Jorgenson's Soundbox: High-stakes Poker, the Training Regimen of a Mental Athlete, and Coaching
Eric Jorgensen and Chris Sparks discuss training for the highest-stakes tournament he has ever played after a long sabbatical. Chris has already decided he is going to win, and now he is doing the necessary things to create that outcome.
He talks about the poker world—making money with poker, playing with pros and recreational players, and frequenting a famous comedian’s poker parties. They also talked about Chris’s consulting agency, Forcing Function, where he shares the concept that “if I can control where my attention goes, I will control what I do.”
This interview is packed with so many ideas and fun topics like travel, being a Japanophile, and living with one of the world’s best pianists.
Audio recording below (1h53m). Time-stamped topics, resources mentioned, and full transcript following.
Topics
(1:50) - What is life like as a professional poker player
(5:28) - The different levels of professional poker
(9:34) - “I’m not one of the world’s best poker players, but I am one of the most profitable.”
(12:10) - Why is being the best not necessarily the indicator of being the most profitable?
(14:38) - How do you navigate the nuance of the myriad ways to play poker?
(18:23) - The world of high-stakes poker and the increasing privatization of games
(23:15) - How do you keep getting invited back to games when the people who know you, know how good you are?
(25:43) - The Mathematical Side of Poker: The Ying
(29:20) - What’s the training you go through to become better than average with the probability and mathematical side of poker?
(31:27) - The Psychological Side of Poker: The Yang
(33:59) - What does it feel like inside when you’re playing in a high-stakes game with huge decisions to make?
(40:02) - Where did you pick up the concepts of Morning Pages & Captain’s Log?
(42:18) - The importance of slowing down
(43:25) - Chris’s current training regime
(48:13) - How has your preparation changed over your career?
(50:53) - How do you train for 12 hours of playtime per day?
(53:54) - Free will and controlling your future self
(1:00:09) - How do you decide what you want?
(1:03:47) - Chris’s upcoming tournament
(1:04:43) - Where does poker fit in the long arc of your life?
(1:08:33) - Playing Zero-Sum games
(1:11:32) - Chris’s Coaching practice
(1:18:28) - Defining systems & bottlenecks in life
(1:22:06) - Chris’s relationship with Japan
(1:28:33) - The mindset relationship between Poker & Investing
(1:34:24) - What do you consider your ‘edges’ when thinking about investing?
(1:37:29) - What was it like to live with one of the greatest pianists in the world?
(1:42:37) - The power of rest and recovery
(1:43:59) - Chris’s relationship with caffeine and sugar
(1:49:36) - Book recommendations and how to learn more about how Chris thinks
(1:52:32) - Wrap Up
Resources mentioned:
Podcast Transcript
[Note: transcript edited slightly for clarity.]
Eric: Hello again, my friends, and welcome to Jorgenson's Soundbox, a sandbox of sounds. Holy shit, what a great conversation this is. I just wrapped two hours with Chris absolutely stuffed with amazing stories and examples and ideas. Chris Sparks is a professional poker player, and while he'd say he isn't the best player in the world, he might be the most profitable. And currently, he's in the middle of a very focused program preparing for the biggest poker tournament of his life, which is a very interesting process, and we dive into the details of—It's basically, "What would you do if you knew you would bet six figures on your performance for one specific day? How would you prepare for that?" And Chris has a lot of answers to that question.
This episode has everything. Travel, adventure, meta-games, Kevin Hart, and the greatest penis in the world. There are deep dives into the secret world of private poker cash games, why the discipline, habit, and environment it takes to be one of the best poker players in the world, how Chris's talent for systems thinking helps him find leverage points, bottlenecks, and feedback loops to bring about the desired outcomes with minimal effort for him and his clients in his coaching practices, which we get into as well. I loved this conversation. I learned a ton from it. Chris is possibly the most optimized performer I've ever met, forged by playing an incredibly tough game with some of the best in the world. Please enjoy this conversation arriving at your ears in three, two, one—
Chris, dude, I'm so, so excited to have this conversation. I've been absolutely binging your stuff over the last week since we got introduced, and I'm over the moon. This is going to be an amazing episode.
Chris: It's an honor. Thanks for the opportunity.
Eric: I absolutely simp over the world of professional poker, and I absolutely buy into the romanticism, and I see all of the movies, and in my head, your life is basically like some combination of Rounders and Molly's Game, and I just want you to like take us to that world and set the scene and tell us what life is actually like as a professional poker player.
Chris: Yeah. I wish it was as glamorous as the movies would have you believe. There's definitely moments that are very cinematic. Our friends can be very—let's say degenerates, and quirky, and I think the word is "interesting." And everything is done very systematically with this curious lens, so I mean, I bet on everything. Betting is how we settle scores, so you don't know where anyone stands until they have something on the line. And so I would say, "You need some skin in the game." All the time, when I hang out with my more normal friends, they'd make some sort of claim like, "I'm a hundred percent sure," and then when I offer to bet them, all of a sudden, they start walking that back. So I'm happy to get into some of the wild bets that I've participated in and witnessed, but that's one dimension.
And it's an interesting dynamic, because you're frenemies. There's, for a while, especially when I was deep into the game—my peak was about age nineteen to twenty-three—all of my best friends were poker players. So we would go out, we would travel the world together, and then we would hop on either the real or the virtual felt and try to take each other's money and laugh maniacally when we did so. So it's a very interesting dynamic and separation, where once the cards are in the air, all bets are off, and once you're outside of the table you have to leave that dynamic there and enjoy the camaraderie that can only come from—There are very few people in the world who can really understand what you're going through, and we really bonded over that. And I think a big part of my success, and you'll see this in any field, is that the greats come up together. So you have these different cohorts, these generations of players, and I was fortunate to befriend players who were similarly curious and ambitious and willing to put in the work necessary to reach the top.
And by pointing out each other's blind spots, by having relative strengths and desires—some people might like to study these types of situations, other people might like to study these situations. By combining forces, keeping an eye out for each other, everyone won. There was a positive-sum type of interaction.
Eric: Yeah, that's awesome. I love those stories. I think there's a bunch—Like, the LeBron James documentary, about the kids he came up with in high school. And Annie Duke talks about this in the poker world, of like the crew that she ran with. And I think the startup world's the same way. So the—Can you give us a map of the overview—The world of professional poker is huge, right? Like, there's online and tournament and kind of like private cash games. How do those all interact? Do people move around between them? Like, what are the players in each one?
Chris: So, first it's important to separate cash games and tournaments. I started in the tournament world and gradually moved over to cash games as I became more professional. So, in tournaments you buy-in a set amount. So, Main Event, for example, is a tournament that a lot of people know in Vegas. Ten thousand dollar buy-in, and you compete over a prize pool. So once you pay the entry you get tournament chips, and you play until you are out of tournament chips, and the prize structure has a power-law dynamic where a lot of the prize's prize pool goes to the final table, and especially the top three spots. So it's very, very like, slugging percentage, swinging for the fences. Ten percent cash, but—You know, ten percent at least get their money back, but you were really trying to play for those top few spots. And so that structure creates a lot of dynamics very similar to the startup world, because these are asymmetric bets with a high degree of failure. There's a lot of like secondary markets for taking on investment, so you can participate in this upside without having to put up the bankroll.
There are very few people in the world who actually have the bankroll to play ten-thousand-dollar-plus tournaments on a regular basis, because the variance is through the roof. No one really understands that.
Cash games, which I sort of gravitate towards, you're playing with real money. So whether that's represented by virtual chips—or at a casino real chips, or some casinos actual dollars where you're putting real dollar bills in the middle—it's one to one. So when I make a thousand-dollar bet, I'm putting a thousand dollars at risk. And so you have differing communities depending on who specializes in what, and you will see oftentimes that tournaments of late are really driving the story for poker, where—I'll use the live arena, for example, but the same thing applies for online. A big tournament series called Pop-Up—You know, the world series poker in Vegas, most people don't realize, is seventy major tournaments over the course of two and a half months. It's not just the one that everyone knows about. So you have this shelling point, this confluence of tens of thousands of players from all around the world who want to take their shot at playing a tournament, and this obviously attracts people who want to take their shot at people who are taking their shot, so when someone busts out of a tournament and is like, "Well, I don't think I'm done for poker for the day, I still have my hotel for the night, maybe I'll hop in some cash games," that's where I typically am you know, waiting with open arms for these players.
You know, as cash games go, twenty-four hours a day, any time there is someone who you would like to play with, a cash game will magically pop out of thin air. So that's like the kind of—That's the different dynamic that can be at play. Obviously, you have live players versus online players, there's a lot of overlap these days, but as in any field, people tend to really specialize. So there's no good answer to who's the best player, it's who's the best player within a very particular niche. And then you get into the size of the games. So you have Heads Up, you have Six-Max, which is six players, you have Nine Max, which is a typical live game, nine players. You have No Limit Hold 'Em, Pot Limit Omaha—Hundreds of games that I won't even deign to mention because you haven't heard of them with crazy rules.
Eric: Yeah.
Chris: And so you see, it really pays to have this explore/exploit dynamic where you're capable of playing all these different games, but you specialize in one and that's where you really make your bread.
Eric: Yeah. So I've been reading your stuff for like the last eight hours before this interview, which is why I'm so excited about this, and one of the lines that stuck out to me—like actually slapped me in the face—that I think you're alluding to here is like, "I've never considered myself one of the world's best poker players, but I am one of the world's most profitable." And you go on in this piece which is a magnum opus about like decision-making and poker and meta-games and like I don't want to spend two hours guiding you through that because people should just go read it, but I think that's a really good frame for the rest of this conversation. And the other thing I didn't realize that's right kind of adjacent to it that you also mentioned is a typical six-handed poker game is comprised of five professionals and one recreational player. The game only exists when a potential recreational player is present, which makes me never want to sit at a poker table ever again for the whole rest of my life, because I'll be sitting across from someone like you.
Chris: Yeah. The classic saying is if you can't recognize the fish at the poker table, you're the fish. So it's important to realize when you think about this in an investing context or a business context that people are only participating because they think they have something in it for them. I mean, I have a lot of fun playing poker, but I don't play poker for fun. I'm only playing if I expect to make money, and if I don't expect to make money, which is often, I don't play. So that's how this dynamic exists: if an unknown or a known recreational player plays, that is a reason to play, because you would expect, over the long run, this player to not make money against you. So there is clearly going to be lots of competition in order to get a seat at this table. It's like musical chairs, and the music plays and stops at the exact same moment. So you'll see this online where someone sits down, and the game will fill within a second. You're kind of like an eagle hovering over the landscape and you hear a rustle in the brush and you swoop down.
That metaphor, it's a little bit predatory. It's hard to get around that the reason to play is that you think you have an edge. And if you don't have an edge, you're diluting your edge. Every time you sit down and you're not playing your A-Game, every time you sit down against better competition, hey. You might learn something, but you're paying tuition for that lesson. It's really important to remember that.
Eric: So what's—Show us the delta between the world's best poker players and the world's most profitable. Why is the best not the most profitable? Because, is the bankroll size not the indicator of success?
Chris: Yeah, it's a bit of semantics. And as I said, I kind of introduce this because people love debates. Right? This is the whole reason that Twitter exists, is people just love debating things, and especially when there's no objective truth, these debates could go on forever. It's like, what is considered the best? Is it the person who's made the most money in their lifetime, is it the person with the most skill, is it the player who's most feared by their competitors? There's a lot of different definitions. And when you see these debates occur ad infinitum of who's the best player, they're rarely the player who's making the most. The player who is making the most in the world is someone who we have never heard of. It is someone who's like in Macao or London or New York and is probably known as a like hedge fund guy or a real estate guy but uses that background to play with likely billionaires who just enjoy playing poker and their recreational game, right, where we might play for like a five hundred dollar buy-in they add on, you know, several zeros to that, and that's a good day for them, where if they lose that it doesn't ruin their day, and it gets 'em a little adrenaline rush.
So that's why I say, like, the best player—Would you consider this player the best? Like you see a lot of these guys, and—I said, what I see is relative, it's like I don't know who they are, but I know these things exist, you know, through the grapevine. They're essentially Little Leaguers playing T-Ball. Right? If you're a Little Leaguer playing a T-Ball League, you're MVP every single year. It doesn't mean you're the greatest baseball player known to man—
Eric: Yeah.
Chris:—You just are really good at getting into good games. And that is one of these meta-skills that I talk about in this piece you reference, "Play To Win: Meta-Skills in High-Stakes Poker," that if your goal is to make the most money—which for me playing poker, I play to win, I play to make the most money—there are other ways to make more money other than increasing my actual skill in the game.
Eric: Interesting, yeah. So the meta-game that you talk about in that post is really—it's a combination of like game selection—because it's very relative. And you can make this world small, right? And what surprised me was even within the game of online poker, game selection is very nuanced.
Chris: Yes.
Eric: Like big tournaments, small tournaments, geofenced poker sites, different currencies, different nationalities, like—it's very, very cool. So how do you go about evaluating—like, how do you play the game of choosing the games?
Chris: It's nuanced, as you said. So there is definitely an "if you build it, they will come" component, where a lot of online sites in particular have shifted their business model from attracting high-volume high-profit players to attracting low-volume low-profit recreational players, because if there are recreational players, the pro players will come to play with them. And essentially, you follow the money. So if there—I'm usually looking for a site that is—I call this a relative blue ocean. This is, in marketing terms, the blue ocean strategy. You think about the opposite, so imagine like Vegas in the summer where all the pros go, this is a red ocean. There's lots of blood in the water. And so I didn't go out to Vegas in the summer, I go out to smaller casinos that are a little bit off the map, or I play on smaller sites where the action isn't big enough to attract the best players, because it's relative skill that's important.
In the book, Signal and the Noise, by Nate Silver before he got into the FiveThirtyEight fame, he has a chapter on poker, and he shares that in a ten-handed cash game—a typical ten-handed cash game—you have four winners and six losers. The reason that that number is not five and five is because the game takes a rake. Right? You have an economy that is being taxed, where it is money coming out, so continually you need new money being replenished in order for the economy to not go to zero, because you have these liquidity crunches. And it's almost a pyramidical structure, in that if you don't have new money coming in, the whole structure collapses. But an interesting thing happens. If you remove the worst player from this game where four players are winning and six players are losing, all of a sudden you have one player winning and nine players losing.
So a lot of the winnings for the players are actually coming from this worst player. So that's your summary right there: if there is a player who is reliably playing enough and reliably losing enough, for lack of a better way of putting it, I'm looking for that player. Now, I'm not like hunting them down, but if they're there I'm gonna find them. And so that's like the game, the dance you have to play, is where, where do these players like to hide out, and can I be one of the only pros at the party?
Eric: Yeah. So that's super interesting. Those two scenarios are really interesting, because that means you either have to be—you have to be the best player at the table unless there's a rube, and if there's a rube you have to be basically in the top half. You have to be in the top like four out of ten.
Chris: Your margin of error is much larger.
Eric: Much larger. Super interesting. So, okay. So talk to me about that in the world of like high-stakes private games where you're like flying to Macao on a private jet with like a Bond girl and like everybody's wearing tuxedos. Is that a thing that exists in like, playing with celebrities and travel and like —
Chris: It absolutely exists. I don't consider myself an expert in it. When I played in—when I lived in LA for a couple years during my heyday, I played in some of these celebrity games where, you know, ex-celebrity—I'll use Kevin Hart's name, because he's a very known poker player. I played with Kevin Hart a lot back in the day. He's like, "Hey, I wanna have a game with my boys." And you're playing, you know, in the back room of his house and he has a full set of dealers and cocktail waitresses and masseuses and he serves dinner and it's a whole party and the game goes as long as Kevin wants to play, and when Kevin gets tired everyone leaves. And so this is happening all around the world, and the only reason we don't know about them is 'cause we're not invited. So that is the interesting dynamic that occurs in private games: how can you be someone that is adding value to the point that you get invited? It's just like in startup investing, if all you had to do was pick winners, there'd be a lot more winners out there. Everyone knows who the best company is, but these deals are super-competitive. They're over-subscribed, you have to find a way to get in. What is the value add that you can deliver?
So I'll share, it's like, first, table stakes is—I show up early, I'm friendly, I tip well, I'm really nice to the staff, I pay out promptly when I lose, just do—like that is just basic table stakes. And then it's like, okay. Well, I try to crack some jokes, I try to—You know, if there's a host, I absolutely make sure that the host is having a good time. But even then, like, I expect to make money in this game, and sometimes just because—I'm retired, but just because I once was a pro, that's a non-starter for some of these games. They want only recreationals in. And so like, not to throw some shade, but there's a lot of “recreationals” out there who have an entire backstory that they've concocted to cover up that they actually make most of their money from poker. So that's just a whole interesting dynamic.
And obviously, when you have things that are privatized, I've experienced—I've had issues getting paid, I've had issues getting cheated. I don't wanna go into specifics there, but it does happen.
Eric: That seems totally reasonable, to not go into specifics.
Chris: A lot of these games, they're taking out large amounts of money as rake, and so sometimes the game might be really good but you can't even overcome that. So there's lots of these other factors, but the trajectory is really clear is that progressively over the years, particularly in live poker but also in the pandemic and online poker, the games are becoming increasingly more privatized. Where in my heyday, for example, there were two main sites, PokerStars and Full Tilt, and that's where all the action was, and you could hop in at any time and find a game. And now progressively more and more often these games are taking off based on private apps and private rooms, in garages or penthouses, and the critical skill for maximizing your wealth as a poker player is almost business development. It's staying in the know, it's going to the right conferences, it's befriending the right people. And for me, I've always had a clear moral line. It's like, I don't befriend anyone who I don't wanna hang out with. I don't do business with anyone that I don't love, respect, would like, pick up the phone in a minute, invite them over to dinner, invite 'em to stay at my house.
That's where I draw the line. And other people draw the line at different places. So just because of that, I'm not able to access some of these games—and sometimes I am able to access some of these games, because they like me, I'm friends with the organizer, this type of thing. So it's a very interesting meta-layer to it, in that your greatest skill is finding a way not only to get invited, but to stay invited. Because you're winning and people tend to not like losing to someone over and over again. So can they enjoy losing to you? It's a whole interesting dynamic.
Eric: Yeah. I mean Kevin—It seems like it would be absolutely hilarious to play poker with Kevin Hart, so just that off the bat is amazing. I'm glad you went into detail there, because my first question was like, "Why the hell would they want you there if they have any inkling that you are as good at this as you are and have put as much effort into getting as good as you are," which we'll get into in a second here.
Chris: I'll answer that, if you don't mind.
Eric: Yeah, please.
Chris: Everyone has different preferences. So there are some—I'll just use "recreationals" as a broad category. There are some people who want to have a nice home game, and they only want other recreational players there. And there are some recreationals who are generally very high performers. So these could be like, you know, portfolio managers or you know, someone from Silicon Valley who you know, is a venture capitalist. You probably know some of these names who love going up against the best. And they feed off competition, and they're okay losing in the long run in order to maximize their learning speed. They're seeing poker as a sandbox for improving their own decision-making and for becoming a stronger investor or a stronger person outside of the game. So those are generally the people who I love to play with, because I don't have to hold back against them, I don't have to put on my kid gloves, and I can talk like a little bit of strategy at the table, because they're excited to learn. But I said, it varies greatly.
Eric: Yeah. That's really interesting. I mean, it makes sense. Like, I would wanna play basketball with an NBA player like, even if I got my ass kicked, just because it's a cool, fun story, and it shows me where I am against the best in the world. So that, yeah. That's really interesting. And where the personality piece comes down to it. So yeah, the BizDev meta-game is really interesting in the game invites and stuff. My full education on this came from Molly's Game, so I appreciate you giving me some corroboration of that, but it does seem like a really interesting kind of like sub-economy.
Chris: Yeah. Rounders is the classic, Molly's Game is the second. People ask me what poker movies I recommend, those are the only two. The interpretations of poker cinematically, other than those two movies, is very poor.
Eric: Casino Royale doesn't really cut it.
Chris: You don't have the nuts against the seconds nuts against the third nuts with some obscure tell where the guy itches his right nostril. That just doesn't work.
Eric: No. So let's talk about kind of what it takes to be this good and play at this level. Like, I'm very like recreational like buddy's house poker, so I understand the game, but I definitely only appreciated maybe the first two layers, and like talking to you even for ten minutes kind of showed me that there's actually like—There's six obvious layers and three more non-obvious layers. So I would love to kind of keep just peeling that onion for a minute and see just really the reality of all the detail and skill and meta-skill that goes into this. Starting with maybe just the game and the rules, and then going out to kind of the emotional and player game and then the context of it.
Chris: Sure, I'll do my best. There's a lot to unpack.
Eric: Yeah. You're gonna have to give us bullet points, not like your full—I have a feeling you could write quite a long book about that, if you set your mind to it.
Chris: Yeah, it's in the works. Backlogged. So—
Eric: Cool.
Chris:—Let's say that there's a yin and a yang when it comes to poker, and the yin is mathematics, particularly probabilistic thinking. So the lens of a poker player is to view the world as a probabilistic universe, that everything has some probability of occurring, that what is occurring in this moment is just one permutation, right? One parallel universe of the infinite universes that could have occurred. So the results are just one example. And when you look at things through this lens, that everything should occur some percentage of the time—well, first thinking in those terms allows you to calibrate, like, "What does twenty percent feel like?" Like that's like—To be getting punched in the face over and over again, when you get in as an eighty-percent favorite and you lose, you're like, "Oh, that's what it feels to lose twenty percent of the time." You start to calibrate, and most humans are just not good at probability, where they have like, "It's definitely gonna happen, definitely not gonna happen." And it's a coin flip. And everything all in the middle is super grey.
Eric: Yeah.
Chris: So becoming sensitive to these small deltas in probability—Where, for example, something happening fifty-five percent of the time, that's a ten percent edge. Like, you multiply that out over millions of hands, like, you're a millionaire. But like in a singular instance, that feels like a coin flip. It's becoming really sensitive to those differences. So there's a good amount of math in poker, but I don't actually know a lot of the exact probabilities. Like, there are people who are kind of like Rain Man-like with this, but I'm very good at estimating, like, plus or minus five percent. Like, what my chances are at any given time. And when I have enough of that margin of safety, let's say it's like, "Okay, I'm at least like fifty-five percent. So, worst case scenario it's a coin flip." Like, I'm really pushing the action. Right? It's like pushing these small edges.
It's like—Blackjack, right? Card counting, all of your money comes from when you go to a .5 percent house edge to a .5 percent edge in your favor, all of a sudden you 10x or 100x your bet. You're putting more money in the pot when you have this small edge. So that's one aspect.
Eric: So, how can you develop that sensitivity? Like, what is the training that you go through to become better than average at feeling that shift?
Chris: Guess and then calibrate. So there's tools where you can put in the situation and it will spit out the probability. Now obviously there's a lot of assumptions that can go into that, right? It's like, the probability is exact when everything collapses on one hand where you know exactly what your opponent has. But you're playing against an unknown range of hands. So that input is something that you have to learn to calibrate over time, which I'll get into. But you're essentially like testing yourself. And so you think about this in like the real world, everyone just wants the answer key. If someone's explaining something, you pause it and say, "Okay, what would I do here?" And then you say, "See what they did." And see if what you did is different from what they did. Otherwise, like, if you get spoonfed, you won't have the change necessary, you won't have these synapse connections that allow you to start to hone in.
And the cool thing is that as you start to calibrate and you have acquired evidence that, "Hey, my intuition about my edge here is correct," well, that allows you to trust it. And when you trust it, you can be a lot more confident, and that creates this positive feedback loop where your edge increases. And so that's the real power there: with confidence comes increased edge, but confidence needs evidence. So that's why I said, any time someone's doing a trade—for example, crypto or otherwise—download all of those assumptions onto a piece of paper. What are all of the things that are going on with your decision? Externalize them. And then when you come back to them later you can see what you missed, and most importantly see what you got right. And if you're able to get something right consistently, that allows you to move faster.
And it's like, speed kills. I think everything comes down to the tightness of feedback loops.
Eric: I like that. Okay. So that's the—we've got sort of the math and probabilistic piece of poker. What's the next layer on top of that?
Chris: Yep. So the yang to meet the yin of probability is psychology. And I hinted at this just now, is inherent in any model are hidden assumptions, and the black box in poker and in life are humans. Like, we live in complex, adaptive systems, and humans just cannot be predicted exactly. Psychohistory aside, like, no one knows what one person is going to do. All we can do is hope to approach some sort of understanding. And this is another way where we are—in probability terms, this is called "Bayesian updating." As we receive new evidence, we're updating our priors. Psychologically, how do we predict what other people are going to do before they know what they're going to do? So this starts with creating a baseline of behavior, and then becoming sensitive to deviations from this baseline as someone's emotional state changes, as you see, "Oh, the way they played this hand is signaling that they're thinking this way at this moment. This is the motion that's driving them. Well, with this new information, how do I expect them to deviate from their current baseline?"
This allows you to make predictions so that that variable in your calculation you can compress the range of outcomes. Right? Instead of going three standard deviations, you're two or one. And this psychological dimension has another element that I think is really interesting. And I think you'll like this term: it's "psychological leverage." So, that there is an edge that comes from being more psychologically ready to play, ready to make high-stakes decisions under conditions of uncertainty. It's both, "Can I understand you better than you understand yourself,” and “Can I understand myself, my own triggers, my own biases better than you understand me, and can I put myself in the position to perform, to play—like, all the things that happen outside of the table—so that when I show up, like, I'm in flow. I'm playing my A-Game more often, I'm super dialed-in, that I can acquire more leverage over my competition by being more ready for my A-Game?"
Eric: So I think the word "ready"—I know you well enough to know that the word "ready" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and that that'll kind of be our next topic, but maybe the right interlude before we get there is, what does it feel like inside you when you are playing these high-stakes games and making these big bets? Like, are you zen mountaintop, are you like in turmoil but in control of it, are you like—You know it's gonna be, you know, you can feel your heart racing but you anticipated this moment so it's all, like, it's all fine? What is it like in there?
Chris: I like to say that intuition is internalized experience, and I have the benefit of lots of experience at this point. I've played over two million hands of poker, and although every day I'm surprised, I've seen a lot. So the confidence that comes from lots of evidence that I know what I'm doing allows me to be pretty calm and collected at the table. At least, I like to think so. And sometimes this might be the duck, where everybody else thinks that I'm just totally checked out, and you know, inside I'm like running all these calculations. But it's really important to not give any impression that you're trying hard. Like, they can't see you sweat. You have to make it look effortless. That's the last mile of all this stuff, is like you acquire this psychological leverage where everyone's like, "Man, like, he's just making it look so easy. He's not even trying. Like, what chance do I have?" And then they just roll over and let you steamroll them.
So, that's a little bit of what's going on. Obviously, when I place a bluff, especially like putting an actual brick of money onto the table, that's important to practice, because as easy as it looks on TV, it's not. So I have different breathing exercises that I do, I have different routines so that I don't give anything away in terms of physical tells. So I'm looking at a specific spot on the table, I'm telling myself specific things so that I'm not acting, I actually believe that I have a hand. I'm like, "I'm not bluffing." This is like, what I do no matter what I have, these types of things. And it's all about trying to stay as close to this emotional baseline as I can, where when I win the hand I don't react, I lose the hand I don't react. And the more I'm on this baseline—this is a really important point—the more I become sensitive to deviations from this baseline.
It's like, I wanna control all the variables in my life. I mean, I we can psychoanalyze that off the table, but like, it's true. The more that I have control over these variables, the more I can become sensitive to deviations. So you know, tuning into my body, if I feel like, "Oh, I'm hot in the back of my neck," what is that telling me? Is that, "Oh, I'm getting a little bit agitated," or is like this player's story not quite adding up, or it's just getting hot in here? Who knows? But if I know that I've controlled for a lot of these variables, I can start to tune into what my body is telling me. And it's something with this confidence that I have acquired over time: subconsciously I know what's going on even if I can't put language around it. So it's just this ongoing practice of tapping into what I know. That's the really big part of it, is just trying to flatten.
Eric: Yeah. How do you know—Especially when something comes from the subconscious, how do you know that it is like the hard-won trained intuition or like the uncontrolled emotional response that this like feeling is coming from?
Chris: That's a deep question. I think I have progressed more from thinking things through and more from feeling things through, and if we're thinking about the meta-level, the infinite game of this is, the more you trust your intuition, the more you will be able to trust your intuition. Like, expect that your intuition as you're new to something won't be well-calibrated, but the more that you just go with it, or you say, "Hey, I should go talk to the person," and you walk out of the room and you're like, "Hey, I don't know what to say but my intuition said to come over here," the more you do that the more you will be able to trust that and more be able to act on it. And I said, that's why I led with that story of internalized experience: you can trust your intuition to the extent that you have relevant experience, that you have been in this context and this situation before. But how do you know what that feeling is telling you?
The only way that I have found is by correlating it. So the most valuable practice for me is morning pages, in the morning. It's just offloading my brain onto the page, and I have a captain's log that I do after every session where, what were things that went well, things that didn't go so well, things that I learned? And this is the space that I have created to upload observations. And if I start to see patterns, my assumption is that these patterns recur. If I can identify an underlying emotion and tie that to a situation and that duality, that pattern recurs, I can assume that there's something there, and if that situation recurs again, I'm on the lookout for that emotion. Or if the emotion recurs again, I'm like, "Hey, is this situation recurring again?" Right? Either one becomes the trigger to be aware, to observe. And it's this hyper-vigilance that we can use our emotions or our context as a trigger to pay attention.
Eric: That's incredibly interesting. Where did you pick up those practices? The morning pages and the captain's log?
Chris: Morning pages comes from a book. I think it might be behind me. This is The Artist's Way. I'm a huge proponent of it. It's designed for artists, so different practices to get out of your way creatively, but hey. I think we're all creatives, we're all artists. And it's just like verbal diarrhea in the mornings, that's just a good metaphor, where if you get all the stuff out of your head it creates space for magic.
The captain's log, this is something that you see a lot in investing, you see a lot in—I think it originated with like Star Trek, is that just by having a place to leave observations, you create this objective record that you can refer back to later, because what is one of the like—The things about human OS that maybe we would change if we could is that we're really, really good at rationalizing things, and if we don't have this record of something, if we store everything in our head, we can just overwrite that information any time that it's convenient for us. By having it on the page, I can't deny that reality. Like, that's something that I felt at one point, that's something that I saw. So having it there, it creates an affordance. Affordance is a design term, in that it allows me to do something about it. And I don't know what's going to come up, but I have that space to write, and I have to write something. So if—there's sort of a trust in that process, that sooner or later if I can wait without waiting, everything that I'm putting on the page will be useful. Let's just it put on the page and not judge it.
Eric: Yeah. Yeah. That's very interesting. And it's definitely a common thread that I've heard from a lot of creatives and professionals that are just high-achieving. It seems like something so simple, but it seems to be a wonderful habit and have a lot of under-appreciated or unanticipated benefits.
Chris: Yeah. Something that has been a practice for me that I am really working on is slowing down. I can't emphasize this enough, I used to schedule my day down in like fifteen-minute windows. Obviously that has a lot of insidious effects on mental health as well as on relationships. People tend not to be like, "Hey, like, oh yeah I've got fifteen minutes to hang out, let's do it." And as I've grown I think a little bit more mature, I've really emphasized slowing down. And a lot of this comes to prioritization, saying 'no' to most things so I can say 'yes' to the things that are 'hell yes,' and trusting that if I create space, if I have practices that allow me to slow down, that the answers will come. That a lot of this tuning into what your body is telling you, tuning into your emotions, requires silence. Requires space. And if you're always running from one thing to the next you don't know what you think about anything, because you haven't taken the time to listen.
Eric: Very interesting. So how was your—I want to talk a little bit about your preparation and your training regimens to perform at this level, and maybe how they've changed over time, but let's start with where you're at right now and how you're preparing for this next big event.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. So this is actually a fun time to have this conversation, because I'm coming out of a sabbatical. I haven't played any poker since June, and I just this week picked it back up. I wanted to take the summer off to travel, spend time with friends. As you might tell, I'm kind of an all-or-nothing type of guy, so this allowed me to sync my schedule up with the natural world, because poker tends to be, you know, nights, weekends, goes really late. So it has a lot of effects. I was able to wake up early and surf and do stuff like that. But now I'm ramping back up again, and so the catalyzing event is there's a very large tournament that I'm playing in three weeks, and this will be the largest tournament that I've ever played by a factor of six, and I am very confident, I'm predicting right now that I am going to win. I've already decided that I'm going to win, and it's just a matter of doing the things now necessary for me to win in the future. I've visualized it, every day I wake up and I think about how good it's going to feel when I win this tournament that's, you know, life-changing money.
So, what do I need to do to prepare? Well, I need to learn tournaments. I haven't played a lot of tournaments, especially recently, and so I'm working with someone who's essentially downloading the math into my game, and it's a lot of, "Hey, Chris, what do you think are the hands you should play here?" And I say that, and then the machine learning algorithm spits out, "Here are the hands you actually should want to play. Okay, try again." To the point that I can have the paradigm of mathematically correct play drilled into me. Once I have that paradigm drilled into me, I know I can subvert that. I can decide, "Hey, I want to play more hands with this player," or, "I want to play a little bit less hands when my edge is lower." So it's starting to get the confidence I need and the statistics in order that I can subvert those paradigms.
I'm doing lots of things to really dial in mentally, psychologically, so I've really upped my spiritual practices recently, doing lots more yoga, meditation, eating extremely clean, working with various coaches, spiritual trainer, et cetera, to really dial in my mindset. And I want to walk in there feeling like I'm a billionaire and that this largest amount of money that I've ever placed on the line in my life doesn't mean anything to me, I've already won, this is just another day for me. So a lot of that type of stuff. Thinking about my strategy, I have like training tournaments that I'm doing. So I played twenty-six tournaments on Sunday with different specific areas of my game that I was looking to train on. I'm flying to Miami right after. I'm saying, "Bye mom," and hopping on a plane to Miami to play five tournaments, five days in a row of escalating buy-ins, so that I can practice playing against players who admittedly are probably better than me at this stage, but that by playing against these players and having the confidence that I can hold my own, it will allow me to hop into a larger tournament, which honestly the players aren't going to be as good, and feel very confident because I've already played against the best. Like, this is a walk in the park.
Lots of things in like, I think that edges come from information asymmetries, so I'm gathering information. I think the key role of any CEO is you're always gathering information. I want to know everything there is to know about the venue, I want to know everything there is to know about the organizers, who are the dealers, what are the dealers like, what are their interests, who are the other players, what's their bankroll, what's their situation, what's their schedule, do they have to catch a flight that night? Like, anything that I know coming into the game is a potential source of advantage. So I want to walk in there feeling like I'm the expert in the room.
That's a few of the things. I'm already planning out what I'm doing on breaks. It's like having—the classic saying is the plan is worthless, but planning is essential. Or something like that. Eisenhower said it. So I'm gonna have a really, really good plan so I walk in there feeling super-confident, knowing that I'm going to rip the plan up the second I walk in there, but the whole goal is to walk in there feeling like I've already won, and let that be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Eric: Is this different from how you prepared and how you trained when you were younger?
Chris: Yeah. Yes, absolutely.
Eric: Okay.
Chris: Yeah, so in my heyday I think I was a little bit both naïve and hubristic, which is a little bit of a toxic combination.
Eric: That sounds like pretty much every young man in his twenties.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, generally my days began where I would get a text in my bed, probably somewhere around 2:00 PM to wake me up, is that some player I wanted to play with was hopping on, and I would go right from bed and hop into, you know, like ten to a hundred thousand dollar buy-in poker games you know, with still, like, crusties on my eyes, and try to figure it out. You know, throw a Digiorno in the oven, have my two liter of soda next to me. It's like, really, really bad habits, but I mean luckily my skill was able to overcome some of that. The margin of error has gotten much smaller over the years.
And what you used to see was a poker tournament was really a big party. You know, you think you're going to play poker but really you're like hanging out in a hotel lobby throwing back shots all night. Now that is completely changed, and you see the top players, myself included, training like we're Olympic athletes. Like, exercising for an hour every day, tracking all of our macros. Like, I sleep eight hours a night every night. All of these things, if I want to be a cognitive athlete I need to perform like a physical athlete. Because like, energy is real. If I am not showing up energetically correct, if I have poor energetic hygiene, that is going to show up in the way that I do things and the way that I make decisions. All of this preparation off the table pays off on the table. And a lot of this, especially when it comes to tournaments, it's a marathon. Like, you are in a chair sitting for twelve-plus hours a day every day, if you're playing a tournament series. It's a grind. And I said, ninety percent of the time you sit down, you're going to lose.
So imagine that. Like, ninety percent of the time you're like, "Well, I would have been better off just sleeping today and doing nothing today than what I did." It can take a real mental and physical toll. So you need to make sure that you've maximized your capacity, that you control the variables that you control, because then, "Hey, at this point I've done all I can, I have no regrets, let the chips fall where they may."
Eric: Yeah. How do you adjust for or train for the length of these things? Right? The stamina that it takes to be mentally super active and optimal for twelve hours a day for days at a time, especially with escalating stakes, right? In a tournament, like, the longer it goes the higher the stakes, so the more tired you are, the better you have to be. How do you—what are the things that you kind of do to counteract that or prepare for it?
Chris: Yeah. It's—It's different from my usual. So—In my specialty, high-stakes cash games, my average session length is only three hours. And there's a lot of evidence that performance degrades like notably after three hours at an increasing rate. Like it gets—At a certain point, you might as well be playing drunk. And so I historically had always built it for, "I'm only playing when at my peak." And as soon as I'm no longer at my peak, I hop off. Well, there's sometimes where the action is too good, where it would be irresponsible to quit. So a good example is like New Year's Eve. I don't celebrate New Year's Eve because that's the best night of poker for the year, and if I play twelve hours on New Year's Eve, I can take the rest of January off, because I might be making ten times more an hour during that time than I will the rest of the year.
Eric: Woah.
Chris: So it really makes sense to be able to stay up all night and play well. And there's an interesting dynamic as well, because these games are built around specific players, maybe these players play for thirty minutes and they have to go to dinner. Maybe these players want to play for three days, and if you get up, you lose your seat, so you have to find a way to stay for three days. A good friend of mine, I was talking to him on my podcast, his name's Garrett Adelstein, and he shared the really interesting tidbit that he estimates that eighty percent of his winnings lifetime—and these are in the seven figures—have come after hour twelve of a session.
Eric: Wow.
Chris: That almost all of the money that he has made has come after he has already been playing for twelve hours. So in the live arena, these games can go quite long. And it's important to note that like, Garrett works out for two hours every single day. He's about as physical beast as you can get. His performance is still degrading, but notably is that if his slope is linear, other players are exponential. So because skill, because energy, because tension is relative, you know you're going to have some mal effects, but you have to be getting worse not as bad as everyone else, if that makes sense. Like, you could be totally delirious, but at least you're not falling asleep.
Eric: Yeah.
Chris: That's the thing you have to keep in mind, is like you're not going to be performing at peak, but can you be performing relatively well?
Eric: Yeah. So somebody sent me this quote that you have, and I don't know which post it's in, but I think it's a perfect encapsulation, and I want to know how you are applying your own advice here. "When it comes to creating your own environment, assume you have free will. When it comes to living in it, assume you have no free will." I think that's an absolutely perfect summary of—and maybe a good one-line way to accomplish almost anything in life. But I'm curious how it's applying to kind of the grind that you're going through now in preparation for this tournament.
Chris: Yeah. That line you're referencing came out of a conversation in Oaxaca with our mutual friend, David Perell. And this is a post that I've been working on for the last six months, and hopefully this will be some accountability to get it out by the end of the year. It's almost there. But the idea is that our free will is very limited. And everyone immediately gets some resistance to that idea. It's like, "I'm a sovereign individual. Like, look at all these things that I make with my bare hands. I wake up and I hit that alarm and I hop into my cold plunge." Yes. But recognize that everything you do is contextual. That context of your present moment is already set. And that's what that quote is referencing, is assuming as I'm acting, talking to you right now, I'm not deciding, I'm not choosing what I'm doing. The choices have been made already for this context that I find myself in. So the interesting implication is that by surrendering control—again something that, for me, is an ongoing practice—I regain control. That the way that I exercise my free will is to create contexts for my future self which are advantageous, which are in alignment with my long-term goals.
This is again another meta-level intervention: what do I want to want, what is a context that would support that, how do I create that context, how do I make that context occur more often? And it's interesting when you see life through this lens. And anyone listening, I really recommend that you just try it for a day, is just go through the day imagining that you don't have any free will. You don't need to do anything different, but just experience what that lens is like, and what you realize is that you don't do things, you try to make things you want to do easier to do. And a lot of that is the secret for how I'm able to help some of the highest-performing investors and executives in the world get a little bit more satisfaction out of their day, is, "Can we take the context that you're in and make it a little bit more supportive of what you want to do and trust that the score will take care of itself?"
Eric: Yeah. That's—I talk about that a fair amount in the Leverage course, too, is probably the most productive thing you can do on a per-minute basis is like throw your TV out the window, or something to control your environment for your future self forever, and the returns to those things are incredible. So in your context, and it sounds like basically hiring these coaches is the creation of accountability and controlling the environment for your future self. You probably threw away all your junk food to be sure that you were eating clean. Do you like leave out workout clothes, what else do you do to control Future Chris?
Chris: Yeah, the name of my consultancy, Forcing Function, the term "forcing function" means “to bring to consciousness.” And so this is a concept that's very near and dear to me: if I can control where my attention goes, I will control what I do, that—Man. There's such a rabbit hole here, but like really quick summary of what we know about consciousness, which is very little, is that a tiny percentage of things we are perceiving are actually perceived consciously. It's about a million to one ratio. What we are perceiving consciously is only about three dozen bits of information versus millions of bits subconsciously. And what's the key takeaway there, is the world is tiny points of signal in a sea of noise, and that our advantage comes from knowing what to pay attention to, and the vast sea of noise to ignore. So constantly this practice is for me is like, "How can I bring my attention by creating forcing functions to that which is most important?"
So you mentioned some of those things that I install in my life—and where appropriate, I help clients install—is, "All right, I want to have experts who can help me level up in this thing and tell me what I should be looking out for or what I should be paying attention to, and trust them. I want to create an environment that makes it most likely that I do the things that I want to do." Whether it's some of those things that you mentioned, going to sleep at a reasonable hour, getting sunshine on my face, eating things that make my body feel good, and listening to what my body is telling as I'm eating, or, hey, writing articles that hopefully people get some value out of and install things in their life. What can I do to keep these things top of mind, to bring attention to them, and at the same time turning down the volume on all the other things that are getting in the way? When you take this lens, most things in life are a complete distraction. That hey, they might be good things, they might have value in themselves, but do they have more value than this thing that you could be doing instead? Right? Opportunity cost is always the biggest cost.
So you have to in this metaphorical buffet that we call life, you have to pass up some of these things in the buffet in order to get the things you want most.
Eric: I love that. Which leads me to the question, I think you had a really good phrase in there. It was like, "What do you want to want?" How do you decide what you want? Like, I think with this mindset and outlook and level of talent you could be accomplishing almost anything that you decided to do. How did this level of professional poker and coaching and the other things that are on your plate become the thing that you want to want?
Chris: What an amazing question. I mean it's something that—It's a belief that I'm trying to sit in and absorb is the realization that I can accomplish anything. That the only limit that is placed upon me is my ambition. So that comes with a great responsibility, is, "Well, if I can do anything, oh my god. What do I do? That's—" And it would be very easy for that to be paralyzing, and for various points in my life it was paralyzing, because, hey, with so many good things to do, well, maybe I should just do more research and read more books and talk to more people before actually going out and bumping up against the world, because I gotta make sure that I'm doing the right thing, because that would be the worst, to waste years of my life doing the wrong thing. And my antidote to this has been what I refer to as experiments.
So this is encapsulated—I put out a workbook a couple years ago called Experiment Without Limits. So this is me taking a year to compress everything that I've learned about productivity and performance from five hundred coaching conversations, and be like, "Here's what I think I would recommend doing." You know, step-by-step exercises. But the first exercise I think is the most important, is just framing something as an experiment. And when you have an experiment, what are you doing? You're being curious and, "Hey, let's try this and see what happens." And I just try to view my life as I'm constantly trying things and collecting data. And I commit to a period. It's like, you know, a month is a good baseline. You can commit to something for a year, you can commit to something for the day. But like, commit, and give it your all. Like, all right, I have five options here. Option One seems to be the best. It's like a marginal winner, but it seems to be the best. For the next month, I'm going to act as if Option One is like my hundred percent pick, and I'm gonna just like full steam redline after that option.
And at the end of the month, I take a step back, I do my captain's log, and I'm like, "Hey, what did I learn about that?" And it's every decision is like double down or stop. Like, is this going well enough that whatever I'm doing, I want to go after it twice as hard, I want to like take to the next level, I want to invest even more? Or do I want to say, "Hey, let's try Option Number Two. That was interesting, that was fun, that was cool, I want to try Option Number Two.”
Every dimension in my life, health, relationships, personal, financial, I'm constantly trying to experiment and learn things. And my hope is that if the pace of learning is high and I'm iterating quickly, right, it's coming back to tight feedback loops, that eventually I'll stumble and fall on the right answer. But I'm not going to find it sitting at my desk reading the internet. I'm gonna need to try things and figure it out.
Eric: Yeah. I like that a lot. So poker was an experiment that became something that you kind of kept doubling down on. And you are—
Chris: Exactly.
Eric:—In one of those moments again. So, before we—I wanna talk about a few more things that are unrelated to poker, but before we move on there's a few kind of open loops that I wanna close that I'm still very curious about. So you said this is the biggest tournament you've ever been a part of. Biggest by what measure? Is it like by number of people, by size of pot, by buy-in? What is big?
Chris: By buy-in. This is going to be a six-figure buy-in. My previous large tournament is twenty-five thousand.
Eric: Woah. Okay.
Chris: So this is a tournament size that occurs maybe a couple times around the world a year.
Eric: Okay. And that puts the pot, the winnings at, what? Gotta be seven, maybe eight—
Chris: Seven figures.
Eric: Seven figures? Okay. Life-changing amount of money.
Chris: Yeah. It's gonna be really good when I win.
Eric: Go get 'em, Champ. I like it. So is there a—so where does poker fit in the long arc of your life, as this experiment?
Chris: I like to view things in terms of a portfolio, and I think values are no different. An alternative answer when you ask, "How do you figure out what you want to want," I love this exercise—This comes from another book behind me, I'll just pull it out—called The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook. The exercise is called the "Top Values Exercise." We have a version that we recreated in Notion, if anyone wants to try this, but it's essentially, "Hey, what are all the things that you value?" And then you eliminate it to, "What are your top three values? What are your top two values? What do you value the most?" Any decision that you're making really reduces down to this question of, "What are you optimizing for most?" And for me, I think like the leverage point of the system is, what is the value by which we decide? So for me, a current value is adventure. And I find that poker brings a lot of adventure to my life. It's really fun to have this sandbox to constantly be learning about the world and myself, it brings me in front of lots of interesting people, allows me to travel, it allows me to really explore the boundaries of my own performance. And I'd like it at least to be considered in part of my portfolio for the rest of my life.
And at some points, if I continue this metaphor, I've rebalanced. Right? I took six months off completely. I actually retired at the age of twenty- three and didn't play a single poker hand for five years. Traveled around the world, working startups, did some investing. Like, completely walked away and then came back. Right? So something can leave your portfolio and it can come back in. But inherently, as we've talked about today, poker at its base, it's a zero-sum game. And so I've really made efforts to boost other parts of my portfolio that feel much more positive-sum. Forcing Function for me is a total mission where I have the privilege of working with really smart and talented people, having a direct impact on them, but most importantly taking what I learn and trying to open source it, share it with as many people as I can, so anyone out there can like hopefully take some of these things that I've been fortunate enough to learn and put them into practice.
And I've really gotten more into investing, not only just for obvious financial reasons, where poker has linear returns, as we've talked about offline. You can only put so much of your bankroll at risk, whereas in investing you have the value of compounding. You can put your entire bankroll at risk if you think the bet merits it. But I also have found progressively is that most of the most interesting and intelligent people that I know invest, and so by being involved in these circles it allows me to grow and to get access to a lot of really interesting minds. So that's kind of been the three-leg stool that I've been working with recently, is you know, mission (Forcing Function), poker (performance), and then investing. And I assume that other parts of the portfolio will come into play, and I'll have to see, you know, how they fit in, what are the missing allocations that I want exposure to?
Eric: Yeah. I think that's really interesting. I was actually planning to ask you about your philosophy on zero-sum games, so you kinda beat me to it. Something that kinda clicked for me a few years ago was—You know, Silicon Valley especially is very positive-sum oriented. Right? To the point where they almost don't—They are like anti-zero-sum games. And I understand why. 'Cause you know, there's people in industries that—I think real estate is more zero-sum than tech, and sports are more zero-sum than startup investing, and things like that. And it helped me to kind of see this like barbell strategy of like, play zero-sum games to train yourself, to harden yourself, to sharpen yourself, to grow. Because they're fucking hard to win, and it's much easier to know if you're good and getting better and if your systems for improving are good. But also, bring positive-sum games into your life to connect and cooperate with people and live and build and it's certainly not all or nothing.
Chris: You know, I'd love to comment on that.
Eric: Please.
Chris: I mean, I'm pretty skeptical, a lot of that stuff. I mean, there's a lot of virtue signaling and other things, that people see themselves as much more virtuous than they really are, and if people took a hard look at who's on the other side of what they're doing, they would find it's a little bit less positive-sum than what they actually think. Obvious exceptions on both sides, but I think there's a lot of people who are kinda fooling themselves, and that's all I have to say about that. Going back to the values portfolio, a common piece of advice that I give is you don't need to satisfy every value you have with the same position. That you can have different sub-selves that have expression, that satisfy different urges that you have, different values that you want to satisfy. And you don't need to find this unicorn-chimera pursuit that somehow allows you to support yourself and do something that's as fun as doing a game and, what do you know, allows you to change the world. Because, like, that thing doesn't exist. It's okay to do something that allows you to support yourself, and it's okay to do something that's fun but doesn't make any money and not turn it into a project, and it's okay to do something to change the world, but you don't need to find them all in the same place.
Eric: Yeah, that's really interesting. And I imagine quite liberating, for people who feel like they, "How will I ever find this thing?" It's like, well, you won't.
Chris: We're so hard on ourselves. We're so hard on ourselves, and we create these impossible standards, and we're just humans bumbling around trying to figure things out, and the more that we can be gentle with ourselves—I know it's like, hey. The more that I try things, the more that I get in touch with what I think and believe and want out of like, the more likely I am to get it. But this pursuit of perfection that doesn't exist, again, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. By going after this ideal, we ensure that we never find it.
Eric: Yeah. So talk about your coaching practice, and kind of when that emerged and what it looks like.
Chris: Sure. So it emerged because someone asked to pay me and I said yes. But the longer backstory is I did a lot of coaching in the poker world. And I coached over a hundred players, and it's notable that these are a hundred of the best players in the world, they just happened to be not quite as good as me. And I realized that the best way to learn something is by teaching. I think that was one of the reasons I was able to rise to the very top of poker is that I had this broad sample size of how all of these other really, really smart minds were thinking about the game, and I was able to just take like little pieces of what everyone's doing and make it my own, and not only that, by having to explain things like I'm explaining it now I had to understand it much better. Right? It was able to excavate these gaps in my own thinking. It's like, "Oh, I really don't understand how to play this situation, I should study it more." And then the next time I have a conversation, it's like, "Yeah, that sounds right, I think I understand that a little bit better.” You see this feedback loop that was taking place.
And the same thing occurred when I retired from poker. There was this big event in poker called Black Friday where poker got shut down in the US, boo-hoo, sad story, you know, we were all on the side of the road, what are we going to do with the rest of our lives and all of our money, and a lot of these guys who I was once coaching in poker created startups. They went in and raised the seed money or they went and started angel investing themselves, and so the conversations we were having around performing as poker players I found surprisingly that the same conversations were happening with them in these new contexts, that the same skills were necessary in order to compete and to compete well. So when one of these former friends said like, "Hey, would you be interested in coaching me but in a business context," I was like, "Sure. I'm just sitting on a beach in Thailand, I'm not doing anything, let's talk." And that was 2016, and just referral by referral, bird by bird, it's slowly grown up. I have a small team around me now that helps with the back end and helps me get content to the place it needs to be.
I, inspired by you and others, just launched a podcast last week, so excited to have more of these conversations. And I really hope that I'm coaching in some form for the rest of my life. I don't know whether it will be professionally, but I think there's so much value in having someone who's an objective third party to point out your blindspots. So I have my own particular lens of looking at things, and some people find that helpful, but most importantly having people in your life who you trust to call you out on your ish, because we all need that.
Eric: Yeah. Yeah. Is that a pithy description of most of the coaching, is just bullshit calling and accountability reminders and—Not to take anything away from it. I do think it is—probably the better question to ask is, what role does coaching take in these people who become your clients' life? Right? It's somewhere—It's not therapy and it's not nannying, but it's like—Is it like people who are at an eight and want to go to twelve, is it people are at a three and want to go to a five? Does it encompass all of those things? Is it people who just want to get introduced to something new? It's one of those big poorly-termed worlds of coaches and life coaches and therapists and trainers and all of these things that are just kind of a messy soup that everyone has their own little world to carve out in there, so carve us out your world and who you like to work with.
Chris: Yeah. It's messy. I wish there was another word, but you know, this is the language that we're stuck with, and you know, it's the best we've come up with so far. I like to think that I'm taking someone who's already in the top one percent of their field and helping them get to the .001%.
Eric: Okay.
Chris: So they're already operating at a nine, and I want to help them be at a nine all the time, or sometimes they hit a ten and I want them to hit a ten more often. So it can be either real tactical optimizations, or it could be subtle reframes or flips in the way that they do things that just improves their subjective experience of reality or makes them feel a little bit more fulfilled, even if nothing on the surface has changed. It really can vary, but where I think I add the most value is I just have this really uncanny ability with patterns, and I recognize patterns in people. And as we've talked about, I don't think free will really exists in the present moment, so if someone has a pattern, I assume that that pattern is just going to keep repeating unless something is done to divert the dominoes, so to say. So, recognizing, "Hey, what are the positive patterns?" And there's lots of them. A lot of the things they've accumulated are great. Let's amplify that, let's make those patterns happen more often. When you do that you have a great day. Great. Let's have a great day every day. Why not?
But also, we're holding ourselves back all the time. And this could be environmental, this could be beliefs, things that are limiting ourselves. Invisible boxes that we're putting around us that, hey, if we only decided to step outside of the box, who knows what we could do? And sometimes it requires somebody else to point out that obvious, and sometimes like some days I'm just like, "Hey, you already know this. Hey, you said that recruiting a new engineer was your top priority, but you showed me your schedule and I don't see any interviews on there, so like, is it a top priority or not?" Right? And someone on the outside is like, "Well like, you're paying him thousands of dollars to look at your calendar and tell you to do something?" But sometimes pointing out the obvious to someone and holding them accountable is really valuable, especially if this person has no one else that they're answering to, they're giving orders all day long and they need someone to say, "Hey, like, yeah, maybe you should start doing that thing you said you were going to do, or not. Or decide it's not actually important. One or the other, it can't be both."
Eric: Yeah. I think—And it's almost impossible to do that for yourself as often as you need it to be done, and for people who are in that situation, the value of getting that, you know, that engineer recruited two weeks earlier is well worth the few thousand dollars that it takes to get that task accomplished. So you have an amazing post about the systems that you see in the world and the kind of mental models within it. It is like—systems, bottlenecks, leverage, and feedback loops all kind of briefly tied together in this one post that I think is exceptional, and I hear that in your—I hear this post in your description of your coaching, right? Like looking at the systems that guide people's lives, looking for the bottlenecks and the high leverage points of intervention, and how that affects, you know, the next day's behavior and the next day's behavior, and the dominoes, as you said. And I think it's absolutely reasonable that someone with an uncanny talent for seeing those points of intervention and just putting them in front of your face all the time can drive an orders of magnitude change in that outcome.
Chris: Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate it. I mean, systems thinking is completely foundational to everything that I do, and if there's one thing that I can leave every client with, it's being able to embody this lens that if I can help them see things as a system, I know that everything will work out all right, because some of the implications of systems thinking are just so powerful that I just wanna shout them from the rooftops. When you think about bottlenecks, realizing that almost every single thing that we do has no impact whatsoever. Everything that we're doing is a waste. Well like, why are we doing so many things? Let's just like take a moment to think, "Hey, maybe I should be thinking about what I should do that actually will have an impact, because most of these things are shuffling deck chairs."
Leverage. Like, okay. I can have a small impact on one person or I can have incrementally more effort and I can have a small impact on millions of people. Okay. Well, let me take that extra step to do so. Instead of doing this thing over and over again, why don't I take five minutes to write out a crappy SOP, and then assign that SOP for someone else to own and then prove, and all of a sudden I don't have to do this thing over and over again, but no, I'm not gonna take five minutes just to write out what I'm doing. I wanna keep it in my head so I can own it. It's like these things that are so obvious when you say them out loud, it's like—Well, yeah. Why wouldn't I do that? So yeah, I really, really just think it's like so foundational. Thinking In Systems, anything that Donella Meadows has written, all the stuff coming out of Santa Fe Institute—Like, if I was to go back into academia—And I've played with this, like complexity systems thinking, there's just so much to be mined there that you could literally just say "systems applied to X," and everything would change.
I don't know, I'm getting off my rocker here.
Eric: That's exactly what I was hoping for. Have you read The Systems Bible?
Chris: Oh, it's so funny. It's hilarious.
Eric: Fucking love it. It's absolutely hilarious. Okay, good. I was hoping you had. I assumed you would, but yeah, we'll—
Chris: It wakes you up to the realization that everything around you is a dysfunctional system, so you either need to (one) find a way to work within the dysfunction, or (two) figure out why the system is dysfunctional.
Eric: Yeah, and then just kind of accept it with like a nihilist shrug and a giggle and go on about your life. It is amazing.
Chris: This is the world we live in. What are you gonna do? Stop beating your head against the wall with things you can't change.
Eric: Yeah, exactly. Okay. So, god, we're a ways into this and I still have like whole chunks of stuff that I haven't gotten to yet. So, people that I talked to on background told me very specifically and multiple times to ask you about Japan specifically amongst your global travels. I know that you are an incredibly well-traveled person, but Japan specifically came up, though I was not told why. So I'm just going to pull your string on Japan and see what happens.
Chris: Yes. I'm a big Japanophile, I try to visit every year. I was supposed to be in Japan this year to live for three months overlapping with the Olympics. Unfortunately, that was not to be, but I'm very excited to go back next year and the year following, probably between one and three months on each of those visits. So—It's just—I can't wax poetic enough about the country. I was just in the Galapagos for my birthday, and I think the Galapagos is a very good metaphor for Japan in that it culturally evolved independently, because they were just closed to outsiders until, you know, the Americans showed up with gunboats in 1850s, so you have some influence from China and Korea, but essentially was its own animal in its own ecosystem, so some of the implications of that are really fascinating. I think just—They have this striving for excellence and perfection that is just so cool to witness, and if you think you're honing your craft, go find the Japanese grandmother who's been making the same dumpling for fifty years because five generations back that's what she was doing, or these Onsens that have been in the same family since the year 1000.
Like, talk about a big load to bear, it's like you're the 26th generation Onsen owner. No, no, you're not going to be a professional baseball player, you're an Onsen owner, because you have the family legacy to hold. Amazing service, just like this counter-culture that is completely rebellious against the somewhat like repressive conformist' s over-layer just creates so cool art and design and music, and yeah. I mean if it was practical, time zone and otherwise, I would be there already, but I find as a tourist it just has infinite depth, and I'm super excited about it.
Eric: And Japan is so cool. I went—I've only been to Tokyo, but I found it to be the most otherworldly place I have ever traveled, and it's incredible in that way. It's deeply clean and quiet and polite—It is just an amazing place.
Chris: There are more stories—And I say 'stories' like tales, narratives, characters—In a single office building in Tokyo than in some countries.
Eric: Yeah.
Chris: I really believe that.
Eric: I found it—I loved it, but I also found it frustrating. Like me and my fiancée were there as total like you know, she was the only blonde person and I'm the only giant, so everybody's very polite but not very like accessible. And I was like looking into those windows of those office buildings and going like, "Oh my god, there's incredible depth in this city and in this building and in this place, but I can't—I'm not drawn into it, and I don't know how to get in." And so I really want to go back and explore more of the country and more of the city with like even pseudo-locals so that I can feel more of that depth and get a couple more layers.
Chris: Yeah. Again, this is subjective and I'm gonna try to report it objectively without judgment, I think there are definitely some trade-offs that Japanese culture brings, and one of them is just the inability to show emotions or speak your mind outwardly. And a lot of that comes from Japan is extremely hierarchical, so if you see two people meeting the first five minutes is going through, "Where's your family from? Where do you work?" All these different things in order to determine relative status, and then that determines the pronouns that they use to refer to each other for the rest of their lives until one of those variables changes, right? Until maybe he gets hired at Sony or Panasonic, which is perceived as more status.
But essentially like now this is the relationship, and the implication is that there are no peers in Japan, and that makes it very, very hard for deep friendships. Not only for like outsiders who never actually become insiders—I've had friends who've lived in Japan for fifteen years and their friends for fifteen years still remark on how good their Japanese is and how nice it is that they're practicing. Like, you'll never be an insider and you have to just deal with that, but also like you'll never be on a peer relationship with someone, and that makes it really hard. And it's a big reason why drinking culture is so big in Japan, but also in Korea and China, because it creates this social plausibility or say like plausible deniability is a better way of putting it that things that you say when you're wildly intoxicated won't be held against you. So it's the one time, just like the fool telling the king what he needs to hear in this joke that you can tell your boss to go shove it, and the next day—You have a little fist fight on the street and you're like, "Man, you made me work a hundred hour week again, F you." And then the next day you wake up and you go back into the office at 5:00 AM and everyone pretends like nothing happened.
So it's interesting, you have these kinds of social lubricants that emerge through the veins of this repressive structure.
Eric: That's so interesting.
Chris: And that's like the anthropology that I find really interesting.
Eric: Yeah. Man, that's incredibly interesting, and beautiful, and yeah. I hope we can go together someday. So is there, just to tie this roughly back in, is there a professional poker world in Japan? Like, can you go and play there?
Chris: Technically poker I believe is not legal in Japan. I assume that it is taking place underground, but I think that this is the big part of the appeal of places like Korea and Macao, is there is a large Japanese contingent there.
Eric: Okay. Makes sense. So let's do a little interplay between your poker sort of mindset in the world and the investing that you do, 'cause I think, you know, from the investor's lens, like people would say in a sort of derogatory way like, "That's not an investment, that's a gamble." And I imagine that you have a different outlook, and I'm curious sort of how those two things sort of sit in your mind, in your worldview.
Chris: Yeah. I think a good prerequisite is to realize that we're placing bets all the time. I think you mentioned Annie Duke. She's really popularized this common notion from the poker world, is that we think in bets. That when we cross the street, we decide that getting to the other side of the street is worth the risk of getting hit by a car, and I would encourage any investor who's close-minded enough to think of what they do as investing and what a lot of other people do as gambling to reconsider what those definitions are and how that lack of imagination might be costing them in other areas of their lives. And so for me, when I hear "gambling," I think "investing without an edge." Like, gambling is flipping coins with friends. And I've seen friends gamble and flip coins and lose six figures in a night because they wanted an adrenaline rush. Gambling is, "Hey, I'm gonna bet on the Patriots to win the Super Bowl, but I have never watched the Patriots play, I just like their uniforms." Like, it's putting money or other resources at risk—You know, time, attention, et cetera, without an open, clear-eyed view of the risk/reward calculation.
So, I try to be as clear-eyed as possible, and I'm aware that everything that I do, every investment that I make, time, attention, energy, monetary, relationships, is an investment, and that I hope to more than recoup every single investment that I make, and that I am playing the longest game possible. I'm making lots of small bets that might not pay off, but when they do over the course of a lifetime will be really interesting.
Eric: I'm particularly interesting in the long game piece of what you just said, because I'm always—I think the same way, and I'm always looking for new perspectives. 'Cause I feel like everyone who's playing a long game is looking at it a little bit differently. So when you say, "I'm playing the long game," what does that mean? How does that change what your bets are, or what your investments are?
Chris: Just compounding everything. Recognizing that when you have a lifetime of compounding with something, whether that's, you know, a relationship where every friend—"I want to be friends with this person for the rest of my life." Hopefully that's the case. My health. Well, any investment that I make now maximizes the chances that not only will I be alive in eighty years, but that I'll be cognitively healthy and able to like do things. Man, how crazy that would be. You know, I'm a hundred years old, and I'm still thinking, well, with all that experience, I hope that to be really interesting.
It comes with just like, finances is just so obvious, that I can make investments that help me to learn and to grow my own skills, my capability, my ability to earn or meet people or get deal flow that basically any investment that I expect to have a long compounding period is a hell yes. And the same thing is like, especially like any investment that can get paid off over and over and over again. So it really for me comes back to intangibles. For someone who really likes to measure things, sometimes back in the day down to multiple decimal points, it's like really flipping the script on that, is like, "Well, what can I invest that puts me in the position to find great opportunities, to be able to capitalize on those opportunities and to just trust that I'll be able to recognize them when I see them and move quickly so I can take advantage of them?"
So, yeah, I think that someone said this to me. I wouldn't take authorship of this quote, but I think it's really true, is like, "The ultimate con is the long game." Like, if you're having fun and you're doing things with like no desired payoff, right, you keep adding value to people with no desire, no even thought of "someday, and this day may never come, I'm gonna ask a favor of you," like, if you're completely non-transactional with everything, you have no worries about things coming back to you. It's really counter-intuitive, but like the less you think about the immediate ROI on doing something, the more the ROI is gonna stack. It's a really crazy notion.
Eric: I've seen that play out and prove true over and over and over again. I think that's so correct. The like, "Play the long game, don't keep score, give give give give give, it'll all work out, the karma bank is real but it's invisible and it's intangible and it keeps score but only intangible numbers and you can never check your balance, you just have to trust it." I think that's so totally right.
Chris: Yeah, it's a little "woo," but I have to go there. It's like, if I'm directing my energy at things I want, right, it comes back to being very clear on what wants—At least like, having an idea, an experiment, that like, "Hey, I'm acting as if this is the thing I want." And the more you just redirect your energy that way, the more it'll come back manifold.
Eric: So what do you consider your edges when you look at the world of investing and you're not about to put money down without feeling like you've got an edge and you're picking the "games," that in the investing world you would pick in the poker world, what are those, as you've kind of put your head in that direction?
Chris: People.
Eric: People.
Chris: It really comes back to people. I don't feel like I have an edge in a lot of other areas of investing. I might, if I had dedicated years of my life, but something that I do have a lot of confidence and conviction and evidence is that I have a good understanding of people. My first investing experience, this is probably important to note, is I backed over two dozen poker players for a number of years, and it was completely trust-based, where I had no way of knowing other than just like seeing them on video, they were like halfway across the world, "Is this someone who's gonna send me my share of the profits, and is this someone who's gonna actually work hard that I can trust them," et cetera. And I did very well, and I seemed to have a knack for recognizing good people. And I see a lot of what I'm doing at Forcing Function is investing in people, seeing someone who I think is going to go on to do great things and just giving them a little like nudge on their trajectory, just like give it like a couple more degrees on that X.
And the same thing, is I generally invest in managers. I've gotten more into like early stage, I've started doing some seed investments. Backing some crypto projects. And I don't pretend to be like technical enough to understand what they're doing, but if I know the person, I know how hard they're working, I know the effort and their integrity, that I'm comfortable placing a bet on the person that even if the final vision looks nothing like the thing they sold me on on the call that I can trust them to execute. And ironically—I keep saying the word "ironically." I don't think it's ironic at all. A lot of my best investments have come from friendships. Like, people who I met on the other side of the world staying at a hostel, and we hit it off, and a few years later they're like, "Hey, I'm doing this thing, I don't know if you're interested, but like would you take a look?" And you never know where these opportunities are going to come from. So I realize, it's just recognizing good people and continuing to invest in them.
Eric: I think that's so true, and I completely agree. Like that's—My criteria for investment as well starts with like, "Do I know and love and trust this person enough to basically just give them the money and not ever worry if I will get it back?" And ironically, like those end up being the best investments.
Chris: And if you can't, you shouldn't.
Eric: Right, yeah. Exactly, yeah.
Chris: If you're gonna be like hovering over this person's shoulder or making sure that they're a good steward, they're not a good steward. That's—your intuition is telling you that.
Eric: Yeah, okay. So there's on thing—I hesitate a little bit to bring it up, but doing research I was talking to a friend about you and I feel very certain that I misheard this, and maybe he was pranking me, but I just have to ask you this question: "Ask him what it's like to live with one of the greatest pianists in the world."
Chris: Oh. So "pianists" as in piano players. I'll just make sure I'll really enunciate. Okay. So, shout out to Eric Lewis, E Lew, in my opinion one of the top five pianists of the world and my former roommate for five years in New York. Also an excellent short movie producer, where he's kind of like a John Carpenter where he writes, directs, films, creates the score for primarily like short horror films. Like, incredibly smart guy. What have I learned from him? A lot of life comes down to preparation for important moments. When people see Eric perform, it's like an explosion. I mean when he gets on the piano, he like goes to the point of breaking it. It is ferocious, it is animalistic, it is like this cyclone of energy. And people assume that this level of intensity is his baseline. It's, no. Like this principle from physics, that energy is neither created nor destroyed, it's merely shifted from one place to the other.
And I think this is very true when it comes to productivity as well, is you aren't creating energy—they say when you drink caffeine in the morning, you're not getting energy out of anywhere. You're essentially opening up a debt that needs to be paid back later. There's going to be a crash. So you might have more energy now, but you're just shifting it from the future. And again, that's a whole 'nother story, is we're constantly opening up these debts, not realizing that we're not creating them out of thin air, that they'll need to be paid back.
Anyway, people see this explosion of energy and assume that's how he is all the time, but no. Like, a lot of times Eric is like a cat and is just like recharging, relaxing, thinking, playing chess, reading psychological papers, just like doing things to fuel his body and mind so that he can unleash himself on the audience when he has a performance.
And that was a really good object lesson for me, because I see so many people operating at an anxious seven all the time, and when you see the best in the world, and I would put Eric in that category, they are operating at a ten or a one, and most of the time it's closer to the one.
Eric: But they're saving, they're allocating their energy and effort towards being the very best version of themselves when they unleash all of that energy and attention and effort in very well-chosen moments.
Chris: The hibernation is just as important as the crystasis. I'm pronouncing that wrong. The emergence. Crystallis—I don't know. We're live, I can't pronounce words.
Eric: Ha. I've seen that in programmers, too, actually. Computer programmers. Some of the most genius engineers I've ever worked with didn't just sit at the computer for two weeks and crank out code, they like sat there and played video games on their iPad and looked like the laziest bum in the world for nine days and then sat down and wrote one beautiful elegant function in eight hours that no one else could have written at the company no matter how long they worked at it. It's really incredible.
Chris: One maybe utopian, perhaps dystopian version of reality that I think we're heading towards is like, we spend most of our lives in this fever dream and we're occasionally woken up to make some small change to the algorithm to execute on our behalf while we charge. And I think an important part of that story, hey, this might be true for this programmer, so again I'm coming at this place of a non-judgment, it's important to recognize that not all activities recharge. And I think this is why I'm really big on reducing social media usage. I spend barely time on there, because while it feels like a break, it's not a break that recharges. It actually saps your batteries. So in general, when you're not in one of life's most important moments and you don't need to be performing at a ten, go read a book. Go sit by a lake and contemplate. Like, put your feet in the grass. Like, do something that is proven to recharge you, rather than something that, you know, turns off your brain.
Eric: Yeah. This is something that I think you mentioned earlier, like cognitive athletes have to train like physical athletes. This is something physical athletes really get, the power of rest and recovery and, they rest just as hard as they train. You know, Ronaldo sleeps like twelve hours a day, and LeBron, but I think mental athletes and performers tend not to do that nearly as effectively.
Chris: There's no shortcuts in this game. I—I mean, everyone wants to buy the shortcut. That's how, you know, Men's Health Magazine survives, is like you know, no one wants to hear just like, "Go to the gym three times a week and lift some heavy things and then sleep eight hours." Like, there are no shortcuts. The shortcut is to be consistent. So yeah, like if we need to sleep eight hours it's for a reason. We wouldn't—Like, imagine ourselves on the savanna, when we aren't surrounded by walls and guns, is like we wouldn't just like turn our brains off and like lay down while lions are roaming around us if it wasn't absolutely essential. And you think that you can hack that and you can reclaim four hours a day by only sleeping half that? Come on, man. Like, there are other places to make that up, and I think the way that you do is just by doing things of higher average importance.
Eric: I love that. So you don't drink caffeine?
Chris: I don't drink caffeine when I play poker. As we're saying before, I want to control variables, and I don't want anything in my system, caffeine, sugar, et cetera, that could affect my energy level, could affect my aggression levels, my processing. That being said, I do have a caffeine pill which has a hundred milligrams of caffeine, two hundred milligrams of L-theanine every single day. This is like the last seven years at 9:00 AM every single day. So Saturday, Sunday, I'll cycle off on vacation, but like generally I have it every single day. And like, recognizing that I'm mostly just alleviating some withdrawal symptoms, but I think the debt payment is worth it.
Eric: I think that's—That wasn't meant to be a 'gotcha,' I was truly interested, because I think there's two things there. One is like that I recognize in you is sometimes it's intimidating to think about optimizing these things, 'cause you project it forward forever. You're like, "Fuck, I don't wanna live at like a twelve out of ten hyper-optimized like fifteen minute schedule for my whole life." And that's what I love about the experiment framing that you use, and the kind of like—You know, you're hyper-optimizing for one event in three months, which is very clear for this particular thing. I think the rest of us could do more to define eras or programs or projects, and—
Chris: Yes.
Eric:—Focuses for areas of time.
Chris: I'd like to comment on that. I think it's clear that I think about this deeply, but I don't wanna give any impression that I'm some sort of automaton that's hyper-optimized. Like, I struggle with this stuff just as much as anyone, and like I would be very, very cautious of taking advice from anyone who finds this easy. Like, it is not easy, and everyone wants to just go from zero to sixty overnight. We're about to see this with the turning of the calendars. Everyone's gonna wake up on January 1st and be like, "This is the year that I put on twenty pounds of muscle and this is the year that I run a marathon." And it's like, no. What we're doing is stacking bricks. One brick at a time, one small change at a time, and if this change is paying rent, if it's showing that it's valuable, you stack another brick on top of it.
And so like what you're seeing, what I'm talking about in the context of poker or performance, this is like a decade of iteration, and lots of things that didn't work for me. Right? Something might work for me, something might work for Eric, doesn't mean that it works for you. Try it, do your own research, see, and if it does work great. Double down on that. If it doesn't work, awesome. There's a million other things you can try. And I think that's a really good framing is to come at things with abundance. You see something on Twitter, you listen to something on a podcast, and you're like, "Man. Like, I couldn't do something like that." Isn't it awesome that this person is out there on the frontier exploring the boundaries for you and is gonna report back and say like, "Hey, this is really cool. You should try it." That like these are all opportunities, they aren't obligations.
So like, yeah. I can't emphasize this enough, it's like when you're zooming out, when you're playing the long game, like make the changes very small and sustainable. Like, start with the one pushup. If you like the one pushup, go to two. You don't need to go from like, "I haven't worked out in a year," to, "I'm gonna work out two hours a day." Right? There's a lot of steps in the middle. And if you take those small incremental steps, it'll be a lot more sustainable. It'll be something that actually sticks.
Eric: Yeah. I love that. And it helps you to see the impact of each of those small, incremental steps. One of the other quotes here that you reminded me of with what you said about caffeine is, "When it comes to poker, my body is a temple. I don't even wanna know how much money I've cost myself with poor decisions which trace back to saying 'yes' to dessert." I mean that is a perfect encapsulation of I think like two hours of the attention to detail, the systems and feedback loops that impact on decision-making, the high stakes involved with some of these things, and the sort of granularity of knowing you know, where the dominoes fall. But you know, and you're not an automaton, you just know what the levers are that control the outcomes, and when to flip those things on and off. And you know, when you wanna go travel and drink and eat, you travel and eat and drink. And when you want to win a fucking tournament and become a champion and take a life-changing pot down, you skip dessert, 'cause you know what the impact is. Like, I love that.
Chris: Exactly. Everything is a bet, everything is risk/reward, and sometimes like having dessert is like, "That looks really delicious, I wanna do it." And sometimes it's like, "Well, if I eat this dessert, I'm probably gonna have a little bit less sleep, and that's going to echo into the day tomorrow, and I have a really big day tomorrow, and I'd rather have a better day tomorrow than have a dessert now." But you weigh those with the decision and you go in with eyes wide open, and sometimes you're like, "Man, I shouldn't have had that dessert last night." And you don't—Instead of punishing yourself, you're like, "Okay, well that situation is probably gonna come up again many different times, what's something I can do next time to make it more likely that I make a decision that I'm proud of." And having that mindset is like, everything that's happened is gonna recur a bunch more times. The results of any given decision don't matter. Let's approach this from how would I like to make this decision on average, and try to create a supportive context for that.
Eric: I love that so much. So we're about to bump up into two hours, but jam-packed with stuff. As we kind of wind down here, I wanna ask you just to comment on two things. One is like some of the most formative books that have hit you, and just—And where people should go to dive into more of your stuff. You sent me a very comprehensive email. I know you have a ton of great writing. But yeah, tell me about some of the formative books that really shaped you and your worldview into kind of where you are now.
Chris: So we're going on another two hours then, huh? So there are many. Two I mentioned earlier, Artist's Way, The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook. Both of these are kind of workbook style things you can go through. I really like both of those. If you wanna learn more about, you know, the way I see things, a bunch of free articles and resources on forcingfunction.com, including some posts about my favorite reads over the years. You can also check out the Forcing Function Library. That's forcingfunction.com/library. That, at this point, is two hundred different resources that I have curated with the love and patience of a true librarian, of "Here are the best podcasts, articles, books that I've read over the years tagged and categorized depending on what you want to learn." So I'd recommend you check that out. I'm kind of remiss to mention another book, because I'll go on forever.
Eric: Fair enough. This is a very comprehensive list and website, and all—I appreciate you—All of your writing is very considerate and dense. It's not like you're posting every week. You are waiting until you have something like really awesome to write, and writing the best article you can write about it. That "Play To Win: Meta-Skills In High-Stakes Poker" post is really, really, really incredible. Thank you so much for putting all this work together and sharing all this with us. I'm a little confused as to why you want us all to know how good you are at poker, this feels like a thing that you should keep a secret.
Chris: Hubris.
Eric: Yeah. Hah.
Chris: You know the ego death is still a work in progress. You know, it's nice to be loved and respected, and I think there was a lot of educational component there, and sometimes when I want to play in a poker game, and they link me to this piece and be like, "Sorry, dude, you can't play." I'm like, "Argh, I shot myself in the foot. Darn it." But I don't know, I get a lot of fulfillment and joy out of sharing this stuff with you in written or spoken form. So hey, you know, anything in life has trade-offs. I try to open source whenever possible, and you know, can't win them all.
Eric: It's beautiful. I really appreciate you doing it. I learn a lot from it, I think others will too, and I don't think that Kevin Hart listens to this podcast, so you're probably all right.
Thank you so much. Good luck on the tournament. You are going to win, I know it. I can't wait to see you take it down, and we're all rooting for you.
Chris: Eric, this was an absolute pleasure. Thanks for creating the space, thanks for being an awesome host, really loving diving into your catalog and what you do. So, really honored to be here. Thank you again for the opportunity.
Eric: Later, Chris.
I appreciate you hanging out with us today. Thank you for listening. I'm still buzzing with excitement over that, I hope you are too. I hope you take something away from this conversation. For me, it's this question: What can you change today that will make the desired outcomes more likely for your future self? What's a few things you can do now that will set you up for success in the future? Take a few quiet moments for yourself, breathe deep, and be well.