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why hello ladies and gentlemen this episode of the podcast is brought to you by audible audible is the internet's leading provider of digital audio entertainment as far as audio books um radio broadcast lectures comedy specials basically they have no peer there is no one like audible audible rules uh it is is my favorite place to download audio books they have over 150,000 titles so essentially you could probably do it until the day you die if you really thought about it like how many books do you read in your life do you really do you think you read 150,000 books probably not but you could have 150,000 books read to you and it's much less effort and you could help people you read but you're not really reading you know what I mean it's like you can read while doing other [ __ ] and that's the cool thing about audiobooks if you're commuting if you're on a plane I have stopped in my driveway and listened to a book for like an extra 15 20 minutes um why I I don't make the best decisions in this life but I enjoy it I really enjoy audible too if you go to audible.com Joe you can get a free audiobook and you can get a month a free month of audible service it is really an excellent excellent resource when it comes to audio books um if I could recommend one to you hm what's a good one to recommend Jamie uh brick Cher's Life of the Party pretty good what a great suggestion by read by Bert and uh the audio books by the way are crushing the the reading books because much like Bert his fans do not read [ __ ] but again you can get all the information it's exactly as if you read it uh so go there pick up the life of the Party by our pal Berke Cher and enjoy the 150,000 plus other titles at audible a fantastic resource for people who enjoy audiobooks that's audible.com Joo for your free audiobook and 30 free days of audible service like how I did that audible service we're also brought to you by Ting Ting is one of my favorite is um not just one of my favorite podcast sponsors but it's also um the official podcast phone the the the phone that we use for the podcast for booking guests and stuff is a Ting phone why because it's first of all it if you're economically inclined if
you're thinking about saving money there's no better place than Tang 98% of people I'll say that again 98% of people would save money with tang why did I have to say it again I say it again I sound like a douche like when people say that like the beginning of comedy clubs they do this thing where they go all right everybody you ready for the show and then people clap they go that's not good enough I need oh come on you [ __ ] I hate it it's gross it's so foul should be abandoned and and should be outlawed but there I said it anyway a lot of [ __ ] people how about that would save money with Ting including you 21 bucks is the average monthly bill with Ting what is Ting first of all Ting is they use the Sprint backbone so it is just like having a spone a phone on Sprint a major Network and instead of doing it anyone else's way when you rent time on a backbone you can kind of do it your own way and their own way is the best way to look at it is like it's very ethical it's very it's it's a very good deal what they do is they provide you with excellent service but they cut out all the [ __ ] no early termination fees no contracts uh you pay for what you use which I believe is the future of cellone service now the way it is with most people if you are with a major Network or a major carrier rather um you pay for x amount of minutes per month and if you go under that you don't get any money back and if you go over that they charge you you get charged uh you get penalized um with Ting you pay for what you use if you use less you pay less if you use more you pay more and Ting on their second year anniversary for no reason other than the fact that they could give people a better deal slash their prices you can Google it you could read the articles I will I'll spare you the details but I just love the way they do business and I've heard zero complaints from any of my friends that use Ting I have zero complaints about Ting personally I think they're excellent and if you go to rogan.com you can save $25 off of one of their outstanding Android devices they even sell iPhone 5es they have the iPhone 5 you can get an iPhone 4 okay say if you're Frugal you get an iPhone 4 for 95 bucks folks and if you pay 95 bucks it's yours that's the other thing I like I do not like when you buy a phone and say if
let's you know we don't need to name a provider but say the phone costs $2.99 it doesn't really cost $299 it probably costs 600 bucks but it says $299 and you pay $299 initially but then every month you're paying a little bit of that phone off so that if you try to cancel and try to leave that's where the termination fees come from that's where your cancellation fees it's very tricky it's you know it's like you're mortgaging a phone [ __ ] all that nonsense you can get a Samsung Galaxy S4 for $425 how about that you can get the ht1 M8 which is an outstanding phone 600 bucks it's yours the uh Samsung Galaxy S5 the newest and greatest 597 bucks but when you pay that 597 bucks that's it it's yours now you could do whatever the [ __ ] you want with it you it's yours okay you don't have to pay any more you don't have to pay any less rogan.com save yourself 25 bucks it's it's an awesome service we're also brought to you by onit this is the last commercial on nni T onit is a human optimization website what we sell at on it is essentially all things that I use I have found over the course of my life and Athletics and martial arts I have found a bunch of things that have been shown through science through um through people that are uh strength and conditioning experts that recommend it what are you doing over there Jamie you just jump up panicked thought some [ __ ] was on fire um through science through strength and conditioning experts things that have been shown to improve physical condition things that have been shown to improve cognitive function which is a very controversial aspect mean like saying something's going to improve cognitive function meaning if you're one of the Dumber people listening that means makes your brain work better uh that sounds like it's going to make your dick bigger right this is where it's wrong have you ever had a day where you're like I feel like [ __ ] today I'm stupid my [ __ ] brain's not working I can't remember what I where what I'm supposed to do there's days that you just don't feel right and then there's days where you feel fantastic I believe and it's not just me it's been proven through science and studies that there's a bunch of different factors involved in cognitive
function here's a big one sleep sleep's a huge one I mean it's Mega like 8 hours of sleep a night will will change the way your body functions if you can get eight hours of sleep at night your body will have the ability to recover that it just is not going to get if you're doing four and three and five and four and three and it's just like you're breaking your body down so Sleep Number One Nutrition huge gigantic absolutely give your brain the ability to recover give your body the ability to recover and it's going to function better give it the nutrients it deserves and it's going to work better and some of those nutrients directly Aid cognitive function and we have with Alpha Brain taken the ones that we have shown or that have been shown through clinical trials through anecdotal evidence that have been backed up by clinical trials years and years thousands of years for some of them of of use of human use and they have shown that there are some certain elements some certain elements of nutrition that you can take that actually improve your memory that actually improve the the way the way your brain works and if if you're skeptical you should be uh if you go to on it.com click on the alphabrain link and then click on the the research page it'll show you all the different tests with sources with references that have been done on each of the individual ingredients and then it'll also show you the alpha Blain Alpha Blain that's what we need Alpha Brain clinical Tri obviously I haven't taken any today uh the Alpha Brain clinical trial research results um we have done one test so far a double blind Placebo control test test showed positive results we're also doing a much larger one now the first one was called a pilot test you do it with 20 people I think three or four dropped out so it wound up being 16 people uh but excellent results um especially when it comes to memory um memory is a big one it's uh it's one of the things like when you're when you're reaching for information when you're reaching when you're trying to um formulate sentences that's where I feel that Alpha Brain really benefits me it benefit it makes it easier for me to formulate sentences and it makes me easier for me to know what the [ __ ] I'm talking about when I'm saying things uh if you're skeptical you
should be um that's one of the reasons why we have the research page it's also one of the reasons why on it has a 100% money back guarantee on the first 30 pills for 90 days take it eat them all say this stuff's [ __ ] you don't even have to return the bottle you get your money back we're not trying to rip you off we're just trying to sell you the best [ __ ] that we can find and all the [ __ ] that I use if you go to on it.com that's o nni t use the code word Rogan you will save 10% off any and all supplements enjoy and that ladies and gentlemen concludes the commercial aspect of this podcast now we are going to talk to Isaac AKA Ike Haxton super wizard poker player strap yourself in ladies and Gentlemen The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night all day all right Isaac Haxton AKA Ike we're going to go with Ike is that your friend is that what your friends call you yeah I want to be your friend so let's go with Ike let's go with Ike um one of the things um you you are a a BigTime poker player travel all over the world uh and uh there's a lot of people on my message board that are big poker fans and uh very excited to have you on the podcast one of the things they they asked me to differentiate because I bring this up all the time um that a lot of poker players are gamblers and a lot of poker players are kind of degenerate gamblers but poker is not really a gambling thing it's more of a game of intelligence and a game of information and a game of strategy is that true yeah well it's gambling in the sense that on any given day you win or lose money if you're playing for high stakes you want to lose a bunch of money but it's not gambling in the sense that it's outside of your control it's not like going to the roulette wheel and saying I'm in a red sort of mood let's bet on red and see what happens so it's gambling in the sense that there's money at stake it's not gambling in the sense that you are submitting yourself to chance and just seeing what happens how did you get involved with well first of all you what are you 28 years old yeah 28 years old and you are a world traveling poker player I mean that is first of all awesome I love it congratulations I'm sure congratulations on really being
able to craft that kind of a life because I think that's excellent it's really cool um so how did you get started and how did you make this leap to becoming this you know internationally known professional well I've been sort of an obsessed game player my entire life I started playing chess when I was four I started playing pretty seriously in tournaments when I was like six played chess pretty seriously from 6 to maybe 13 or so I was never really great at chess like probably my greatest accomplishment as a chess player is eighth place in the New York State third grade in under tournament um but uh so I played chess seriously for a while around 13 I reached this point in my chess career where it got really boring where I was just really solidly the second best player in the county and every time I'd go to a chess tournament I knew it was going to happen I was going to beat all these kids I was a lot better then I was going to play this dude Nick in the final and I was going to lose why would Nick beat you he was better than me he studied harder and he had a sharper chess mind than me um something that I never really got past in chess was that it's really easy to make one small mistake and end the game and poker is a little more forgiving of slight oversights like in chess you think through a move it looks pretty good you make the move and then right after you made the move oh [ __ ] Bishop takes Knight and I lose and poker is not quite the same in poker you make a comparable blunder and you bet the river and you think this is a pretty good bet you're going to beat a bit more than half the hands that call you and then you think oh [ __ ] actually he can also have played King Jack of Spades this way this was a slightly Bad Bet rather than a slightly good bet and it doesn't end your tournament to have made a slightly wrong play in ch in poker the same way it does in chess so I think my brain is set up better to be an extremely good poker player than an extremely good chess player would it be uh an a relevant analogy to say that playing po ER is like more of a a game where you restart every time yeah whereas chess is like a sword fight like you you get one chance to not get
stabbed if you get your arm cut off you're going to die yeah that that is actually a pretty good analogy you so when you play poker um are you the type of guy like when you like read a person and you have an idea that you have a a big advantage mhm will you then take a big chance will you then gamble or you are you a conservative calculated sort of a guy um you don't want to give up your hand he doesn't want to tell people how he thinks I see what he's doing he's like I see what you're doing you're playing chess right now you're going back and forth H I should um maybe shut the [ __ ] up no I I I'd say I'm more in the former category I mean so you're more of a gambler guy in poker you have to make the best of the edges that you're given you aren't presented with constant unlimited opportunities to get an advantage so when you are presented with one yeah you have to so there's a certain amount of Courage that's involved in playing the game of poker is it's not something that you chip away at necessarily it's something that when the opportunity presents itself and you believe that you have it do you have like a a green light that goes off in your head or do you have an instinct that you sort of rely on um in in terms of like the risk management part of what you're talking about a lot of that is actually outside of the process of making decisions within a hand so like in terms of risk management a lot of that is like managing the stakes you play relative to how much money you have so if I'm playing a cash game and it's a game where you buy in for $5,000 that's a game where losing one hand for the maximum amount isn't going to ruin my life isn't going to have a big impact on anything so in that context I can go ahead and risk the full $5,000 that's in front of me on a half a percent Edge because because that's how you make money playing poker you identify an edge and you exploit it so in terms of like courage and risk management the like Risk Management thing comes in before you're actually playing a hand and then in the course of playing a hand you have already made decisions that put you in a position to be comfortable taking the maximum amount
of risk that you could be conf fronted with after that point is what I'm saying making sense there yes totally makes sense so you're more inclined to take a big chance if you're betting a small amount of money that's what you're saying a small amount of money going in now when you go what's like the biggest buyin that you've ever had to play uh for a tournament it would be a million dooll buying oh Jesus Louisa wow so um when you do that um I see you're sponsored by poker stars.net um does Poker Stars pay for a portion of that did they give you a piece of the action how's that work uh poker stars does not but what I well part of my contract with poker stars does involve getting a certain amount of money per year that is earmarked toward buying into poker tournaments but they're not like explicitly staking me in the poker tournaments it's just my compensation for right so representing the company so your compensation is essentially up to your management discretion yeah so so when I play something like a million dollar buy in poker tournament what I do is I take on investors who are typically other professional poker players and they buy shares of me in the tournament they put up a fraction of the Buy in and if I win they get a fraction of the winnings oh that's fascinating so uh you guys kind of back each other yeah hm so you if you go into a poker tournament and there's maybe 20 guys it's conceivable that you and the guy you're playing against in the finals have a piece of each other yeah that happen somewhat often that's a big thing in the world of pool but pool they do it in Billiards professional pool because they don't make as much money and so they they they you know they kind of like uh make a Sav that's what they call it so like say if you and I were to play in the finals and it was a major pool tournament I it depends on the agreement but we might make a 5050 or 6040 split so we would play our best but you would know that no matter what worst case scenario even if you lost you were going to get 40% of the purse right the same thing also happens in poker tournaments in addition to what I was describing where people sell action before the tournament
starts there are also often deals made toward the end of the tournament so I was recently playing a tournament in Las Vegas and when we got down to three players left it was me and two other guys who I think are also really strong poker players and we agreed that rather than play it out we are going to just divide up the remaining prize money according to how many chips each of us have and call it a day wow does that bother people does that is there an ethical quandry involved in that there I would say there's a vocal minority of people who are bothered by that and that most people are not bothered by it at all that's something you see happen everywhere from the very highest Stakes tournaments in the world to a weekly $20 tournament that at some point people will agree to a chop it can be a partial chop where they just take out some of the money like the saver sort of thing you were talking about or it can be a complete chop where they just split up the prize pool and call it a day but the vocal minority what is their argument like what do they say they say you guys are ruining it this is like poker is supposed to be about gambling and chance and that's where the excitement comes in and that or it's supposed to be a pure competition it's not supposed to be about this deal making it's supposed to be you go in you compete the best or luckiest player wins and that's the guy who gets all the money now the vocal minority are they the spectators are they the actual players themselves are they the the commentators are they the more often it's the ators and the media than the people who are actually in there playing on a day-to-day basis same thing with Billiards yeah that's interesting so the spectators feel like it's not as exciting for them is that the idea that hm so they want to see one guy win a million bucks and one guy win dog [ __ ] yeah and I mean that that's understandable right like I guess yeah I guess yeah I don't know man I mean uh I think I'm too close to stuff like this to see it objectively cuz I'm friends with so many pool players and because um I don't you know I think people should be compensated I I I hate the idea of a winner take all thing right you know because like if two like there was a big
pool tournament called the Tournament of Champions and every year the winner gets a a good for pool I think it's like 50 Grand it's not much for poker but everybody else gets dog [ __ ] you know so so of course people do when they get heads up yeah they definitely chop it up so the people that are the the commentators and The Spectators like um you say the vocal minority is it only small percentage of the commentators and Spectators it's hard to tell cuz the people who don't object aren't saying anything about it but I would guess yeah it's only a small percentage now there's no rules against it though right it's not like something you guys have to do on the sneak tip there are some tournament venues that won't enforce the chop which means um at the majority of tournament venues you say to the tournament director we've agreed to this chop pay each of us this amount of money at a minority of venues you can't do that you say that the tournament director says I don't want to hear it you have to play the tournament out and then you do it your your then you have to do it on your own and then you have to trust the other people at the final table to honor the agreement and turn around and hand you the cash right after the tournament has anybody ever not honored that agreement very rare it very rare I can't think of I can't think of a circumstance where it was like a handshake deal chop at the final table and then somebody just didn't pay I couldn't that would be a disastrous thing for that person there been a handful of cases where somebody has made a backing deal and then refused to pay out their backer whoa there was a really high-profile one with the guy who won the World Series of Poker Main Event several years ago uh Jamie gold got taken to court by a guy who claimed to have a backing arrangement with him and had like voicemails saying yeah I'm giving you this amount of money for 50% of your winnings and then after the fact Jamie Gold's like nope why did he say that I don't know he he was a pretty weird guy he was is he dead still no still is he's a pretty weird guy who I have considerably less exposure to lately because he has more or less moved on from the poker World well Jesus Christ
he won the World Series of Poker won the World Series of Poker Main Event had a big dispute with a guy who claimed to be entitled to a big share of his winnings and then just faded out of Poker because of that not because of that uh lost back a lot of what he'd won playing in tournaments and cash games and just decid [ __ ] this game pretty much yeah how do you get to I just would imagine that if you got so so good that you win the World Series of Poker that that's like a very profitable way to to spend your time I think well that's the thing is that not everyone who wins the World Series of Poker main event is an excellent poker player it's one really it's one tournament with uh on the order of 6,000 players and the best player in the tournament is maybe 10 times as likely to win it as the worst player in the tourn tournament but it's one tournament so it's possible that a midling tournament player can win the World Series of Poker happens all the time wow I never knew that oh yeah that's crazy see that never happens in pool no you yeah you're not going to beat like Earl Strickland in the finals if you suck that's so crazy and that's why you can play poker for high stakes and it's pretty hard to find a high stakes pool game without some careful handicapping yeah wow I never knew that that's fascinating I always felt like the guy who won was the best guy or there's like a handful of best guys and they swap positions and it's about who's focusing more no I mean this year a guy made the World Series of Poker final table for two years in a row that hasn't happened in about 10 years oh that's interesting I need to pay attention more than this poker [ __ ] um now what about gambling in Vegas do they put a l on who's going to win uh yeah you can make you can make bets on the outcome of the tournament but they only whereas for like a football game if the Giants are playing the Falcons you can bet the money line and you can get two to one on the Giants if they're the underdog or lay two to one and take the Falcons for poker tournaments the bookmakers are not that confident that they know the right prices and they only put up one side if you want to bet on
one guy to win the tournament they'll give you a price but it's a really bad price and you're going to lose making that bet and you can't take the other side oh okay I see betting on the outcome of Poker Tournaments is a pretty small Market yeah because they that's another thing they tried with pool but um they took the one time they did it in Vegas they had this big tournament and this one guy Mike LeBron who's an excellent player but was like the 40 to1 Underdog so they all dumped to Mike LeBron they all bet on Mike LeBron and Mike LeBron W up winning the whole tournament like and then the you know of course Vegas is like all right you [ __ ] shortsighted [ __ ] we're done right you know oh the 40 to1 guy won and everybody's missing balls they should never [ __ ] miss and it was just so ugly yeah that I mean that's potential issue anytime you're betting on the outcome of a sporting event that it could be fixed especially a sporting event where the players don't make so much money that that's the thing is when you get to the small Market stuff like pool where the players aren't making a lot and you can bet more on the outcome of the tournament than the tournament itself is worth that's obviously creating a bad situation so like if World Series of Poker comes along and uh Vegas puts up a line I could bet on you to win the whole thing yeah but that's basically it I couldn't bet on you against individual players and individual games or um maybe some of the smaller online bookmakers you could get some prop bets on like who'll be in the tournament longer me or Phil Ivy that type of thing right but betting on the outcome of Poker Tournaments is real small like if you wanted to bet they'd probably let you bet maybe a couple hundred dollars now a lot of these poker players oh you won't you couldn't bet like 50 Grand or something crazy now a lot of these poker players are like serious crazy gamblers like they'll gamble on Golf and they don't even play golf like they'll do [ __ ] like that like a million dollars on a game of golf who who's like the nuttiest when it comes to that stuff um that's a good question Phil Ivy does a lot of nit Phil iy comes to mind but the thing with him is he's a real sharp
guy when it comes to betting on stuff he is not as crazy as he'd want you to think um like with golf for example he started playing higher and higher Stakes golf with people and was losing everybody's like Phil's terrible we all got to gamble on golf with Phil he was dumping he wasn't dumping he was legitimately bad but then what he did was he went and got coached by Tiger Woods's coach and got really [ __ ] good and came back and played made for huge Stakes against a couple of guys and smashed them wow and just Midway through the round they're like this is [ __ ] what's going on when did Phil get good so how did he do it on the sneak tip did he put like a mask on and [ __ ] I mean everybody knows what Phil ivy looks like if you're a pool player or poker player rather what would he need to be sneaky about like where he practiced oh yeah I mean I guess he like took a vacation Hawaii or something oh okay wouldn't it take more than like one vacation must be a really sharp dude monthlong play every day yeah and then came back and kicked some see I don't the the golf thing is so bizarre to me I would think there's so many variables involved in golf that like the courses themselves are variable the wind is variable there's there's so much going on like figuring out where the ball lies and then trying to figure out the roles of the Hill and all that jazz and trying to get I mean yeah it seems pretty damn complicated I haven't played in a really long time but yeah the mechanics of it seem very difficult to learn and I understand like the coaching could help that but even just the variables like when a guy like Tiger Woods was just dominating everybody like winning like crazy it just I it defied my imagination cuz I was always like how could this one guy figure out this weird game like where there's so many variables so much better than everybody else like what could it possibly be yeah is it feel is it touch is it you know like what is it that's allowing him to see the roles of the of the hills and then how does it all go away with one divorce that's the really crazy part that's the craziest of the crazy I read this study that um on hedge fund managers that by far the most predictive variable of the performance of a hedge fund is
whether or not the manager is currently going through a divorce oh yeah cuz then your life just goes into a turmoil yeah H or if your wies are [ __ ] you you get out of that div divorce and you just [ __ ] free and your thoughts are clear really just depends right depends on whether or not it's a good divorce whether you're not you want it yeah I mean even if you want it I bet it's still a pretty big disruption depends man I've seen both sides I've seen horrible horrible divorces where you know the guy is just destroyed and usually it's Financial the the financial stress of of divorce is really for for a person who's never been through it or never seen someone go through it it's it's like you're being attacked by aliens that you can't see and they're stealing money from you and just like every second of every day thousands of dollars are leaving your bank account and you're watching yourself go broke you're watching years of your life all the work you put in I had a a good friend that I've talked about it on the podcast before but not only did he uh get divorced but his wife calculated and planned it where she went to every good defense attorney or every good uh divorce attorney in town and consulted with them before she decided to pick one so that when the husband found out that she was divorcing him he couldn't get a good attorney because they had already talked to her so it was some sort of a conflict of interest that's pretty diabolical she's as diabolical as it gets not not only did she do that but because they were together for so long he had to pay for her attorney cuz she didn't work and he has to pay her for essentially the rest of her life cuz they were they were married for more than 12 years California has some wacky laws so the only way it'll be different is if she remarries which of course she never would because you know she she would lose her her sweet paycheck that she gets every month I watched this guy like age 10 years in two in two years he probably aged 10 and just was pulling his [ __ ] hair out and going crazy and it was never over I was like are you out yet is it over yet it's like no no no no she's renegotiating she's changing the term she's doing it and she was doing it
because he had to pay for her lawyer as well so she just dragged it out as long as possible she dragged it out for almost two years this poor guy got destroyed so for him yeah I would [ __ ] I I wouldn't uh bet on him playing golf that guy would be [ __ ] knocking balls into the Treetops and screaming and attacking birds with his clubs yeah it's it's devastating for people you mean when you know and women want to know why why guys don't get divorced maybe they know somebody like that you know or Tiger Woods yeah poor bastard not really though right he's still fine yeah I think he'll make it yeah he'll make it he's just uh he's not Tiger Woods anymore right like how many how many golf tournaments has he won since the uh since the divorce I don't really follow golf but I don't think it's many why it's so weird do you follow with Jamie yeah he's one a few yeah uh he's recently coming back from an injury right now but I just saw something the other day he they say he's got about 10 years left in his career to catch Jack Nicholson how do you get an injury playing golf back I mean there's a lot of torque in that swing I can see throwing out your back [ __ ] [ __ ] Jesus Christ you playing golf I would surely get injured playing golf I'd just hit myself with the club well that's if you knew what you were doing I bet you wouldn't so you're 28 years old how long you been a professional uh poker player I've been playing seriously and making money at it about 10 years uh filing taxes as a professional Gambler since I was 18 wow I was in school and only sorted playing part-time for the first few of those years so 6 to 10 years depending how account so you're doing it through college yeah and at one point in time when you were in college and you were in the middle of some stupid course you didn't really give a [ __ ] about where you're like you know what I think I could be a goddamn professional poker player definitely that's what it was second semester of my junior year Um poker was going great school was not um I was studying computer science which at one point I was pretty good at I thought this is the thing for me I'm going to get my undergrad Dee in computer science I'm going to go to grad
school do some more computer science and become a professor work in research something like that I thought that was my career um second semester of my junior year this thing started happening to me where I'd go to the computer lab and sit down to do a project and an hour would go by and I'd just still be staring at a blank screen wow I just hit a wall I couldn't do it anymore wow what was that I don't know exactly um I I think it was some subconscious part of my brain realizing ahead of the more conscious and willful part that this was not what I wanted to do long term that's fascinating so you had a passion for it at one point in time or at least an interest in it yeah and was it just that the the passion the interest for poker sort of overcame it that it became an option that it became like I think that was probably only a small part of it I think think that even if I hadn't found poker and decided to make a career of that that I would have made myself get through undergrad computer science and somewhere around grad school or early into a career doing that I would have realized it wasn't doing it for me yeah that's something that some kids do when they're young and they're they're starting to try to pick a career they they look at something that they think they can do yeah and then once they start doing it they go this is not what I want do though well [ __ ] you're 18 you get to school and they tell you pick a major yeah how crazy is that and like I took an econ class a math class a computer science class and a cognitive science class my first semester of college I was like I really don't like the math class the econ's kind of boring I don't really think there's a career for me in cognitive science I guess I'm a computer scientist now but it's not what you were drawn to I mean liked it I thought it was interesting uh some of the classes more than others I liked the theory and math side of it better than I liked spending 12 hours in the computer lab banging out code isn't it so weird that we expect kids at 18 years of age to be able to pick their future to be able to pick a direction for their future yeah it's just so bizarre I just I I can't imagine
going through that again you know for me I um I took a year off when I got out of high school and and then I went to uh UMass Boston for 3 years but I completely half asked it like I just was doing it cuz I didn't want to be a loser so I was I was going to school with no idea whatsoever how I was ever going to fit into any traditional work environment and all the while I had a sort of a career because I was teaching martial arts and I was teaching it at a high level I was teaching it in Boston University and I had my own school and everything like that but I was still going to school and I was like what the [ __ ] am I doing but at least I had like some things that I was interested in but I had friends that were going to school and they're like well I'm going to be an electrical engineer and I'm like is that what you want to do you know I don't know I'm okay it it's good money you can make good money I'm like okay proba get a job yeah but that life is a weird life man that's the life that the majority of people do yeah the majority of people do this life where they start doing something because it's a job that they can do [ __ ] man that's a that's terrifying to me it's a sad scary thought for a guy like you so that's why when I hear about a guy like you I go yes like I love when guy yes I [ __ ] love when I meet a a another comedian I love when I meet a guy who makes a living as a musician I love when I meet a writer you know I love people that have figured out a way to stay out of that [ __ ] trap that weird trap of just doing something because you can do it and you know and people who are doing something cuz they can do it and they're listening to this don't think I'm not criticizing you I I easily could have been you easily you know it's not no one's better than you I'm just I'm celebrating you you Ike that you you did it you figured it out there's a lot of luck involved a lot of different ways but there's a luck a lot of luck involved in being American there a lot of luck involved in having good you know motor skills that you can walk and you don't have a disease and you know you don't have [ __ ] cancer your eyes work you know there's a lot luck involved in a lot of different things so no doubt about it and there's definitely a lot of luck in finding a path picking a path
and then figuring out that this is something you can actually do and that's when the courage and then the determination come in once there's an opening to just run run through that door so when you were 18 and you you started making money doing poker and then you realized that like school was kind of whack like what did your parents think about that uh well the way that played out was like I said second semester of my junior year I failed most of my classes um after like straight days for five semesters did your parents sus drugs no I I I don't think that was that's what I would Su I'd give you a little pissed test come here you little freak [ __ ] you doing all that College tuition come here son this cup what did they think um you're bored yeah bored uh I think that they were a little skeptical of the computer science thing all along that it I just seemed to sort of pick something out of a hat and go for it and it was not a huge surprise to them that I was getting sick of it and then by coincidence uh over the following summer some legal rumbling started in Washington that maybe it's time to crack down on online gambling and a bill called the unlawful internet gambling Enforcement Act got passed um or was due to get ped that fall and I started thinking [ __ ] online poker might be going away I got to get all the money while I can and I called up the school this was like late August I'm like about to go back to school and I called up the university and said uh I maybe want to take next year off what happens if I do is there any penalty can I come back the following year no issue and they said yeah it's fine uh you've got like one more week to let us know I said okay I'll call you back in a bit I called up my parents I was like I'm pretty sure I want to take the year off and just play poker fulltime wow and what did they say and they said why and I explained the uiga thing and the getting sick of computer science thing and my mom said how much money do you think you can make if you take a year off and play poker full-time was
like uh my goal would be about a million dollars whoa and she said that sounds good I think you should do that yeah you got to go high you can't get hope to make about 30 grand the first year but yeah a million bucks is a good call people like hearing that their kid made a million bucks yeah go for it son and you were only 18 right no I was um about 21 21 yeah I'd been doing it for three years already I'd made a few hundred thousand bucks already by that point it wasn't like out of thin air guas it was like I'm going to be playing these Stakes this many hours a week I beat these games for this much it was like a realistic Target for me wow now what is the difference between a successful online poker player and a non-successful when it was legal because obviously now it's a big [ __ ] mess right you you could legally gamble if you a resident of Nevada online isn't that the case the legal situation in the US and worldwide is pretty complicated um the really weird thing is that no laws actually changed how the government felt like enforcing them changed when the law I was talking about the uiga passed I didn't know this at the time I was making the decision to take the year off but the final language of the bill says nothing about what unlawful internet gambling is it assumes that that's something that somebody else already knows and provides for enforcement against the banking and credit card transactions that facilitate illegal online gambling it's in no way clear what illegal online gambling in the US is what there that sounds so crazy there's there are no federal laws about online gambling other than this anti- illegal online gambling Enforcement Act online gambling is treated as illegal by the Department of Justice on the basis of a law from the 60s called The Wire act that says you can't place Sports bets over Telegram and they're like and really [ __ ] telegram [ __ ] telegram oh my God how about smoke signals is that legal still Jesus Christ and they're like that's basically like playing poker on the internet wow that is so crazy so they decided that that's playing poker on the internet yeah wow gambling on Sports through a telegraph that is
that's so loopy yeah and was this like sponsored by the casinos or something like that is that is that how it got weasel Through the Wire act or the U the uiga the whatever it is them cracking down on it had to be right probably it's hard to tell um the casino Lobby is really [ __ ] powerful in America oh yeah imagine a lot of goddamn money involved a lot of money involved donate a lot of money to both political parties um yeah and and then of course the well right hm the unions I'm sure as well uh yeah the like for instance there are I I don't actually know what union represents Casino workers but I'm I think it's one of the bigger like food service sort of ones and is a big deal yeah I would imagine that they would do it just to sort of strengthen their position as job holders because like the the UFC has a big issue with The Culinary Union yeah I think I think that's who has a lot of the casino jobs as well I'm not certain I'm sure well that's what they're trying to do the reason why the UFC has an issue with the Culinary Union is because zua the company that owns the UFC also owns Station Casinos so there's this huge push to try to get them to turn their casinos into Union casinos okay so they're keeping the UFC out of New York that way like paying off politicians it's fascinating yeah it's fascinating because it's so old school and so transparent like the corruption so I mean New York State like the the actual people themselves would benefit tremendously if they allowed mixed martial arts sure they also have boxing already there which is more dangerous they I mean it's all proven and they still for whatever reason have been able to bribe these politicians transparently all that [ __ ] is just a power struggle over the bunny it seems like yeah so they just try to keep online poker for online gambling it was the same thing the online or the uh Casino Lobby in the US has gone through a few St es in what they think about online gambling at first they just ignored it didn't give a [ __ ] that's not a real thing nobody's going to gamble on the internet who cares and then around about 2005 2006 they started saying oh no this is this is unethical we can't let people gamble from their homes they need to
drive to their local casino and gamble cuz that's where we make money and that's where we serve liquor so we could be sure they're [ __ ] up with and think of the children if you're playing online it could be anybody which of course is wrong in both directions for one thing people gamble under aging casinos all the time for the other the identity verification stuff for online gambling is probably stricter than for live gambling anyhow that's pretty interesting is it I didn't know that so like what do you like what's the online thing like what do you use you have to show a photo of your credit card you have to your driver's license rather it varies from site to site and ramps up if there's more money involved how would they know it's you and not just someone who has the information like if you're a 16-year-old kid you grab your dad's information and just start entering it in you need more than a credit card what you uh it it depends on the site but like copy of photo ID utility bill you might need to answer phone call on a landline associated with the address you claim yes this is Mr hexton my son Ike my Ike is not the one who's making this gamble it's me my name is George I'm 50 you hear the Bas in my voice son and yeah obviously you can get around anything but yeah making a online I mean making a phone call that seems like so [ __ ] old school yeah that's such a weird way to verify isn't it I mean it's one layer of a whole bunch of different [ __ ] that they do [Music] to if it's on a landline it demonstrates that you are physically in the CL place you're claiming to be right okay that makes sense I guess but just it seems like anybody could just be on the phone unless you're FaceTiming yeah I mean it that's why it's only one aspect of it then you just have to hire a makeup artist to [ __ ] do you up like your dad um that that internet gambling thing though that did it was a big Crackdown cuz I remember it um I remember at one point in time used to be able to gamble on Sports Online oh yeah guys used to be able to used to play poker for money online it was really common and there
was even some websites that were uh there was a you I'm sure uh they're still around bodog they still around bod dog in the US has become bada and still exists what is bada bada is the entity that they spun off of the main bodog corporate entities because operating online gambling in the US is so risky that uh they have basically set up their corporate Fall Guy of bada which is what gets [ __ ] when inevitably continuing to take bets from the US eventually goes poorly oh I see so they're they're just kind of like setting up a straw house to blow down when the [ __ ] gets but they're meanwhile taking money out of the straw house and putting it in this big Stone mansion somewhere that's under a different name and yeah bodog I I shouldn't say any of this too confidently I haven't been paying close attention to it but welcome to what we do on the podcast every day I think bodog is continuing to operate around the world as boow dog and is boada only for its us facing operations oh okay that makes sense that Calvin ey guy he he can't even come into the America North America yeah there are a bunch of people in the online gambling industry who that's scw up [ __ ] they just live in Costa Rica now or something yeah it's so crazy it's so weird that that's what gets you locked up and what is it they saying they're not paying taxes like what is the mean why would they not want Revenue see it doesn't make sense to me if people are willing to gamble and then they'll pay taxes on those gambling debts or gambling profits or what whatever it was or even losses um it seems like you know if the company wins money or if the person wins money taxes are going to be paid like it seems like that should be pretty easy to well so to go back to what I was saying about the stages that the casino Lobby has gone through in their attitude on online gambling around 20052 2006 they decided okay this is bad we need to shut it down losing money they thought they were they weren't they weren't that I mean this is my opinion here um I I think that casinos saw online gambling as competition when it wasn't that um online gambling and casino gambling are not the same product I
don't if I'm the type of person who either likes to go play Blackjack at my local casino or likes to play Slots on the internet I don't play less Blackjack at my casino because I could play Slots on the internet they're not the same experience you don't get the same things out of them um if anything the availability of online gambling was feeding casino's new customers because people would play a little online and say this seems fun I kind of understand this now maybe I'll give gambling at the casino a try yeah that's how I would look at it especially with respect to Poker as opposed to other sorts of gambling going into a casino to play poker having never done it before is a little bit intimidating you don't really know how it works and you're surrounded by people who do and the ability to get a little experience playing online in a lower pressure environment I think introduces people to the game who then go on to play in live casinos as well now when you go to a live casino how many people uh are like me that don't know how to play poker at all but are still trying to play poker like do people get liquored up and just wander into the poker room and go let's [ __ ] give this a shot every once in a while and more at lower Stakes than at higher Stakes obviously obviously uh at high stakes it's pretty rare to see somebody who has never really played poker before but it happens it happens oh yeah sure what is that like when you see some [ __ ] fish some big fish that comes in some what do you call them whales is that what you guys call them fish whales um that's they call them in pool yeah same terminology in poker so they come in and a lot of money don't know what the [ __ ] they're doing and everybody slowly starts circling them yep there's a long weight list to play at the table that guy's at if there's not a seat available he walks in he says I want to play everybody looks up that guy looks rich and we don't know him uh th this game can become 10-h handed now pull up a chair so when a guys when you don't know a guy so the world of Poker essentially you know all the elite players yeah there's no one who could sneak up on you uh I mean they're probably a few people
they're probably like a handful of guys who mostly play online turn up at a casino and I wouldn't recognize him but they're among the best players in the world wow but for the most part yeah I recognize most of the top players my friend Ari shaffir who's a stand-up comedian great guy funny hilarious [ __ ] but very smart and uh when he was struggling as a stand-up comedian he was playing poker tournaments and he was making more money playing in casinos playing poker than he was doing standup yeah I've heard Ari talk about that before yeah I mean he's making a living doing doing poker and uh I I I always found that incredibly fascinating that he was doing that that he was just going from place to place and playing poker and he could he he said he could kind of tell he could kind of tell when people knew what the [ __ ] they were doing where people were just [ __ ] instantly I mean but does anybody ever hustle like the way they do in pool they pretend to suck and then they rope you in and yeah some uh it's more common I'd say at the mid Stakes than at the highest Stakes just because the world's too small to get away with it much at the highest Stakes yeah the high the highest Stakes how many guys are there in the world that are just Elite dozens to hundreds depending on how you're counting it I guess H so hundreds maybe maybe but out of those hundreds you're aware of all of them you think pretty much and if you're not the overwhelming majority if I'm not it's because they're playing in games that don't have a lot of intersect with the games I'm playing in what about places like maau or places like like I mean that's obviously a huge gambling maau is really interesting um I've played a couple of tournaments in maau I've never played in a cash game in maau um though I have played in cash games with maau guys a few times the UFC did some uh shows in maau yeah I know and um there's been some boxing out there and I think they're doing another UFC out there but they said that like it's it's just like Vegas times 100 they said it's Madness like the amount of gambling and craziness and the Majesty of it all yeah it's real crazy where is that exactly it's it like uh it's right next to Hong
Kong it's like a 1 hour ferry ride from Hong Kong and how long has this been around maau um I want to say maybe 15 years maybe less I think so crazy I think it's gotten huge in less than the last 10 how does something like that happen how does something way bigger than Vegas just Sprout out of China China says you can gamble here and the millions of Chinese millionaires say that sounds like a good idea let's go gamble here and then just a building and there it is what is it like like the as far as like the buildings and far as like the looks like Bizarro Vegas it's creepy I lived in Vegas for three years so I go there and oh that's the win and it looks exactly like the win only it's on exactly the opposite side of the world and everyone's Chinese W so they call it the win yeah now there's the wind the Venetian but are they ripoffs or is it it's own by the same people oh okay because you know how China does they do wacky [ __ ] like that they'll build like a fake Paris like it's really strange how their their laws are over there as far as what a fake eiel Tower in Shanghai or something like that not only they fake EI Towers it's like fake entire towns like Europe European Villages towns like down to the brick they look exactly like them there was this this story that was on um one of the major websites I forget what it was where they they DET I think it was vice actually they they detailed all these different towns that have been constructed in China that were exact replicas of famous like you know Swiss Alps towns and stuff like that so really weird China's [ __ ] weird oh yeah Ari just got back from China too and he's talking about how crazy it was there he told us about gutter oil did you hear about you know what gutter oil think I heard about it on the podcast and I was like that can't be real I've eaten a lot of delicious food in Hong Kong I hope it was a lot of delicious poop might not be as bad in Hong Kong as Mainland maybe I don't know but so maau has all the major players like the wi and then the Venetian and all that jazz and a bunch of there's like a hard rock the tournament I played there was at the Hard Rock maau and did does everyone speak English there no what about the hookers speak
English I didn't talk to any I bet I bet there there's certainly a market for it oh yeah you think I I would guess that market forces forc some hookers to speak English in maau yeah yeah my friend who went there said you couldn't get away from them they're just swarming you they're like flies he said it was like mosquitoes in in a hot summer day in the Northeast he said it's crazy like how many how many hookers there were but it makes sense I mean a lot of people gambling a lot of money a lot of Celebration a lot of victims lot of drunks yep I just can't believe that something like that can just explode out of like I never even heard of maau until maybe two or three years ago like uh I remember peripherally reading about it online something like that and then I heard about boxing matches being held there and yeah I basically didn't know anything about it till poker took off there maybe four or five years ago go so you're 18 years old you start playing poker you're 21 years old you tell your parents you know what [ __ ] it I'm going to give it a go I'm I'm going to try to make a million dollars in the first year how many how much did you actually want at make in that first year um 1.6 kapow Jesus godamn Son a couple months after I said that I played in one of my first ever big live tournaments and finished second for like 850,000 so I got a bit of a head start wow Jesus Christ so everyone was happy at the at the Haxton household yes yeah yeah they they were okay with my plan so then from there do you just go guns blazing and just I went back and I finished school I only had a year left so I damn you went you went a million six and went back and I would have told school to suck my dick I would have called them up [ __ ] you and [ __ ] computers that that was 80% what I did I went back and I decided to get a degree in philosophy I figured out there was a particular track within the philosophy Department called uh philosophy of science and logic that I could count some of the classes I'd already done toward and it was like five [ __ ] classes away from a degree in philosophy I like all right I can do that I'll get my college degree before I have to be the creepy old guy who's back
on campus in 10 years when poker's done I'll be happy I have a degree why did you think you were going to have to you were planning on failing you thought it was like possible that it could all go away I thought it was possible it could all go away I thought it was possible it could get too hard I thought that maybe I'm really good relative to my competition now but who knows about in 10 years H you know it it's like competing in a sport at some point you're older than the other people you're not as sharp as the them they're hungrier than you are and you can't keep up do you we talked about in the um the ads uh I was talking about Alpha Brain but there's a bunch of cognitive enhancing things that people take I know some folks take Aderall and some folks take uh uh new vigil or provigil um like these different cognitive enhancing smart drugs do you guys [ __ ] with those things poker players in general yeah absolutely like what what is like the most common stuff I mean caffeine is has to be number one uh there are waitresses walking around serving coffee at poker tournaments really yeah so water and booze booze if you want it uh how many guys get liquored up while they're playing seems like a bad move right at in terms of like high level competition the biggest tournaments essentially nobody uh cash games in a casino on any given night it's reasonably common right so um what what do most guys take besides uh there are plenty of people who take ad or all or riddlin um riddlin that's a speed too right yeah yeah it's another one of the anti ADHD sort of things right um provil is not unheard of I [ __ ] with that a little bit in college for studying and found that I just didn't really like it very much I want to send you some alphab brain see if you like it uh a bunch of my friends use alphab brain yeah that's a good one another good one is um there's a stuff called neuro one have you ever heard of neuro one um I've heard you talk about it before it's Bill Romanowski stuff right it's really good as well there's a bunch of companies that are selling these cognitive enhancing formulas now and especially now that Alpha Brain has become really popular it's become super popular to sell these Blends cuz there's all there's like different things like
parasitin and choline there's all these different things that have been shown to have positive effects on cognitive function a friend of mine at a tournament a couple months ago gave me something called smart caffeine which is just caffeine and alanine oh okay uh and I thought that was awesome I've been taking somean recently do you uh press him you ever mess with that stuff I haven't I've heard good things a few of my friends use it I like it one of my closest friends in poker is JC Alvarado who I you know yeah he's on my website I met him yeah I've met him a bunch of times cool guy yeah he's an awesome guy great things to say about you he said that you are probably the best heads up player one-on-one player in the world what you think about that fella there are I'm definitely in the running I mean so what is the different between playing heads up and playing like you know a large tournament like 30 40 people well besides the obvious like what's the the Strategic difference like how you approach it it's simpler um which doesn't necessarily mean it's easier it means it's easier to get really in depth in how you're analyzing it and the same situations come up over and over again because it's only two players and if there are nine players at the table that's nine different people who can do something different every hand and similar situations don't come up nearly as often whereas when I'm playing heads up two hours into playing a guy I can be in the spot where I'm on the Button he's in the big blind I raise he calls flop comes down he checks I check turn comes down he bets I call River comes down he checks it's on me this exact situation not not the boards that have run out but the betting action that situation has come up already 20 times in the match that we're playing and I can have a pretty clear idea of in this exact spot this guy traps a little bit more than my average opponent he's going to take this line with a strong hand more than some other people will so I can't Bluff him as effectively or I can't make a value bet with quite as weak a hand as I would against some other players and heads up poker is more amenable to
that sort of detailed analysis of how your opponent is playing by the way I understood maybe 10 things out of 20 that you said I don't even think 10 um button blind flop all that River all that's poker talk yeah poon so what how much of it like this this expression this is a big one the um the the big one is a poker face having a poker face like how how much of that is real like how much of is do you read a guy or do you worry that poker yeah absolutely totally yeah it's a huge Factor so if we're looking at each other right now and we're playing what are you looking for um well you feel it do you sense it like absolutely you do sense it and there's just a gut thing that happens for sure I you just look at somebody and he just doesn't look that comfortable or he does look comfortable and often there's just a general sort of feel you get from somebody that is difficult to put words to but that the top players are confident when they get those gut feelings and go with them uh but there are specific things you can look for too like you can you want to first get a sort of Baseline reading on people's posture like look at them sitting at the table when they're not playing a hand and then having done that you can observe shifts from that like somebody will I'm bumping into the mic here but somebody will get up closer to the table when they're interested in invested in the situation or you can even see somebody make like a micro gesture of recoiling in frustration when a bad card hits the board or you make a bet that they don't like and you can see little movements like that you can read somebody's pulse in their neck what yeah so you see so you're staring at someone's neck in that sense it' be good to be a fatso right yeah people wear scarves while they play so that you can't what all the top German guys now are wearing scarves while they play because [ __ ] Germans no joke that's so crazy so you look at a guy's pulse in his neck and what are you looking for the amounts of Beats uh to see if you can see how fast it's going going faster or like the blood pressure raising when they're really tense wow that's crazy crazy I never would have thought that or how how deep someone is
breathing you can watch the rise and fall of their chest wow um one thing people do is uh people tend to be a lot more still and tight when they're nervous and move around a little more and are more relaxed when they're comfortable and so when somebody is trying to just keep it together and look put their Poker Face on look the same way they always look but they're actually really comfortable because they've got a great hand and they're about to win wow you can sometimes see their leg will start pumping they'll they'll start tapping their foot real fast they'll be keeping everything above the table still but their leg will start going real fast wow now what about someone faking all that stuff that happens all the time does it oh yeah yeah like in what way uh any of those things like like have you you now that I've just said I look at people's legs while they're playing I'm going to be playing against somebody in a couple weeks and he's going to be bluffing me on the river he's going to start tapping his foot cuz I've just said that I'm that's something I'm looking for for evidence that they're strong so when you see someone I'm sorry a thing I used to do sometimes uh I feel like I can't get away with it as much now because people know who I am and expect me to be pulling some [ __ ] and in control of my physical stuff but something I would do is I would sit like this while playing in general hand on your face and when I wanted to fake being nervous I'd lean into it and you can like see my cheek go a little white where my Knuckles are making contact with my face and that would make you look more nervous yeah do you practice this stuff in fo of air yeah I mean why not if you can make $1.6 million your first year I'd practice a lot of goofy [ __ ] too fake TS can be real subtle like what about guys that play with sunglasses on is that super common it's very common uh tells from your eyes are it's a factor but it's not one of the biggest ones um because you're used to people looking you in the eyes you're practiced at lying with your eyes you you know people
are looking at your eyes eyes isn't that an eagle song You Can't Hide Your lion eyes sounds like an eagle song I believe it is um so so the glass is not not a huge Factor not a huge Factor what's the big biggest one the lips um the neck hands uh General posture legs and feet even PE people are not on top of that one how many times You' been faked out by fake tells it's hard to tell you don't necessarily know it was a fake afterwards CU sometimes it's not fake and you're just wrong you're wrong in your hand you mean you're no you're the tell is genuine but you interpret it in correctly somebody's not actively faking you out but like none of this is an exact science like I see somebody's pulse go up I know for sure their pulse is up and that they're feeling something intense right now it could be that they have a flush it could be it could be that they're really excited about their great hand or it could be that they're really stressed about the big Bluff they're making ah right right right so you know something's going on so yeah you get these physical signs but there's not a direct path from that to knowing exactly what they have do you believe in psychic energy do you believe that you can read something from a person other than just tells that's a tough one to answer um when you use the phrase psychic energy I'm inclined to say no because that sounds kind of magical and crazy but I definitely believe that there is very subtle nonverbal communication that happens between people that is sometimes involuntary that you just you know things about what's going through the mind of somebody you're sitting next to and it's hard to tell exactly how and why you know I I mean I think that's like give an example like what sense um I mean whether at the poker table or in any other context when you're you are reading people's moods and thoughts all the time you can tell when somebody is feeling relaxed and happy you can tell when they're stressed out you can tell when they're focused and thinking hard or
when they're spacing out right that all makes sense like you just you interpret regular human movement communication Behavior patterns and such but I would say that one of the best sort of pieces of evidence that being a psychic doesn't exist is that there's no psychics that just become poker players and start [ __ ] cleaning up yeah I mean clearly there's nobody who can just sit across the table from you and read your mind yeah because I think if there were really psychics that would be the place where it would show up as poker right sure or I mean any of a number of other places where you could make a killing or otherwise be very successful and Powerful based on that ability I mean yeah there there' be a lot of them stock market would be a good one playing the lottery obviously um well that's getting into predicting the future versus reading Minds which I mean I I don't think anybody's doing either of those things but reading Minds seems marginally more plausible than predicting the future yeah right that's a different kind but reading the future is kind of interpreted as psychic right isn't it yeah I mean in some way they're they're similarly crazy powers that some people claim to have does like socially does that like um it seems to me that like the ability to RS and the ability to be so tuned into it because it's part of the game of poker does that carry over to social communication like do you notice things more in the way people like we all know when someone's a bullshitter right we all know when someone bullshits you and tells you a story that's like a little [ __ ] screwy I mean we kind of have this weird sense just based on the data that we've accumulated over a lifetime's worth of communicating with people that something's off here and and also if you've communicated with a bunch of bullshitters you kind of recognize it yeah so we feel like that like being a a good poker player like makes you a a better social reader as well I think so I think probably not by a giant margin but yeah I think I'm probably a bit above average at that uh I think I have a more studied and
self-aware approach to it than a lot of other people do I I think I may have started from a baseline of being a bit below average at that kind of thing um where somebody might say that story felt kind of [ __ ] I'm more likely to say well he said I think and equivocated on a couple of things where that's not a way you would talk about it if you weren't full of [ __ ] uh his eyes were darting around a lot um so you look at it and you would look at it in an analytical sense instead of just basing just on your instincts you would use both your instincts and analytical yeah yeah there's something there's some I I I'm one of the main things that I'm fascinated with with poker is the ability to read minds the or read tells rather the ability to sort of get this uh sense of where a person's going with things get this sense I think that's fascinating cuz I know that that exists in real life I know it does I know it exists like that thing exists with with human beings I just don't know exactly what it is I've always wondered I always wondered what exactly is going on when people are looking at each other and you know something's off yeah you know just like a sense like there's a perfect story um I've told this before but my friend Brian Ken he used to he's a great guy but he he used to date like some of the craziest [ __ ] people of all time he he's had a bunch of crazy people in his life too and I would hang out with him and he would have this guy over and i' be like what do you this guy's a [ __ ] [ __ ] artist like what do you he couldn't see it for whatever reason just couldn't see it yeah and uh he introduced me to this girl within 5 Seconds like uh he goes hey this is blah blah blah this is my friend Joe uh I go how you doing and she goes oh hi you I go come here Brian I pull him aside I go she's [ __ ] crazy I go get out right now whatever you're doing he goes no she's not crazy she just nervous to be around you I go dude trust me I I have a spidey sense for like real crazy I go that girl's [ __ ] crazy turns out of course he didn't listen moves her in blah blah blah turn out she's on meth completely out of her [ __ ] mind uh is a prostitute um has has uh these johs in her life and and you know [ __ ] pimps
in her life and then you know he gets rid of her and then years later he's uh on a bar uh at a bar on Sunset and uh about to walk in and she walks by and she's Street walking geez yeah I spotted it like that yeah he didn't spot it at all fascinating he would be a suck ass poker player I don't think I'd be a good poker player I don't have the patience it's just not something I'm interested in but if I if I was interested in I wonder if I'd be able to pick up Tails I find that so fascinating I feel like with all the experience in martial arts you would have a leg up on learning that stuff you're I mean picking up tells has some in common with you know looking at somebody's stance and picking up that they're about to throw a kick H that's interesting because looking at someone's stance and whether or not they're going to throw a kick is based on data you know like um like sometimes I'll say like during uh a broadcast like he's about to throw a left high kick and someone will go how you know and because there's a very small but perceptible rise in his heel like his heel came up off the back foot and which means usually that a guy's trying to get a little bit of a head start throwing a kick with his back leg and you just you see it because so many guys have throwing kicks at you or because you're you've tried to hide it on people and you've throw kicks at people you know there's there's a thing that you see but it's there's um there was a book on this and it's um not about martial arts but it's about just acquiring massive amounts of data uh about very specific things and then being able to see these things coming I forget the term that they used yeah but it was just about that about how for a person who doesn't have this data in their mind it seems like like how's this guy seeing this but for someone who has all that data it's like oh there it is you know just like this little well yeah it's exactly the same thing with picking up TS and poker because just thousands of times I've sat across the table from a guy I've looked at him I've thought about whether or not I think this guy has a good hand and then I've put out my call and he shows me his hand and I I've just been through that routine thousands of times and so now I find myself in that spot and the guy's bet and I'm
looking at him and thinking about whether or not to call and I have a big sample of what people look like right before I call them and then whether or not they show me the winning hand so a guy like Doyle Brunson who's been around for a hundred years he would be a wizard at that [ __ ] right I would guess so yeah that's really interesting man that's really interesting like the the does that guy should teach like tells right like if you you're that old you've been around for that how long's that guy been playing a long time um 50 60 years or something crazy like that 50 years more like 60 yeah 60 years all that dude's in his 80s I'm pretty sure that's amazing man that's that that all those years of accumulating that data and a guy like that has been really been around for the transformation of Poker too it was a real different thing back in the 60s yeah it was like you go over people's houses right yeah that was all it was did they have it in casinos back then I want to say the 60s was when poker in casinos began picking up the' 60s yeah what what led to this PO Revolution that we find now [ __ ] everybody plays poker now yeah there were a few stages of it the earlier Parts like what happened in the 60s and 70s I know less about but they started running the World Series of Poker in Vegas in the 60s um and have every year for I guess World Series started in 69 I think so they they've run it every year for 40 some years now well the big one on television was when they started showing those cameras for television cards being able to see people's hands that was huge that was huge in making it a spectator sport making it exciting even for a guy like me who doesn't play if I'm sitting at a bar and I look up and there's a poker thing on you see each guy's hand that's to me it's very exciting yeah that that's that was a huge leap for they had tried televising poker tournaments before that but it's a special to a casual view are a lot less interesting but you see lot less of it at least for the C the the you know the non-involved Observer like myself you see less of it on television now in the US in the US in other countries it's not it hasn't fallen off nearly the same way in other places and the reason behind
that is that in order to make a profitable TV show you have to sell advertising space if you're making a poker TV show who do you want to sell advertising space to poker online poker sites online poker sites can't advertise in the US anymore [ __ ] so in Canada or England or France poon TV is still huge so in Canada it's legal to bet online it is ambiguous ambiguous CU in most of the world it's ambiguous CU I would seem that like if you were a poker player and you live in America you just moved to Vancouver you play online in Vancouver Trav down to America give up US citizenship giv up US citizenship and getting citizenship somewhere else is a lot tougher than you might guess yeah I would imagine in 2011 when it became clear I was going to have to leave the US to keep playing poker online I was very startled that I can't just go wherever I want and set up shop and stay there indefinitely so you would you live in Malon now is that your your move mostly um I can only spend about half the year there for Visa reasons so I spend about half the year in Malta and do a lot of traveling around to other places as well you [ __ ] pimp look at you kid goes from hating school trying to figure out gets the the love of his parents [ __ ] bolts makes 1.6 a year the first year and then from there on when you got your degree and then you decided to just dedicate yourself to being a professional poker player like how many years was it until you kind of had to uh make this move out of the United States three uh I graduated in 2008 moved to Vegas and lived in Vegas from 2008 to 2011 and then moved to Malta what was living in Vegas like it was pretty great um I lived in Panorama Towers uh you spend a lot time in Vegas you might know it it's the apartment complex next door to vander's gym oh okay yeah I know where that is yeah nice spot yeah uh and it was just full of poker players oh really so it was like a some friends of mine from college who moved out there with me at the same time um I had two friends from college who uh one still is a professional poker player one was for a couple years and went to law school um they moved out to
Vegas with me uh my girlfriend then who's now my wife came out with me and then I met a bunch of poker players who were already living out there and Panorama Towers in like 2008 2009 was just Insanity um the whole building was was just poker players and strippers and empty Apartments wow what a party that must have been poker players and strippers how'd that work out must have been a lot of money being exchanged in those Towers allegedly allegedly I I don't know any details of that sort of thing good for you stay on the straight narrow son avoid the divorce that [ __ ] traps hedge fund managers sends them to their Doom so um so you you live in Vegas you're you're doing the poker thing in Vegas in Vegas but mainly online mainly online still yeah why is that um is it more profitable easier more profitable for me at that time given my personal skill set and inclinations um there's money to be made doing both uh the advantages with online poker are you can get a lot more hands an hour in you you don't have any of the cost or wasted time associated with going somewhere to play there's not the drive to get there and the drive back and the time spent waiting for a seat in a game playing live poker involves live cash games involves a lot of waiting around for your turn to get to play in the game yeah I would imagine um and then once you get in the game you play 30 hands an hour online I'm playing 3 or 400 hands an hour and that that's not it's not even particularly high volume are you playing more than one game at a Time online oh I see so you run multiple computers or do no you can it's just multiple windows on one computer okay so there's different sites no you can play multiple tables on one site really yeah yeah you're not doing anything sneaky or bad by playing multiple tables now when you have uh a thing on sites do you have uh a time limit yeah yeah pretty short um something like 15 seconds and then after 15 seconds it goes into your time bank which is like another minute worth of time but that is not constantly replenished so like you use 30 seconds of your time bank now you've only got 30 seconds left for the next hand if you were to go into your time bank again so yeah you have to play
quite quickly that's that seems like yeah like why would anybody go anywhere if you could play it online like that and so the games are tougher online because you can get so many more hands in the best players are winning so much that the competition to be the best player in the game online is stiffer whereas live it's more fun for many recreational players people who are losing at poker not all of them many prefer to play in a live game where they can see and hang out with the people do you have to worry about when you playing online do you have to worry about Bots or is that nothing anymore like that was something that people really worried about for a while it's a concern for sure um the biggest and best sites I think are doing a pretty good job at enforcing against it uh you can do various things to detect when it's a bot rather than a human playing and shut it down how do you do that like what what could Ian what do they do they run programs or something like that to try to the site has various data to work with based on what you're giving them um they're not like scanning your computer to see what other programs you're running or anything like that they're not invading your privacy in that way but what they can do is they can keep track of your mouse movement around the screen and the speed and timing that you're clicking on things and they can detect the difference between a human moving a mouse around the screen like a human and a computer program that just jumps from button to button and acts instantly so at this point if you're running a bot that plays for you part of your challenge is that you have to code up software to move the mouse around the screen in a convincingly humanlike fashion and evade this detection uh they track your playing hours if you're just regularly playing for 48 hours straight that's pretty suspicious right um unless they get a nice [ __ ] webcam video you doing crank sitting in front of your computer yeah I mean occasionally it comes to that sort of thing like um a guy I know was playing 60 tables at once and
they're like that you're a bot that a person can't do that and so he uploaded a video of him doing that and he's like no I [ __ ] can this is what it looks like what does he have like a bank of screens in front of them no I think it was I think it was just all on one screen all the tables stacked on top of each other so that whichever table you you have to act on Pops to the top and you just click and it goes to to the side and the next one you have to act on Pops to the top oh my God he was a competitive Starcraft player before he came to Poker so he was just like sick at speed clicking oh yeah and multitasking those Starcraft players it's amazing you watch that I don't insane I don't know what they're doing so uh it's even more amazing to me but same dun every now and then I watch those videos and it's nuts Duncan's obsessed with that [ __ ] he was a silver whatever the [ __ ] that is on Starcraft for a while and then he lost his silver standing he's very very upset it's very embarrassed but uh I would watch him get obsessed with that stuff and he would watch the videos and his eyes would light up and his p would dilate and oh yeah those videos are insane and it's a huge spectator sport in Korea right that is huge there's like TV stations devoted to just that I'm pretty sure yeah I need to talk to one of those the golf channels Starcraft Channel Starcraft dudes apparently it's a very very very difficult game too like that is in a lot of ways very chess-like in that sense it's very strategic and but also like almost athletic in the sort of speed clicking demands well 3D games are very athletic in that sense the hand eye coordination that are involved and like playing like games like unreal or Quake or you know Doom or any of those crazy quite a few uh competitive Gamers who transitioned to Poker and are now professional poker players but imagine that people that just have this inclination towards like figuring things out in in a a game sense yeah they would have that towards a lot of things absolutely yeah poker's full of people who were in some other game or sport before poker the pool thing is huge is very a lot of pool players going to Poker because they can actually make money doing it as opposed to pool it's
very difficult to do so when you um you you living in Vegas for a little bit bang hanging out with strippers um and poker players and strippers and poker players and uh then so you decide why how do you how do you go with Malta um it's a weird story actually how I ended up in Malta um originally it had a lot to do with where is Malta it's like right next to Sicily oh wow it's like uh couple hours on the ferry to Sicily hm okay that's where my grandparents are from oh cool Mal malta's real nearby I drink a lot of Sicilian wine and eat a lot of Sicilian pizza there I bet man the food there supposed to be Sensational like the seafood supposed to be amazing oh the local Red King prawns in Malta are some of the most delicious things I've ever eaten wow okay so how do you what what makes you live there is it a tax thing is that a gambling thing a residency thing um it's easy it looked like it was going to be when I started looking into it at the time um it was basically just you need to pay some relatively small fees for the process you need to fill in a bunch of paperwork mainly stuff like demonstrating that you have enough money to support yourself that you haven't been convicted of any crimes in the country you're coming from basic stuff like that and they will give you a permit to stay there as long as you like so do you speak Spanish or Italian like what what do you have to speak there in Malta they speak malti and English malti and what is malti it is a Semitic language so like closest to Arabic Jesus Christ but it's uh written in like Roman characters like you're used to oh okay um like Roman numerals no not Roman numerals V's instead of us no the alphabet we use for English and French and Spanish and Italian wow but it's a citic language but it's a Semitic language so it's just full of like x's and q's and gh's that you can't pronounce at all I needed to go to the post office to pick up a package that had been sent to me and I don't have a car there so I need to take a taxi so I get the address of the post office I write it down it's in a town I thought was called cormi it's spelled Q RM I I get in the taxi I say I need to go to the post office in cormi the guy
looks at me like I've just told him I need to go to the Post Office on the moon he's never heard of Cori it's not a big island they're like 500,000 people there you can drive from one end to the other in an hour it I say it again I show it to him on the piece of paper he says oh ory yes we can go to ory or starts with a silent q a silent Q a guessed silent cues why he use it how weird what a strange thing that's that whole part of the world is so bizarre because it's like sort of the The Echoes of the the Conqueror movements of thousands of years ago oh yeah and you can really see it in Malta I mean it it's been conquered by so many people over the years um obviously the language is Semitic because at one point it was under moish or Arabic control which is why that scene from True Romance with the Moors in Sicily yeah with you know where it's saying that yeah the racist scene for all the black people well that mean that's the reason why so many Sicilians have dark skin and curly hair U multi people look roughly like Lebanese people or something pretty dark skinned uh they speak a language that sounds a lot like Arabic with an Italian accent basically um you do like a lot of research before you decided on Malta medium amount uh did you know anybody living there already I knew a few people who had been there um so you just [ __ ] moved to some strange Island well what happened was uh the Department of Justice cracked down on the poker sites happened in April 2011 and a few weeks went by we're thinking may maybe this will all just blow over and everything will be back to the way it was in a month or two it became pretty clear that was not going to be the case by late May and the World Series of Poker is about to start in Vegas I'm going to be playing a poker tournament every day for six weeks um but I'm beginning to plan ahead to what I'm going to do after that so I can get back to playing online and talking to my girlfriend about where we're going to move and the idea of M comes up and we decide she's going to go there by herself and check it out while I'm playing the World Series and she's like not really that
enthusiastic about this idea at the time she's like We're going to go to this little shitty island in the middle of nowhere I I don't know about this yeah that sounds weird but she went over there and ended up loving it it's like Mal is great let's go there wow yeah came back just where did the other poker players go um did anybody follow you over there two other guys came with me over there and didn't stay uh what a fascinating Vagabond lifestyle you guys have yeah it's nuts uh all my friends who were living in Panorama Towers in Vegas are now scattered all over the world so no one stayed in Vegas one dude stayed in Vegas one dude out of how many I one dude out of my like close group of 10 friends or so and handful more out of the like 50 or 60 who are living in the building but isn't it legal now to gamble online on some sites if you live in Vegas yes there is online poker in Nevada but it's Nevada only so playing against other people in Nevada so there a limited group of people to play with yeah you can't play very high stakes there aren't a lot of games playing full-time from Nevada is not a very appealing proposition the guy who decided to stay St is playing mainly in casinos wow now is it is there any movement to change this as far as the online laws CU this yes um what year was this all implemented I want say 200 or the uiga passed in 2006 but it's not really even clear how much that had to do with anything that what happened right after the uiga passed in 2006 was that some poker sites voluntarily pulled out of the US market and that doing transactions with poker became more complicated because remember what I was saying about the uiga it didn't change what was illegal it it's not like online poker was legal before that and then it wasn't it's not like online poker was clearly illegal the whole time nobody really knows it's up to prosecutors to decide that they want to prosecute a case against an online gambling site on the basis of the laws that are on the books which are pretty vague and then courts to decide if it's fair to apply those laws to the case in question so has anybody from the US that's a poker player tried playing
online poker from the United States and been prosecuted players don't really get prosecuted so it's essentially the site owners the sites are the ones that are exposed to Legal risk so like if you just decided to stay in Vegas and start and keep playing online what would be the risk the sites would take my business they wouldn't take your business what if you went through a proxy then I might trick them and I might get to play on the site but I would be constantly at risk of being caught and confiscated if I'm caught I might lose all my money yeah so yeah you you have to do all sorts of identity masking [ __ ] to get away with playing on International poker sites from the US these days so what's being done to try to change that uh in some ways it's pretty similar to the marijuana movement in the US actually it's happening on a state-by-state basis um there's probably not going to be a federal Bill anytime soon they there have been some attempts uh but they haven't come very close to passing but so far Nevada New Jersey and Delaware have passed online poker bills and you can play in those three places that's it that's it so far California is at the Forefront and is a huge one um if California becomes an online poker State even if you can only play against other California residents it's a big enough state with enough money that that will be a full-fledged poker economy yeah 20 million people here I mean this is a goddamn country yeah this is Canada close 10 is 40 is it I think so I think I looked that up recently I think you did too I think you're right I think I think we looked it up actually well let's find out right now population of Canada I want to say it's 37 population that sounds about right I I think California is actually higher than 22 34 34.8 California or Canada Canada 34.8 say California is close I mean La is 12 or 14 already 38 California's 38 so yeah California is a bit bigger than Canada so pretty close 38 and 35 and then those are pretty comparable to like the larger European
countries that's like LA's 20 million LA's 20 million yeah wow that's what uh the 20 million came from but that's just without Mexicans they have no idea how many people really are here right it could easily be 30 yeah or 40 there's a lot of people here that are undocumented yeah that's a crazy thing yeah the actual numbers I mean I'm sure they probably have some sort of a vague idea but unless they're going from neighborhood to Neighborhood scanning I mean how do they know that's the whole idea that they're here illegally there's no documentation yeah you I guess you could like you could guess somehow or another yeah you could track indicators of economic activity like how many [ __ ] bags of rice are being sold at the supermarket racist um I don't know if that would work but uh I mean track how much food is sold yeah in La that that has to be pretty closely correlated with how many people there are here I guess but how much cash business do they do that's where things get really squirely because uh a lot of folks in the illegal Community they they work for cash they they spend cash on their their bills but you spend cash at the grocery store the grocery store has a record of that they don't know who spent it but they know how much food they're selling but it would be racist to check cuz you'd have to check those those weird markets weird Spanish names you drive by like you go down Vanowen you see those I mean you check all the markets yeah I guess and then just just calculate how many people are buying that food look at you you clever bastard he treated it like a goddamn poker game so how long you been in Malta now uh since September 2011 so like three years wow and any plans on what about like Monaco or in those other places where you can Monaco's creepy I don't want to go to Monaco is it creepy everyone there has so much [ __ ] money and they're so snobby s is the guy who made a million six his first year of playing poker yeah those [ __ ] Rich [ __ ] you know how like you'll see a car drive by in the states it'll have like a handwritten sign in the window for sale $15,000 call this number yes in Monaco you'll see
that only it'll be like the [ __ ] McLaren or something for sale €1.5 million just hand sign in the window come on I've seen that in Monaco a McLaren for sale like with a little handmade sign I don't know [ __ ] about cars I may gu the wrong name I know but yeah expensive cars wow that sounds crazy why wouldn't they go to a broker the taxies there are all Cadillacs if you have that much money why wouldn't you go to if you have enough money for a [ __ ] McLaren not a there's different McLaren yeah there's a there's I've talked about this in the podcast before people got upset at me but there's this I was saying that McLaren don't sound very good and then they said what about this sounds awesome that's the million dooll McLaren that's a million plus doll Mclaren has this amazing sound to it but the regular McLaren that's like I think 200 plus thousand s it doesn't sound bad just doesn't sound like a Ferrari like Ferraris have this part of the the beauty of a Ferrari is the sound it makes the P like people underestimate that that's one of the reasons why turbocharged cars aren't appealing to a lot of U real sports cars Fanatics because they just don't have the same sound because sense yeah the forced induction with the air it just doesn't doesn't gives the same exhaust sound so much so that a lot of Turbo like some of the new turbocharged cars what they're actually doing is they're faking the sound so there's a thing called The Sound synthesizer that they use on on the BMW M5 you could turn it off praise Allah um cuz it's really gross and when you when you have it on it's actually pumping sounds like engine sounds through your speakers so it uses a sound system of the car to make you think that you're making all this engine noise which car is this the BMW M5 which is a brilliant automobile but they just tacked that on cuz it was too quiet by default well they used to have a V10 and the V10 was a monster engine it was just a an incredible incredible engine and uh it made so much cool noise it was just like this [ __ ] throaty deep powerful pretty sure it was a V10 hold on a second BMW V10 let me pull that off real quick um uh wv10 um and they switched to a
turbocharged engine yeah yeah it was a V10 so they switched to a turbocharged engine for the new one it has more power more torque it's faster but it just doesn't sound as good just doesn't you know the one that it you know it used to have this incredible whale to it that's like here I'll play it for you sound like a Ferrari like Ferraris have this that's part of the that's the delay yeah let me find this [ __ ] um so anyway what I was saying about Monaco is that more than any other place I've ever been in the world there's this feeling that you don't belong there and that nobody is happy about the fact that you turned up like nobody's happy about the fact that you turned up like there there's one big poker tournament a year in Monaco that I have been to several times and like all the hotel staff and cab drivers and everybody else like that that I've interacted with there just seems like surprised and put off that that there is like some young American dude who doesn't speak French who is in Monaco really so it's just a millionaire billionaire playboy Place yeah and they want it for the rich french-speaking people H but doesn't like George Clooney live there or some [ __ ] yeah I mean there are a bunch of people who are not French who he's probably got like shat all around the world sure does shat a [Applause] [Music] shat that's sort of BMW with a V10 sounds like the new one that's a serious engine the new one sounds like a little [ __ ] but the new one's a better car it's Catch 22 it's like what are you going to do if you keep going with these bigger crazy throy engines they just eat the gas and then they kill the seals and the Arctic [ __ ] drown the polar bears the Frozen glaciers and all that good stuff what is the uh the economy like in this multiplace like what's it Con constructed with a lot of it at this point has to do with foreign companies many of them in the online gaming industry a lot also just in banking and finance and stuff like that is there tricky laws there or something is that why they move there yeah it's uh some of the lowest tax
rates in the EU so like many small countries it's like you know Antigo or um St kits or there are a bunch of like island nations near the US that have carved out an itch for themselves as tax Havens and business friendly economies uh Malta has a bit of that going on as well so do you have to because you maintain your United States citizenship do you have to um pay taxes there and here as well is that how it works only here uh if I had become a resident like I was planning to um which I never really finished that story um if I had become a pres a resident like I was planning to yes I would ow taxes there they have a tax treaty with the us so I can deduct what I pay there against what I would owe here you don't end up getting double taxed um but since I'm not a resident no I have no tax liability anywhere in the US see but if you if you do become a resident somewhere else you have to give up your residence here right no not always um really I mean in this case not at all this isn't becoming a citizen this is just becoming a permanent resident so I don't get a multis passport or anything like that I get like a sticker that goes inside my US Passport report saying that I am a registered permanent resident yeah there's a thing like that with um with Mexico yeah you a resident Visa or something like that you could stay like six months at a time and then you have to go back and forth yeah yeah yeah there there're all kinds of visas for every country has their own set of rules and different rules that apply to citizens of different other countries and do you enjoy this this living in Malta and doing your online gambling there yeah uh it's a pretty decent place to live um if I could live anywhere in the world and keep playing online poker there's a decent chance I'd pick somewhere like San Francisco Over Malta why San Francisco I just really like it there I was like getting ready to move to there from Vegas just before the doj Crackdown just because of the atmosphere of the Town yeah it's just a nice place it's a great place very smart one of the smartest cities I
think in the country it's it's also like one of the most techsavvy there's so so many tech people there A lot of complaints though the um the folks who uh were there for a long time are complaining about the real estate prices was shot through the roof where regular people can't even afford to live there anymore they can't afford to buy houses cuz i' I looked at the housing prices like in San Francisco it's a ridicul a $4 million house is like this like regular house like how is that a $4 million house that's not it's a million dollar house maybe it's not a million do house I have friends who live in uh Atherton do you know where that is no it's the richest it's one of the richest neighborhoods in the country okay and it's just outside of San Francisco and it's [ __ ] Preposterous like their house is worth $15 million and it's not worth $15 million it's just not yeah it's just they have a large backyard but I mean it's not large if you live in Kansas right or you know in Nebraska or anywhere else it's just large to this one [ __ ] area where it's just ridiculous real estate I mean it doesn't make any sense like you look at this you're like how could you ever pay $15 million for this [ __ ] house it doesn't make any sense yeah that shit's crazy it's called all those wacky [ __ ] billionaire Google people live out there right it's just too much money so yeah I mean it it's supply and demand people want to live in this one spot there's limited space and those people have a whole lot of money it drives me crazy though that you can't live here not that I love you so much but it just drives me crazy that you you have to like leave the country to do what you do for a living because of some [ __ ] goofy laws that were obviously put in place by criminals or people that are just shady as [ __ ] yeah I don't no it's it's [ __ ] awful it's awful so if it does change will it be like a something that's gonna happen you know within the next decade or is it like I think so yeah I mean does like poker stars.net do they try to work on that or they yeah uh there is a pretty good chance that they will be in the New Jersey Market in the next year or so uh because you need to get regulatory approval um and obviously the US Casino interests
are trying to keep poker stars out it's not a company owned by Americans they should just send Donuts to the Christy guys house over and over and over again he'll let them in donuts and hot dogs and maybe cheese pizza just keep sending send food to that guy's house until he'll say yes he loves food he loves food probably as much as he loves money and money buys food and this is like you cut out the middleman just send him the food he it it looks like he's pretty enthusiastic about food yeah he's not enthusiastic about Teslas he won't allow them to direct sell Teslas which is just shady as [ __ ] I don't know about that you didn't know about that no what's the story with that I'll Google it so I have all the information so I don't [ __ ] anything up but uh Tesla New Jersey chrisy he's just gross I just I Christy says Tesla criticism is complete crap he's such a [ __ ] slob um conservative criticism over his administration's decision to stop Tesla from selling cars in its showrooms in New Jersey is complete crap the fact is we looked away for a year to allow Tesla to do what they were doing and we couldn't look away any longer Look Away what what does that mean that they had already been selling cars books that they could interpret to stop them from doing that but they didn't for a little while and then decided they would oh the company cannot sell their cars from the showroom they have two showrooms but the company cannot sell their cars from the showrooms or offer the customers test drives the Jersey law on the book since the 1970s requires cars to be sold through the traditional dealership model okay he says I don't like the law either I didn't vote for it I didn't sign it but I don't get to just ignore the laws that I don't like H okay well that actually makes sense yeah so he probably was spitting food out when he said it though probably had [ __ ] flying out of his teeth somebody sued or whatever and they couldn't ignore it no maybe yeah probably something or someone paid someone off or something like that right it's just gross I just I don't understand it's first of all it doesn't make any sense like why would you have a law like that
in place the only reason why a law like that would be in place because someone paid somebody off doesn't make sense I guess in theory the idea is you should need to have a license to sell cars otherwise you might sell people real shitty cars that fall apart and then disappear and not be accountable for selling people cars that don't work yeah I guess the the rule was actually a result of a backroom deal electric car makers chairman charges H okay the anti- Tesla rule a new rule that effectively bans direct to Consumer Car Sales this is what it's saying in this one article that is in uh new jersey.com oh th this is sounding pretty suspect it's for specifically direct to Consumer so like there has to be a middleman broker you have to have manufacturer who sells to a dealer who sells to a consumer and Tesla was selling manufacturer to Consumer and so they had to crack down on that is that what's going on Elon Musk the way he said it uh he said that if you believe that the law in the books protecting dealers are there for the good of consumer then Governor Christie has a bridge closure that he wants to sell you yeah which is of course in reference to the Scandal where that slob closed down a bridge for whatever political reason that had nothing to do with safety or the Health and Welfare of the citizens is some political pressure Governor Christie has promised that this would be put to a vote of the elected State Legislature which is the appropriate way to change the law musk said when it became apparent that the auto dealer loby oh okay when it became apparent the auto dealer Lobby that this approach would not succeed they cut a back room deal with the governor to circumvent the legislative process and pass a regulation that is fundamentally contrary to the intent of the law okay so he's a [ __ ] artist yeah which makes sense sounds about right yeah that makes sense so New Jersey's got a bunch of issues this is also the same guy who's morbidly obese but said that he's going to stop marijana from being legal in his town that it won't be legal in his State rather on his watch because of the children you know how about the children looking at you as their leader this morbidly
obese person that's giving out any health related advice whatsoever you know just drives me [ __ ] bananas that kind of [ __ ] and of course they have um I don't have anything against fat people being elected to office but I do yeah yeah morbidly obese I just don't think it's right really no Fu around [ __ ] around ble children no if they're really good at their job [ __ ] yeah they should be fat but he's not good at his job doesn't seem that way he's fat and he's a hypocrite it's just well I you know my issue became only with the marijuana thing which is marijuana is near and dear to my heart I think it's a [ __ ] fantastic plant and I think it aids Evolution and so I see some nonevolved morbidly obese person who doesn't care about his health and he's trying to push what he's talking about it from a health perspective you know worrying about the children not only that he's citing studies that he doesn't understand not biased studies that he doesn't understand at all the government studies on that stuff for and ignoring real shady yeah ignoring all the positive benefit studies that have just time and time again been pushed aside because of their agenda well yeah I mean in my opinion you don't even need to demonstrate that there's anything positive about it for it to be clear that it should be legal just from a harm reduction standpoint people are going to smoke weed whether or not you tell them it's legal and if you make it illegal then they're going to have to deal with criminals to do it and they're going to be putting themselves in danger and there's going to be more crime the associated crime that goes with that and not only that people are going to be locked up which is more harm which is ridiculous blocking people up for non-violent drug offenses is archaic it's stupid in fact the World Health Organization just recently called for a decriminalization of all drugs saw that fascinating absolutely fasc absolutely the right thing it is the right thing if you can have drugs and you can have drugs there's goddamn plenty of drugs there's gone over this a thousand times but go to Any Corner liquor store and you could drink yourself to death go to any drugstore there's a liquor aisle that's
filled with enough booze to kill dozens of people oh yeah we live in a preposterously hypocritical Society is Malta like that can you get good weed in Malta what's it like no Malta is pretty repressive on the drug laws really it's a Catholic country ah those [ __ ] so what happens if you get caught with a joint in Malta oh death potentially a good bit of time in jail um really a joint I don't know the the [ __ ] up thing with Malto drug laws is that they really don't draw a lot of distinctions between one drug and the next and there's bit of a growing heroin problem there and so there's a bit of a push for harsher drug laws to crack down on that and there have been a couple cases of that spilling over into weed and people getting in a lot of trouble for a relatively small amount of weed that kind of makes sense that does happen in a lot of these smaller countries or countries that are just not sophistic icated they tend to lump drugs together and often times they also tend to um prosecute people B based on the weight of the plant and they pick up the pot with the plant like the pot like the you know that grows in the dirt the soil itself and they count all that as your drug you know like like if you you found someone who had marijuana plants in their house and you know you weighed everything it's like probably a few ounces of smokable marijuana but it's like many pound pound of stuff associated with it yeah it's like a sneaky little [ __ ] loophole that prosecutors use you know it's just gross just it's just when you make you make criminals out of people that are just doing what they want to do that doesn't harm anybody else it's just it's it's it's a loophole and it just shows you that you have too many laws I mean that's what it is it becomes bureaucracy it becomes red tape and it becomes a machine that needs fuel to feed itself and it's getting to the point that everyone's a criminal and they can just pick and choose who needs to be taken down and sent to jail and so that the criminal justice system just becomes a vehicle for discrimination and oppression because if you interpret the laws to the maximum
stringency we're all felons for a million different reasons a bunch of the [ __ ] you do on the internet's a felon a bunch of the [ __ ] you own in your house is a felony like if you do both of those you're [ __ ] double criminal yeah smoking pot and gambling online you dirty bastard going get downloading videos that don't didn't pay for like yeah well that's a tricky one man that's a tricky one because I think that as time goes on and it does seem to be changing in making access to Legal purchasable versions of these movies and things seems to be much much much easier used to be a and you know I'm not in favor of putting anyone in jail for downloading things but you're going to have to deal with what is a downloadable copy of something I mean what is that for sure there's a lot of ethical arguments both ways I like the argument that the people that have downloaded things when they you know start calling them piracy they go no it's not piracy because it was piracy I would take yours and you wouldn't have it anymore right it's a copy and that's so true and this is just it's one more example of how people want to use these black and white sort of definitions of things that exist for physical you know carbon-based hard things that you can put on a scale that you simply can't do when it comes to digital content you just can't you can't do it proper applying property laws to ideas gets pretty complicated especially ideas where you're not stealing the idea for a profit right like you when you taking someone you're just enjoying the idea without paying for it yeah it's weird right and I'm not saying that's okay to do I'm not either my dad's a writer there there are professional artists in my family who need to make a living by selling their art and if you can get all the art you want for free that's [ __ ] them over it is but I think that there's room in this country for uh ethical consideration by the consumer so like to put it this way like remember when Napster was around there was a bunch of people that were downloading things for free off of Napster they were doing the peer-to-peer thing but a lot of people had this sort of really cool ethical consideration where they would take like if they got
something and they liked it they would go buy it yeah they would say hey I owe this guy this [ __ ] album kicks ass I'll go buy it right you know and they also would become fans of the band and then they would go see the band Live which is even better for the band because then it's more profitable for the band as opposed to like the record where they get kind of pennies on the dollar they would get a much larger chunk you know so there's there's a lot of [ __ ] going on you know I mean how is it different that you can download music for free how is that different in some ways than the radio is it just cuz it's a better copy because the [ __ ] radio is playing your music all day long cuz you have to pay for your radio music by listening to the ads in between right right but aren't you paying for your bandwidth that you use to download it I mean it all gets squirly yeah it's all pretty complicated and my point in bringing that up wasn't that I think it's wrong that there are laws regulating what you can and can't download without paying for it but just that it creates a [ __ ] up situation when the laws are such that if the government decides to they've got a reason to put [ __ ] anyone they want in jail well especially now that you're they're literally downloading every single voicemail that you've ever said every single email that you send from now till [ __ ] who knows when will be in some NSA database somewhere and they might go look through your [ __ ] and who knows you might have said something completely joking like this uh look this poker [ __ ] isn't working out so I'm going to start robbing babies and [ __ ] you know whatever shooting Banks up and taking all their money and then they say oh that's Criminal Intent and this is a terrorist threat the super [ __ ] up thing that they do is they I'm pretty sure this is accurate um if I'm spouting conspiracy theory [ __ ] here someone call me out on dare but I'm pretty sure they find that [ __ ] they leak the information to the FBI or the local police who then basically conduct a sham investigation to find the information legally so that they can use it in court but they already know what they're looking for cuz the NSA got it illegally and just gave it to them yes that's exactly what they do yeah yeah so
yeah that should be illegal yeah that that that shit's insane that's sneaky as [ __ ] well depending upon what you're doing and that's where it gets squirrly if it turns out you're involved in trafficking uh human trafficking and you know selling children to sex slavery yeah there's [ __ ] that's bad enough that it becomes a difficult question of what rights you can trample to keep people from doing that yeah but there's got to be a better way just got to be and and also if our society was just and if all the laws that were in place were in place in order to act Pro actually protect people protect people from being victimized by bad people but that's not what's going on I mean especially when you come you're dealing with most drug laws they're no one's getting victimized by pot it's just they're just not you know they tried to push it for a while if they were do you remember when they used to have those commercials where these two [ __ ] non-nonsense guys would be eating dinner and uh like the guy would be uh saying that if you buy drugs you support terrorism period right and the K kept eating like to tell you like like it was like giving you this this feeling of authority like it's your dad that's tired of your [ __ ] stupid nonsense they've been talking with your friends around it's like no listen listen period end of discussion if you buy drugs you're supporting terrorism and he's eating the salad so I'm like what the [ __ ] is this what is this weird psychological message you guys are trying to do you remember that Jamie you know what I'm talking about like no I'm pretty sure my buddy Dave knows a guy named Jeff who grew these mushrooms in his closet yeah well especially with pot I mean I was buying it directly from the guys who were growing it so like I there's no terrorism involved there man they might have terrorize some fertilizer pop the top and pour it into the ground no it was just so silly but I mean there is a little truth to that like if you buy cocaine somewhere up the chain there's some [ __ ] up people involved in getting cocaine to you mhm and you know why because cocaine's illegal it's illegal yeah course if cocaine was legal you'd be buying it from Merc or [ __ ] you know galaxo Smith Klein or something
like that they'd be selling cocaine they're of course just ethically hey just like Jack Daniels they have a commercial for Jack Daniels have you ever seen it I mean is what pull yeah pull it up let's let's watch this [ __ ] goofy ass commercial because this is it's quite hilarious how they treat you like you're a [ __ ] monkey let's take a look at this yeah this is exactly it this is so funny watch this this is so it's a ploy what this drug money funds Terror it's a ploy Ploy a manipulation Drug Money funds Terror I mean why should I believe that because it's a fact a fact F fact so you're saying that I I should believe believe it because it's true that's that's your argument it is true so the guy on the left the first guy is a [ __ ] the handsome guy and the older gentleman is like his that's a weird ad it's the dumbest [ __ ] ad ever because there's nothing being said it's two [ __ ] what why is that convincing who thought that was a good idea because people are scared of their dad it's convincing for people that are scared of their dad not only that who's going to [ __ ] see that and go I don't want that guy eating salad to be mad at me so I'm not going to buy drugs like completely ineffective like absolutely 100% ineffective like not one person watched that ad and didn't do drugs matter of fact I did more drugs because of that ad I got mad and I did extra drugs cuz it's so [ __ ] stupid they treat you like you're a [ __ ] like somehow or another that's all you have to say like first of all the that was pre- internet this is like 2001 not pre internet but pre the effect of the internet and social media social media really changed the whole game the way people communicate the way they understand information that was pre social media because you can't have those kind of arguments you just can't you can't say because it's fact F A oh you can [ __ ] spell fact you must be right I'm sold have that guy come over here and sit him down for a podcast for three hours I'll dissect that dude I'll send him through the [ __ ] vit mix splice him up silly [ __ ] it's ridiculous it's a ridiculous way to express an opinion yeah you you know
first of all you can't make an argument about terrorism and Drugs in a 30-second commercial it's just physically not possible yeah you don't have it's a really complicated issue it is as complex as as biological life itself I mean is unbelievably complex if you want to break down the root cause of addiction where drugs come from what is a drug what are the effects why does this one term drug why is it a blanket that we throw over things that save lives that enhance cognitive function and and productivity like caffeine and things that kill you and things that are bad for you and things that makes you know life more interesting there's all together under this one big blanket called drugs so if you're saying if you buy drugs you support terrorism if you have a cup of coffee after your meal I'm going to stab you cuz you're a [ __ ] drug user you crazy [ __ ] you're going to have a whiskey on the Rocks like a gentleman you piece of [ __ ] this just like a it's Madness it's like and that's all the kind of [ __ ] that was available you know that they or was out there before you know the social media aspect of the internet made that Preposterous you could you imagine the Twitter response if somebody tried to put a [ __ ] video like that you know hash yesall drugs hash yesall drugs would be the [ __ ] the the parody attack of it they're still out there they're still putting out not like that pretty not that bad I guess what is one that you could think of um Jamie see if you could look up recent anti-drug propaganda commercial because I don't think they do them anymore I really think that they're so idiotic if one child went without a school lunch that was funded by the state if one teacher got paid one extra dollar someone who made that video should get their dick kicked into a [ __ ] meaty pulp cuz it's just it's just a waste of money it's a waste of taxpayer money not only that most of that [ __ ] when you see that remember that talking dog like Lindsay I wish you wouldn't do drugs that was the one I was about to bring up isn't that pretty recent uh fairly it was on my 2009 comedy special so I'm assuming that it was 2007 or 8 and it was just mocked mercilessly yeah I wish you wouldn't smoke but you're not the same in you
smoke pot I miss my friend [ __ ] [ __ ] sponsorship that's all made by a partnership for a Drug Free America the problem with that of course is a partnership for a drug-free America has received millions of dollars from Alcohol Tobacco and pharmaceutical companies yeah of course my joke was that that's like hookers making commercials against strippers that's really what it's like it's like pretty much like alcohol companies making commercials against pot or pharmaceutical drug commercials making commercials against it's Preposterous it's just it's just idiotic is there more is there something recent there's a the foundation for a drug-free world oh a world filled with first of all before we talk about this if you're interested in any of this stuff like really in depth I recommend Dr Carl Hart's work Dr Carl Hart who has been a podcast um guest and what was his name of his book remember his book um uh here I'll pull it up real quick Dr Carl Hart um he had a great point and one of his uh high price high price yeah he's brilliant just a brilliant guy and he's the associate professor of psychology uh and Psychiatry at Columbia University and he uh is well known for his research in drug use and abuse and uh his his statement is so clear it's just the best statement not only is there never going to be a drug-free America or a drug-free world you wouldn't want it yeah of course you wouldn't like why would you drugs are technology you know the the reason they exist is because they're effective is because we have figured out that there's ways that we can manipulate the way our mind works the way our body works the way our body feels for good and for bad and like all things in life human beings have tools and those tools can be abused or they can be used and they can use be used to the greater good of mankind and that's a drug is just like that it's just like a tool absolutely what is it do they have a commercial there's a bunch of them just play one of these goofy [ __ ] things in the United states have tried drugs or alcohol by the time they're 13 years old a third of teens have gone to House parties where there was alcohol pot cocaine ecstasy or prescription drugs over half of kids say it would be sneaky use of an statement if they wanted some
seven out of 10 teenagers have been offered an illegal drug teenagers whose parents talk to them about drugs are 42% less likely to use drugs okay well that that's a good commercial drug mean that's that's like talk to your kids that that makes sense that really wasn't bad also seven out of 10 kids get offered drugs in high school I want to know who those other three are those [ __ ] losers nobody's offering you drugs come on man what [ __ ] parties are you going to you're like getting something yeah don't take pills you don't know what they are all right don't do heroin that shit's addictive but the only way we learn all these things is by you know the ability to freely communicate and express each other Express thoughts rather like poor Portugal has instituted a Countrywide decriminalization of all drugs a while ago yeah and it's going great the results have been fantastic yeah lower crime lower drug addiction you know lower cases of HIV infection it's just across the board across the board you know you you can't suppress people you know I I know this as a parent um I try very hard to not suppress my children I try to explain to them what's good or bad about doing things explain to them the dangers of things but give them like I I don't want to be the boss you know I just want to be the person who can tell them things that they don't know yet and do it because I love them but when you as soon as you [ __ ] tell people like cuz it's a drug cuz it's a fact f a fact I just want to beat you to death you [ __ ] duns you you shitty propaganda machine walking around with a [ __ ] pair of glasses eating salad [ __ ] [ __ ] face just to [ __ ] shitty commercial that's my least favorite commercial I think ever cuz it's a fact F fact so you're telling me that it's a fact I'm telling you you're both [ __ ] the first guy an assho talks about anything like that cuz it's a fact your dad that's it's like a dad thing that guy is like a dad I have a friend who has a dad like that and I I know people who have dads like that I can't talk to them cuz I'd be like you're a dunce and that's why your son doesn't accept your you don't even understand this he gets away from you he mocks you
okay I got to go cuz I can't have this conversation I'll [ __ ] yell at you in your own house I wouldn't really but but that that thing that [ __ ] Mr noons guy that Mr No Nonsense guy intimidates people cuz it's fact f a fact do you anybody who [ __ ] spells fact out like that you should be able to just spit on them just it should be an automatic what the [ __ ] seems like the appropriate response spit spit it's not assault but it's clearly too late for an intellectual discussion yeah you're got to hit him and hit him with rocks [ __ ] pee on his leg or something this and I've taken this [ __ ] way out of the boundaries of normal thinking [ __ ] but you know those those kind of commercials are really Insidious they're Insidious and they're it's the roots of them is what's the most disturbing when you find this partnership for a drug-free America is just it's essentially just a business boy yeah it's the alcohol Lobby protecting their Market yeah I mean it's so weird it's just it's so weird especially like you know what it would be like well that's not even good now I would I was saying that it' be like a really shitty movie that's attacking like a really awesome movie you know for for being you know cuz they don't want you to that's what it's like kind of in a way just that no nonsense guys it's just that that is something that like for whatever reason like even the ineffective way that the first guy communicated the way he so you're trying to tell me that's what you're trying to tell me like you he's not telling you anything are you guys both dumb like you guys are idiots this conversation sucks and this is the reason why people shouldn't be allowed to vote you two dummies you two dummies having this [ __ ] salad argument it's weird and Malta worse huh in terms of drug laws yeah it's pretty bad you you can end up in jail for a very long time for not very much do some [ __ ] Midnight Express type [ __ ] right you ever see that movie I don't express it's a movie where the guy seen no movies ever it's embarrassing really yeah you just playing poker like a mad man how many hours a day you play poker uh not that much I mean
20 I'd say like I probably average 30 to 50 hours a week oh okay um 50 hours a week is still like a real J yeah yeah yeah so it's a real job uh it varies a lot throughout the year for yes it is a lot of sitting it's not good for you yeah terrible for you sitting is the new smoking have you not heard I have heard that phrase and I I kind of buy it I mean my back is way too [ __ ] up for a 28-year-old is it really [ __ ] up do you stretch out or do you yoga or anything like that I stretch a bit but nothing organized not as good as it should be yeah you can get some bulging disc that way dude degeneration of discs I don't think it's gone that far yet but yeah I was wearing I was using this thing for a while which is pretty cool this uh knee thing but I I decided that I like uh sitting up straight in this mhm better than I like sitting on that thing it doesn't have you know what these things are you ever see these here I'll put it on it's uh it's a um it's like a kneeling chair yeah I I do know those I I thought about buying one of those to sit on while playing poker and didn't do it well there's good and bad to it but it's uh it's not the most comfortable thing but uh it definitely forces you to sit up straight A buddy of mine has started playing from a treadmill desk really so he's on his treadmill while he's uh it's this like specially designed treadmill desk he's like walking real slowly it's not strenuous because the studies show if you go more than like 2 miles an hour it starts impacting your cognitive function he's just walking real slowly but he's standing up and moving around all day his computer that's probably way better for you a lot I may do that eventually treadmill desk I love it what if it gets to like some virtual reality type [ __ ] some Oculus Rift poker playing that would be kind of dope you aware of oculus rift I not you're not oh oh but I have to tell you Oculus Rift is the newest latest greatest 3D virtual reality um helmet that they've created okay um my friend Duncan who's a big proponent of it he loves this [ __ ] cuz he got a copy of one of the earlier ones he let me try it on and it was amazing but it was really pixelated was like Quake one like old school video gamey like there's no way you could misinterpret what it is like you you
know it's do you remember that really old Nintendo one came out like Virtual Boy Virtual Boy that's why I thought it was that thing was insane red my a friend of mine got it and he got a headache within 30 minutes some people get headaches Brian got a headache from Oculus Rift but it doesn't give me a headache I think maybe it's the same kind of people that get like a boat sickness like motion sickness on a boat seasick that would Mak sense yeah it's an inner ear thing apparently but uh I think maybe um that's a genetic thing like you either get it or you don't get it cuz my kids don't get it but my wife gets it it's weird cuz I think my kids get their robustness from the [ __ ] old man um but um uh anyway this Oculus Rift apparently it's gotten exponentially better and Duncan called me the other day I was at the Improv and he called me up and he was like [ __ ] frothy he's like dude what I just saw he going to change everything the world is going to change this is bigger than the internet he goes this is bigger this is bigger than the the invention of the wheel this is bigger than a he goes it's [ __ ] CRA he was [ __ ] frothing at the mouth I wish I could see his [ __ ] Bey eyes like bulging out of his head he was so happy and excited he went to this 3D um virtual reality developers conference thingy and he said the newest version of the Oculus Rift which hasn't reached consumers I don't think any of them have right just in a a lowlevel sense like developers MH but the newest latest greatest one you go into a room and there's a guy playing piano and the way they filmed it apparently they put cameras all over a person's body and so everywhere you look it's like you you you see it as if the camera like you're looking like there's no there's no breakup of the motion it's completely smooth and it's completely HD three-dimensional like a movie like like like you're watching perfect three-dimensional 4K video Jesus yeah and you guys you go into this room and there's a guy playing piano and he talks to you and you get to sit down you can like move near him you can move around him you can go like it's all been filmed like you can change where you're going and the video follows you and he said it's [ __ ] nuts like the sound he said is like 3D stereo sound the guy playing
the he goes you feel like you're in a [ __ ] room with this guy he said it just changed it changes everything he was he was going crazy yeah he was going nuts he was going nuts about it and based on his original one that I uh [ __ ] with which was like I said very pixelated very old school like 1990 video gamey type it was uh still pretty [ __ ] cool even then they have ones now where Virtual Boy was fun wasn't well pull up Virtual Boy I've never seen that before I've never uh I'm I'm actually enjoing this chair this sort of helmet thing on top of a tripod that you lean into and it's just like red lines on a black background if I remember right and there are various video games you can play like flight simulators here it is right here Virtual Boy that's what they this is what the games looked like basically there was very little detail oh God it's all red like that yeah e gross slightly 3D depth well pull up um uh Lewis from unbox there therapy our pal Lewis he uh Lou has a uh video on that one that they made with an iPhone um it's it's a cardboard box he had it here and take this cardboard box you open it up and then put the pieces all in place and then set your iPhone there and then you put it on your head it's got It's like so low rent and apparently they made it that low rent on perfect on purpose rather to mock the Oculus Rift cuz the Oculus Rift is this gigantic huge you know silicone and this is uh he's uh inth about the Google cardboard VR headset or VR cardboard cutout that uses your phone to create a headset does that make any sense anyways I recently made a reaction video in which I gave this contraption to a number of individuals who you might recognize and I got some amazing reactions so if you haven't seen that video yet you should definitely go and check it out but this one is dedicated to telling you and showing you how this seemingly boring piece of cardboard can turn your phone into a state-of-the-art virtual reality headset so it all starts with this cutout this cardboard cutout that you construct into what you see here now you can actually make this on your own using plans via the cardboard website so you don't need to purchase one of these just get your hands on some cardboard use the plans and you can make it yourself or you can buy a
preconfigured cutout via Amazon if you want something that's a little bit more streamlined and closer to a finished product it's about $10 and I'll link that down in the description let's cut it off here so Lou uh gets the hits it's uh but it's unbox therapy on YouTube and he's got that you could see that as well as the recent video of us shooting the iPhone 6 glass with a bow and arrow uh but um he got a copy or hold of the newest uh the glass screen for the iPhone 6 it's this sapphire glass and you can bend it you can scratch it with keys you can it's like really super super durable that that sounds like a thing I would have some use for yeah this is what my iPhone looks like ah there it's taking a beating huh yep yeah most of them have um but uh what you can't do with that we found is shoot an arrow through it did not deflect yeah it did not deflect went right through it destroyed it yeah arrows and phones don't mix but you know how often are you going to get shot by a [ __ ] Arrow when you've got a phone on you probably not often and probably if your phone is ruined that's not your biggest concern yeah if you're getting shot by arrows your phone is not it's the least of your concern yeah it's yeah you better be worried about your [ __ ] personal health some shit's going down son being attacked by Mongols or something usually the arrows don't come one at a time yeah I don't know how we got on this virtual reality headset thing but yeah I don't remember where that started at oh I remember because I was thinking ergonomics yeah well be being able to do it sort of like in the Oculus world like I think eventually you're going to be able to grab sitting at a virtual table and yeah physical object looking at virtual cards well or or virtual screens in front of you Minority Report style and you're moving them around through this Oculus Rift headset and you're standing up while you're on this treadmill and you're walking or that's not too far away I don't think I bet it's not you know um the um I I really love this idea this guy's doing of walking really slowly you know a lot of people claim a writers especially um claim that they get some of their best ideas while walking yeah like they walk specifically and they hold on to a tape recorder while they're
walking and then they just talk like a walk with the dog or something like that talking to a tape recorder yeah I could see that yeah there something about moving like the movement like just getting not nothing heavy but a little bit of blood flow yep but your back's [ __ ] up from sitting huh I mean it's not terrible but want to try this sure want to try one of these jammies here get this to you take a few seconds ladies and gentlemen this is a a kneeling chair I just started doing it recently and I did it now I love it there I'm gonna try to do podcasts like this stand up do you think there's any uh benefit in that how many podcasts do you think you could do if you had to stand up would that be good so what do you think about that this isn't bad not bad right the standing up thing I've actually been messing around with that a little bit recently I started playing poker uh using an Xbox controller instead of a mouse really and then I don't need to be flat on a desk so I can stand up while I play wow that's pretty cool you can kind of lie your back what about that what about lying on your back staring up at the ceiling put a screen on the ceiling I don't like it I feel like I'm less I've like played poker just on my laptop lying in bed before uh I feel like I'm less mentally engaged when I'm lying down I think uh sitting upright or standing are a lot better yeah I wonder standing writing cuz I think one of the things about standing desks are getting pretty popular they are but I wonder if they're getting popular for writers because there's something about writing you don't want to be thinking about what you're doing like you don't want to be thinking about standing you just want to be like like get in that flow state where yeah I wonder seems like it would work though yeah I don't see why not dictating would work well I could see dictating standing yeah yeah cuz you walk around on a cell phone or on a phone when you talk and just Meander yeah whenever I'm on the phone I'm definitely moving around wandering dictating software is [ __ ] incredible now just the dictating software that you have on your phone the voice recognition sofware your that's
got really good it's amazing it's like the the the ability to pick it up like uh you could you know you could get on these um these note things on your on your phone and just talk into it and it just picks it up incredibly well like look I'll give you a uh like hello you dirty [ __ ] I'm tired of writing so I just figured I'd talk in my phone PS [ __ ] you period bam pretty good nailed it absolutely PS [ __ ] you period the whole thing we live in the future I mean did it put a period or did it put the word period No period if you say period uh it it puts a period if you say exclamation point it puts an exclamation point but what if you want to use the word period that's a very good question it's limited in that regard maybe if you say the word period Well if you say the Jurassic period does it right the Jurassic dot or that's a good question here we go does it have context the Jurassic period the Jurassic okay hold on how about this period the word period the word h h the Jurassic p r i o d no can it tell us at the end of the sentence if you say the Jurassic period was a very exciting time Ah that's a good question the Jurassic period was a time where a lot of dinosaurs got dinosaur [ __ ] period it's [ __ ] confusing it's confused let me try that again I think here the Jurassic period was a time where a lot of dinosaurs has got a lot of dinosaur [ __ ] period yep did it that time got it yeah yeah so it can tell you're at the end of a sentence yeah that's pretty sweet that is if I guess guess if you keep going yeah it keeps going it it thinks of it as period but if you want to say no that happened during the Jurassic period H I wonder if you can get the intonation just right that it can tell anyway or if it's the last word it always goes to the dot no that happened during the jurass S period period I'm going trick this [ __ ] that worked nice period period works that's how you do it so if you want to say
period in the middle you just keep going if you want to say period period Then you get the word period and a period all right we've got it figured out now dude we got it man we [ __ ] got it that's we live in the future ladies and gentlemen but sooner or later you're going to be able to do that with your Oculus Rift and it'll just show it to you on a scroll like some like one of those kings Scrolls will appear out of thin air um how long you think you're going to do this poker thing this is it for for your life you're 28 ride this [ __ ] right into the Rocks I mean at some point I'm not going to be able to compete up the highest level the way I do now that that just has to be true right what age do you think that is 40 50 but why would that be what would it be do you think people's brains slow down do they though do they do they slow down because of atrophy because of lack of use do they slow down because you're dying like at what age does that happen there's never been a seven-year-old Chess World Champion ah how old have they gotten I think 50s 50s um I think poker's probably similar though you can make a living in poker without being one of the best in the world so make a living yeah yeah but it's like but it gets to be a lot less fun at that point yeah right you're just kind of a journeyman one of those guys that they bring in as an opponent for a boxer and gets beat up every time yeah basically but he's still a test still a good opponent so by then you'll be living in Malta you'll be in jail for pot you you won't uh won't be able to come back to America what's uh do you have like a strategy like of how many years you want to do this or are you just like enjoying it right now enjoying it now and it's just so hard to predict what the landscape of Poker will look like what making a living in poker will look like 10 years from now yeah I would imagine especially with the regulations and the laws if everybody just opened everything up I think it would be quite fascinating yeah I'm hoping you know there was a um there's an article that I posted recently about uh the death the death of politics um it was technology and the death of politics and the idea was that
data was going to uh deny politics a lot of what politics is is sort of like manipulating data and that the internet and this free access to information is going to sort of cut out most of the forms of of politic lot sense totally makes sense I would hope that that would also have a similar effect on things like your business because it just it frustrates me to no end that you have to live in some [ __ ] weird island in the middle of nowhere to avoid being locked in a cage or you know just they're not going to lock me in a cage they're just going to lock the guy who lets me play poker on his site from the US and and they're going to steal your money they might steal your money yeah steal your [ __ ] money son the do J likes stealing people's money they do they love it it's their best thing they do they do that better than anything the DEA does it too that's what the DEA was doing in in California it was hilarious they would uh bust these pot shops not charge them with anything take all their money and then say the case is pending and so they would just steal you know million dollars here 100,000 there happened to a friend of mine who's a another professional poker player professional Gambler he took a trip to I want to say Puerto Rico pretty sure it was Puerto Rico to play Blackjack in a casino there um he's a Advantage blackjack player the game there was such that he could get an edge counting cards so he made a trip there to make some money and he flew back into I want to say it was the Atlanta airport uh and he had $80,000 in cash on him and he had all the receipts from I sent this bank transfer to the casino cuz I was going to go gamble there I gambled there they paid me out this money I've got the cash I've got all the receipts clear trail of what he did he got there they said You' got a lot of cash look kind of like a drug dealer to me mine wow wasn't charged with anything they just took his money and what happened he had to take them to court to get it back and he did win but it took years and a lot of money and if you don't have a lot of money to pursue the case and you don't have the wherewithal to navigate the legal system the way he did and something like that happens to you
you're just [ __ ] well not only that $80,000 it seems like they could be eaten up pretty quickly in legal fee I think he ended up suing for the fees as well so he got paid the money back he got paid his costs back well that's nice but still the interest and all that Jaz and you don't always win sometimes you're out the 80 they took from you and 60 more you spent chasing it I wonder if that could have been prevented if he had legal representation like as he landed or had it cleared in advance you know what I'm saying instead of trying to go in you can't just travel around with a lawyer everywhere you go and you're a professional Gambler no I didn't mean that I meant like contact a lawyer and arrange to have everything taken care of as you get there that be is there a way around that uh I mean like if you contacted a lawyer traveling with cash and declaring it at the border is a thing professional gamblers deal with all the time have you dealt with that before yeah and it's no no issue it's almost always no problem it's legal to carry money if you're carrying more than $10,000 across a border you have to fill out a form saying you're doing so but you fill out the form they say why are where'd you get all this money what are you doing with it and I say I'm a professional poker player I want it in Vegas and I'm going to deposit it in my bank account when I get to somewhere else or whatever and it's fine what's the most cash you've ever traveled with traveled with like had with me on a plane I want to say around €70,000 what's that in dollars about 100,000 damn son walking around with 100K in a briefcase with a [ __ ] big chain attached to your wrist and a bag a bag like like a gym bag that's what you want right like a Nike bag yeah you don't want to look conspicuous if you're moving around handcuffs attached to the [ __ ] they'll just chop your hand off that's what they do that's what I heard yeah it seems like yeah the the the arbitrary limit of 10,000 always drove me crazy too are you carrying more than $10,000 in cash like well what's $110,000 to Bill Gates and what's $110,000 to the regular person right you but it's only a reporting requirement it's not like you're not allowed to do it if you have
more than that yeah so if Bill Gates shows up somewhere and he's why do you have a billion dollars in cash he's like cuz I'm Bill Gates [ __ ] like I just like to roll around with a billion in my pocket could you even carry a billion dollars on you what's like is there A1 thousand bill what's the like the largest $100 bill is the largest 100 is the biggest US bill um it used to be larger though right there used to be thousands or maybe even 10 thousands but they were like not in general circulation they were printed for like Banks to hold on to and pass between themselves oh I see um the € 500 EUR note is I think the largest International largest denomination that's like actually in wide circulation I've read that International crime is mostly done in Euros now because it's a lot easier to move around cash in 500 EUR notes if it's giant amounts of it that makes sense because a 500 EUR note is like $700 and takes up the same amount of space as a us 100 what is the mo what is that right there that's $100,000 Is that real yeah it was it was a gold certificate only printed once in 1934 okay God damn who's that creepy dude on the car think it's wooder Wilson he a creepy looking [ __ ] he's responsible for some [ __ ] guaranteed looking at his background what is the most money that you ever won in a poker tournament in a poker tour poker uh any any event any yeah it the biggest cash I have ever had in a poker tournament was about $3 million um finished second in a tournament in Australia this year that was a $250,000 Buy in so you had to spend $250,000 to get it well like I was mentioning earlier I took on investors to play in that tournament I didn't put up all the money myself so the big it was a re-entry tournament so I busted once on the first day and then bought in again so I spent 500,000 on the tournament oh my God and but you came in second I came in second ended up making some money how much does that pay to come in second about million I don't actually remember the number off the top of my head could Google it real quick I think it was 2 something what kind of pressure is there on you once you spend $250,000 then you get shanked
and you come back in again it was a rough week it was a series of tournaments there the first one was or the the first big one that I played was the 100K that was also re-entry that I was in six times and didn't cash so you spent 600 Grand and you didn't cash in a day oh my God and then 4 days later is the 250k oh my and I show up for that and bust right away you have you have major league balls son giant huge iron [ __ ] balls wow six times in a day that was a rough day oh my God what do how do you sleep that night what is that night like um cuz you obviously can't do that too many times in a row nobody can right well with that exact one um the re-entry period was open until the start of the second day of the tournament so after the first day I was getting blood bathed and down a ton of money and still had to come back the next day and play for real wow and came back and got knocked out for the sixth time on the first hand of the second day Jesus Christ son so then after that it was a lot of Australian chz and long long sleep and then a couple days off and then the 250k wow that's crazy that's digging into the account there huh [ __ ] that do some damage so when you look at like losses like that and wins does that make you play more conservatively in upcoming events or do you just have to play intelligently period and just take the losses when they come um the place where you get more conservative is your bankroll management rather than your play the play from one hand to the the next is really about you have to put the magnitude of the numbers out of your head and try to make the best play each time it's on you to make a decision so are you in the moment are you Zen or are you still thinking about that $600,000 that you I'm pretty good at just getting myself into the moment um the the place where you get more conservative is you lose for a while you have less money than you did before that period started you reevaluate I have only 75% of the money I did a few months ago should I maybe sell 75% of my action in this upcoming tournament instead of 50 right I see I see uh that that that's the way in which
you can get more conservative if you're going through a losing stretch is play for lower Stakes what's the biggest losing stretch you've ever gone through um in dollar amount in Period dollar amounts uh let's see like have you ever gone through like a couple million dollars in a weekend um in games where I didn't where I had sold action didn't have all of myself uh yeah I've lost I guess my biggest losing couple of days was on the order of 50 million Hong Kong Hong Kong dollars Hong Kong dollars which are bigger or less rather so only like 6 million us oh my God son only $6 million us do and personally I had a a small share of that so I didn't personally lose $6 million that me what's a small share a million 2 million what's a small share 10% oh okay 600 Grand still that's a lot of [ __ ] money yeah it's doesn't feel good wow and then of course a bunch of my friends lost a shitload of money too and have to send out the email hey guys didn't go real well [ __ ] that that's the worst part of it for sure is the hey guys didn't go real well you know I'm sure because everybody's like planning on making a like a profit based on your success in the past yeah so it's rare that you hit these dark spots what do you attribute them to is it just luck is it is it I mean it's not that rare like any given day that I play poker I might be if I'm playing cash games may be like a 52% favorite to have a winning day maybe less than that uh if I'm playing a tournament I'm a favorite to have a losing day because uh tournament they pay about 10% top 10% of the field so if they're paying top 10% of the field a really good player cashes 15 18% of the time that seems incredibly stressful it's pretty stressful is it what how do you feel like like about this like as a as a human being trying to make a living in this incredibly it feels like you're navigating a Minefield like um yeah it you've been obviously you've been very successful with this you've turned a very nice profit you do very well yeah but the amount of stress that on your 28-year-old body not just your back but
your mind like racing and battling these numbers you know you're talking millions of dollars back and forth and down and up and what is that do you do something to mitigate that do you I like to meditate every day what kind of meditation uh just breath focused um basically just sit quietly for anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes and attend to my breathing just concentrate and breathing in and breathing out just trying to stay calm and and uh sometimes I'll do an exercise on top of that where I'll track the thoughts that enter my mind and label them as thoughts about the future or thoughts about the past and that what that exercise does is helps you helps to bring you into the present moment um and to see that uh it's difficult to have thoughts about the present moment you you just have Sensations and feelings and experiences of the present moment and the thoughts that you build on top of that are almost all about the future or about the past and observing that that process is really good for bringing you into the present moment H and that that's great for poker because all the [ __ ] that stresses you out when you're playing and dealing with these big swings is thinking about the past and thinking about the future thinking I'm down this much in the last couple of days that's real [ __ ] bad what am I going to do or I'm going to win all this money and then I'm going to buy a [ __ ] yacht and sail off into the sunset and both of those are things you can think that take you out of the moment of all right he just bet what do I think he has what's the right play so in that sense poker is a lot like life like that's oh yeah I think the key to life is to be present it's great training for living your life mindfully and rationally and effectively have you ever done any uh treatments in or sessions in the isolation tank I have I really want to why don't you get one you're making Banks son yeah but I'm traveling around all time to Mal I don't know how to get something shipped to Mal I can't [ __ ] figure out how to get them to send me a desk chair in Malta I guarantee you somewhere in Europe they they have sensory deprivation they have a couple in Malta I looked at up I I
didn't get around to go into one but it's an hour across the whole island no it's right [ __ ] there I'm just so it's there kind of lazy Jesus Christ if you do it once you're going to realize what an amazing tool it is you're going to want to do it all the time I came really close to doing it once with JC and La several years ago we got in the cab and we went to the place and we got there and it was closed well there's a place that's in Venice while you're here the float lab they I'm pretty sure that's where I tried to go I mean JC took me there so oh it's amazing so they're the best place too the best place in California for sure I should check that up for sure yeah well I'll try to see if I could hook it up when you get out of here cool but we're out of time man we're going to turn into a pumpkin so uh we're 3 hours in that was three hours isn't that incredible that flew by yeah follow Ike on Twitter it's Ike poker ik e poker on Twitter um anything else pokerstars.net your sponsor real quick I want to plug my dad's book my father Brook Saxton is a writer and just published a book called fading hearts on the river that's sort of a family Memoir that uh tracks my poker career and all the other interesting [ __ ] that's gone on in the Haxton Clan over the last several Generations it's a great read like uh cool family stories and also interesting meditations on game playing and the meaning of games and how they function in our lives excellent and what's it called again one more time fading hearts on the river I'm pretty sure you can get it on Audible I think there's an audiobook version as well glorious uh and that brings us to our sponsors audible audible.com thank you to audible go to audible.com Joe get a free audio book and up to 30 free days of audible service and if you want to get Ike's dad's book it is fading Hearts On The River by Brooks Axton write it down [ __ ] I know your memory sucks um thanks also to Ting go to rogan.com and save $25 off of any of their brand new Android devices or the Apple iPhones as well um thanks also to hit.com go to o n niit t use the code word Rogan and save 10% off any and all sment that's it for this week you dirty [ __ ] we'll be back next week until then much love we'll see you Friday night at the uh San Jose
performing center for the perform go to my website Jo rogan.net all the details are there I don't remember [ __ ] much love see you big kiss M oh