#1 - Molly Bloom: Finding peace after losing everything

32:29And he came in one day and he's like, I need you back in the office. This is too distracting for you. And it was, because I was obsessed with it now. I was obsessed with starting my own games. But I was loyal to him. and when he finally threatened to take it away from me and he was like, I'm having this other girl take it over. And by this time, I had put a lot of sort of my own IP into this. Like I had recruited players and I had cultivated these relationships and I had built spreadsheets and, you know, all this stuff. And so I, and this was the girl that poker taught me to be. I was like, I'm going to take a risk.

33:11But it needs to be a calculated risk, you know? So I sort of partnered with one of the guys in the game that I knew would be behind me. And I planned a game, and I invited everyone except for my boss. And he's a terrifying person, like the scariest, you know? And we had the game and everyone liked it and, you know, played. And then the next morning he called me. And in this like terrifying voice, he's like, get over here. I don't know why I went to this day, but I went over there. It's like 5.30 in the morning. I'd been up all night running this poker game, you know. And he's like, ordered me to go sit in the guest house.

33:57And I'm sitting there and I'm like, I'm insane. Like, he is going to kill me. I've humiliated him. I've you know infiltrated the billionaire boys club and and I've broken these rules and I'm a you know right and he comes in to the guest house and he stares at me and he and I'm I'm like shaking and he's like I'm proud of you because it was this moment where he's like you've graduated right you know and I didn't know how to feel about it because I'm like does this mean that my soul's in trouble right it was like your graduation to becoming a hustler Yeah. It was that. You learned the hustle. And then to his credit, he and I have been friends ever since.

34:39And he would come and play in my games and support me. They don't put that in the movie at all. No, they don't. They don't. And then when everything fell apart, he was one of the few people that had my back. So as you develop this skill of running these games, because you're essentially like the vibe creator. Well, you're not only, so not only are you making sure that, like the mechanics of everything, you know, that you've got a good quality dealer, that debts are getting paid and everything's getting settled up regularly. But you also have to create the ambience and the vibe and ensure that people are actually having a good time so that they keep coming back and playing.

35:17What, like, what would, in your mind, constitute a good game? Okay, a couple things. People of equal or close to equal skill level.

35:34very similar playing styles so nobody that's going to sit there and sit on chips people that are going to give action those nine seats should be inhabited by people who are exciting who when you go home from the game you call your friends guess who I sat next to and that's hard to do considering some of them are people who are like A-listers or whatever and aren't that excited about sitting next to other people. Here's the hierarchy. Okay. So it was like, billionaires were at the bottom, then celebrities, then athletes. You bring an athlete in, you're going to see a bunch of famous, wealthy, powerful men look like a bunch of teenagers at a Bieber concert.

36:21Why? I don't know. What is it about athletes? I don't know. But it is. Okay, I guess it's maybe because poker is at its essence you know it it ticks a lot of the boxes of masculinity right yes it's highly you have to have a huge appetite for risk yep um it's more although you might disagree with this but generally speaking it certainly at the higher levels it's more of an abstract thing as opposed to a people thing uh you might disagree but well in that it's it's it's very quantified it's Oh, yeah, yeah. You mean like you need to be able to know the odds and probabilities. Exactly, yes. But no one in my game was playing game theory optimal.

37:06Sure, okay. But yes, at the highest level, for sure. Yes, and then it's also, you need to be very comfortable with aggression. Not only receiving aggression at you, but being aggressive and cutthroat with someone. Looking for their weaknesses and trying to exploit them with no mercy in many cases. So those are typically male traits. And this is pure pop psychology, but I'm just wondering if, given that this is an outlet, because there's almost always men that played in these, right? Or were there sometimes for some women? So if I would have ever let pros in, I'm sure that women would have played.

37:46But no women played, no sort of women who weren't perfect. Right, business people or female celebrities. nobody no nobody ever played no woman ever played that's so interesting yeah well let's stick a pin in that because i want to come back to that yeah but yeah just on the like this hierarchy i wonder if it's because because this is already like a sort of outlet for masculinity i could see why a professional athlete who are you know they are the peak of physical perfection and whatever and excellence in their narrow domain um in in in a physical way yep maybe that's you know if this is the totem pole of masculine, you know, an orgy of masculinity, essentially, then that's why.

38:29Yeah. I mean, look, there's a natural sort of fandom that, I mean, look at how grown men act when football season starts. Or by the way, look how, and I shouldn't just say men, look how grown adults act for kids playing college sports. Yeah, I don't get that one. We don't have that in England, by the way. It's a seemingly unique U.S. thing. Interesting. But the fact that college football is on ESPN and is tens of millions of dollars, I don't know how big the industry is. Oh, billions. Yeah, it's bizarre, but anyway. Yeah. So, you know, it's just all these things are so fascinating to think about and to watch.

39:23But yeah, no, that was the hierarchy. I mean, I would stake, I would pay their buy-in. That's how good they were for business. Oh, you would actually stake a player to come and play? If they played for the Yankees? Yeah. Wow. Because then all you need is one. Right. One time. Because then your game is the one that... The one that had blah, blah, blah in it. Yeah. It's marketing forever. And then you get into the details, right? Great playlist Great hotel room

39:59The people that you choose to work the game Have presence Charisma And

40:13People with I guess I would say the most tolerance for loss Are the ones that lose that night Because there are some people that when they're losing, emotional contagion's a real thing. They can bring down the entire room. Right. Well, there's some players that people just wanted to win, not because they felt bad for them, but just because when they were in a good mood, that would keep the game alive. Yes, yes, yes. So did you find yourself selecting, did you ever uninvite someone because they were a bad loser? That would not be the sole reason I uninvited them. If they would lock up their chips and they, you know what I mean?

40:58Or I felt like they were a credit risk or something, but never just because they're a bad loser. Did you ever have any instances where you could see a player was either going on a big downswing, maybe just a run of bad luck, or they were starting to play badly where you felt the need or at least the desire to try and step in and make them stop playing. Yes, many times. And it's such a tricky balance because after the first buy-in, after I had relationships with these people, people weren't bringing cash to back it up. It was just like, I'm good for it, I'm good for it, I'm good for it. Give me another 10, give me another 50, give me another, you know.

41:43And I had to make these decisions. And even in the beginning, when I wasn't completely on the hook for it, I was still on the hook for it. Because you let someone go in deep enough and the entire game gets stiffed, the game's done. Right. It's over. So, but,

42:04there's also a number that you can't cut someone off before because they're going to argue, you didn't give me enough ammo to come back. So it's a tricky, tricky, tricky balance of things. And luckily, it was a couple years before I really took that responsibility on solely. In the first year or two, the game, the players in the game, really sort of, the game made choices for itself. So there was a consensus. I see you just let them you'd sort of hand the decision making over to them as much as possible yeah so basically I would just say okay guys what do you want to do here and I guess you can do that if you have the same cast of characters each time it was much easier then it got to a point where I had to start really if this was going to be my thing and if I was going to be making the kind of money that I was starting to make and if I was going to be running multiple games then I had to completely take over the reins.

43:08I had to prove myself in that capacity. Because I remember when we raised the stakes from$10 ,000 to$50 ,000 in Los Angeles, and then all of a sudden there's this new cast of characters, and a lot of these guys were old-school, grumpy players, and they would come in and they wouldn't even look at me. They wouldn't even talk to me. They would ask other people at the table for credit, and I I was just like, and it was hard, but I just kind of ignored it. Because ultimately they're going to have to come. I'm sitting there with the chips. Right. You know what I mean? I'm just shocked that they would do that.

43:49Did they not appreciate your role in the situation? Yeah. They just probably saw, who's this young pretty girl? They just assume you're there as a bartender or whatever. But it was even more... It was even more pronounced than that. It was like, this is our world. If you want to bring me a drink, great. I'm not asking you for money. I'm not asking you for any, you have no legitimacy here. So this, I guess, comes to this topic of being, you know, seemingly a woman and very much a man's world, even though it was actually your world. how did you navigate because it's such a fine line you know i found that myself when playing sometimes it's like i'm very aware that my femininity could be a weapon particularly if i if i'm actually playing because then people will underestimate you and so on and that's that's that's fairly cut and dried and easy to use but for you you're actually navigating a much different game because they don't see you we you what you need them to respect you yes whereas i actually didn't need them to respect me that much i mean it'd be nice sometimes but but you didn't need that to win i didn't need that to win exactly whereas you actually in order to be able to keep your game going and do your job you needed to be respected so how did you navigate that i think it made me so it made me better because i had to be so good at what i was doing and i had to be so legitimate and I had to be so trustworthy and so knowledgeable and so good at this, I couldn't make any mistakes.

45:34Because I was already in this place where people wanted to completely discount me. Right. If you make one accounting mistake. Right. One. Or you extend a little too much credit or you invite the wrong person. Or, you know, like, you, whatever. I mean, there were other game runners in town, and, you know, ranging from mobsters to really famous, really famous directors. and like they have all and they have all at one point tried to like scare me out and then ultimately tried to ask me for things. You know, like that was, it was first it was like, you know, you're a little girl and if you know what's best for you, like you won't be in this space.

46:39And then ultimately it would like later, much later down the road, would call me and be like, can I come over and get some advice? You know? How did you handle that when, for example, one would say that to you, you know, basically tell you you don't belong here? I always tried to make peace. In what way? I would say, listen, I don't know what you've heard about me or what you think I'm trying to do, but I would much rather have collaboration. You know, and like, what can I do to not step on your toes? I see, so you would come at it from a, I understand your grievance, and how can I mitigate this, and so on.

47:24As opposed to, I see, you didn't like, why didn't you take the head-butting back approach? Because it would have been justified. It would have been justified, I just didn't see, it felt like it would have been more out of ego and not a move of productivity. and I also knew I was at a deficit in that position because I knew how far they could potentially go and I could never go that far. I could never hurt someone. Were you, I mean I know there was the moment where you got beaten up by the Italian mob but this was one who was still in LA. Yeah. They were still, was there a moment where you were genuinely just scared for your physical safety?

48:08Not in LA. Not in LA? Mm-mm. Not in LA. Because I was almost always able to cut through that. And that's such an unexpected move, right? For someone to sort of threaten you or whatever. And then I'm like, how can my presence in this world actually be good for you? you know right and I found that to be this like very surprising to have this outcome of like

48:46confronting aggression and fear with humanity doesn't always work but a lot of times it does and so as a rule of thumb you would follow that always I would always try the way of peace first because Because, again, I'm not going to get into a gang war.

49:07You know? If I'm not going to follow through on this. You can't bluff it. I can't bluff it. You need to balance your range. Right. Right. You need to have a perceived balance range. And if you know that you don't and they know that, then there's no point. So you have to go. Otherwise, I have to be ready to go to war. Right. And I'm not. Right. So one topic I wanted to touch on, because I think it's pretty relevant in terms of understanding when competition is healthy versus unhealthy, is the archetype of the psychopath. And you could argue that there are certain facets of high stakes, good quality poker playing that at least correlate with certain psychopathic tendencies.

49:58Because you're playing this zero-sum game, your win means the other person has to lose, and then you have to willfully deceive them into making bad decisions, look them in the eye and say, I have X when you know you have Y. And to have no remorse about it, right? Right. And I found throughout my poker career, it got harder to do that. I never had any remorse whatsoever when I started out, when I won, you know, where I outplayed someone. I felt fantastic every single time I won. And then as I got a little older, and maybe I'd seen more of the sort of negative consequences that can happen when, for example, someone is too addicted to the game, they play out of their depth and so on.

50:51so what's your yeah i guess what's your sort of philosophy around well first of all do you do you feel like you learn you develop the muscle to sort of spot psychopaths or psychopathic behavior because presumably in the beginning you weren't exposed to that you weren't you know you you didn't see it at all and like player x famously in in the movie said that said that line which is um what is it yeah something something to the extent of money winning uh earning money is is cool but nothing compared i would much rather win money from someone than earn the money myself which seems that's definitely not a win-win philosophy let's put it that way it's it's seeing the world as a zero-sum game and like elevating zero-sum situations above like win-win situation because when you earn money it's because you did something in exchange whereas this you're taking from someone which again correlates to me with psychopathy a little bit so like how did you first of all learn to spot psychopaths and then once you spotted them how did you navigate them yeah well it's just such a fascinating uh conversation and and such a fascinating point that when you are obsessed with winning versus earning there's something more savage about that.

52:08Yeah. Well, psychopaths are initially, I think, very hard to spot because they're so charismatic. And they're so good at manipulating your emotions. You know, they can make you feel a certain way. They have immense mastery over themselves and over the emotions and psychology of other people. But then over time, like anything else and with experience, you start to see inconsistencies. And you start to see nobody's perfect all the time, right? So ultimately, the spots start to show, and it's chilling because you'll see this sort of show of charisma, but then when things aren't going their way, you start to see into this pretty dark person who is devoid of a certain amount of humanity.

53:32Are there any particular examples or stories you can think of where you saw that? Yeah. Yeah, just the lengths someone is willing to go to win something from another person. Even if that person has lost everything, is willing to lose more, and is in such a dark, bottomed-out place, to continue to prey on that person when you are up here in your ivory tower and you don't need it. but just to squeeze that last drop out of this person who has nothing. I saw that play out in front of my face and it was bad. What do you think motivates that person to keep doing that? I know what motivated this person.

54:33Childhood stuff. In this particular case, growing up so incredibly poor, surrounded by people of exorbitant wealth and listening at night to the rats in the floor and then having to go out into your day and see these people with their privilege and everything and whatever that did to a person. listen at some point I think we all have to it's our own responsibility to get past whatever happened to us when we were young and I don't think as an adult anymore with a fully developed prefrontal cortex and the intelligence to know better I think you lose your license at some point To point to those things.

55:39Right. You know? But it doesn't mean that you can't. Because I'm endlessly fascinated with how people become, how they become. And what are the causes and conditions. And I also think at some point I stopped categorizing so distinctly right, wrong, black, white, good, bad. because there are shades. It's so rare that I've met someone who's just purely bad or purely good. I don't think ever, maybe. Of course, there are people that exist like that. But even they often have an origin story that is just so horrifying. I guess you can think of, I'm sure that this exists, of someone who's actually had a very objectively pleasant childhood.

56:36and still has this sadism streak in them. And those perhaps, I'm not qualified enough on the psychological definitions of exactly what constitutes a psychopath. But if there's shades of it, then presumably the ones where actually there isn't an obvious environmental cause and they still seem to relish in creating lose-lose situations, causing pain or suffering in someone. and no apparent benefit to them other than some kind of weird gratification. But it's also strange because some of these people who I saw behave that way were actually, in their life, were very good to their children, were very good to their spouses.

57:27They just seem to have decided that in this realm, this behavior can be expressed. Right. Which actually then raises the question of like, is poker itself as the existence of a game creating, you know, is it doing a good thing by giving someone a somewhat contained outlet? You know, someone like that to express this shitty side. Like Dexter? Right, exactly. Yeah, is it the psychopath's past semi-benevolent murder zone or not? Or is it bringing out a behavior in people? Is it enabling a behavior in people that actually wouldn't have otherwise be doing that? Is it a slippery slope to bad behavior or is it actually a semi-contained container to prevent them from doing something worse?

58:23That's the outlet. It's probably a bit of both. Yeah, and it probably depends on the person and their own particular pathology.

58:34Yeah. Because, I mean, the type of darkness you've seen emerge through poker is probably very different to the type of darkness I've seen. You think? Well, I would say the more, I mean, I've definitely seen some of those things where not so much actually in the games, but just like on the sides where people who I felt should know better have encouraged people to take bad bets. Yeah. You know? Yeah. And I mean, frankly, there have been times also in my past where like I, you know, it wasn't like a friend was losing so much to me that it was going to hurt them particularly. But I remember having this moment where I like had to step outside myself.

59:13Wait, I was like really encouraged. I was hustled. I just hustled my friend on this. I won't say who the friend was, but there was a game who we played, we were all obsessed with for a while called Akhtang where it was um it was like a snake game on the iPad it was incredibly addictive and it was just like a you could play multi-way and we would all play it and this particular friend was just objectively worse than me at the game and I think he knew it and I kept but I kept hustling him into giving me giving me odds somehow and there was this part of me was like look at look at how good I am at out because I think in part what it came from when I did that was because he was objectively smarter than me at just everything and I was like, oh look, I found a way to outsmart him.

59:52So it was coming from my own feeling of lack of confidence in my own intelligence that I was like, oh look, I managed to outsmart him by getting him to take bad odds and then I won some money. But now I look back on it and I'm actually horrified at that behavior. I'm like, that was my friend who I misled. I didn't need to, I didn't need the money from him and so on. And it was like, why, you know, so, you know, I'm interested in understanding these mechanisms within ourselves, but within the largest scope of poker, usually where I saw bad stuff happen, was, again, through these weird, sort of slippery slopes that would happen where people would be doing these prop bets against each other.

1:00:31And it's like, okay, guys, there's something where it's like, this has gone from light to dark. Yes. Fun to unhealthy. Yes. What is that moment? It's really hard to pinpoint. And I mean, even though I didn't sit down and play, I've had those moments where you see someone getting really taken apart.

1:01:23They're a little out of control. this is the best game you put on, you know? So it's like, you're so conflicted. And there's this sense of adrenaline and like you're winning. And then at some point you're like, but this person is getting fed on. Yeah, you're literally watching the, you know, nature is red in tooth and claw play out. Yeah, yeah. And then, you know, in your mind you're like, grown man makes own decisions pretty sure he's super rich so yeah maybe it's less about the consequences of the outcome matters to an extent but there's also this it seems like we get this sense of this tipping point happens when there's pleasure being gained from the act itself yeah and it's in us All these things that we just get so outraged about in society, to me it's like, okay, after the nine billionth powerful person has leveraged their power to have an office relationship or whatever, we're like, okay.

1:02:52News flash, sex is compelling to people. Okay? Like, we have established this. Can we stop being so mortified and outraged when people use their assets or their power to get what they want? Listen, I'm not saying it's right, but can we start to try to understand where it comes from and give people tools and defenses against it instead of just this feigned outrage. I mean, I'm all about sort of, let's understand what it means to be a human. Let's understand what it means to have this unedited mind that is very geared in these ways. And then let's start to provide education on how to force evolution or deny impulse or whatever so that we can stop running into and having the same story over and over and over because we're not being very solution-oriented.

1:03:57And some social psychologists would disagree with that. They would say that social consequences and shaming is the way. But I'm not so sure. It definitely plays an essential part. I think we need to, ultimately people are, we are social creatures. we care about. One of the strongest evolutionary urges we have is to avoid being ostracized from our social group. Because it used to literally mean life or death for us back in the old prehistoric days. It doesn't quite mean that now, but it's arguably because of this that pro-social behaviors emerged that enabled us to be better coordinated and actually work together and not just have a feeding frenzy all the time whenever there was an opportunity.

1:04:43so generally speaking I think this you know keeping the shaming there is I don't like shaming is so much yeah term because for various reasons I just think shame is as a shame implies kind of like a loathing of the self or something and that can be um a very debilitating thing very yeah I've I've experienced it before. Can you elaborate on that? Yeah.

1:05:10When everything fell apart and I was under federal indictment and broke and living with my mom and all these stories were coming out in the tabloids. And I was also like really abusing. like I couldn't live without pills and alcohol and, you know, I just, I was bottomed out and I just, I couldn't, like, it's this feeling of being so ruined and so exiled that you feel like it's just the heaviest feeling ever. It's like, it's like you've been permanently ruined and there's no way back. And so I started doing, I started reading about it. Any particular useful books on shame? Well, Brene Brown has been a social researcher for a really long time and is really focused on shame.

1:06:18So I read a lot by her. I read this stuff by Gerald Fishkin, who says that shame is the ghost machine of the mind because it keeps sort of like haunting you with this event. But really what was the most helpful for me during that period was more of a Buddhist approach to things and also everything I read and then what I started to put into practice with meditation. And then also my dad has said things to me that really resonate. He was like, you know, he said, your problem is not that you have these ideas in your mind, that you have this voice in your mind that's telling you that you're ruined and you're finished and everything, that your problem is that you're listening to it and that you're not doing anything about it.

1:07:20and then I remember also reading this book that said, it's The Untethered Soul you're not the voice in your head you're the one that hears it and so through these different little touch points I started to understand which seems like a simple concept but I really didn't understand it that the things that are going on in your head the default mode network the kind of script that's running through is just inputs from the past and that there is another part of the mind that can hear these things, can observe these things and actually has the ability to have agency here. And so like, whereas before learning about this stuff, I would have this thought, you're a failure and you're going to be a failure forever, or you are completely ruined.

1:08:19You fucked everything up and there's no coming back. Before I learned about meditation, before I learned about this stuff, that thought would be my reality. I'd be hooked into that thought and that would be how I spent my days. Now I know when I have a thought like that, I can practice non-attachment or if it's really deafening, I can talk back to that thought. That is, you know, and combat it with like, that's fucking bullshit. You know, at that time, I'm 35 years old. I could have, you know, I have 60 plus years left on this earth to just live out this thing that happened, you know? So like just being, and it's just, it required a ton of self-talk, of relentless not accepting that that was going to be my reality.

1:09:13And then over time, what you learn how to do is you learn how to have agency and not get hooked to those defeatist thoughts and to ignore it. And there's all different kinds of protocols, but I think that that was such a game-changing moment. Was there a specific type of meditation practice that helped get you out of that sort of bottom? Yeah, I mean, I think that the kind that I practiced, I don't think it really necessarily matters as long as you are training your focus. So I practice insight or vipassana. And what that practice asks you to do is to sit for a period of time and place your focus the same way you'd place your focus if you're reading a book on those words, that level of it.

1:10:08onto your breath. And so what happens is you follow the in-breath, you follow the out-breath, the mind starts going, and you can just label it thinking and then come back to the breath. Thinking, come back to the breath. And it gets you into the present moment, and it also teaches you how to ignore some of this stuff. And over time, it builds and trains this agency over where you place your focus, which when you think about it is so incredibly powerful. If you are in charge of where you're placing your focus, think about all the power you have over procrastination, over discomfort when you're working out to keep going, your ability to not express yourself in anger, but instead to remain calm and wait till the person's done talking.

1:11:05It's this ability to overcome yourself. and what sold it to me when I was doing all this research is some of the science I think I told you before about Sarah Lazar who does these brain scans at Harvard and she'll conduct brain scans of people's brains and then they'll go into an eight week meditation course and what she finds is a significant amount of the participants show an increase in gray matter in the prefrontal cortex and a decrease in the gray matter in the amygdala. So, you know, that seems pretty cut and dry. And for those who aren't, the amygdala is sort of the fear center, right? Is that correlating with the lizard brain?

1:11:55Yeah. Yeah, fear center, fight or flight, anxiety. And then, you know, just on meditation, and the way that I got into it is I started so small. I started 30 seconds the first day. Then I built to one minute. I wanted to make the act of showing up more pleasurable than how hard it was going to be because I knew it was going to be really hard for me. I have patience, boredom. All these things were very difficult for me and a very overactive mind. What was the moment? And maybe it wasn't as dramatic as this, so correct me if it wasn't, but it sounds like you were in this absolute rock-bottom state.

1:12:36And then something got you to do that first step of even the 30 seconds a day. What was that thing? Was it just simply time? Do you think just given enough time, you would have eventually found the energy to do that? No, it was desperation. It was desperation because I could not live with what was going on in my mind, with how depressed and how anxious and how shameful and how terrified I was of my future. And I knew on some level that I needed a comeback in a big way. And I knew that it was going to be a big fight. And I knew I had to be as healthy and as clear and as focused and as in control as I possibly could.

1:13:29And so, you know, it wasn't like this overnight thing. First, I got sober. And then I started reading everything I possibly could about anxiety and fear and mindset and psychology. And then I did the 12 steps, which, you know, I'm not, I'm not like presently in a 12 step program and, and I, you know, I'm not completely sober anymore. But even though like for me, drinking is just not that fun. There's just better drugs. Yeah, there's just better drugs. Mushrooms, we can have that conversation. but drinking is not really for me. I mean, I'll have a glass of wine, but anyway. But the education of a 12-step program was really life-changing.

1:14:36And it's this way of, A, to go through this process of writing out all the people that you've ever harmed and to go apologize to them. You don't think it's going to change you very much, and then it does. That sounds intense. It's intense, it's terrifying, and it's liberating. The other really, really cool thing that a 12-step program has you do is it has you write down all the things, people, places, things, ideas that disturb you. And then in this very sneaky way, you go through and you identify which part of the psyche is this offending. So there's different options, like financial security, emotional security.

1:15:36It asks you who you think you are in the context of all of this. So all of a sudden you start to see these patterns. like, oh, all of these things that disturb me are disturbing me because it's threatening this idea that I'm good enough. I'm not good enough. I'm not good enough. Whatever you start to see your pattern. And then the last part of it is, what's my part in this? And so just these different ways of thinking that, because I feel like you can go through your whole life and keep running into yourself until you start to do some of this work. And a lot of this work is looking into the shadows in your own self, the things that you just want to avoid forever or the people that you want to avoid forever, these things you don't want to think about because you're guilty about it or because it just seems too hard to change.

1:16:29And for me, going through that 12-step work was a direct and fearless confrontation of my shit. you know so it sounds like it's something much greater than just like helping someone get unaddicted from a particular substance it sounds like a full sort of psychological overhaul it is and it's therapy it's truly it's like a holistic therapy right I didn't realize that yeah and presumably that's why it's so popular and effective yeah absolutely I mean one I think the social component is huge because and it's gamified too, right? In what way? Every year on your birthday you get a chip and everyone claps for you.

1:17:18You're working the steps with someone, their status. I like that it's a chip. Yeah, it's a chip. It's very appropriate. So there are certain ways that it's socially gamified.

1:17:34It's a very interesting structure. Fascinating. This topic of gamification, because I'm someone who struggles so much. I want to do a meditation practice. I know what my addiction is. My addiction is my phone and Twitter mostly. And it's at that point where I'm like, I know I'm receiving the dopamine, but that dopamine is not correlating with my happiness. Yes, yes, yes. And I can't stop. And that's how I define addiction as that. Oh, for sure. You're sensing that you're getting the dopamine, but it's not actually fulfilling you. That's right. How could, do you think there's a, what little you know of someone like me, what gamification could I do with meditation to help me, for example, get off, spend less time on Twitter?

1:18:21Well, you're competitive, right? Yeah. Horribly. So a community would be really helpful for you in which, like Strava, right, where people are running. I don't know if this exists, but if there is some sort of, like on Headspace, if you're on Headspace, so it'll tell you how many minutes you've meditated, but I don't think that's enough for you. I think you need to be competing with other people. If you have a group. Igor has a whoop thing, right? It's like one of these... I know, my family and I all have one. It's like an Apple Watch type of thing, and you can have your group, and you can literally see how many hours you all slept, what kind of workout you did, what your heart rate was, etc., etc.

1:19:03And then they check in on each other, like, wait, you didn't work out for four days, what's going on? so that would be a good way for you yeah I like that and maybe you could like start a group on Twitter or something so I would say for you just knowing you the competitive component would be one and all you would need is like three weeks of doing it consistently and then you would not this is what happened to me I started to notice such a change in things that had plagued me forever that then I became afraid not to meditate because it changed so much. Wow. I want to get to that stage where I'm scared of, there's usefulness.

1:19:45You want the carrot of like, oh, the rainbow wonderful world that you can exist in, but also I want a stick. Stick's a very good motivators too. And you think three weeks is sufficient? I do. And how much per day? So build up to 20 minutes, but start with one. Just one minute a day. And you've got to do it as soon as you wake up. If you wait until your day gets going, it's done. And I've already gone on Twitter. Yeah. It has to be pre-Twitter. Yeah. Okay, thank you. Check in with Twitter every day and be like, whether you did it or not. And then you're, some accountability. That's one way. That's scary.

1:20:27So what does Molly Bloom spend most of her time on these days? Because you're no longer in poker. Right. What's your main goals right now? My main goal is, well, I had a daughter a year ago, and that is quite consuming. So I hear. Yes. Irony. Yes. And so, you know, that takes up a lot of my time. I'm doing a lot of speaking, and so I travel a lot and I speak a lot. I'm writing two books one is much more specific and the other one is like very esoteric and will probably take me like 8 million years to write if I ever finish it I'm working on a documentary and I'm constantly thinking about a way so I think I talked to you about this a little bit how when I after watching poker people play poker for a couple years I started to like just be fascinated because these people that played in my game had the shortest attention spans.

1:21:32They could not stay interested in anything for a very long period of time. They had full access to anyone and anything and optionality through the wazoo, right? And yet, when you strip away the gamification, they sat around doing pretty simple probability math with each other. So here is something that is so powerful. Gamification is so powerful. How can we apply this to teach meditation, to teach kids compassion, to teach, to rehabilitate people who have just spent their life getting in trouble and going to jail? How can we use gamification to lift the load to change a human being? and so I think ultimately when Fiona starts to go to school or whatever and I have more time in my day this is something that I really feel so deeply passionate about exploring and trying to figure out and I think as VR becomes if it ever becomes universally adapted which I think it has to I would have expected it to I would too.

1:22:54I remember when I first got my VR headset. I would have expected it to as well. Vive or whatever it was back in 2017. I was just like, how will I ever do anything but this? Although interestingly, it captured my attention for about three months and then I never really used it again. So it'd be really interesting to know the neuroscience behind it. It might just literally because of comfort. The headsets are still kind of big and clunky. It's obviously not as high fidelity as your own vision. Right. But that's just a technology problem. In time, it's probably going to become that. So when you say gamification, you mean by having rewards, like some kind of, so harnessing the power of competition, presumably a little bit, but it doesn't have to be, right?

1:23:38You could just like, because you could compete against yourself, or I guess if you having, if you gamify something, it means that you have a scoreboard at the end of it. I think competition's a really big part of it. I think, yeah, because then you get the social status, which is so compelling to human beings. So compelling. The reward, money. Or whatever it happens to be. I mean, the great thing about that is you can get brands involved in the self-actualization of human beings. So it doesn't need to be some crypto coin or something. Or it could, I don't know. But I think that there is a really cool application here.

1:24:29And I think it'd be really fun to figure out. So it could be, yeah, I very much agree. I mean, that's what this whole podcast is about. It's about how do we find the ways to make competition be the thing that motivates us to become better people and isn't the thing that takes us over and drives us to become the feeding frenzy. Yeah, I mean, a lot of the stuff that... And the other thing is, how do we build communities that are not based in the feeding frenzy principle but are instead based in open-mindedness, inclusion, support of different ideas. How do we create that again? Because right now, what is it, the echo chamber or whatever?

1:25:23Right now it just feels... Well, I think a big part of the problem of online... By definition, information is compressed and the breadth of a human is reduced down to these little narrow metrics. You know, the complexity of someone's entire worldview when they tweet something, you know, they tweet an opinion on a particular topic because people can't get all the rest of the nuance behind someone's worldview. Right. Or even more generally, like even if they said those same words, but in person, there's so much other information we're picking up. Yeah. And even if someone says something that we don't agree with, we can see their body language, the tone, the voice they use and so on.

1:26:06But usually it enables us to infer and see the humanity behind someone, and thus it's less triggering to us. We're less likely to get angry and get into bad faith interpretations because we see what's going on. If we're going to spend more and more of our time in online spaces, we have to find a way to include this other information that we have evolved to pass and appreciate each other from. And I don't know how we do that. You know, I think one thing that, like one place where I really realized that is when we all went into lockdown and politics got insane and everyone sort of picked their side, I, for the first time in my life, got a little caught up in that.

1:26:55And then I felt myself getting sort of like really angry and sort of feeling like I was partaking in some tribal politics, you know, even though I wasn't like vocal about it or whatever. And then I remember getting back into traveling and starting to sit by some of those people that I had sort of decided were on the wrong side of things. And I don't know why, but I end up talking to people on planes so often. I end up having these really sort of very fascinating conversations with people on planes. And I'd find out in the middle of one of these conversations that they had a viewpoint or something that was very different than mine.

1:27:38And I'm sitting here like, but I like this person. I liked this conversation. I'm not going to marry this person. This person isn't going to be my best friend. But then I was just like, you can't reduce a person to a single opinion of theirs. And you can't base whether or not, you can't place people into boxes, right, wrong, this, that. And so it was really, I was so happy that I do travel for a living and that I got back into the world and I was able to, like you're saying, interact with the full person and their full humanity. And like, yes, there are certain viewpoints I vehemently disagree with, with these people.

1:28:28But that does not mean that they are my enemy. Yeah, I wonder if there's a way we can gamify social media that it rewards either the types of posts or essentially content that encapsulates as much breadth as possible, or as much nuance as possible. Because again, that's the problem with, again, to just talk about Twitter, you've got a very simple function of like, like, if you like something. And if you dislike it, actually, you tend to comment or write words because you don't actually have an outlet. There's not even a down, I think the jury's out on whether adding a dislike button is actually a good or a bad thing.

1:29:16I slightly lean on the side of thinking that it would be better for discourse if we had a dislike button, because then we have a symmetric outlet for our dislike of a thing without having to write something. But it'd be interesting to look at YouTube. Well, they got rid of the dislike button. Oh, they did? Yep. So you can't thumbs down a YouTube video anymore? You can, but you can't see it. Oh. So at least actually they still have that. But whether that satiates people in the same way, because they know that other people won't see that they disliked it. So I don't know. Interesting. But yeah, I would argue that social media in a sense is an example of gamification gone wrong, actually.

1:29:59Because everyone is, again, it's narrowing the richness and diversity of the human experience down to these little metrics such as number of followers, number of views, number of retweets, et cetera. And while those things can correlate with quality of content, They also correlate with outraginess of the certain content, or even falsehood of the content. And so it's not actually, it's not a very good indicator of whether something is actually something that people want or need. And by definition, that's kind of gamifying, because gamifying is adding metrics to certain things. So there's a thing called, what's it called?

1:30:50Good Heart's Law, which is when a measure becomes a target, the thing that you used to measure something becomes the target, then it's no longer a good measure anymore. Right. Because you're getting decoupled from the original goal. Interesting. And that would be my sort of caveat to the idea of like, for example, trying to gamify meditation. Right. Right, right. Because you have to be very cognizant and careful not to start over-optimizing. Like, oh, well, I know I have to do this many minutes a day. And if you're then targeting getting those minutes done, then it might come at the cost of the original thing, which is about being present.

1:31:28You see what I mean? I do. Yeah, but I wonder if that is a case where

1:31:42it would be okay. You know? Because like,

1:31:49there's all this sort of gamification stuff to get you to work out. Right. Right? And you still get the benefit of the endorphins, however you get there. Yeah, that's very true. I mean, you're still getting, you're still doing this thing that is pretty objectively very good for your mind. so you're still kind of getting the benefit I mean it's it's it's not you're not going to become like the Buddha if that's your approach to it but you'll probably be a little bit better off well I remember someone once saying to me if you are trying to achieve enlightenment you will never achieve it because it's one of these weird paradoxical things like the philosopher king yes no and I agree I'm just like sort of trying to, you know, like, what's it?

1:32:43Red team it, whatever the phrase is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just trying to come at angles where it might not work. But I think it's the way, and I'm certainly excited to try it. Yeah. I mean, it's just this thing. I mean, I remember reading about it and just getting angry every time I read about it because I wanted to discount it. Because I guess just on some level, I knew how hard it was going to be for me to just sit with my own mind. but then think about how crazy that is that we're just so afraid to sit in stillness with our own mind our own mind, this mind that has been with us forever, that at the end of our life will be the only thing that we have just that in itself made me really believe that it's a very worthwhile exercise absolutely If there was a piece of advice you could give to 25-year-old Molly, particularly around how she manages her mind, knowing what you know now, what would it be?

1:33:46It's interesting you ask me this because I was just asked. I left the University of Colorado just so lost. And I left really good grades there, and I never... Never went back. And I was just asked to speak there. The chancellor asked me to speak. Oh, wow. And there was 1 ,500 kids in the audience. And basically, the premise of my speech was if I could write a letter to my 19-year-old self. You know? Not because I want to focus on myself, but because I am those kids. Right, absolutely. I was those kids. And in a lot of ways, it felt like I left that girl there. And so, you know, what I, first of all, what I wanted them to know and what I'd want to tell myself and who knows if you can really hear it, is that, you know, I was so sure that I had to have it right.

1:34:49That I had to know who I was, what I was doing, and that I had to get it right the first time. And I think what I know now is that that is so rarely the way to get it right. You have to go out and you have to show up and you have to mess up and make mistakes and get desperate and get better and continue to grow. If you are willing to grow, you get as many chances as you are brave enough to take. That would have been mind-blowing to me. the other thing that I would really you know and this isn't just a conversation but I think every kid that lives in this world because this is a different world than even when when we I mean these kids deal with school shootings they deal with there might not be any jobs for you because now here's AI and I'm not really sure if humans you know like right are gonna be working in the future, right?

1:35:56Like that is a complete like existential mind fuck. And then even if you do figure out what you're going to be and you don't, you know, get shot during school, like your planet might not be habitable. So I just think about this and I think about like, you already have this baseline anxiety because you're a teenager. And so getting engaged in this ability to manage your mind because what meditation and what mindfulness and what reading a constant diet of whether it's books on Buddhism or books on surrender or something allows me to do is to take myself out of the driver's seat to some degree. Look, I'm going to be a strategic planner.

1:36:51I try to think about how to mitigate disaster. I'm a strategic thinker. But that can be the most stressful type of person to be. And at some point, you have to find a way to make peace with the fact that it's not all on your shoulders. And that you show up for your life, and you try to grow, and you try to be good, and you try to get better. But at the end of the day, there needs to be some sort of way that you have to surrender to this order of the universe or physics or whatever it is and to find your peace with that. Because to try to control for all the existential threats, for all the uncertainties, for all the unknowns is a maddening, maddening exercise.

1:37:40And so I just believe experientially, intellectually, with every part of my being that we have to try to find some peace. Right. If we can control our minds, in a world where everything feels out of control and uncertain, look inward. Yep. Find the control and the stability you need inside there. And then the funny thing is that if everybody does that, the world will be more certain and stable. So yeah, it's like a bottom-up approach to leveling up the next generation. Yeah, and for all those years, I just thought, this is the way my mind is, and there's nothing I can do about it besides do drugs.

1:38:29You know what I mean? And then that got to a place where it usually gets, That's where that caused more unmanageability. In the beginning, maybe it gave me some peace or some whatever. And I just didn't realize that with a relatively small amount of effort, because 20 minutes a day is not that big of a deal. It is in the beginning. But if you build up to it, and then also add in 10 more where you're reading something that is instructive. Pema Shadrone is a great author. She teaches about just relaxing into discomfort and into fear and not having to change it or address it and just being able to sit with it.

1:39:14You know, these protocols, meditation, some Buddhist books are super fascinating, but just this endeavor to try to manage the mind, which is to manage the human condition. And I can't tell you how much that changed my life. Thank you so much. Yeah. so there we go thank you so much for listening and a huge thank you to Molly for being my first ever guest that was so much fun also thank you to my editor Ray for bringing this win-win podcast to life do go check out in the show notes below links to some of the resources that Molly and I discussed including links to her book Molly's Game and of course the Oscar nominated movie that was made about her life and in the meantime make sure you subscribe so you don't miss the next episode And until then, may your life be full of win-wins.