rendering no damage to him, no harm to him. And when they started up the hill, the fire caught up to them and killed all of them. and no one taught them that. No one taught them how a fire works, that don't worry, it's burning so quickly that it won't burn you. And this older guy, he was never taught it. It just occurred to him in the moment. He knew, the gut told him, this is what you have to do. And in this book, I just remember case study after case study of these kinds of things were experienced that something tells me that the data says this, and they gave examples of where the data said you have to do this, but I'm not going to trust the data.

12:40I'm going to follow my gut here. And so what I think is so interesting about the rise of algorithms, and let's be clear what an algorithm is. I mean, the term is bandied about so much, right? It's simply a list of instructions. A recipe to bake a cake is an algorithm. And the algorithm says, if this, then that. That's all it is, is a list of instructions. But we become so obsessed with mathematics algorithms and all of this. Even the way that marketing used to be a gut thing. Now it's just an algorithm thing. You know, you'd A-B test something and their decision's made. I don't care how experienced you are.

13:12What is the role of gut anymore when we can have computational speeds that are so quick? Like, do humans even get the chance to make a decision anymore in anything we do? Right. My theory is, and I don't know this for sure, and I don't think the science is at all accept it. But my theory is, is that just our brains are doing all kinds of, you know, there's so much information going in all the time. And memories are laid down, you know, if you asked me what I did on January 14th, 2012, I would not be able to tell you. But if you showed me a picture of that day, suddenly I'm in and I can probably remember the day roughly something to do at least where I was.

13:51I was like, oh, yeah, that that thing. Right. So those memories are in there. we just don't seem to be able to access them. My suspicion is when we have these like intuitive insights, it is basically our brains are, we've got all this data there and there's some kind of processing going on that we can't really access. But then sometimes when it's just necessary, it comes through. One of the biggest challenges in poker, frankly, is knowing when to go with the maths, what the maths says. Like, you know, there've been many situations in poker where like very clearly the maths says, okay, I have to fold my hand.

14:22I have to fold my hand. this is clearly I have a terrible hand like given everything and but there's just something that my intuition my gut is saying they're bluffing you live I know you've got a crap hand you got a call and you know or vice versa and the challenge is is knowing when to listen to your gut because it's not always right yeah sure and like certainly you know over my gut after 10 years of playing was much better than two years of playing there have been times where I've ignored the maths and gone with my gut and it was absolutely right and I felt like a superhero and there have been times when I've ignored the maths, gone with my gut, and I was dead wrong.

14:54And I felt like an absolute idiot. And it's so, so hard. And what I've found that, so that the fire, the fire thing, for example, like, and that's, that's the other thing. I do think there's to a degree, some sort of knowledge stored almost, you know, our nervous system goes through our body. Like I've been reading a bit about this idea of like somatic processing and like the body holding, but you know, but the body essentially holds knowledge in different ways. You can't get anything more visceral than running for your life from a fire, right? So it wouldn't surprise me if like, God knows what years of evolution and so on has been ingrained in our human bodies.

15:27And this guy was able to switch off like his linear processing, you know, system two, the logic, whatever. The point is, in panic, I don't think our guts serve us very well. And I think we're always taught stay calm, stay calm, because even though you're not quote unquote, thinking, but I think the ability to see patterns that you wouldn't ever be because I think that's where gut operates, You know, mathematics deals with if this, then that. Right. It's linear. It's linear. Yeah. Whereas our guts are nonlinear and can find connections that the mathematics will miss. If fire is going at this pace and this type of grass burns at this rate, you need to run at this pace to outrun the fire.

16:07Nowhere is going to say, just lie down. And I find this very interesting, which is we become so reliant on computers now, which is the role of experience, the role of wisdom, the role of time, the role of gut, I think is becoming underappreciated to a point where I think anybody who's of age and has been in the workforce for a while recognizes that a young workforce that comes in is almost dismissive of age and experience. You're so obsessed with game theory and competition. Just wax philosophical with me on this, like going from somebody who's pathologically competitive, who's now relaxed and no, you've, you.

16:50No, I don't, I wouldn't go that far. Okay, fine. But you're dealing with the pathology. Yes. So what is your relationship with maths versus gut now? Yeah. Versus before. So it's funny because in 2018, I gave a TED talk where I talk about the role of, it was It's like one of these six-minute super short ones. And I gave like three lessons that poker taught me. And the second lesson I talked about was don't overprivilege your gut instinct. Because I remember, you know, I was looking into it. And every time I Googled intuition or instinct, all of the memes are like, your gut is always right. Never second guess it.

17:32Follow your heart. It alone knows the truth. Entrepreneurs say that all the time. Yeah. My secret was I followed my gut. Right, right, right. And it's every single meme was saying that and there was no balance to it. And I was just like, well, this that's not my lived, you know, my lived experience in poker. Sometimes my gut is right, but sometimes it's wrong. There's an error rate inherent in my intuition. And we should maybe talk about that. And I think this I can imagine this is the case with others as well. And like, let's not, you know, black and white this too much. So in that talk, basically, I wouldn't go so far to say as I was disparaging of the gut, but I called for moderation.

18:10You're raising a very, very difficult problem, which is a failure rate of our gut. So now we're left standing going, well, then when do I trust my gut? And what you're making a case for is, well, trust the math. At least you know what the failure rate is. That's basically the case I made in that talk. Now I would say I've swung back in the other direction again and think that there is some degree of like, I would even go so far to say as I think there's value in some kind of shared knowledge going on that we can tap into like I even made the joke in the talk it's not like our intuitions come from some magical source of inspiration you know and I got a laugh and so on but now looking back on it I'm like yeah you know what I've had some moments where it literally felt magical of like and once I became open to the idea that you can sort of almost tap into some borderline supernatural realm of inspiration, I've started having way more inspiration and insight.

19:03Okay. I got to go down this rabbit hole, right? If we're applying a mathematical theory to the playing of poker, for example, and the more data you collect, the more accurate your statistical knowledge. In other words, you know the failure rates of this hand versus that hand, right? Or this gameplay versus that gameplay. And you're talking about failure rates of gut. that means that if you have enough data, you can mitigate failure rates or even reduce failure rates. So it raises the question, how do we make our guts stronger? How do we make our guts better to reduce the failure rate? So I think it starts with the same way we, you know, everyone's been talking about cognitive biases now for the last 20 years.

19:45It's a very popular topic. But they, again, you know, to use the sort of dichotomy of thinking fast and slow, you know, system one, system two, you know, gut logic, whatever you want to call it. Just tell people what that is. Yeah. So thinking fast and slow was Daniel Kahneman, right? And he won a Nobel Prize for it. Basically, his research seemed to show that we have two modes of thinking. We have our system one, which is the gut that we're talking about. It's like if I was to say, what's five plus five? You immediately know the answer is 10, hopefully. But if I ask you what's 321 plus 75? I have to think.

20:22Right. and that is your system two so again a system two is like the linear like voice in your head that sort of will think through this plus this plus this and system one is the thing that just like knows the answer so in certain situations one is better for the other and when you're playing poker like what i actually would do back you know i don't play poker anymore but in in the peak of my game the habit i developed was to you know like say someone makes a big bet i try and feel what my gut said in that like okay that was a bluff or okay he's got a strong hand you would practice the feeling of gut yeah and try and practice that and like like what what was my it was my initial feeling as soon as the action was made make a mental note of it and then do the maths and so on and actually do the logic be like well okay when the king came on the turn he he thought for a while and then you know he had to think before he bet so that means that but then are you looking for things that may not exist.

21:16And they could also be screwing with your, they could be delaying things to screw with your attempt to read their tables. Sure, but you can factor that in. There's all of those. There's error rate with everything. But you're just trying to sort of like sift through the noise and find the signal. So then once you've done your thinking through of the problem, now you have to try and see, okay, well, does the mathematical conclusion line up with what my initial gut feeling was? Hopefully they're aligned. Great. is when they're not is the tricky thing. But the trouble is that, as we know, he has an error rate.

21:51And that error rate comes from, I think, biases. Same as loss aversion can make us do funny things with our thinking in the system too, it can also, I think, bias our gut to coming to certain conclusions sufficiently. What's so interesting about you and me is you are clearly a scientist, or at least you approach things with a scientific brain. I'm an artist, right? I'm just like chaos, happy. Let's see where it goes. Find a pattern, right? And so when I think about how to make my gut stronger, my intuition says, fill it. Fill it with seemingly disconnected information. So for example, if I'm trying to make my gut stronger, let's say I'm a poker player.

22:40So I want to fill my gut. It's not by playing more poker. I'm going to do that anyway. I'm going to study the tables anyway. I'm going to go do things that make no sense. I'm going to go to the zoo and look at gorillas. I'm going to go to a dance performance. I'm going to go to rehearsal. I'm going to go watch a choreographer and how he makes a piece of dance and watch the dancers interact. I'm going to sit in a coffee shop and watch people interact, talk to each other, how they talk to the barista. Unbeknownst to me, see all these subtleties of human behavior. One of my favorite things to do to this day, I love going to a bar or a restaurant and guessing when I look around the restaurant and bar, the couples, are they on a first date?

23:22Are they on a second date? Are they a couple already? It's really fun to do with just body language. Unbeknownst to me, quote unquote, what I'm studying is human behavior. What I'm studying are tells. What I'm studying is discomfort. What I'm studying is confidence. What I'm studying is insecurity. security. What I'm studying is hope, desires, dreams as manifested in a funny twitch or a mirroring of our body language. Oh, that's the other fun thing, which is when they are in an early first or second date, is it going well? And it's actually really easy to tell. I'll just give you a quick, really funny one.

23:55I was out for dinner with a friend and there's a couple sitting next to us. I could actually hear the conversation. So it was abundantly clear they were on a first date. And you can tell from the body language, they were getting along great. You know, like they were laughing at the same time. They were mirroring each other's body language. They were both leaning in. It was like really magical, right? To watch. They wanted to look something up. No problem. He pulled out his phone. No problem. They're both in on it. He typed something in. They look it up. And then he sort of sends a quick text. You know, you can see, you can see the interaction, then puts the phone on the table.

24:26And all of a sudden, the body language completely changes. Her arms are folded. She's now leaning back. they're not laughing at the same time anymore he still thinks the date's going great but the whole dynamic is completely changed I'm praying, I'm like I hope she goes please go to the bathroom she gets up and goes to the bathroom and I lean over to him and go do you want a little input on your date? and he looks at me and goes what? I'm like put the phone away do you not see what's going on here? you were getting a line great and you've completely screwed it up because you pulled your idiot phone out and you've destroyed everything put your damn phone away the date will go better you know and did he?

25:03yes he puts his phone away and all of a sudden she comes back and like the whole thing works again but the point is is like it's those subtleties what I'm doing is making my gut stronger right and so I think the way that we make our gut stronger is by doing things that make us uncomfortable or put us in unfamiliar situations and you said this because all that gets stored somewhere yes and our bodies and our minds have the ability to recall that if it matters And so I think there is a way to make a stronger gut, which is go out and do things that have nothing to do with your job. Certainly with anything that's reading people, body language, then it is all kinds of information is useful.

25:41I think all kinds of information is useful, period. It's not about reading people. That's my interest. That's what I look for. If you're in manufacturing, I know what you do. You read all the manufacturing trades, which means all you're doing is reading about what somebody else has already done that you didn't think of. or they're ahead of you. So the best you can do is copy them and be a follower at best. How about stop reading your own trades and read the trades of other organizations and find out how other companies are solving problems that may show up in your industry that nobody else has seen or thought of?