Malcolm Gladwell on Disagreeableness and Pulling the Goalie

[00:00:10]bushkin so one one one thing that that chapter one is about is the fact that if a lobster is defeated in a dominance battle you can give it essentially anti-depressants and it will fight again there's a Canadian like me my age almost exactly who teaches my favorite subject psychology at my alma moer the University of Toronto his name is Jordan [Music] Peterson if you want to understand a complex nervous system it's a good idea to understand a simple one first and then sort of elaborate upwards and it turns out that serotonin governs status emotional regulation and posture in lobsters just like it does in human beings and so that would just blew me away he wrote a very provocative self book called 12 rules for life rule number one stand up straight with your shoulders back rule number two treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping rule number 12 Pat a cat when you encounter one on the street Peterson's book was a sensation and soon all kinds of other people were doing 12 rules like The Economist Tyler Cowen whose blog marginal Revolution is the first thing I read every morning I particularly like Cowan's rule number seven learn how to learn from those who offend you every time you turn a corner 12 rules the columnist Megan McArdle rule number three always order one extra dish at a restaurant an unfamiliar one you might like it which would be Splendid if you don't like it all you lost was a couple of bucks the exercise of curiosity requires a risk a sacrifice a commitment I love [Music] that also mcardle's rule number 12 always make more dinner rolls than you think you can eat for some reason dinner rolls Loom much larger in our imaginations than in our stomachs whoa Megan mcardell makes her own dinner rolls everybody's doing 12 rolls wait I'm jealous [Applause] [Music] my name is Malcolm Gladwell you're listening to revisionist history my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood this episode is about Malcolm gladwell's 12 rules for living my guiding principles my wisdom distilled except thought about this for like a month and I realized I don't have 12 rules I just don't I mean I have rules like the fact that I only drink five liquids ever water tea red wine espresso and milk in some combination but that's not a rule for living it's just pointlessly provocative self-denial the least attractive part of my personality if you want a cocktail you should have a cocktail I only have one rule pull the [Music] goalie what do you mean when you say you're obnoxious uh be more specific if I found something funny which is still a disease I have I will say it even if it's gets me in some trouble I never thought I was particularly cruel mhm but I was a class cutup my one rule for living came to me from the work of two people cliff Asus and Aaron Brown both philosophers of A Sort and friends this is Clifford asnes he's in his mid-50s bald goatee grew up middle class Jewish in Long Island I was in the honors classes and I was the cut up in the honors class which is always a strange thing to be you don't think of those classes as having one but we had them M it wasn't always me too we were not perfectly well behaved so obnoxious I was tolerable uh but I found myself extremely funny now I should say that I didn't find Cliff Asis obnoxious he's delightful company instead I suspect he is what psychologists call disagreeable short digression psychologists believe that human personality can be assessed along five Dimensions extroversion conscientiousness neuroticism openness to experience and finally agreeableness my sense of Cliff assness he's at the low end of that last trait number five he's low agreeable disagreeable which is not the same as obnoxious it's rather the quality of not being dependent on or particularly interested in the approval of others when I went to interview Cliff Asus in Manhattan I turned on my digital recorder and discovered that my memory flash card was full and after much fluster and fumbling I realized I had no idea how to delete any of the existing data from the flash card to make room for my interview with Asus now the rational thing would have been for me to hand Asus the digital recorder and ask him to figure it out because Clif Asis has an IQ I'm guessing two to three standard deviations higher than mine he could have solved the problem in about 30 seconds but I didn't hand him the recorder because I was embarrassed because I worried that he would think I was pathetic and that concern was more important to me than actually fixing my tape recorder issues I am agreeable I am interested in the approval of others I am the opposite of Cliff asness so I ended up running down 42nd Street two cross down blocks to Staples to get another flash guard to replace the one I was is too embarrassed to ask for help figuring out here you you may include this this is this is um this is not a secret I don't work as hard as people think I goof off a lot Cliff fastness likes puzzles games problems that engage the imagination I have been caught several times playing internet chess in my office from people and I say caught I'm the senior guy at the firm I don't I don't I don't quit over this but come in and I'm like yeah I got to beat this guy hold on or or lose I'm not a great chess player he doesn't play conventional chess he plays one minute chess known as bullet chess if you're curious this is what a typical bullet match sounds [Applause] like it's like Einstein playing pingpong by the way when Asis says I'm the senior guy at the firm he's referring to the fact that he heads a company called aqr Capital applied quantitative research a hedge fund with $225 billion under management which brings me to philosopher number two the second architect of the pigoli principal Cliff asus's friend Aaron Brown if we were to create a disagreeableness scale where zero is like a Golden Retriever and 10 is Mr Spock Cliff Asis would be a solid seven Aaron Brown is an8 maybe even an [Music] 88.5 Brown is a member of the tribe of mathematically minded Finance guys known as quants The Wall Street quants used to gather after work at the Odon restaurant in downtown Manhattan to talk about gaussian probability in the bond market yeah so there's different definitions of Quant so remember Quant is an insult invented in the mid 90s that became adopted as a you know point of pride Aaron Brown is a big guy beard imp passive demeanor when I met him I was reminded of my favorite joke about engineers The Optimist sees the glass as half full the pessimist sees the glass as half empty the engineer wonders why the glass is twice as large as it needs to be brown grew up in Seattle his mom had a master's in chemistry his dad had a PhD in physics did a lot of unconventional work for the Air Force like the time he inherited a strange Contraption the Air Force had given this guy like $2 million over 10 years to build some machine and they didn't know what it was supposed to do but they knew he was really smart and then he killed himself and so the Air Force said is there anybody who wants this machine who can figure out what it does and fix it and my dad said sure I'll take it he had it in our basement a tortured genius builds a Sinister Contraption with millions of dollars of Secret Pentagon money the man mysteriously commits suicide the Air Force said says who wants the machine Aaron Brown's dad says over here over here he puts it in his basement and says to his teenage son Aaron hey take a look if you want like it's a box of Legos this is how you raise a child to be an 8.5 what was the machine I was just this huge Mach I stared at that thing for hours and hours I couldn't had tubes and wires and this and that um and you turned it on and it did kind of you know lights would light up and do interesting things but we never figured out what it was intended to do his not his notes were indecipherable and he burned some of them so either he was the guy who invented like the universal Wonder machine and and whatever or he was just some crazy guy who like put wires together maybe it was it what's the what's the thing from that movie from Back to the Future the FL the flux capacitor yeah flux capacitor yeah yeah maybe he didn't maybe he teleported himself to to some other civilization or something when Aaron Brown was a teenager Seattle was in the midst of a deep recession all around him people are losing their jobs he decides he needs a marketable skill he teaches himself poker and finds a big money game in the basement of a Local Tavern and I figured out two really important things I was much better than these guys I could easily win money consistently and they let me win it and walk out with it you know kid comes in plays walks out so that's like AEP pipany for me that says okay you're how old 14 but I was a shy kid this took every ounce of courage I possess to walk in there you know there are people who could have done this and it wouldn't have been a big deal but for me it was like the most traumatic event in my life but when I walked out I said okay I never have to worry about getting a meal you know having a place to stay because you can always find a poker game did you did did you pay your way through Harvard with poker yes Aaron Brown ends up on Wall Street then goes to work for Cliff Asis at aqr Capital of course a match made in heaven do you guys think the same way do you have differences in the way you approach problems well the massive difference and the reason he has billions of dollars and I have a comfortable living he cares far more he gets literally physically angry when things don't work and and they lose money we I'd rather work on an interesting problem the profitable problem now what do these two do aside from making money of course they do thought experiments write them up and post them online on something called ssrn the social science research Network in my opinion the greatest website on the Internet it's place where anyone anyone can post any kind of paper or research or argument and every article posted is then ranked according to its popularity as I'm writing this there are 7987 45 papers on ssrn I don't know if you remember back at the beginning of this season an episode called divide and conquer I talked about my love of law review articles well where do you think I read law review articles not in law reviews are you kidding why would I wait 2 years for some dusty publication to put something out I read them on ssrn because that's where everyone posts their articles the minute they finish in Manhattan for years the most important source of Gossip was page six of the New York Post ssrn is Page Six for dorks so not long ago I'm on ssrn poking around and lo and behold what is the number one ranked paper at the time pulling the goalie hockey and investment implications by Clifford asnes and Aaron Brown I thought I didn't have any rules for living I was wrong pulling the goal tender down three so really giving a big advantage on the power play with possession firmly established here's the issue you're playing hockey your team is down by one goal late in the game the coach of the losing team typically removes his own goalie and substitutes in an extra attacker so instead of having five offensive players and a goalie guarding the net he now has six offensive players and no one guarding his net thrs it down into the open neck that'll make him pay for it a short-handed goal it's a trade-off pulling your goalie makes it easier for the other team to score and put the game even further Out Of Reach but at the same time your extra attacker increases your chances of scoring a goal and tying the game now if you watch hockey you know that coaches typically pull the goalie with a minute or a minute and a half left in the game but that's just hockey tradition it's not Based on data when exactly should you pull the goalie tell me the Genesis of this paper that I love so much okay uh well cliff and I talk a lot about sort of Quant sport stuff and I have always been talking to him about decisions that coaches make that are mathematically indefensible but are def you know make sense from the coach's motivation and then specifically we were talking about Seattle Seahawks uh 2014 Super Bowl new England Patriots they got the ball on the one yd line Second down 26 seconds to go now second and goal Russell Wilson what are you doing he gets picked off by the undrafted rookie free agent from Western Alabama Malcolm Butler who preserves the Victory and it will leave everybody asking why in the world with marshan in the back field did the Seahawks throw the football 21 reasons at this point Brown goes on a tangent for maybe 15 minutes about that particular play which has gone down in Super Bowl lore as one of the worst coaching decisions in the history of football but Brown convinces me that in fact it was the right call the rational call and I would explain his logic to you except that we have much bigger fish to fry anyway talk turns to pulling the goolan hockey and Cliff says to Aaron oh I've done some work on this already it's probably six seven years ago five six years ago I wrote this model in XL uh out of pure personal interest I thought I had a neat way to think about the problem um and essentially it was it's really hard to think about with 5 minutes left but with 10 seconds left it's really easy to think about Cliff shared his calculations with Aaron Brown Aaron made them better and built a beautiful computer model and their conclusion was a team down by one goal should pull its goalie with 5 minutes and 40 seconds left in the game and a team down by two goals should pull its goalie with 11 minutes and 40 seconds left 11 minutes and 40 seconds with an undefended goal no one in all of hockey pulls their goalie with that much time left if a Coach did that in a playoff game with real Stakes involved the entire Arena would probably go up in smoke in basketball and baseball there's been a statistical Revolution over the past generation known as Moneyball where Advanced metrics have been applied to maximize every aspect of the game hockey is a step behind with the exception of my beloved Toronto Maple Leafs who have a genuine Quant as their leader this is a sport where players pick fights with each other in full knowledge of the fact that the penalty for their transgressions will materially diminish their team's chances of winning baseball is quantum theory hockey is the grown-up professional version of Red Rover Red Rover let Wayne Gretzky come over hockey coaches are not looking for strategic tips on ssrn so what do they do they keep their goalie in place until the very last minute defending the goal and why do they keep doing that because anything else would be impossibly [Music] disagreeable imagine you're a coach of a hockey team down 3-1 with 11 minutes and 40 seconds left in the game you pull your goalie the other team scores so now it's 4-1 with half of the final period left and now your fans think that you've robbed them of what might have been a reasonably interesting game they'll hate you and so are your players because it's an awful lot more humiliating to lose a lopsided game than a close one the cliff and Aaron strategy maybe again an our geeky sense optimal but it doesn't provide the optimal or the maximum amount of entertainment it is very high probability you create a laugher uh where the where the you get down by three down by four and of course if you follow cliff and Aaron's cold Vulcan model you never put the goalie back in you still an infinitesimal chance you will tie it and you lose 14 to nothing and it's embarrassing and maybe entertainment in a sideshow kind of way but it's not what they want who would try this or anything like it not anyone who has any normal human expectation of being liked and applauded but do cliff and Aaron need to be liked and applauded no they don't asnes founded his firm with a couple of other PhD graduates from the finance department of the University of Chicago which is like the geek capital of the world and his basic hiring philosophy ever since has been to hire more phds disagreeable quants just like him he's now up to 73 phds for comparison purposes the economics faculty at MIT has 41 PhD d s he's at 1.78 xmit and Counting now does he need that many phds I have no idea but how much more fun is office life for insanely smart disagreeable people if at all times they are surrounded by dozens and dozens of other insanely smart and disagreeable people circling each other's arguments like vultures this is going to be one of the Watershed days in financial markets history it was a manic Monday in the finan icial markets the Dow tumbled more than 500 points after two pillars of the street tumbled over the weekend Le remember the start of the financial crisis in 2008 when no one knew what to do as stocks were falling and Banks teetering on the brink and everyone was running around screaming for the Secretary of the Treasury to do something Aaron Brown told me that if he had been treasury secretary he would have done nothing in fact he would have gone on vacation for a few months because the truth was no one knew what to do and when no one knows what to do Aaron Brown says the rational thing is to wait until you have the data you need before you start throwing around trillions of dollars in bailout money this is exactly the kind of thing that someone with a disagreeable score of 8.5 would say in times of panic the agreeable treasury secretary would want to be a calming presence to project stability and wisdom to have others look at him and Nod approvingly and murmur something about the importance of a firm hand at the tiller but not Aaron Brown he doesn't care about wall Street's feelings he cares about the trillion dollars people would be calling for his head he would be poolside in bokeh browsing ssrn on his [Music] BlackBerry oh man how great if we could all be as disagreeable as cliff and Aaron [Music] suppose you were let me give you a hypothetical scenario you have a Plucky young team and inexplicably you have ended up in the Stanley Cup finals and you're up against you know one of the great Pittsburgh Penguin teams of the last couple of years uhhuh would you consider pulling the goalie to start the game I absolutely I would love to do it now I'd have to do the math do the math always we'll be right back [Music] a few years ago a movie came out called No Good Deed starring taji P Hensen as a woman named Terry and the ridiculously handsome Idris Elba as Colin No Good Deed is a home invasion movie and home invasion movies are of a piece with pulling the goalie they are meditations on disagreeableness not to get pretentious but both goalie pulling and the home invasion genre are versions of the canonical story of God commanding Abraham to kill his son Isaac sain kirkgard wrote about it in fear and trembling God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac to demonstrate his loyalty and the rational thing is for Abraham to obey God because if God is all powerful then Abraham's future and the future of his family depend on being in God's good graces but how can he look his son in the eye and then kill him it's a disagreeableness test how much will you let the thought of what others think of you and what you think of yourself get in the way of doing what is right in the eyes of God on the one side is fear on the other trembling this is exactly what goes on in home invasion movies absolutely that's Amy logos who wrote no good deed to me that's at the core of why these movies are interesting to people why the home invasion genre you know it's an actual genre at this point you know why it it sort it persists I called logos up after the revisionist history research team determined that no good deed was the most perfectly kirka guardian of all home invasion movies it puts you in these incredibly morally ambiguous situations where the audience can see the direct path to success so here's the premise of No Good Deed it's late on a Friday night raining hard Terry is at home with her two small children B girl okay Finish cutting the doorbell rings the plate and then come over here and eat okay it's Idris Elba I'm sorry I don't mean to bother you I just lost control of my car and wrecked it he says he's been in an accident he forgot his cell phone can he come in and use her phone she lets him in of course she [Music] does he kind of has to be insanely handsome yes for that to work she's she's not going to let me in if I show up wet and P draggled at 130 lbs she's not like I don't know I mean I I think I think maybe she would I think ultimately yes I think his insane good looks are a huge part of that and and another you know another big part of her character you know she's sort of been primed for this moment in in her life leading up to this moment right she's feeling unseen she's feeling unsatisfied in her marriage she's feeling neglected this handsome stranger shows up and compromises her her instincts you know on some level because he's so handsome it's awkward at first but he's super Charming they flirt a little witting for the tow truck to come there's a whole lot of something in the air and then halfway into the movie she sees him for who he really is a deeply evil guy she runs to the kitchen to call the cops and sees that he's cut the phone line she looks around terrified to see where he's gone can't find him then oh my God runs upstairs to find him playing with her daughter again do it again again all right let's do it let's go and up touch the sky who no Ryan Ryan baby you got to go to bed okay please Ryan and I just having some fun that's all aren't we Ryan no Ryan come on Bugaboo it's past your bad time sweetie Emy loo say she went to see No Good Deed an opening night at a theater in Balwin Hills in Los Angeles you know it was it was a really rousing I mean there were lines out the door to get in and the place was packed and people were screaming and shouting at the screen and it was wait what point do you remember what point they're screaming um the entire after they get to back to the house where Colin's um ex is murdered I don't think I could hear a word for that the rest of the film from then on it was just people screaming at her what she should do wait and did they have what I mean what were the range of things they were suggesting did they say were they saying to her run yeah kill him you know was like it was it was everything from like run get out of there to kill him to you know to like just every everybody had their answer of what she should do next and they were 100% sure that's what you should do exactly what should Terry do she's a baby and a four-year-old a psychopath is threatening her children at one point she grabs a fire extinguisher and hits him over the head and he tumbles down the stairs but he's Idris Elba he gets back up later Idris herds them all into her car and they drive to another house on the way they get pulled over by a cop he suspicious but Idris reaches into the back seat and takes her baby into his arms so Terry can't tell the officers he's in trouble can she what should she do I felt like I needed high level assistance someone who could put the home invasion dilemma into broader context so I called up Sam Harris author podcaster neuroscientist the kind of person who would publish his own 12 rules or if pressed maybe even 24 so yeah if if someone uh breaks into your house uh I mean there are a few things that are are relevant to to flag there one is the time of day is relevant if someone breaks in in the middle of the night and you are there well now you're talking about somebody who hasn't taken any care to show up when you're not there and the kind of person who does this is the kind of person who either doesn't care to find uh a person in the house that he's breaking into or finding a person there is part of the fun right and so this selects for the scariest kind of criminal that would be Idris Elba in No Good Deed you can't assume that this person has any ethics that you can interact with profitably by by bargaining by be pleading Your Case by this is just that's not who's coming through the window you know in all likelihood halfway through my interview with Sam Harris I began mentally calculating his score on the disagreeableness index I'm thinking 9.5 and I must admit this is is highly counterintuitive and perhaps impossible to act on uh but I mean just just think this through Sam Harris says you have only one option when Idris Elba is upstairs playing with your kids that's your opportunity run everything in us recoils at the idea of doing that except it does change the situation in a surprising way one it introduces significant uncertainty in the mind of of your attacker because now he knows the the clock is ticking you can you you'll be summoning help in a matter of moments or or minutes at the longest and then you know uh we'll discover just what sort of attacker this person is we'll discover just what sort of attacker this person is is now if your concern is that he's going going to kill your child because you didn't follow instructions well then very likely this is the sort of person who is going to kill your child anyway right or and and and kill you as well it's late in the third period you're taji Hensen you're losing down by a goal to a psychopath now running away carries a huge social cost and a real risk of an even more disastrous outcome but at the same time it increases your chances of winning from zero to something slightly greater than zero pull the goalie that is a totally rational option and May in fact be the only rational option but it's impossible isn't it you've got to be disagreeable level eight or nine to pull that off I mean imagine how you will look to your child or to your wife or to anyone else who's you know terrified and looking in your direction for help uh if you just Bolt from the house at that moment uh it's you it's only when you come with the Cavalry and rescue everyone that you know you you seem like you were you know Wise and responsible but in those moments it just seems like a total failure and you know May in fact feel like a failure I know that sounds crazy I thought he can't be right but he is right the job of a parent being held hostage by Idris Elba is not to win a parental popularity context test it is to maximize their child's chances of survival I try to convince Amy Lagos of this Amy logos herself the mother of two small children wish me luck she should run without her children like she should just well this is what I want to get this this is totally what I want to talk about let's think about this rationally she what's he going to do to the kids when she's not there right right is there any right I mean the only reason to mess with her kids is to get leverage over her well not necessarily she doesn't she doesn't know what his motivation is right I mean oh she you mean he just could be a just a psychopath standard issue psychopath I mean I'm telling you if I'm in my house and I realize that there is somebody there is a psychopath in my house I am not leaving my kids like you could you could burn the house down and I would stay with the kids no no no the fact that he's a psychopath is exactly why you should leave your children behind it's your only chance to save them Amy Run for the love of God rule number one for living pull the [Music] goalie in common law there's a principle called duty to retreat which holds that a person being threatened has a duty to retreat to a place of safety to exhaust all Avenue of Escape before they can justifiably use force in self-defense in the past several years though about half of American states have passed St your ground laws now what's a stand your ground law it's a law that effectively repeals duty to retreat it says you don't need to exhaust all avenues of escape to claim self-defense in a court of law you can stand your ground defend yourself and the law will support that choice duty to retreat is a legal principle that gives people license to act disagreeably I am not a coward if I cut and run the first opportunity I am in fact acting morally and responsibly stand your ground laws sanction the socially agreeable act they say what matters is that you preserve your honor in front of family and community I did not run I stood my ground so what's happening in those states that now have stand your ground laws well I refer you to stand your ground laws homicides and injuries Journal of Human Resources summer 2017 I think overall we found about a 7 and a half 7.77% um increase in the overall homicide rate that's Chandler mclen Adjunct professor at American University first author of the study in question states that pass St your ground laws saw their murder rates rise 7.7% compared to states that didn't pass those laws well the fact that the homicide rate increases in these cases suggests that that's not the case that people are using these laws and standing their ground in cases where they're actually not being lethally threatened they could deescalate the situation they could get away but instead they're choosing to engage in self-defense and use lethal Force against this threat and as a result you're seeing this kind of net increase in in homicide rates and who are all these extra people getting killed in Sag ground States white men I think our estimates kind of show about 20% 25% increase in homicides among white males and actually that seems a a little high a little surprising little high it's a huge number yeah exactly it is um but nevertheless that's kind of what that's what fell out of the the modeling yeah yeah we speculate that because the white male population is the population that's most interested in the gun culture um more likely to be members of organizations like the NRA um because white males are so entrenched in this sort of culture we think that these laws are most Salient for them and as a result they're most aware of them and they're most likely to act on them so a certain kind of white guy who is really into guns and the NRA gets super excited about Stander ground laws and instead of looking to avoid violence or run away grabs his gun and stands his ground that is right before the other guy shoots him dead tragic is the is the is the most appropriate word but um the other word that's appropriate here is ironic that the NRA is has been pursuing a policy agenda with st your ground that has the effect of getting its own members killed I it it is a little ironic and that figuring out when to pull the goalie or what to do when Idris Elba shows up late at night seem like abstract intellectual exercises they are not they are rehearsals for real life life because being disagreeable when you need to be disagreeable is hard especially because the world around us the crowd in the stands the short-sighted lawmakers they encourage us to do the easy and agreeable thing which gets us killed pull the goalie I I have an ant she's Australian who once a year calls me to ask when she should convert her Aussie dollars to work wherever she's going that year on vacation for about 10 years I explained and Cynthia you know we do have views on currencies but they're micro views their 51% chance of being right let alone on a given day um uh so I I'm loathed to give this to you and she'd always act like I knew the answer I just refused to tell her year after year his Australian aunt called and Cliff refused to help her then one day Cliff Asis realized he didn't have to always be disagreeable she'd say when should I convert my my Aussie dolls to Japanese Yen and I'd go not this but next Thursday and everyone was happy she I I was lauded for giving her the truth yeah she was happy cuz she really feels she knows what she's doing she never checks before or after and I did not harm her one drop because nobody knows what day to do it and she was always going to do it on some arbitrary day I just picked the arbitrary so there's a case of maybe it's suboptimal but I picked a uh High EQ if not IQ solution well you were protecting your reputation as opposed to your her just making my aunt not mad at me he could be Cliff Asis polar of goalies he could also be Cliff Asus dutiful nephew Malcolm gladwell's first rule for living poig goalie but be wise enough to know that disagreeableness is not a matter of temperament it is a choice but way I'd love that you take calls from your Aunt about currency uh and what did he say next anyone who's successful won't take calls from their crazy ant is is no friend of mine Malcolm gladwell's second rule for living two down 10 to [Music] go revisionist history is is a panoply production the senior producer is Mia LEL with Jacob Smith and Camille Baptista our editor is Julia Barton flon Williams is our engineer factchecking by Beth Johnson original music by Luis Gara special thanks to Andy Bowers and Jacob Weissberg I'm Malcolm [Music] glabro what makes you a good poker player um two things um there's just the basic math and Theory which any why I want say anybody can learn but if you're quet you can learn it but the real thing that sets you apart is something I think you have to do TR by traditional wisdom you have to learn this in your teens while your brain is still forming and you have to do it under intense sleep deprivation so we do these 72-hour sessions with maybe a few power naps in between and you're pushing every scent you have in the world sometimes more than every scent you have in the world in the middle of the PO and that develops certain mental abilities that the way I think about it is I think you managed to harness the processing power of your unconscious brain so that you're not staring at people in the table and sort of you know enumerating tells that person you know moved as chip your unconscious brain is so much better at noticing what people do kind of like blink you know you just look at somebody and you don't you don't know he holds the Ace in Jack you know it's not doesn't tell you that but it says this guy is afraid to lose or this guy is afraid of being bluffed and you it tells you what they're going to do if you do something so it tells you when you can push and they're going to fold or when you can draw them in um and they're going to go high this outtake goes on for a long time if that bothers you I don't care anymore is a curse I would never recommend to somebody do it yes you can make money from it but it strips away a lot of Illusions right it's a lot more pleasant in life to believe that there are things like love and friendship and honor once you ruthlessly strip all that away and just look very objectively how people act is probably something the Psychopaths do the world's a bleak place so it's kind of a dangerous road to go down do you do you feel like you went down that road yeah yeah how did it affect your life it it what it meant is that you're Bleak you're just kind of you know you don't really trust anybody you you in a sense you trust them you know what they're going to do and because you know what they're going to do it just uh I guess it almost makes you treat them like robots that that you can predict what they're going to do you know their program and therefore you can't really trust that there's love and friendship and honor or anything like that so that's one of the reasons to move to finance I actually moved from poker to sports betting and then to finance