Penguin Latte: 2 Million Hands of Poker
Paul LeCrone and Chris Sparks discuss decision making, intuition, strategy, adaptation, eastern philosophy, determinism, consciousness and video games (of all things), artificial intelligence and art, and more.
Video recording above; audio recording below (1h26m). Time-stamped topics, resources mentioned, and full transcript following.
Topics
0:00 – Intro
1:30 – “Poker is an incomplete information game”
7:00 – Chris Sparks psychoanalyzes himself
10:00 – Predicting with incomplete information
12:00 – Consciousness and video games
15:00 – Poker and A.I
22:00 – Poker and Smash Bros. Melee
32:00 – Adaptation
35:00 – Does studying games atrophy intuition?
38:00 – Player archetypes
45:00 – Games imitate life
54:00 – Improvement
57:00 – Pressure
1:01:00 – Common mistakes of poker players
1:04:00 – Philosophy: Eastern and Western (and PPMD)
1:14:00 – Free will
1:17:00 – Man vs machine, creativity and the divine
1:27:00 – Robots, the future, WWIII
1:33:00 – Death, failure, inconvenient truths
1:36:00 – Skill > self-esteem
1:38:00 – Peter Senge and Robert Fritz
1:41:00 – What does Chris Sparks enjoy most about being alive?
Resources mentioned:
Experiment Without Limits (workbook)
Podcast Transcript
[Note: transcript edited slightly for clarity.]
Paul: We are rolling. My name is Paul LeCrone, and as usual, on this show, we explore life in all directions. We talk to change-makers, misfits, status-quo shakers, rascals, juvenile delinquents, bohemians. In other words, writers, illustrators, entrepreneurs, creators. Anyone seeking to make a living on their terms. And that is exactly why I am so stoked for the following conversation, because today I have the pleasure of speaking with Chris Sparks, a professional poker player with two million (that's two followed by six zeroes) hands of poker under his belt.
Chris Sparks has transformed his skills as a top poker player into a practical framework taught by his consulting company called Forcing Function, which seeks to help individuals become better decision-makers in the game of life. Chris, thank you for taking the time to be here. I really appreciate it, man.
Chris: Thanks, Paul. I appreciate the wonderful intro. I was counting in my head how many of those categories I fit into. I think probably around six or seven, depending on the day.
Paul: Yeah, all of the above. So let's, if you don't mind, give folks some context. Some background, if you would. Maybe a brief introduction to the game of poker. This would also help me, since I have read your article on sort of the meta, abstract layer of competition, but not so much—I don't have much of an understanding of poker itself, and I don't know how many people who listen to this show play poker. But I'm all about reading between the lines, so if you could give a little of the background, that would be great.
Chris: Okay. Game of poker. You'd think I'd be better at this by now. So, think about poker as a game of incomplete information. So there is information that is known only to you, in Texas Hold 'Em (which is the variant that I play the most, it's the most popular in most places around the world) you have two hole cards, two cards that only you have that no one else knows, and there are five community cards. Three on the flop, one on the turn, and one on the river, with a round of betting after each. And so you are competing with other players at the table, between two and eight other players, to make the best five-card hand, combining the two cards in your hand and the five community cards, which (as you can see from the name) everyone can use.
So poker is a game that lives at the intersection of psychology and statistics. So you have statistics, where a lot of the betting is driven by your equity in the hand. Right? How much of the pot statistically you are entitled to if all of the cards were face up. That if you have a really good hand you have more equity, if you have a not-so-good hand you have low equity, and you need to try to get other people to fold by pulling off a bluff.
Now, it's important to note that because poker is an incomplete information game, there's a lot of modeling your opponent, and that's where the psychology comes into play: you are trying to discern the nuance in your opponent's actions to determine what hands they do not have. Right? It's generally a process of elimination, that you have a compounding probability. Because they've done this and this and this, they can't have these hands, thus they have some of these hands. And how does my hand do against those? If I have a better hand, I want them to call my bet. If I have a worse hand, I want them to fold.
And so you can see how it gets very interesting very quickly, in that there are—as I like to say from Dune—feints within feints within feints. You are trying to give the impression that you have certain cards, and the things that you are doing are also informing the decisions that they make in this, continual reflexive feedback loop.
Paul: Well, what impresses me about all of this is that this is taking place not just in your hands, but in your head. Like, you don't see all of those—all of those details you've just described, it's there when you know how to look for it, but it's also taking place in the minds of the players, in the face of the players, in the hands of the players, the mood of the room as well. As far as I can tell. But you play online poker, right?
Chris: I do, yeah. I think—
Paul: Okay, so—
Chris: —live and online poker are two different games, in a sense.
Paul: Okay. How does this kind of information translate over the screen?
Chris: Yeah. This is—we're getting "woo" very quick. So, obviously when we're sitting face to face, even if it's like video right now, I have a lot of non-verbal information that I can use to gather. And not to make you self-conscious, but I'm paying attention to your posture, to your general verbal tics, tone of voice, whether your pupils are dilating, what's your level of interest or 'arousal,' in psychology terms. All of these are signals that I am using to calibrate not only an overall picture of who are you, Paul, as a person, but how are you feeling in this moment, particularly about the two cards that are in front of you, face down.
Now, when we are playing over the computer—and I know you've played Smash remotely, and you can play—it's not quite the same. Just because you can't see your opponent in a determined setting doesn't mean your opponent is not on the other side of the screen. And so what I like to say is that the computer is just a lossy translation interface for human emotions. So the signals that I'm getting are much noisier. How long does someone take to click a button? What number do they bet? Say someone bets something like three hundred sixty dollars versus three hundred eighty dollars, that conveys a lot of information, especially when I can check to see what they've done with similar bet-sizing in the past. If anyone is fortunate enough to type into chat, right, I can see the subtext of the things that they are saying, their emotional cadence. And obviously, because I have the benefit of statistical analysis, particularly in the past when these tools were more of a thing, I can go deeper into what patterns does this person play over the long term.
So there's information there to help me get a feel for who this person is in this particular moment. It's just different signals that are a little bit noisier.
Paul: Okay. So why are you drawn to this game? Why are you drawn to poker? Why were you drawn to it when you began to play? What attracted you to this?
Chris: I can only guess. I think we are—this is something I'm sure we'll get into. I think we are hopelessly oblivious to our own motivations for doing things. If I had to psychoanalyze myself, I've always been very competitive. I've always been drawn towards mastery, towards being the best in something, and all of the status and enjoyment that comes from that. So I had a little bit of a gaming background, not as much as you. I was probably most known for this game called Microsoft Ants, which—think of it as like a child's precursor to an Age of Empires or a Starcraft.
Paul: Okay.
Chris: I was the best player in the world in that game—it's not as impressive as it sounds. Like a small player pool, age of like thirteen or fourteen.
Paul: How old were you at the time?
Chris: Thirteen and fourteen.
Paul: Oh, gotcha. So you weren't like a thirty-year-old destroying twelve-year-olds in Microsoft Ants.
Chris: No, there were a couple of thirty-year-olds, and we were always a little bit suspicious why they were there. I'll let that one go unsaid. I then transitioned more into the Yahoo Suite of games. So, some chess. I've always been a decent chess player, but it's not my particular game. The other game that I had a lot of success in that I achieved a perfect—the equivalent of ELO, so the chess rating system—was Gin, which is a two-player variant of Rummy. So heads up, competing, all ten cards in your hand are kept secret, so there's a lot of inference. It has a lot of similarities to heads-up or one-on-one poker.
So, I played Gin for a couple of years on my parents' dial-up internet, until I heard—this was like fifteen, sixteen—some of my Gin friends were saying, "Hey, you can play this game called poker and make money at it." So, "Hey, if you play these freeroll tournaments that are free to enter and you beat out ten thousand people, you can win a thousand bucks." Which, when you're a sixteen-year-old, feels like an infinite amount of money. So, I started playing these freeroll tournaments, and then I entered into university, age seventeen, and poker was everywhere. This was the moment that Chris Moneymaker had just won the World Series of Poker, so 2003, and if you're like a Midwestern guy, this was what you did for fun on the weekend. So having a headstart in a games background, that became not only like a really good vehicle for socializing in a context that felt very fun and safe and competitive, but it's because I was learning so quickly.
So I think that this is one of the biggest commonalities about a game—like Smash Brothers and poker—that really, really attracts me, is that the feedback loops are incredibly tight.
So, for those of you who are less familiar with systems thinking, a feedback loop is you are taking a measurement of the environment, and then based upon that measurement you are changing an action. The classic example of a feedback loop is a thermostat, where the thermostat is saying, "Hey, what's the temperature in the room? If the temperature is below this level turn on heat, if the temperature is above this level turn on cool, and then check again." And so in a poker context, I am making an action, right, a bet for value or bluff or call or any of these things, and I'm immediately seeing my opponents' cards, and I'm immediately seeing whether my underlying assumptions were correct or incorrect.
And just to put this into context, I currently average about twelve games at a time, which is about eight hundred to a thousand decisions per hour. That has been as high as two thousand back in the day. So a thousand times an hour, I am making a prediction and then finding out whether that prediction is correct. If someone is paying attention and calibrating their beliefs in line with that, you can get good at something incredibly quickly, because you have all of this feedback on what you were doing that's right, and more importantly, what you were doing that's wrong.
Paul: That's a lot of just—holy moly. And what does that—how do you play that many games at the same time? That's a lot of open tabs.
Chris: A lot of tabs, yeah. Okay. The context that I usually introduce here is what we think of as human consciousness is only a tiny sliver of reality. So the best studies that we have, and I'd love to hear your input here because you've gone deeper down the academic side—what we perceive consciously is only one one-millionth of what we perceive subconsciously. And so if we do a little pseudoscience around that, it is very important to discern what is signal and what is noise. We are taking in a lot of information, but the huge lever that we have in a noisy environment is what do we pay attention to?
Paul: Right.
Chris: And so when friends watch me play poker in real-time, for them it's sort of like the scene from Minority Report, and things are happening too fast in order to process, because they're trying to pay attention to everything that's going on. But for someone like me who has millions of hands worth of experience, I know that very little of the things that are happening are actually relevant.
Paul: Yeah.
Chris: And thus I only need to pay attention to a very small subset of what's going on. So I can diffuse my attention much more efficiently due to this internalized experience.
Paul: I think the statement you made about attention is really important to bold and italicize. I just finished this book called, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, a study of the two hemispheres and their relationships. One of my favorite books that I've ever read. And it explores obviously the relationship between the two hemispheres, but it also explores the meaning of attention, in that what we consciously see and notice in our everyday lives is always guided by the quality of the attention that we give to the world. Like, there's a difference between thinking about something and actually paying attention, like giving your—we call it "paying." We pay our attention to something.
So I think in the context of a game, this is really, really cool because you've got these people who haven't played your game before and they're just astonished at how you could keep up with so many different factors all happening at the same time, but so much of consciousness (at least to the degree that we actually understand what the hell we're talking about when we talk about consciousness) is predicated on filtering out so much useless information. Like, there is a reason why we can't perceive more than what we can perceive, because then we would collapse. We wouldn't be able to stand up straight.
Chris: Exactly, yes.
Paul: So in the context of a game, as skilled as you are at what you do and as skilled as even what a—as any master of a game does, like, they can't see everything. Like, that's not really the goal. The goal is supposed to be able to ignore a certain kind of information, or you could get even more high-level and like play with the information that you think your opponent thinks you're ignoring.
Chris: Yes.
Paul: And it's so cool how I know absolutely nothing about poker, and you don't come from an e-sports background, and yet there are commonalities here. There's invisible threads between games. And we've discussed offline the great book, The Art of Learning, by Josh Waitzkin, which is a book about (of all things) chess and Tai Chi. Couldn't be more unlike. It's so ridiculous. It's such a beautiful thing.
Now, I want to focus on the sort of conundrum between—so we're talking about consciousness and how it relates to playing games and attention. And this is being recorded in the year 2021, in the middle of a robot takeover. My game, Super Smash Bros Melee, has experienced a little bit of a robot takeover. There are some training programs that people can use to get what is called "frame perfect execution." In the world of Super Smash Bros Melee, there is this dream of having perfect execution at machine levels of hitting buttons and then reacting as quick as you possibly can. And I was reading an article about—what is it? There was a section on GTO. That's Game Theory Optimum. Game Theory Optimal?
Chris: That's right.
Paul: And I thought, "Okay, yeah, that's like our version of frame perfect." But yours, GTO, that seems to be more about prediction and sort of masquerading your skill as only covering the most predictable and the most common plays of hands and strategies across all skill levels. Would that be a decent summary from somebody looking on the outside in, or am I completely in the dark here?
Chris: So every argument needs a straw man, and the straw man in the article you're referencing, "Play To Win: Meta-Skills of High Stakes Poker," is this style that has become prevalent and almost glorified within the poker world called "Game Theory Optimal." So game theory, this is referring to the approach of a Nash equilibrium. So an equilibrium solution being if you play in a certain way, your opponent has to respond in a certain way. Any deviation from this equilibrium will cause them to lose in the long run. And so it's very important to make clear that this is a strategy that is not optimal in the name of optimum, like the best strategy. It's a game theory optimal strategy, in that you pick a strategy that forces your opponent to play a certain way.
And the way that this strategy is created is you have machine learning programs playing against simulations of themselves for trillions and trillions of hands and reaching this ideal solution. And what has become of poker at the highest levels is it is now a game of memorization. That you study these edge cases and you learn how a computer would play it and try to embody that strategy the best that you can. And a lot of the interplay and growth and boundary exploration that has occurred in poker is this dance between how a human would play a hand and how a computer would play the hand.
And I've kind of come on the other side of this. I'm very old school. I'm thirty-four, which makes me like eighty in poker years. The best players are generally like you know, barely old enough to go to Vegas legally. I think that this is a bit of an evolutionary dead end: you have everybody memorizing solutions rather than internalizing the reasons for those solutions. Right? They aren't able to generate them on their own. And so I'm very principle-driven. I'm also very—I also think about things in a much more holistic way, and I don't want to have a strategy that is unbeatable, I want to have a strategy that is the best. And that takes my opponents' mistakes into account.
Now, as long as (knock on wood) I'm playing against other humans on the other side of the screen, they're going to be making mistakes. And so my strategy is designed to take maximum advantage of those mistakes.
Paul: Well, it's like—is the point of this to 'solve' poker? Like, where's the fun in that? It seems to me that we're—and I don't want to like stomp down on a community I have no part of, but I guess I can't avoid it. It's like, when did the point come to 'solve' poker? Like, how can we use technology to sort of aid us in improving the game itself? But I guess that's what it's done, 'cause it's played through trillions of hands and now we have all these answers to trillions of hands.
Chris: Yes.
Paul: Do I have that right?
Chris: Yeah, it's getting stuck in an evolutionary Red Queen race where you need to run twice as fast just to stay in place. I say, just to hold your standing in the poker world means being approximately twice as good every year. Like, the pace of improvement, especially due to these tools, which are—the tools are accelerating, the use of them is accelerating, et cetera. The derivative continues to increase. And so if an evolutionary—if you aren't doing this, you won't survive. Because there is so much money up for grabs. Right?
For a long time, poker was a lot more casual. Because there was this influx of new players, you didn't have to work as hard in order to make a good living. But as those players lost interest, as these tools came in, as more information about how to play became diffused throughout the community, if you wanted to continue to make a living playing this card game/video game for a living, you needed to get with the times or else you'd be left behind. You'd be left for dead on the side of the road. And, hey, there's plenty of games of poker where you can go in there and have a great time. But there's also the possibility that you can win millions of dollars playing the game, and you have to decide: "Am I here to have fun, or am I here to win?" And if you're here to win, you don't have a choice.
Paul: And you've stayed away from becoming a GTO player. Miraculously.
Chris: Yes.
Paul: How—yeah. My next question would be how have you managed to stay in the game despite all of this?
Chris: I don't know. I honestly think "Play To Win" is like an eight-thousand-word exploration of how I'm able to play to win, because I'm not quite sure. On paper, it doesn't make sense. I'm assuming that I have lots of old tricks up my sleeve that others don't have.
Paul: You're just lucky.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, I love for other people to think I'm lucky, and that's always been my MO for a number of years. I think both of us know that that's not the case. I like to say, "Luck is lazy math." Right? It's—we say something is lucky in life, because we don't actually want to think of the probabilistic universe that we live in. All outcomes do occur, but some outcomes are just less likely than others. Right? So we're trying to maximize our expected value in this game we call life.
But, how do I win? I know what I do well and I stick to that. I'm very, very careful about game selection. I only play in games where I know that I'm going to win. I think ego is the downfall of many a player.
Paul: How do you know what games you're going to win? And I was gonna ask you, what are you good at? If you're willing to reveal what those things are.
Chris: So—
Paul: Not your whole bag of tricks, obviously, but.
Chris: Poker is relativistic. So, simply, I play in games where I know there are players who are not as good as me.
Paul: Hmm.
Chris: It's really that simple. Just like in Smash, you know all the pros. If some guy with a screen name that you've never heard of sits down and wants to play for money, you're going to assume that you're better than him. Because you know all the good players.
Paul: Right. Yeah. Yeah. So by you saying you don't play—so you choose to play people who are how low below your skill level?
Chris: As low as possible.
Paul: As low as possible? Okay.
Chris: I mean the ideal opponent, and this is not controversial, is someone who is low-skill, high net worth.
Paul: Low-skill, high—Okay. So this is actually interesting, because this where our paths kinda cross. Or, not cross. Actually, diverge.
Chris: Now, to make it clear, right, I am playing in games where there are five to eight other players.
Paul: Okay.
Chris: And so, we'll use the six-max variant, as that's the most common variant in poker. So six players total. One of those musical chairs is filled by me. Generally, one of those other five seats is going to be filled by what's called a "recreational player." Someone who does not play for a living, and on average, should expect to lose in this game. And the other four players are going to be composed generally of other professionals who are as good, sometimes a little bit worse, sometimes a little bit better, depending on the day. Other professional players.
Paul: Okay.
Chris: So it doesn't mean that I am just playing against someone who's bad. Like, I have to be on top of my game, because there are all these other players who are also very good who are also in the game. Right? It's not a one-on-one, it's a multi-dimensional conflict.
Paul: Okay. Okay. So my game is one-on-one, it's you versus some other person who wants to destroy you. Who are you competing against in the game of poker? Like, it's gotta be yourself, to some degree. There are certain—you approach a session with certain things you want to improve. I come from a background of, "My goal in this game is to just beat the other person. He or she is the obstacle in my way, and for me to get to the next point in the tournament, they gotta go." Where—who do you compete against when you sit down? It's, the whole table, right? 'Cause you're trying to win the whole pot, you're trying to eliminate everybody.
Chris: It's a much more nuanced answer to that. I'll do my best.
Paul: Okay.
Chris: So, first it depends on whether you're playing a cash game or a tournament. If it's a tournament, you want to be the last person standing. And so everyone else needs to be eliminated, even if it's not you who eliminates them.
Paul: Ah.
Chris: So the general strategy in a tournament is you accumulate chips, or in this case monetary resources, so that you can survive, and you wield your chips like a weapon. Because it's a single shot kill, right? Everyone only has one life. Now, the game that I primarily play, which is less known because it's less televised, is called a cash game, in that you buy into the game with your own money. In many cases, it's no limit. You can bring as much money as you want, and you play for what's on the table. So the amount that's on the table, in front of the six players, that's the amount of money that's potentially up for grabs. That's the pot that's available. And so I am trying to win as much of that pot as possible, and I am indifferent to who I win it from. It could be from a recreational player, it could be from a professional. Every hand is an opportunity to increase my share of the pot.
And where it gets really, really interesting and nuanced and complicated, when we get to notions of finite versus infinite games. That this game, this session that I'm playing, this one table of six players, I'm generally on—maybe up as high as—twelve games with other players from this table. So I am—this is one battle, one front in a multi-polar war that could be being fought on twelve fronts simultaneously. So I can do things on this table to set up my opponents on other tables. Then it gets even more interesting, is that this game that we're playing today—I'm going to be playing against these opponents every day for years. And we're all tracking over time and making all these counter-adjustments on a daily basis for years, so this setup, the feint, the counter, can take a long time to play out.
So the hand, this hand that's being played in a vacuum, or in your case a single match, is only just one layer of the game. That's why something that I talk about very frequently, which you hinted at in the beginning, that the game takes place entirely in the players' heads, is that I'm not playing the same game as other people.
Paul: Yeah.
Chris: I am playing many levels above them.
Paul: Okay. Okay. So yeah, that brings me to my next point, which is I wanted to talk about context. You had a line in your article that went something like, "The beginning player doesn't relate the single moves beyond the context of that one interaction." So I translated that, in my game, to I do something in front of my opponent. I do a—I lunge forward, and they understand the lunge, but they don't understand the lunge outside of the context of that situation. So what I'm getting at here is that there is more of a longevity aspect to the game, as such. Like, Chris does something in the game, and then—I'll just say 'opponent' 'cause that's the language I'm so used to using—Opponent A sees that, and let's say they're a beginning player, and they don't have the experience to give them the wherewithal to see that move in the broader context of multiple games being played across time.
I get that in tournament play, only to the degree that the people I'm playing with in a tournament game will keep coming back to tournaments. Now, in my case, that's not very frequently. Only the people who are really dedicated to winning and competing, which is relatively speaking, to the wider scope of people who play Smash Bros Melee, is a very small number. But do you get that sense that there's more people kind of paying attention to the way that you're playing across time? It seems to me like there's more dedicated players. I don't know if that's an easy comparison or not, but I had never considered that. Like, this move means something that can kind of transform the way I see the game across time.
Chris: Yes. So it's just one variable amongst many, when you're modeling your opponent. So if I am playing with someone who I expect to never play with again, I am going to play in a maximally exploitative fashion. Exploitative in a game-theoretic sense, is like I'm going to do whatever I think is the perfect move in this scenario. Now, it's going to be very different if I'm playing against someone who I expect to play with in the future, is I have to take into account what are the second-order effects of this move that I'm about to do? How are they going to react to that? And sometimes it can be very correct when I'm taking this zoomed-out lens to do a move that is sub-optimal within the match in order to set them up for a future match.
Paul: Yeah. So, second-order principles. It's like, "How did what I just do—how did that change the way—how did that like change their operating system for adopting five seconds from now?" Or however long of a time span you use in poker.
Chris: Yes. And the layer there is not predicting what they're going to do off of this move, it's, "What do I want them to do, and what is the move that puts them in that position?"
Paul: So this stuff seems so self-evident to me as somebody who plays—you know, all these games are played by humans, but I still cannot wrap my head around how it is that a system that can play trillions of hands of poker—like, on some level I get it. Like you value adaptation, reading the room, reading your opponent, the human element—which is always there. We always play games against humans. Something I always tell beginning players is just like, "You gotta play the human game. Machines don't go on tilt." But you can—I read the part about Garry Kasparov who came up with hands that even Deep Blue hadn't thought of yet. It seems so wild that a machine couldn't—like, how do you avoid the hands that haven't been predicted yet by a machine? But is it the adaptation factor that's so constitutional to the way that you play? You're a ray of survival in the game so far?
Chris: So, the concept that you're pointing to is centrality. So maybe I'll use a basketball metaphor, or—you know, I know we're both a fan of the inner game of tennis. I'm taking tennis lessons now, so very much in that part of learning phase where you are paying attention to where your opponent is comfortable. A lot of early tennis is just avoiding unforced errors. And for example, if you notice that your opponent isn't as comfortable on their backhand side, then the optimal strategy is to hit it to their backhand every single time. And for you to practice those shots over and over, assuming you're going to play this opponent more often, so that you are really, really more comfortable in the situation that your opponents are uncomfortable.
And thinking about it maybe in a Smash context, where you are studying moves that are rare. Situations that don't come into play very often. But what we often forget when we are doing statistical analysis is that we are in control of how often the situation occurs. So think about it in poker. If I notice that someone is really uncomfortable on big pots on the river, I am going to intentionally make sure all of the river pots we play are really big, because I have a relative advantage in that situation, and so my situational advantage is multiplied by how often that situation occurs.
Think about basketball. If your team plays really well on the fast break, you want to be running the press the whole game, because you're going to have more situations where you have a relative advantage.
So, recognizing on an opponent-versus-opponent basis, what are the situations that you've studied more, you're more comfortable, maybe your character has an advantage there. And how can you make those situations occur a higher proportion of the time?
Paul: Make the situations that they're not used to happen more often.
Chris: Yes.
Paul: Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent.
Is there a danger to analysis? Can you get stuck trying to analyze too often?
Chris: Absolutely.
Paul: See, that's something I've never considered. It's very popular to do match analysis. Not even just in my game, but in many games. To study sets. But I do see a compulsive tendency to just keep studying. Yeah, it's helpful, but what are those traps?
Chris: I think study can become a crutch. Particularly when it comes to statistical analysis, people become dependent upon them, and their intuition atrophies. They start to trust themselves less. So all these things that we're talking about, I try to treat as tie-breakers, for when I have these coin-flip type decisions that are very close. Either different heuristics, rules of thumb, that I employ to both randomize my decision-making, which is a very critical component of all games, but also to find little pockets of edge. But if I become a slave to, "What are the optimal strategies?" or, you know, "What is my opponent doing wrong?", I lose that advantage, where I believe very strongly that I don't want to become dependent upon the analysis. It's just another tool in my arsenal to reveal my blind spots.
Paul: Yeah. 'Cause it implies that your opponent is going to pick the optimal decision every time, and in a game of varying skill levels, like what's the chance that they're going to pick the options that you've studied?
Chris: Yes. Exactly. And yeah, it can cause you to become—like, the game doesn't go how you had planned it, and that creates an emotional fragility—
Paul: Yeah.
Chris:—where you try to force a square peg into a round hole. Or all of a sudden you create this narrative in your mind, which is super pervasive, of, "Things aren't going the way that I planned for." Right? It's a common scenario in poker where you have an amazing hand on the turn, and the final card of the river comes, and it's the worst possible card, and you're like, "Oh, crap, what do I do now? Like, this always happens to me. I just can't have a good hand hold up." And you get trapped in this narrative of becoming a victim, versus, "This is just another opportunity for me to make the right decision. This was a low-probability event, but it was always a possibility, and I needed to be mentally prepared for it.”
Paul: Yeah. So it doesn't put in to consider the invisible possibilities that could happen in the game. Stuff you didn't study, stuff that wasn't in the textbook, stuff that wasn't in the study material.
Chris: Yes.
Paul: I would love for you to go into player archetypes, 'cause boy do Smash Bros players have some strong player archetypes in heuristics of players. There's actually two players in particular in Smash Bros Melee that embody perfectly the archetype of the completely robotic player, and the antithesis to that, which is the absolute wild man. And those players are Mew2King and Mang0. Mew2King is the archetypal computer, and Mang0 is the archetypal, "I'll just throw something that the computer has never processed before." That's at the pinnacle of the game.
And then what's so cool about that is that those two styles are so popular at the top level that people emulate them. People who are drawn to robots, a robotic style and deconstructing the game and studying for hours on end and practicing alone in your mother's basement for twenty hours a day, are drawn to Mew2King's style. And then people who just want to go to tournaments shit-faced drunk are attracted to Mang0's style, and just wanna be complete wild men on the stage. Are there such strong archetypes in the world of poker?
Chris: Absolutely. The first couple thoughts that I can't resist: first, the acknowledgement that there are many paths to the top of the mountain. There is no ‘best style.’
Paul: Yep.
Chris: And to over-identify with one style I think is a path to obsolescence.
Paul: Yeah, that's what Bruce Lee said.
Chris: Yeah. The best style, be like water, right? No style.
Paul: Right.
Chris: That you should be able to embody both of these extremes. I talk about this as a mental superposition. That you are both the drunk unpredictable player and the extremely cold and calculating player. That both of these coexist, and you can call upon these sub-selves when the situation calls for it.
I think there's also a whole other psychological thread that we can go down around how these archetypes become self-reinforcing. That the expectations others have for us become a container that our liquid selves conform to. Others expect us to play or perform in a certain way, and thus we play or perform in that way to match their expectations, which becomes calcified into an identity.
Now, in a poker contest, thinking about archetypes—if you picture like a two-by-two, the major two dimensions are tight/loose and—making sure I have it—passive/aggressive. So you have tight/loose. Tight players are players who don't like to play too many hands. They'd rather stay out of the action until they have something good, so they're doing lots of folding, particularly before the flop.
Paul: Defensive.
Chris: Whereas loose—not defensive. Not defensive. So it's like, how often do they get involved? Whereas players who are loose, we say they are loose, they have loose standards of when to get involved, they like action. They like to, "Let's see the flop." They like to play lots of hands, they like to be involved. That's one dimension of the archetype.
The other archetype is passive or aggressive. So this is when a player is involved, what is their preferred playing style? So passive is matched very closely to defensive, which is they tend to do more check and calling rather than betting and raising. So they're a little bit more cautious, they like to keep the pot small, they see lots of monsters under the bed. It's a very safe style. And then your aggressive players, they like to drive the action. So they're doing betting and raising, putting people into tough scenarios, getting into big pots.
So you have—so knowing what their intersection is, right, in the two-by-two dimension, tells you a whole lot about how a player is going to approach any number of situations. Right? So someone who is tight and passive, right, they have very few hands that they're getting involved with, and when they play those hands they play them very defensively, all of a sudden if this player is making very big bets or raises, you should be very alarmed. Right? This is what's referred to as a polarized range, in that because the number of hands they could have that are good is so small, they either have like a monster hand or nothing. Right? So it's not that these players can't bluff, it's that they bluff very seldom, and they have very few hands which they need to bluff.
Paul: Okay.
Chris: The opposite extreme, you have someone who is loose and aggressive, they're playing tons of hands and they're playing very aggressively, so they're going to tend to get into very large pots without good hands. These are good players to trap, and these are good players to lower your own standards because what is considered a good hand is relative, and you can loosen up a little bit. So that's immediately—when someone sits down at the table who I've never seen before, that's my first step, is to put them into one of those four quadrants.
Paul: Where do you think you fall?
Chris: Abstain to answer. I—
Paul: Company secret?
Chris: I think I'm—I tell—okay, okay. I'll bite. So when I'm teaching people poker, I generally only work with expert players, but occasionally I'll have like a hedge fund manager or a venture capitalist who is fortunate enough to know rich friends who like to play poker, and is interested in improving their game. Mostly for just bragging rights, so he can beat his other rich buddies in the game, but you know, it's always fun to take your friends' money. And so I'll teach him some of these principles of poker. And I'll tell him to play as if you live in a tight but aggressive fashion.
So if you extend this to business or life, thinking about a tight approach is you have fewer priorities. Fewer things that enter your sphere of attention, as we were talking about before. Most things you ignore. Most opportunities are not for you. But when you do get involved, you're very aggressive about it. You move quickly, when you have high conviction you raise the stakes. So on average, I would say my default style is closest to this: I try to be very particular about the situations I get involved across all areas of my life, but when I do, I try to sprint as fast as I can.
Paul: So the game imitates—see, I've always believed that as crazy as it sounds, and I don't think it's crazy at all, that how you approach the game actually reflects how you approach life.
Chris: Absolutely. I think poker is very much a sandbox for understanding human behavior, and the approach that I take and that many players take is—so our equivalent of a Comic-Con or a tournament was the World Series of Poker in Vegas every summer. So like, fifty-three tournaments and a carnival of side cash games around that. And imagine twenty-one to twenty-three-year-old Chris—we would rent this big Vegas mansion, it would be like a frat house with twelve other players. And this was our SXSW, or Con, or Davos, where all of the poker players of the world got together.
And you know, many (for a time) of my best friends in the world—this is probably more familiar to you than to most—were people who I didn't even know what their names were. Like, I don't even know what they look like. I just had like their avatar, because we would be talking on AOL, Instant Messenger, or Telegram, now. This type of thing. And so you meet up for the first time in Vegas, and you're like, "Oh my god, you look and act exactly the way that you play, and it is so uncanny." And I see that so often, that the game imitates life.
Paul: It absolutely does. People get to know you so well from the way you approach a game. But I think that the way you approach the game is as close as one can get to a healthy approach to life. It's almost like a choose your own battles thing. And then once the opportunities that sort of fit into your personality, your temperament, then you go all-in on those. 'Cause those are your opportunities, and god, those are the opportunities that you don't want to squander, because they're so intrinsic to how you behave. What you were—the temperament that you have, and your potential to sort of mold the opportunities around your temperament. It's in the game. Like, you're attracted to those things in the game.
People who are—some people even have elements of their personality that they don't even know about that come forth in the game. Like I've discovered very aggressive and very competitive and very angry parts of myself through Melee that I did not know were there, that I've had to reconcile. And it comes out when I play. You already psychoanalyzed your play style, I'll do mine. People describe me as "always moving," "hyper," and "active." And the pitfalls of that would be "doesn't know when to stop." I've been working on this. "Doesn't know when to put the brakes down and observe" the consequences of the interactions that I've had on my opponent.
For the most part, I've always been like pressing buttons and being active and doing something. Putting cards on the deck. That's probably a terrible analogy, since I don't dare use the language of your game, since I have no experience in it.
But my improvement path has been so focused on observing how my opponent has been transformed by what I've done onstage. It's been the biggest obstacle to my improvement, because I've been acting so fast. And god, I guess if I were to zoom out I'd say that's pretty accurate to the way my temperament is. I'm very interested in many, many things, and it's hard for me to put the brakes down and just kind of observe how my world and how the people who I interact with on a daily basis are sort of influenced by my tendencies towards engagement with the world, or lack thereof sometimes.
It's crazy. It's a beautiful thing, man. Like, people—it's no wonder why people play games. It's not just for the game. It's like, "Well, why are you playing poker for ten hours a day? It's just cards." Oh, gosh. You are sorely mistaken. It's much more than that. Like, the game that I play—I mean, I don't know the history of poker, but it's very rare for a game made in—Super Smash Bros Melee was made on the Nintendo GameCube, and was designed as a family party game for children. And there's twenty-somethings going to tournaments to compete in this family kids' game. So it's a beautiful thing. It's an absolutely beautiful thing.
Chris: Yeah. It comes down to having the right mechanics, and so many effects in the world are emergent, that the emergent behavior is greater than the sum of the parts. You brought up this thought for me—the game as an interface with which to observe yourself. I think this comes into play a lot with our behavior. Just like in physics where you don't know where a particle is until it's observed, we don't know how we're feeling until we have some observation that we're forced to reconcile with. Right? And the thing about a game where it has an objective score, whether that's dollars or matches won, is that you're forced to reconcile with the trade-offs of your decisions. And there is no room for willing blindness. Where so many areas of our lives we lack that feedback, and we can just continue forward blissfully ignorant of all the things that we're doing wrong. In most cases, for our benefit. Right? Our ignorance is generally to allow us to move forward in the world without falling into existential angst at every corner. But this is really important, to be able to embody this stance of, "Let's assume that everything that I'm doing is wrong. How could it be wrong?"
I think about this on a continuum, where when we're in the game, we want to be fully present. I think of this as confidence. I am playing as if I'm the best player in the world, and I don't tilt, and I don't make bad decisions, I don't chase after bad cards. And then as soon as the game ends, I'm like, "I'm the worst player in the world."
Paul: Yes.
Chris: "What's one thing I can do to get better?"
Paul: Yeah.
Chris: Because, man, the rabbit hole is infinitely deep. I've been playing poker for sixteen years—I'm still terrible. I may be one of the least terrible players in the world, but I'm still very terrible. I have lots and lots to learn.
Paul: Yeah, yeah.
Chris: And that framing, that lens with which to view the world, that there is always another dimension to growth, that there is always something if we're willing to pay attention and be curious, that we can learn from every experience. That becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The score, the dollar amount in our bank account, a lot of that takes care of itself if we can bring that presence to everything we do.
Paul: It takes care of itself. Okay. That's a great thing to touch on, kind of. So it takes care of itself. Like, the desire to win, the desire to make money. If you make that the focal point of the reason why you play, it can be a blinding light. You know, it can blind you. It's so weird. You try to pursue happiness: "I'm gonna go so hard on happiness, I'm gonna try as hard as I can to be happy and successful." It's gonna, you know, it's gonna cast a shadow on the actual source of happiness that's sort of over here and to the left, but you're so focused on the central point right here, but it keeps moving away. And so I have always approached—not always. I've had to do this lately. I've had to approach my game with that mentality: Okay. The goal is to win. Always to win. Right? But if you try so hard and you press the buttons so fast, as hard as you can, like, "I'm trying to win," you're not gonna win. A hundred percent of the time you are not going to win. Try-hards. They're called try-hards.
Chris: Yes, exactly.
Paul: Yeah. I try-hard a lot, and it's never worked out for me at all. Yeah.
Chris: The hardest part about anything is making it look effortless. That's the last mile. And in many competitive pursuits, if it's obvious you're trying hard, and that gets your opponents to try harder against you. So that's the key, is to make it look so easy that they won't take it as seriously, or they'll be so intimidated by you, it's like, "Man, he barely even needs to try to beat me, why am I even here?" Like, if you can win that mental game, you've already won.
Paul: What are you working on now in your game?
Chris: I've many dimensions which will be able to translate to a non-poker-player audience. I've successfully avoided the second-most popular variant of poker, called Pot Limit Omaha. So it's the exact same rules as Hold 'Em, except I have four cards in my hand instead of two, of which I must use exactly two. And this simple change creates many more combinations of potential hands. Right? We're making a five-card hand out of nine cards, four of which are private. And this game, because the hands tend to be bigger, tends to attract people who really like to gamble. So I have been learning this game recently after successfully avoiding it and being a hyper-specialist for well over a decade. So it's a very humbling experience.
Obviously, a lot of my Texas Hold 'Em experience translates over into Omaha, but there's—it's very rare in Hold 'Em these days to encounter a situation where I'm just like, "I have no idea what the eff I'm doing." And that happens several times an hour in Omaha, which is both exciting and a little bit scary at the same time. So I'm enjoying that.
And I think of it as, "I want to be able to take advantage of as many opportunities to play as I can." As the game becomes more fragmented, where it's just harder to find a game at all times these days—like, there's lots more pockets rather than these global player pools. The more games that I'm super comfortable playing, the more opportunities I'll have to play in the best game. So, yeah. Learning Pot Limit Omaha is probably the biggest one. I've also started playing some live poker again, post-vaccinations. I had been online-only for probably the past four years. So I play in a Monday streamed game, so it's live-streamed. It gets like ten to twenty thousand people watching, depending upon the week. And the cool part about that is I can watch back myself afterwards, and not only see, you know, "How did I look, did I give anything away in terms of tells?" but replay the hand with the benefit of experience. "What did I miss in the moment that I need to pay attention to?" So, two very different dimensions to poker that have been kind of fun to perform.
Paul: Does this require you to sort of build up new heuristics for understanding what I would call a rule set for the game? Like a different interpretation of the behaviors of players?
Chris: Yes. It's—many of the things that were once true do not translate, and that's a process to uncover. What can I export, and what do I need to rebuild from first principles?
Paul: Are there any specific elements of that have been sort of bubbling up in your brain, lately? We talked earlier about prediction. Does that coincide with what this is about?
Chris: Yeah. One that I think you and many listeners could relate to is the dynamic of people playing on a televised setting. So, generally hey, I play online and the hand happens and you can see who won, but everyone moves on, and barely anyone except for a professional thinks about any hand. Maybe they lost a really big hand, they'll think about it. But they're more or less over it. And also people know they're not being observed, so sometimes they can do some silly things. Now, as we know—I think the Hawthorne Experiment, where they were in the factory, and all they did was just turn the brightness of the lighting up a little bit, and all of a sudden people worked a little bit harder because they knew they were being watched. All of a sudden, when you bring cameras and lights into play, everyone plays very differently, because, "Hey, my friends are watching at home. I don't want to do something silly that my friends are going to laugh at." Or, the opposite extreme is, "My friends are watching, so I'm gonna try this crazy suicide bluff so I have something to brag about." So there's this new variable where everyone reacts to the cameras differently.
Paul: Yep.
Chris: People just don't play the way that I'm used to, and trying to account for that variable has been a challenging experience.
Paul: Oh my god, yeah. Dude, people play so differently on tournament day. It's like—you play somebody for, what we call 'friendlies,' non-tournament matches for like eight hours, which is what we do, and the moment you get up on a big stage for the tournament, completely different person, 'cause now they're trying to impress Mom and Dad at home and say, "Oh look, I won a video game tournament." Completely different players.
Well, it's so interesting what pressure does to the way you behave. You put the lights on. Like, people are watching. You don't want to fuck up in front of everybody. And you're modeling a different sort of ideal of player. It's very interesting, how that happens.
Chris: The goals decouple, right? The goal normally would be, "How do I make the most money I can?" But now it's conflated with, "How do I not do anything really stupid?" Or, "How do I get invited back?" Right? If you don't play any hands, you don't get invited to play again, because you're boring for TV, so all of these other goals sort of coalesce and mix together into this like, yeah. It becomes very—the behavior becomes very emergent and hard to predict. And yeah, it's something that I'm slowly getting used to in myself. I realize that I play differently when I'm being watched, and I have to account for that variable as well. It gets very perplexing.
Paul: I take it GTO play doesn't translate very well into real-life, IRL play. Right? Does that only pertain to online play?
Chris: No, yeah. It generally—some of the principles, particularly for pre-flop, there's generally agreed best practices for pre-flop play, like when to get involved, that translates. But GTO works best when you're playing against other good players, right? Think about it as, if I can use a war metaphor, you're leading as few fronts of attack as possible. Right? You have very high castle walls. But when other people just have wide-open defenses, right, their castle gate is like, "Hey, come on in," there's no need to be that defensive.
Paul: Okay. What are some mistakes that you see, the most common mistakes from beginning players?
Chris: The first one is just playing too many hands. You know, if you get involved in marginal situations, you're gonna be put in very tough spots.
Paul: "Marginal situations"? What does that mean? Like you're stuck in a corner? Marginal, like the margins of a—
Chris: Playing hands that you shouldn't.
Paul: Hmm.
Chris: Because the pot grows as the hand goes on, what is a small mistake in the early rounds becomes multiplied as the hand progresses. So beginning players, they get involved too often, and what is a small mistake becomes a really big mistake by the river. So that's the biggest one, is just playing tight but aggressive. What's another common one? Another common one is absolute strength versus relative strength. So, because you are interacting with the community cards, what is considered a 'good hand' varies quite a bit depending on the community cards, where sometimes if you don't have a full house or better you should fold, because of the cards there. And sometimes like, ace high, which is no pair, like best no pair, is an amazing hand. And so most beginning players think in terms of absolute hands. Like, "How strong is my hand?" Versus, "How strong is my hand relative to the average hand on this board?"
And obviously, there's levels to that. It's like, "How strong is my hand compared to how strong my opponent thinks my hand is?" That type of thing.
Paul: Okay.
Chris: But generally, if someone's like, "Oh, I have aces." And sometimes aces is the best hand in the world, and sometimes aces is like, "Get the hell out of here." And beginning players have a hard time discerning that.
Paul: What about mistakes of advanced players? What do they make? Hubris?
Chris: I think hubris is the biggest one. That's—where you see games where it's like, it doesn't make sense why this game is running, because everyone is really good, there's usually one player who is just like trying to be king of the hill. Like, stream on Twitch, show everyone he's the greatest. And it tends not to end too well for these guys, because everyone else generally only takes a seat when they have an advantage, and they'll hop in for a couple hours, suss it out, see how the guy's playing. If he's playing bad they'll stay, if he's playing good they'll leave. So it's one of these kinds of adverse selection things, and they're just—like the more action you give, the less likely it is you have an edge for all that action.
Something that I like to say is, "I only play when I have an advantage." Other players dilute their advantage by playing without an advantage.
Paul: Ah, yeah. Sun Tzu. Still, to this day.
Chris: Yeah. Deciding, knowing when to fight and when not to fight. And in the Sun Tzu context—man, I am so, so influenced by that stuff. I think my favorite writer for just general strategy that applies to life, business, poker, is all of the OODA Loop stuff, which is John Boyd. And I think he is the bridge to this Eastern philosophy, as devised by Sun Tzu and some of the other Chinese, post-Tao philosophers.
One of my favorite ideas that I've been playing a lot with, recently, that I'd love to test on you, is in the West we tend to think about the world in cause and effect terms. That the world is deterministic, and A follows B. I brush my teeth, and now my teeth are white. That we do something, and then whatever happens next is the result. And the Sun Tzu approach to warfare and just general the Eastern philosophy of life is that the world is indeterministic and we have no idea what is going to happen. Not only do we not know the percentages, we don't even know what the options for potential states of the world are. Like the world—the future states of the world are completely unknowable.
And so in this case there are only conditions and consequences, where there are conditions, things that are happening in the world which lead to consequences. And from a strategic point of view, it's knowing—think of it like you're the general of an army. "What conditions are beneficial for my position on the battlefield?" What are the consequences I want, what are the conditions that lead to those consequences?
So, as you said, in Smash, where a lot of the game if you're zooming in enough is inaction. Not inaction as like, "I'm sitting here twiddling my thumbs, like, la-dee-da-dee-da." It's, "I'm waiting for the right moment to strike." That there are going to be conditions which are ripe, which are ready for me to have maximum effectiveness. And like, I'm surfing. I'm paddling, I'm paddling, I'm paddling, waiting for that right wave. And I know what that wave is going to look like. So when those ripe conditions emerge, that's when I move.
So, I think this applies to everything. When I talk to my performance clients, and I'm helping them to optimize the architecture of their life, it's identifying what are the conditions which are most predictive of their success. However they define that. Feeling happy, feeling fulfilled, getting shit done. What are those conditions which lead to those consequences? Thus, how can we rate those conditions as often as possible, and recognize when those conditions are ripe, and then use those conditions as a springboard for action? Yeah.
Paul: Well, it's like a cause-and-effect attitude can't be sort of cut from the propensity to think that you're in control of everything. That I did A and B happened, which means that B a hundred percent of the time will happen as a consequence of doing A. Like, I do a move in Smash, I lunge forward, and they reacted in a particular way. Okay. Well, how much of their reaction was predicated on you doing that lunge? How much of it was a consequence of that? It's not a hundred percent. It ties back into the Stoicism ideals. Like, you can only control yourself.
Chris: Yes.
Paul: Focus on that. And it's very hard for us Westerners to adopt this pattern of behavior, this mindset that is 'okay' with not being the center of the universe, that "I can control everything." I mean, god, you can barely control what time you go to bed every night or what time you wake up in the morning every—I mean, there are things you can control, but just because you've developed this sense of personal responsibility or this stoic attitude of, "I'm gonna control myself" doesn't mean that it branches off into the wider world around you.
I mean, yes. It is very difficult for Westerners to see this, because I've—so much of the improvement that I've experienced in my game, in Super Smash Bros Melee, has come from reading books like the Tao Te Ching, and The Inner Game of Tennis, and The Art of Learning. We call it "The Magic Tennis Book," actually. It's literally called "The Magic Tennis Book," because there's this player named Kev—Yes, I know. Kevin Nanny, PPMD, who used to be one of the top six players in the world. Still is to some degree. The meta-game has sort of changed since he used to compete actively—he sort of brought this book into popularity. And from The Inner Game of Tennis I discovered The Art of Learning, and then through Josh Waitzkin's book I discovered one of my favorite books that I've ever read, which is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Have you ever read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?
Chris: Quality, yeah.
Paul: Quality, yeah, the meditation on quality. I don't underline books hardly ever. I underlined many passages from that book, because they were so foundational to transforming the heuristics that I used to view the game. And then as I've—I read that about five years ago. And as—I would say hopefully I've matured since then—as I've matured, I've been sort of able to branch those lessons out into the broader, real world, and then tie it back into the game itself. But it's so fascinating that all of these lessons—Like, Art of Learning and The Inner Game of Tennis, that's sort of a retelling, or an autobiographical retelling, of these ancient Taoist philosophies, these Eastern philosophies of detachment and action through non-action—I've had so many revelatory experiences from like, "Oh my god, I can do something without doing something. I can play with the presence that I have—"
And I mean, there's this concept in Melee called "stage presence" where I'm in front of you, and just the fact of me being in front of you is going to cause you to do something. And you can kind of manipulate that. Like, I'll feign something. And you talk about feints upon feints upon feints. Like, I'll move back and then I'll observe how you react to me moving back. I haven't lunged, I haven't attacked you. I've just moved back. And what Kevin Nanny does, what PPMD has taught all of the up-and-coming Smash players, is you can sort of treat a lunge back as an attack. Because it's a psychological attack. It's like, "Okay, great. I've put in you the sort of data point that I can manipulate. You're going—there's now a higher chance hopefully of you reacting in a particular way from me moving back, instead of me lunging forward. But me moving back is aggressive, even though I've moved back." So to the average player, to the weaker player, they would see—they would move back, but it would only be defensive. The more advanced player would move back, but that's part of the aggressive plan. It's like, "I've moved back, but it's an aggressive moving back."
And I didn't get that until I explored these books, like the Tao Te Ching and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It just blew my mind. Like, this isn't in the manual. I didn't know this.
Chris: So many roads we can go down there. Yeah. I mean with reading, there's—so many people ask me about recommendations for books on business or books on productivity, and I'm like—that's not the places you want to look. You want to look at the things that are timeless that you think have nothing to do with what your day-to-day is, and that's where the real insights, the real paradigm shifts are going to come.
I wanted to explore or expand upon a really good point you made around control, of how much of our cognitive edifice is dedicated to putting ourself back into the driver's seat in a world which, sorry, is very cold and indifferent, and really we're very, very small in the grand cosmic scale of things and don't really have all that much control in our lives. That this really inconvenient truth causes us to do things to try to put us in a narrative sense back in control. Just like, hey, why we build statues and donate money to institutions and have kids just to forget that we're gonna die and we're not gonna live forever. Sorry.
Paul: Right.
Chris: But once we can recognize that we are not in control, that we are served these conditions, this state of the world, we give ourselves the power to act. Hey, we can't control what is going to happen, but we can control our reaction to it. The Stoic notion that you introduced that knowing what's in control and out of our control, that wisdom is knowing the difference. That once we know what we can do, that creates an affordance to act, to seize upon conditions, or to wait for better conditions when conditions aren't right.
One of my big ideas right now—so, in psychology there's the fundamental attribution error, which says, "Even though we know this we still do it." Which is just like all of our biases, that, hey, we become aware of them a little bit earlier, but they're very deep. We still do them. It's that when someone else has a good outcome, "Yeah, they got really lucky." When someone else has a bad outcome, "they're a dickhead." Or, you know what I mean—
Paul: Not unlucky. You're anything but unlucky.
Chris: Anything. They, you know, they missed the penalty kick. "Man, that guy really sucks."
Paul: Right.
Chris: Right. So it's like, other people: good outcomes luck, bad outcomes lack of skill or ability. But of course, when we look at ourselves with the rose-colored glasses, as we are wont to do: when we have good results, "Man, I played amazing in that match." Or when I have bad results, "Yeah, he just got so lucky. I should have won that. That match-up is just so good for me." And like, just doing anything we can to avoid taking away a lesson from defeat. That the truth of the universe is the opposite, that we like to think that we succeeded, that we write this twenty-two hundred business biography of like, "How I Got To the Top of the World In Business Through Hard Work and Effort," and the truth is that we succeed through luck. We fail through our lack of effort. That these conditions are not in our control. Yes, we were able to seize upon these opportunities where many would have just let them go by, but the truth is the opposite of what we like to think: our lack of control is empowering, because it releases us from this narrative of all these bad things are happening to us. That failures become opportunities to learn.
So, yeah. I said, so much of this goes back to the mindset, right? Being curious rather than judgmental. Seeing failures as lessons, things on your to-do list as opportunities. That we have not chosen the place that we are in this moment, but we can choose what we do next.
Paul: Mm-hmm. See, a lack of control might scare people into thinking that they have no agency. "Well, if I have no control, then what am I supposed to do? Or who's guiding me? How am I supposed to behave in the world if I'm not in control?" If I were to play Devil's Advocate.
Chris: Yes. I mean, I'll rip the band-aid off. I think free will is a complete illusion, so I mean, yes. You have a lack of agency, deal with it. But what can you do is that if your future behavior is determined by the conditions you will find yourself in. Right? If you sleep well, you will likely have a better day and you'll get into fewer arguments. Or, okay, if you work out you'll feel better about yourself and you'll be more likely to write when you put it on your plan. You are in control of the conditions that your future self will experience, and that's how we exercise our agency: we put our future selves in a position to succeed. We make what we want to do in the future easier to do, and conversely, we make what we don't want to do in the future harder to do. If I don't want to wake up tomorrow and have an ice cream sundae for breakfast, don't have any ice cream. Right? Don't have any ice cream sitting in the freezer, and then it makes it very, very difficult. But if I change those conditions, I just put a delicious ice cream sundae right on my nightstand, what am I likely to do when I wake up? I'm likely to eat an ice cream sundae. I exercise agency, but only in the future.
Paul: Well, a cause-and-effect attitude to life is only exclusive to robots. And I was gonna say that, you know, machines and computers don't really experience—the word is escaping me now. Environment, or context. What is the word you were using earlier antithetical to cause and effect? Condition. Condition.
Chris: Conditions, yes.
Paul: Besides speed. I was looking at my computer and thinking, you know, over the next ten years this thing is gonna get slower. But it's not gonna get moody. It's not gonna get unhealthy. It's gonna get slower. We as a species have a broader range of things that we can experience. Speed is just one of them, the speed at which we behave and think.
Chris: Yes.
Paul: Like, cause and effect, like A happens therefore B happens, or I can do this thing this fast, is—like, those things alone, we operate beyond way beyond that.
Chris: Yes.
Paul: It's like we have so much more experience of the subjective. The divine, the beautiful. You know, something even smaller, like feeling good after a workout, the physiological effects of working out, of eating right. We can experience those things, and those sort of change our psychic environment, which in turn really does change what you pay attention to. 'Cause if you're just putting crap in your body all the time, you're going to be paying attention—like, "Where's more of that same crap that I can put in my body?" 'Cause that's what I'm conditioning myself to experience. Garbage in, garbage out.
Chris: Oh, man. Oh, this is really good. It's very fun. So this notion of the API layer—right? A kind of underlying subtext to this conversation is the exponential growth of algorithms, right? Like, man against the machine and how a lot of ways that man tries to beat the machine is to become a machine, rather than leaning into the things that make us uniquely human. Right? I don't want to try to drive a car, because a machine can do that better than me. But there's always going to be this one percent of things that is one time is completely condition-dependent, that no number of variables could be input into a model to even approach my level of ability, and that as a lifetime North Star is where I'm always heading towards. Or like, "What are the things that only I, Chris Sparks, Human, can do?"
Because you have—I think of this as kind of like a rising tide. This API layer of, "You are above the API." API is like you plug in a specific program that does like one specific job. You're above the API layer if you maintain agency and you wake up in the morning and say, "I don't think I want to work today," or, "Oh, I think I want butter and jam on my toast instead of just butter." You make those decisions. You're below the API layer when the algorithm serves you with your choices. When you decide, "Oh, I'm gonna read this article because it was in my newsfeed," or, "Okay, I'm gonna go pick up this passenger or deliver this package because that's what the algorithm told me to do." Right? That this layer of decisions that the algorithm is making is continually rising, and the speed is a derivative. It's accelerating exponentially, but it will never reach this point of doing things that are one-time creative completely contextually-dependent, and that's where all of the opportunities are for humans as a species.
Paul: Right. And if we're talking about content-predicting algorithms, those algorithms can only predict what they know from the model of you. They don't know you. They don't know the human who has the potential to change their mind, to wake up tomorrow morning and then be for some reason more interested in knitting than they are in politics. The changing thing, the changing aspect. This is also why I'm not afraid of AI taking over the world of creativity or writing articles and poetry and art and podcasts. AI right now (and obviously we need to distinguish between general AI and AI as it is, the general AI being the Terminator-style AI), it can't—it can only emulate, as far as I know, like emulate styles. Like, "Oh, this is a very John Milton style of poetry." This looks very telling, but it—
Chris: There's nothing new being created. It's an imitation—
Paul: Right. Well, it looks like something new is being created. It's the illusion of something new being spawned from a wide pool of things that it's familiar with, and so it looks new. But it's not, it's just a pattern.
Chris: Yeah.
Paul: Like, "What's related to this, and what's related to that, and then how can I make it coherent?" Which is what the AI is sort of "thinking" about. "How can I make it coherent?" And usually it fails at that. It looks new. But it's not.
Chris: Yes. Everything is a remix when you think of a creative sense, but I think a lot of the creativity—it exists at the intersections. It exists in creating new combinations between things that have not been created, and so even though it's not completely new, I think a human creativity is more generative rather than predictive.
Paul: Yeah.
Chris: And thus I think there will be increasingly convincing imitations that will be beautiful in their own sense, if we're thinking about something like art. It will never be a replacement.
Paul: Right.
Chris: And I think there's a lot of things that will become close enough, convenient enough, good enough to be replaced. And there's a lot of moral, ethical arguments around there as far as like, what should be human or not. Is hard assembly-line blue-collar work something that we really need to protect? Obviously there's a lot of short-term pain that comes from uplifting something that is like an industry, but that—you know, who am I to say what ethically should or should not exist? All I can do is think about, "What is the life that I want to lead?" And hopefully by example others can emulate that. And I think that that creative path, finding new combinations, experimentation, trying things that most likely will fail—that's the human unique factor. And I say, I'm always trying—you know, whether it's—I'm very focused on human performance, very focused on competing against other humans—that's been the thread that ties how I see everything together. It's like, understanding humans so that we can increase our performance and remain unique.
Paul: Yeah. It's the generative aspect of human creativity, the ingenuity of it. To be able to spawn and give birth to these new experiences. We're experiencing creatures. A machine can't experience something. It's like, "Oh, I want to think like a machine. I want to think as fast as a machine." No, you don't. So much of the beauty of life comes from your faculty for experiencing the subjective. Just the thrill of a good game when you're playing at your best. A machine doesn't know when it's playing at its best, a machine just plays. And then the lows of playing at your worst. Like, "Oh, gosh, I was playing so good last month. God, that felt so great. Man, remember when I was competing against that person, and oh, it was so close, and we had these great moments." And you share a drink together about that beautiful game you had.
Chris: Yeah.
Paul: It's the beauty of it. Like, you don't remember—
Chris: Comparing ourselves to an ideal which is not only impossible, it's something that we wouldn't want, even if we had it.
Paul: Right. Yeah, I wouldn't want it. No, not at all.
Chris: Who wants to—no one's playing checkers for large sums of money. Right? It's a completely solved game. What's the fun in doing something when there's nothing more to figure out?
Paul: Right.
Chris: That's what makes life exciting: the pleasure of finding things out and knowing that there's always another frontier.
Paul: So poker doesn't have—Like, you don't think that poker will ever be "Solved." with a capital S and a period at the end?
Chris: I think it's getting increasingly close. The best programs are beating humans. And again, just like any technology, it's an arms race where humans—so for example, bots will pop up in our games.
Paul: Wow.
Chris: And that's like the one time that players will cooperate. Now it's, "Okay, it's us versus them. We have the other."
Paul: Oh my god.
Chris: You know, it's so detectable, we'll detect a bot, and usually there'll be some sort of flaw, where like, "Hey guys, if you bet exactly thirty-five dollars, the bot will—sparks will fly out of it, ha-ha, and it will like automatically raise to a thousand dollars." And then just keep doing that until the programmer figures it out. There's usually some flaw in the programming that you can find and exploit, but yeah, a total arms race, in that presumably they're getting better at—"They," anthropomorphizing a non-thinking being—machines are getting better at poker faster than humans are getting better. I think likely what will happen is there will be varying leagues of "what degree of assistance is considered acceptable"? There will be leagues where people are playing with pencil and paper only sort of thing, super abstract, but then it's like, "Hey, my program against your program in the Death Octagon. We're gonna go, we're gonna battle out bot-versus-bot." And all spectrums in the middle.
And that gets into the whole—as we begin to augment ourselves, you know, genetically, et cetera, what is—how this definition of what it is to be human starts to evolve, and that becomes a more permeable and loose literary term to be human. Right?
Paul: Right.
Chris: And there'll be thirty years down the line, I'm predicting there'll be many debates around like, "This person is no longer human." Or worse, like, you'll need some level of enhancement to still be considered human, or like, "This person is inhuman, subhuman." Yeah. It's gonna get weird.
Paul: Yeah. I'm not super afraid of, I don't know, people get so afraid of like the neuro-link thing, of, "Oh, we're all gonna become robots one day." Kinda like what I said earlier, I think we are very far away from being able to mechanize the elements that really make us human. The appreciation for art, for beauty, for love, for reciprocity and empathy and connection. Once we figure that out maybe we're screwed, but until then I'm actually pretty optimistic for the intersection of humanity and technology as we know it. What about you, though? Are you pessimistic for the future in that regard?
Chris: All dichotomies are false dichotomies, right? To say whether someone is optimistic or pessimistic is just an oversimplification.
Paul: Sure.
Chris: There's many dimensions of the future, some of which I'm optimistic, some of which I'm—I don't know if pessimistic is the right word I would use. It's like, "more concerned." And as I say, I think in probabilistic terms. I see the world in terms of probabilities. Like, no one knows what is going to happen. The best we can do is make hypothetical scenarios and try to estimate their probabilities. I say, "Once you have a probability, you can say, well, what would increase this probability in our mind? What would decrease this probability?" It is: I'm thinking about edge cases and what can I do to move things a few inches, a few percentage points away from these undesirable futures and more towards these more desirable futures?” I'm kind of a many-world proponent, in that there are going to be Terminator scenarios in some universes, and there are going to be some universes that are the most Utopia you can think of. And everybody's Utopia is gonna be very different. And lots and lots of grey in the middle. So I'm just trying to steer us towards the parts of the decision tree that are best.
Paul: I think we've become so damned technologically sophisticated that we will not survive another war. At all.
Chris: Yeah.
Paul: And that's a scary thought to have, but I think like it's—
Chris: We've—we've already almost had nuclear war a couple times. It's been narrowly averted by humans, by humans who refused to touch the button. And hey, this notion of the great filter, why we haven't seen other intelligent civilizations—The Three-Body Problem trilogy really covers this in beautiful detail. There are already lots of versions of Earth where we no longer exist, where we've been destroyed by nuclear war and many other things, and the probability of this stuff, even if because we are here and experiencing it, we don't experience it, thus it never happened, it's happened in other versions of the story.
Paul: Sure.
Chris: Everything is just a matter of probability, and you have enough of these low-probability events, they will occur at some frequency at some point.
Paul: So keep pursuing what the fuck interests you—
Chris: Yeah. So I define myself as an investor. I think just to be an investor, you have to think of yourself as optimistic. I'm always looking for, like, what is already good that people don't realize how good it is.
Paul: Right.
Chris: Or what new technology already exists, it's just not widely known? But like any investor, you're always covering your downside. It's like, "What are the risks that other people don't realize are there?" Let's assume that this went terribly wrong. How did it go wrong? Let's make sure that that doesn't happen. That you can be—we talked about this mental superposition—you can be wildly optimistic, but also think about scenarios where you die or go broke. That those two can coexist.
Paul: Yeah, right. Yeah, I've never—sometimes I scare people 'cause I start talking about death, and it's like, "Well, how can you talk about death and not feel depressed all the time?" Well, to me death isn't this—I mean, maybe it's because I'm still young, and it doesn't seem real in the sense that I'm approaching it, but I don't know. Maybe it's because when you read heavier material or when you study history, these darker concepts of death and the psychology of malevolence don't kinda shake you up as much. Like, you can be a "happy" person or a content person or maybe a psychologically more so stable person and still kind of wrestle with ideas with the future of humanity and nuclear war and death and other worlds and then not have schizophrenia or be put into an asylum.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, let's say hypothetically that you're a person who wants to have an outlier outcome. You want to do something extraordinary. That requires your ability to look at the void and not flinch.
Paul: To look at the void and not flinch. Yeah. Where is that void?
Chris: It's everywhere. It's in the possibilities, all of the failure modes, all of the things that could go wildly wrong, all of the inconvenient truths, both about the world and human nature but also some of these blind spots. Confronting these aspects of ourselves that we'd rather deny. Things that, hey, they're not our fault. These aspects of our personality emerged through the conditions that we were in, many times when we were in a young, formative age. But they are parts of us, they are a part of us. And can we be willing to look?
Paul: Right.
Chris: Rather than, "Hey, you know—" There was a point in my time when I was at my lowest where I was like thirty pounds overweight. Where I was eating a whole pizza and drinking a two-liter of soda every day, wildly depressed and not realizing it. You know, like hey, the five miles I was walking to college, no longer. I was just sitting in this computer chair all day, sometimes falling asleep in it. I've experienced the void very much. But one day, you have to look up and say, "Okay, what I am doing is not leading me to where I want to go, and it sucks, and I hate myself in this moment, but I am going to take the first necessary step forward to turn this ship around." And all this improvement, whether you're improving in a game or your habits or your life, it all begins with your awareness. This willingness to look at that void: "Where is current reality? How is current reality different from where I would like it to be? What's one thing I can do to start to nudge it in the direction that I want it?”
And just, that's the continual practice of—just one step, one step, one step. But so much of culture, so much of our thinking, is designed to reassure ourselves that what we are doing is great. But this requires: "Hey, I suck, that's okay. What's one way I can suck a little bit less?”
Paul: Yeah. You know, I always go on these rants about positive psychology. There's this field called positive psychology that's all about affirmations. My favorite positive affirmation in the world is, "I suck." It's like, "I'm not good at this."
Chris: And that's okay.
Paul: There's no, "No, you're good at this. Self-esteem!" No. I don't want your damned self-esteem. I need to admit that I suck at this. And like, I'm not saying that because it's self-hatred. It's the first step to improving at anything. Like, I don't like the conditions I'm in.
Chris: And your skill in a game, right, an aspect of your intelligence or your ability, it's not you.
Paul: Right.
Chris: Right? Where a lot of this can go off the rails is like, "I suck at poker. I suck."
Paul: Right, right.
Chris: Right? The two—there's a very thin line between the two. It's that your creativity, your writing, your ability is not you, and maintaining that separation allows you to be objective about it.
Paul: I would love to know what thinkers and authors have influenced your intellectual development over the course of your life.
Chris: Oh, man. I mean, it feels like we have so many in common. I mean, all the books you've held up are favorites. I'm so afraid to like—if I start talking about them we're going to go down whole 'nother rabbit hole, so I'm just gonna reflect and say—
Paul: We can always do round two. I'm enjoying the hell out of this conversation, but if you wanna do round two—
Chris: Let's do round two.
Paul: You can leave me with a tease and name drop a few, and then we can save it for the round two, because I'm enjoying this.
Chris: A tease. Okay.
Paul: Cliffhanger. Yeah.
Chris: So the rabbit hole that I have been going down recently are two authors who I find pretty similar in their approach and ideas. It's a very Eastern mystical approach to management, so both in a leadership and a project management sense. So those two writers are Peter Senge and Robert Fritz.
Paul: Okay.
Chris: So Peter Senge is a systems thinker, so applying how can we think about organizations that learn, how do we shift paradigms at scale. Robert Fritz is a composer, playwright. And so he's taking aspects of the creative process and applying it to creation in your own life, in the sense of: what is your personal vision? What do you want to create? How does the creative process translate towards that process? Those are two writers—they cite each other a lot, there's kind of a lot of overlap, that I've been trying to think and incorporate a lot. So I'd be happy to delve more in part two.
Paul: Well that's great, 'cause I actually haven't heard of these names before, so this gives me some time to check out their work. Speaking of work, where can people find yours on the internet?
Chris: Yes.
Paul: I don't know where else you put your work on these days. It's the internet.
Chris: Yeah, the internet's a good place. I do a lot of stuff on paper and pen. I have like note—you can't see offscreen, and I have all these notebooks around me.
Paul: Yeah.
Chris: I'm pretty analog, but occasionally something that I write down or say makes it onto the internet, and I'm thankful to people like you who make these spaces happen. The best place, if you're interested in me or what I do, my company's called Forcing Function, so that's forcingfunction.com. I have a hundred-page workbook that I put out that has all of my best practices for maximizing your productivity and performance, and that is completely free to download, so check that out. There's a quiz on there, so if you want to get some illumination on what are your biggest areas of improvement. That's forcingfunction.com/assessment. Experiment Without Limits can be downloaded at forcingfunction.com/workbook. Lots of wonderful articles and interviews on there, so you can delve into your heart's content. Probably the best place to find me, I'm not huge on the socials these days but my biggest presence these days is on Twitter. My handle there is @SparksRemarks.
Paul: Sweet. The only social platform that matters, as far as I'm concerned. Just one more question, and then we can wrap this up. What is your favorite part about being alive?
Chris: I'm gonna say surprise. This was a big lesson for me when I took a field trip into the world of comedy, that what we find funny is usually what surprises us. It reveals that there is a gap in our model of the world, and this laughter is our reward for, "Hey, I don't know what I'm doing. Hahaha, that's great." And it's like that reward for, "Okay, I'm updating my beliefs, this feels good." And man, like, I'm just surprised all the time. And something that I like to say is that knowing is the enemy of learning. So I'm always trying to tap into, "What is surprising about the world around me, and how beautiful is that that I'm continually learning more about it?"
So, yeah. My—a mentor of mine who—he's in his seventies, but he is timeless, he could easily be forty. He likes to say that he stays young by keeping the light on. By having something that he's currently learning and going after at all times. That the second you get comfortable and satisfied and settle into this place of, "I'm an expert," like that's the path to obsolescence, to the slow death. That you need to keep the light on, you need to stay hungry, stay curious in Steve Jobs terms. Like, always be looking for what surprises you, because I mean, that's where the learning is.
Paul: Great answer. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here, Chris. I really appreciate it.
Chris: Thanks for being an excellent conversation partner. Can't wait for round two. Pleasure to be here, and pleasure to meet all you guys. I like to say that this is the beginning of the conversation, so if anything that I said resonated, please reach out.
Paul: Wonderful, wonderful. Thank you so much for listening, everybody. And take care, keep reading, keep learning, and be surprisable. If that's a word. I hope it is. Cheers everybody. Take care.