July 22, 2014 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:58:48
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| 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 audiobooks, radio broadcasts, lectures, comedy specials, basically... | ||
| They have no peer. | ||
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| Audible rules. | ||
| It is my favorite place to download audiobooks. | ||
| They have over 150,000 titles. | ||
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| If you really thought about it, like how many books do you read in your life? | ||
| 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 can help people you read, but you're not really reading. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's like you can read while doing other shit. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Why? | ||
| 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 forward slash 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 audiobooks. | ||
| If I could recommend one to you, hmm, what's a good one to recommend, Jamie? | ||
|
unidentified
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Burt Kreischer's Life of the Party was pretty good. | |
| What a great suggestion! | ||
| Read by Burt. | ||
| And the audiobooks, by the way, are crushing the reading books. | ||
| Because much like Burt, his fans do not read shit. | ||
| But again, you can get all the information. | ||
| It's exactly as if you read it. | ||
| So go there, pick up The Life of the Party by our pal Bert Kreischer and enjoy the 150,000 plus other titles at Audible. | ||
| A fantastic resource for people who enjoy audiobooks. | ||
| That's audible.com forward slash Joe for your free audiobook and 30 free days of audible service. | ||
| Like how I did that? | ||
| Audible service. | ||
| by Ting. | ||
| Ting is one of my favorite. | ||
| It is not just one of my favorite podcast sponsors, but it's also the official podcast phone. | ||
| The phone that we use for the podcast for booking guests and stuff is a Ting phone. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because it's, first of all, if you're economically inclined, if you're thinking about saving money, there's no better place than Ting. | ||
| Now 98% of people, I'll say that again, 98% of people would save money with Ting. | ||
| 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, alright everybody, you ready for the show? | ||
| And then people clap, they go, that's not good enough, I need to, oh come on you fuckhead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I hate it. | |
| I hate it, it's gross. | ||
| It's so foul. | ||
| It should be abandoned and it should be outlawed. | ||
| But there, I said it anyway. | ||
| A lot of fucking 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 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 it's very ethical. | ||
| It's a very good deal. | ||
| What they do is they provide you with excellent service but they cut out all the bullshit. | ||
| No early termination fees. | ||
| No contracts. | ||
| You pay for what you use which I believe is the future of cell phone service. | ||
| Now, the way it is with most people, if you are with a major network or a major carrier, 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. | ||
| You get penalized. | ||
| 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, 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.ting.com, you can save $25 off of one of their Outstanding Android devices. | ||
| They even sell iPhone 5s. | ||
| They have the iPhone 5. You can get an iPhone 4, okay? | ||
| Say if you're frugal. | ||
| You get an iPhone 4 for $95, folks. | ||
| And if you pay $95, it's yours. | ||
| That's the other thing I like. | ||
| I do not like when you buy a phone and say if... | ||
| You know, we don't need to name a provider, but say the phone costs $299. | ||
| It doesn't really cost $299. | ||
| It probably costs $600. | ||
| 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 like you're mortgaging a phone. | ||
| Fuck all that nonsense. | ||
| You can get a Samsung Galaxy S4 for $425. | ||
| How about that? | ||
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| The Samsung Galaxy S5, the newest and greatest. | ||
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| It's an awesome service. | ||
| We're also brought to you by Onnit. | ||
| This is the last commercial. | ||
| O-N-N-I-T. Onnit is a human optimization website. | ||
| What we sell at Onnit is essentially all things that I use. | ||
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| That's what we need. | ||
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| Obviously, I haven't taken any today. | ||
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| 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. | ||
| But excellent results, especially when it comes to memory. | ||
| Memory is a big one. | ||
| It's one of the things like when you're reaching for information, when you're reaching, when you're trying to formulate sentences, that's where I feel that AlphaBrain really benefits me. | ||
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| It makes it easier for me to know what the fuck I'm talking about when I'm saying things. | ||
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| Take it. | ||
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| Enjoy! | ||
| And that, ladies and gentlemen, concludes the commercial aspect of this podcast. | ||
| Now, we are going to talk to Isaac, a.k.a. | ||
|
unidentified
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Ike Haxton, super wizard poker player. | |
| Strap yourself in, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The Joe Rogan Experience. | |
| Train by day! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Joe Rogan Podcast by night! | |
| All day! | ||
| Alright! | ||
| Isaac Haxton, a.k.a. | ||
| Ike. | ||
| We're going to go with Ike. | ||
| Ike is good. | ||
| Is that what your friends call you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I want to be your friend. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Let's go with Ike. | ||
| Let's go with Ike. | ||
| One of the things, you are a big-time poker player, travel all over the world, and there's a lot of people on my message board that are big poker fans and very excited to have you on the podcast. | ||
| One of the things they asked me to differentiate, because I bring this up all the time, 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 win or 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're, what are you, 28 years old? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| 28 years old, and you are a world-traveling poker player. | ||
| I mean, that is, first of all, awesome. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
| It's been a lot of fun. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 six to maybe thirteen or so. | ||
| I was never really great at chess. | ||
| Probably my greatest accomplishment as a chess player is 8th place in the New York State 3rd grade and under tournament. | ||
| 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 what was going to happen. | ||
| I was going to beat all these kids I was a lot better than. | ||
| I was going to play this dude, Nick, in the final, and I was going to lose. | ||
| Why would Nick beat you? | ||
| It was better than me. | ||
| He studied harder and he had a sharper chess mind than me. | ||
| 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 fuck, 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 shit, 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 poker the same way it does in chess. | ||
| So I think my brain is set up... | ||
| It's better to be an extremely good poker player than an extremely good chess player. | ||
| Would it be a relevant analogy to say that playing poker is more of a game where you restart every time, whereas chess is like a sword fight. | ||
| You get one chance to not get stabbed. | ||
| If you get your arm cut off, you're gonna die. | ||
| Yeah, that is actually a pretty good analogy. | ||
| So when you play poker, are you the type of guy, like, when you, like, read a person and you have an idea that you have a big advantage, will you then take a big chance? | ||
| Will you then gamble? | ||
| Or are you a conservative, calculated sort of a guy? | ||
|
unidentified
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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. | ||
| I see what you're doing. | ||
| You're playing chess right now. | ||
| You're going back and forth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm, I should maybe shut the fuck up. | |
| No, 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. | ||
| 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 green light that goes off in your head or do you have an instinct that you sort of rely on? | ||
| In terms of like the risk management part of what you're talking about, a lot of that is actually... | ||
| 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 five thousand dollars 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 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 confronted 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 buy-in that you've ever had to play? | ||
| For a tournament, it would be a million dollar buy-in. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh! | |
| Jesus, Louisa! | ||
| Wow! | ||
| So, when you do that, I see you're sponsored by PokerStars.net. | ||
| Does PokerStars pay for a portion of that? | ||
| Do they give you a piece of the action? | ||
| How does that work? | ||
| PokerStars does not. | ||
| But what I... Well, part of my contract with PokerStars does involve getting a certain amount of money per year that is earmarked toward buying into poker tournaments. | ||
| But they're not like... | ||
| It's not explicitly staking me in the poker tournaments. | ||
| It's just my compensation for representing the company. | ||
| So your compensation is essentially up to your management discretion. | ||
| 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 you guys kind of back each other? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Hmm. | ||
| So 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 happens 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. | ||
| So they kind of make a saver, that's what you call it. | ||
| So say if you and I were to play in the finals and it was a major pool tournament, It depends on the agreement, but we might make a 50-50 or 60-40 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? | ||
| Is there an ethical quandary involved in that? | ||
| 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's supposed to be about gambling and chance, and that's where the excitement comes in. | ||
| 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 commentators? | ||
| More often, it's the spectators and the media than the people who are actually in there playing on a day-to-day basis. | ||
| Same thing with billiards. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's interesting. | ||
| So the spectators feel like it's not as exciting for them? | ||
| Is that the idea? | ||
|
unidentified
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Mm-hmm. | |
| Hmm. | ||
| So they want to see one guy win a million bucks and one guy win dog shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's understandable, right? | ||
| I guess. | ||
| Yeah, I guess. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know, man. | ||
| I mean, I think I'm too close to stuff like this to see it objectively because I'm friends with so many pool players and because I don't, you know... | ||
| I think people should be compensated. | ||
| I hate the idea of a winner-take-all thing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There was a big pool tournament called the Tournament of Champions, and every year the winner gets a good pool. | ||
| I think it's like 50 grand. | ||
| It's not much for poker. | ||
| But everybody else gets dog shit. | ||
| So of course people do this. | ||
| They chop it up. | ||
| Yeah, they definitely chop it up. | ||
| So the people that are the commentators and the spectators, like, you say, a vocal minority, is it only a small percentage of the commentators and spectators? | ||
| It's hard to tell, because 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 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 on your own. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| Very rare. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That would be a disastrous thing for that person. | ||
| There have 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. | ||
| 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 was a pretty weird guy. | ||
| Was? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Is he dead? | |
| 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. | ||
| Lost back a lot of what he'd won playing in tournaments and cash games, and... | ||
| Just decided, fuck this game. | ||
| Pretty much, yeah. | ||
| How do you get to... | ||
| I just would imagine that if you got so good that you win the World Series of Poker, that's like a very profitable way to... | ||
| To spend your time. | ||
| Well, that's the thing, is that not everyone who wins the World Series of Poker main event is an excellent poker player. | ||
| Really? | ||
| It's one tournament 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 tournament, but it's one tournament. | ||
| So, it's possible that a middling tournament player can win the World Series of Poker? | ||
| Happens all the time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow! | |
| I never knew that. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| See, that never happens in pool. | ||
| No. | ||
| 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 ten years. | ||
| Oh, that's interesting. | ||
| I need to pay attention more to this poker shit. | ||
| Now, what about gambling in Vegas? | ||
| Do they put a line on who's going to win? | ||
| Yeah, 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 2-1 on the Giants if they're the underdog, or lay 2-1 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. | ||
| Betting on the outcome of poker tournaments is a pretty small market. | ||
| Yeah, because that's another thing they tried with Poole, but 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-to-1 underdog. | ||
| So they all dumped to Mike LeBron, and they all bet on Mike LeBron, and Mike LeBron wound up winning the whole tournament. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I can't. | |
| And then, you know, of course, Vegas is like, alright, you fucking short-sighted assholes, we're done. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, oh, the 40-1 guy won, and everybody's missing balls they should never fucking miss, and it was just so ugly. | ||
| Yeah, that, I mean, that's a potential issue any time 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's the thing. | ||
| 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 if World Series of Poker comes along and 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... | ||
| Right. | ||
| who will be in the tournament longer, me or Phil Ivey, that type of thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But betting on the outcome of poker tournaments is real small. | ||
| 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 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 shit like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| Like, a million dollars on a game of golf. | ||
| Who's, like, the nuttiest when it comes to that stuff? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Um... | |
| That's a good question. | ||
| Phil Ivey does a lot of nutty shit with that, right? | ||
| Phil Ivey 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. | ||
| 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 gotta 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' coach and got really fucking good and came back and played for huge stakes against a couple of guys and smashed them. | ||
| And just midway through the round, they're like, this is bullshit. | ||
| 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 fucking... | ||
| I mean, everybody knows what Phil Ivey 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 to Hawaii or something. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| See, wouldn't it take more than, like, one vacation? | ||
| Must be a really sharp dude. | ||
| I mean, like, a month-long plan every day. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then came back and kicked some... | ||
| See, I don't... | ||
| 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 so much going on, like, figuring out where the ball lies, and then trying to figure out the rolls 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 that coaching could help that, but even just the variables. | ||
| When a guy like Tiger Woods was just dominating everybody, winning like crazy, it defied my imagination, because I was always like, how could this one guy figure out this weird game Where there's so many variables, so much better than everybody else. | ||
| What could it possibly be? | ||
| Is it feel? | ||
| Is it touch? | ||
| What is it that's allowing him to see the rolls 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 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. | ||
| Because then your life just goes into a turmoil. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or, if your wife's a cunt, you get out of that divorce and you're just fucking free and your thoughts are clear. | ||
| It really just depends, right? | ||
| Depends on whether or not it's a good divorce, whether or 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 the guy's just destroyed. | ||
| And usually it's financial. | ||
| The financial stress of divorce is... | ||
| Really, for a person who's never been through it or never seen someone go through it, 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 good friend that I've talked about on the podcast before, but not only did he get divorced, but his wife calculated and planned it where she went to every good defense attorney or every good divorce attorney in town and consulted with them before she decided but his wife calculated and planned it where she went to every good 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. | ||
| Pretty diabolical. | ||
| She's as diabolical as it gets. | ||
| Not only did she do that, but because they were together for so long, he had to pay for her attorney because she didn't work. | ||
| And he has to pay her for essentially the rest of her life because 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 she would lose her sweet paycheck that she gets every month. | ||
| I watched this guy, like, age 10 years? | ||
| In two years he'd probably age 10 and just was pulling his fucking hair out and going crazy and it was never over. | ||
| I was like, are you out yet? | ||
| Is it over yet? | ||
| He's like, no, no, no, no. | ||
| She's renegotiating. | ||
| She's changing the term. | ||
| 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 wouldn't bet on him playing golf. | ||
| That guy would be fucking knocking balls into the treetops and screaming and attacking birds with his clubs. | ||
| It's devastating for people. | ||
| And women want to know why guys don't get divorced. | ||
| Maybe they know somebody like that. | ||
| Or Tiger Woods. | ||
| Poor bastard. | ||
| Not really though, right? | ||
| He's still fine. | ||
| Yeah, I think he'll make it. | ||
| Yeah, he'll make it. | ||
| He's not Tiger Woods anymore. | ||
| How many golf tournaments has he won since the divorce? | ||
| I don't really follow golf, but I don't think it's many. | ||
| Wow, it's so weird. | ||
| Do you follow Jamie? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, he's won a few. | |
| He's recently coming back from an injury right now. | ||
| I just saw something the other day. | ||
| They say he's got about 10 years left in his career to catch Jack Nicholson. | ||
| How do you get an injury playing golf? | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of torque in that swing. | ||
| I can see you throwing out your back. | ||
| Fucking pussies. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| You're playing golf. | ||
| I would surely get injured playing golf. | ||
| I'd just hit myself with the club. | ||
| Well, if you knew what you were doing, I bet you wouldn't. | ||
| So, you're 28 years old. | ||
| How long have you been a professional poker player? | ||
| I've been playing seriously and making money at it about 10 years, filing taxes as a professional gambler since I was 18. Wow. | ||
| I was in school and only sort of playing part-time for the first few of those years, so 6 to 10 years, depending how you count. | ||
| So you were 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 fuck about, were you 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. | ||
| Poker was going great. | ||
| School was not. | ||
| I was studying computer science, which at one point I was pretty good at. | ||
| I thought, this is the thing for me. | ||
| I'm gonna get my undergrad degree in computer science. | ||
| I'm gonna 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 passion, the interest for poker sort of overcame it? | ||
| That it became an option? | ||
| I think that was probably only a small part of it. | ||
| I 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 starting to try to pick a career. | ||
| 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 to do, though. | ||
| Well, shit, 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, I liked it. | ||
| I thought it was interesting. | ||
| 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 can't imagine... | ||
| Going through that again. | ||
| You know, for me, I took a year off when I got out of high school, and then I went to UMass Boston for three years, but I completely half-assed it. | ||
| Like, I just was doing it because I didn't want to be a loser. | ||
| So 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. | ||
| I was still going to school and I was like, what the fuck am I doing? | ||
| But at least I had some things that I was interested in. | ||
| But I had friends that were going to school and they were like, well, I'm going to be an electrical engineer. | ||
| I'm like, is that what you want to do? | ||
| You know, I don't know. | ||
| I'm okay at it. | ||
| It's good money. | ||
| You can make good money. | ||
| I'm like, okay. | ||
| You can probably get a job. | ||
| Yeah, but that life is a weird life, man. | ||
| That's the life that the majority of people do. | ||
| The majority of people do this life where they start doing something because it's a job that they can do. | ||
| Fuck, man. | ||
| That's terrifying to me. | ||
| Yeah, 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! | ||
| Someone escaped. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| I fucking love when I meet another comedian. | ||
| I love when I meet a guy who makes a living as a musician. | ||
| I love when I meet a writer. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I love people that have figured out a way to stay out of that fucking trap. | ||
| That weird trap of just doing something because you can do it. | ||
| And people who are doing something because they can do it and they're listening to this, I'm not criticizing you. | ||
| I easily could have been you. | ||
| Easily. | ||
| No one's better than you. | ||
| I'm just celebrating you. | ||
| You, Ike. | ||
| You did it. | ||
| You figured it out. | ||
| There's a lot of luck involved in a lot of different ways. | ||
| There's a lot of luck involved in being American. | ||
| There's a lot of luck involved in having good motor skills that you can walk and you don't have a disease and you don't have fucking cancer. | ||
| Your eyes work. | ||
| There's a lot of 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 started making money doing poker and then you realized that school was kind of whack, what did your parents think about that? | ||
| Well, the way that played out was, like I said, second semester of my junior year, I failed most of my classes after straight A's for five semesters. | ||
| Did your parents suspect drugs? | ||
| No, I don't think that was... | ||
| That's what I was expecting. | ||
| I'll give you a little piss test. | ||
| Come here, you little freak. | ||
| What the fuck are you doing? | ||
| All that college tuition. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Come here, son! | |
| Piss in this cup. | ||
| What did they think? | ||
| Your board? | ||
| Yeah, board. | ||
| I think that they were a little skeptical of the computer science thing all along, that... | ||
| 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, 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 or was due to get passed that fall. | ||
| And... | ||
| I started thinking, shit, online poker might be going away. | ||
| I gotta 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. | ||
| 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 full time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And what did they say? | ||
| And they said, why? | ||
| And I explained the UIGEA 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? | ||
| I was like, my goal would be about a million dollars. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| And she said, that sounds good. | ||
| I think you should do that. | ||
| Yeah, you gotta go high. | ||
| You can't get... | ||
| I 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 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 an out-of-thin-air guess. | ||
| It was like, I'm gonna 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 fucking mess, right? | ||
| You could legally gamble if you're a resident of Nevada online. | ||
| Isn't that the case? | ||
| The legal situation in the U.S. and worldwide is pretty complicated. | ||
| The really weird thing is that No laws actually changed. | ||
| How the government felt like enforcing them changed. | ||
| When the law is talking about, the UIGEA 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? | ||
| That sounds so crazy. | ||
| 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 play sports bets over Telegram. | ||
| Really? | ||
| A fucking Telegram? | ||
| A fucking 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's so loopy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And was this like sponsored by the casinos or something like that? | ||
| Is that how it got weaseled through? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The Wire Act or the UIGEA? No, the UIGEA, whatever it is. | |
| Them cracking down on it. | ||
| Had to be, right? | ||
| Probably. | ||
| It's hard to tell. | ||
| The casino lobby is really fucking powerful in America. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I can imagine. | ||
| A lot of goddamn money involved. | ||
| A lot of money involved. | ||
| Donate a lot of money to both political parties. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And... | ||
| And then, of course, the unions, I'm sure, as well, right? | ||
| The unions, I'm sure, as well. | ||
| Yeah, the... | ||
| It's like, for instance... | ||
| There are... | ||
| I don't actually know what union represents casino workers, but 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 UFC has a big issue with the Culinary Union. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's who has a lot of the casino jobs as well. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| 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 Zufa, 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. | ||
| So they're keeping the UFC out of New York that way, like paying off politicians. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| 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, the actual people themselves would benefit tremendously if they allowed mixed martial arts. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| They also have boxing already there, which is more dangerous. | ||
| I mean, it's all proven. | ||
| And they still, for whatever reason, have been able to bribe these politicians transparently. | ||
| Yeah, all that shit is just a power struggle over the money, it seems like. | ||
| Yeah, so they just try to keep online poker. | ||
| For online gambling, it was the same thing. | ||
| The casino lobby in the US has gone through a few stages in what they think about online gambling. | ||
| At first, they just ignored it, didn't give a shit. | ||
| That's not a real thing. | ||
| Nobody's gonna gamble on the internet. | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| And then around about 2005, 2006, they started saying, oh no, this is unethical. | ||
| We can't let people gamble from their homes. | ||
| They need to drive to their local casino and gamble, because that's where we make money. | ||
| And that's where we serve liquor, so we can be sure that they're fucked up when they're gambling. | ||
| 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 underage in 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 what's the online thing? | ||
| What do you use? | ||
| Do you have to show a photo of your credit card? | ||
| 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 do you need? | ||
| It depends on the site, but, like... | ||
| Copy of photo ID. Utility bill. | ||
| You might need to answer a phone call on a landline associated with the address you claim to claim from. | ||
| Yes, this is Mr. Hexton. | ||
| My son Ike. | ||
| Why, Ike is not the one who's making this gamble. | ||
| It's me. | ||
| My name's George. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm 50. You're basing my voice, son. | |
| Yeah, obviously you can get around anything, but... | ||
| Yeah, making an online... | ||
| I mean, making a phone call, that seems like so fucking 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 shit that they do to... | ||
| If it's on a landline, it demonstrates that you are physically in the place you're claiming to be. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That makes sense, I guess. | ||
| But it seems like anybody could just be on the phone. | ||
| Unless you're FaceTiming. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, that's why it's only one aspect of it. | ||
| Then you just have to hire a makeup artist to fucking doody up like your dad. | ||
| That internet gambling thing though, it was a big crackdown because I remember it. | ||
| I remember at one point in time you used to be able to gamble on sports online. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh yeah. | |
| Guys used to play poker for money online. | ||
| It was really common. | ||
| And there was even some websites that were, I'm sure they're still around, Bodog. | ||
| Are they still around? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Bodog in the U.S. has become Bovada and still exists. | ||
| What is Bovada? | ||
| Bovada is the entity that they spun off of the main Bodog corporate entities because operating online gambling in the U.S. is so risky that they have basically set up their corporate fall guy of Bovada, which is what gets fucked. | ||
| When inevitably continuing to take bets from the U.S. eventually goes poorly. | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
| So they're just kind of like setting up a straw house to blow down when the shit 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 shouldn't say any of this too confidently. | ||
| I haven't been paying close attention to it, but I think Bodog... | ||
| Welcome to what we do on the podcast every day. | ||
| LAUGHTER I think Bodog is continuing to operate around the world as Bodog and is Bovada only for its U.S. facing operations. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| That Calvin Iyer guy, he can't even come into the America. | ||
| Into North America. | ||
| Yeah, there are a bunch of people in the online gambling industry who that's true of. | ||
| They just live in Costa Rica now or something? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's so crazy. | ||
| It's so weird that that's what gets you locked up. | ||
| And what is it? | ||
| Are they saying they're not paying taxes? | ||
| Why would they not want revenue? | ||
| See, it doesn't make any sense to me. | ||
| If people are willing to gamble, and then they'll pay taxes on those gambling debts, or gambling profits, or whatever it was, or even losses. | ||
| It seems like if the company wins money, or if the person wins money, taxes are going to be paid. | ||
| 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 2005-2006, they decided, okay, this is bad. | ||
| We need to shut it down. | ||
| Were they losing money? | ||
| They thought they were. | ||
| They weren't. | ||
| They weren't. | ||
| I mean, this is my opinion here. | ||
| I think that casinos saw online gambling... | ||
| As competition when it wasn't, that online gambling and casino gambling are not the same product. | ||
| 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. | ||
| If anything, the availability of online gambling was feeding casinos 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 is... | ||
| 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 are like me, that don't know how to play poker at all, but are still trying to play poker? | ||
| Do people get liquored up and just wander into the poker room and go, let's fucking give this a shot? | ||
| Every once in a while and more at lower stakes than at higher stakes, obviously. | ||
| Obviously. | ||
| At high stakes, it's pretty rare to see somebody who has never really played poker before. | ||
| But it happens? | ||
| It happens. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| What is that like when you see some fucking fish? | ||
| Some big fish that comes in. | ||
| What do you call them? | ||
| Whales? | ||
| Is that what you guys call them? | ||
| Fish, whales. | ||
| That's what they call them in pool. | ||
| Yeah, same terminology in poker. | ||
| So they come in and a lot of money, don't know what the fuck they're doing, and everybody slowly starts circling them. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| There's a long wait 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. | ||
| This game can become ten-handed now. | ||
| Pull up a chair. | ||
| So when you don't know a guy, so the world of poker, essentially you know all the elite players. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There's no one who can sneak up on you. | ||
| I mean, there are probably a few people. | ||
| There are probably a handful of guys who mostly play online, turn up at a casino, and I wouldn't recognize them, but they're among the best players in the world. | ||
| But for the most part, yeah, I recognize most of the top players. | ||
| My friend Ari Shafir, who's a stand-up comedian, great guy, funny, hilarious motherfucker, but very smart. | ||
| And 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 stand-up. | ||
| Yeah, I've heard Ari talk about that before. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, he's making a living doing poker. | ||
| And 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 said he could kind of tell. | ||
| He could kind of tell when people knew what the fuck they were doing and when people were just assholes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| 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, other people are? | ||
| 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 Macau? | ||
| I mean, that's obviously a huge gambling spot. | ||
| Macau is really interesting. | ||
| I've played a couple of tournaments in Macau. | ||
| I've never played in a cash game in Macau. | ||
| Though I have played in-cash games with Macau guys a few times. | ||
| The UFC did some shows in Macau. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| And there's been some boxing out there, and I think they're doing another UFC out there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But they said that 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 right next to Hong Kong. | ||
| It's like a one-hour ferry ride from Hong Kong. | ||
| And how long has this been around? | ||
| Macau? | ||
| I want to say maybe 15 years, maybe less. | ||
| That's 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 you're just a building. | ||
| And there it is. | ||
| What is it like, like, as far as, like, the buildings and as far as, like, the atmosphere? | ||
| It 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. | ||
| Whoa, so they call it the Wynn? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, there's the Wynn, the Venetian... | ||
| But are they rip-offs, or is it the actual Wynn? | ||
| No, no, it's owned by the same people. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Because you know how China does, they do wacky shit like that. | ||
| They'll build, like, a fake Paris. | ||
| Like, it's really strange how their laws are over there, as far as what they can get away with. | ||
| Isn't there, like, a fake Eiffel Tower in Shanghai, or something like that? | ||
| Not only is there a fake Eiffel Tower, it's just, like, fake entire towns, like, European villages, towns, like, down to the brick... | ||
| They look exactly like them. | ||
| There was this story that was on one of the major websites. | ||
| I forget what it was. | ||
| I think it was Vice, actually. | ||
| They detailed all these different towns that have been constructed in China that were exact replicas of famous Swiss Alps towns and stuff like that. | ||
| Really weird. | ||
| China's fucking 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 gutter oil? | ||
| I think I heard about it on the podcast. | ||
| And I was like, that can't be real. | ||
| And yes, it is. | ||
| I've eaten a lot of delicious food in Hong Kong. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You've eaten a lot of delicious poop. | |
| Might not be as bad in Hong Kong as mainland. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| So Macau has all the major players, like the Wynn and 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 Macau. | ||
| And does everyone speak English there? | ||
| No. | ||
| What about the hookers? | ||
| Speak English? | ||
| I didn't talk to any. | ||
| Good answer. | ||
| I bet there's certainly a market for it. | ||
| Oh yeah, you think? | ||
| I would guess that market forces force some hookers to speak English in Macau. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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 a hot summer day in the Northeast. | ||
| He said it was crazy, like 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, a lot of drunks. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| I just can't believe that something like that can just explode. | ||
| I never even heard of Macau until maybe two or three years ago. | ||
| I remember peripherally reading about it online, something like that, and then I heard about boxing matches being held there. | ||
| Yeah, I basically didn't know anything about it until poker took off there maybe four or five years ago. | ||
| So you're 18 years old, you start playing poker, you're 21 years old, you tell your parents, you know what, fuck it, I'm going to give it a go. | ||
| I'm going to try to make a million dollars in the first year. | ||
| How much did you actually want to make in that first year? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Um... | |
| 1.6? | ||
| Kapow! | ||
| Jesus goddamn, son! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa! | |
| 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's happy at the Haxton household. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, they were okay with my plan. | ||
| So then from there, do you just go guns blazing? | ||
| I went back and I finished school. | ||
| I only had a year left. | ||
| Damn! | ||
| You went a million six and went back in school. | ||
| I would have told school to suck my dick. | ||
| I would have called them up. | ||
| Fuck you and fuck computers. | ||
| That was 80% what I did. | ||
| I went back and I decided to get a degree in philosophy. | ||
| I figured out that there was a particular track within the philosophy department called Philosophy of Science and Logic. | ||
| That I could count some of the classes I'd already done toward, and it was like five bullshit classes away from a degree in philosophy. | ||
| I was like, alright, 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 ten years when poker's done. | ||
| I'll be happy I have a degree. | ||
| Why did you think you were planning on failing? | ||
| You thought it was 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. | ||
| You know, it's like competing in a sport. | ||
| At some point, you're older than the other people. | ||
| You're not as sharp as them. | ||
| They're hungrier than you are, and you can't keep up. | ||
| We talked about in the ads, I was talking about AlphaBrain, but there's a bunch of cognitive enhancing things that people take. | ||
| I know some folks take Adderall and some folks take NuVigil or ProVigil, like these different cognitive enhancing smart drugs. | ||
| Do you guys fuck with those things? | ||
| Poker players in general? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| What is the most common stuff? | ||
| I mean, caffeine has to be number one. | ||
| There are waitresses walking around serving coffee at poker tournaments. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And water and booze if you want it. | ||
| How many guys get liquored up while they're playing? | ||
| Seems like a bad move, right? | ||
| In terms of high-level competition, the biggest tournaments, essentially nobody. | ||
| Cash games in a casino on any given night, it's reasonably common. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, what do most guys take besides... | ||
| There are plenty of people who take Adderall or Ritalin. | ||
| Ritalin? | ||
| That's a speed, too, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's another one of the anti-ADHD sort of things. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Provigil is not unheard of. | ||
| I fucked 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 Alphabrain. | ||
| See if you like it. | ||
| A bunch of my friends use Alphabrain. | ||
| Yeah, that's a good one. | ||
| Another good one is there's stuff called Neuro One. | ||
| Have you ever heard of Neuro One? | ||
| I've heard you talk about it before. | ||
| It's Bill Romanowski stuff. | ||
| It's really good as well. | ||
| There's a bunch of companies that are selling these cognitive enhancing formulas now, especially now that AlphaBrain has become really popular. | ||
| It's become super popular to sell these blends. | ||
| There's different things like paracetam 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 L-theanine. | ||
| I thought that was awesome. | ||
| I've been taking some L-theanine recently. | ||
| Do you press them? | ||
| 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 think you know a bit. | ||
| Yeah, he's on my website. | ||
| 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 were probably the best heads-up player, one-on-one player in the world. | ||
| What do you think about that, fella? | ||
| There are... | ||
| I'm definitely in the running, I mean... | ||
| So what is the difference between playing heads-up and playing, like, you know, a large tournament? | ||
| Like, 30, 40 people? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well... | |
| Besides the obvious. | ||
| Like, what's the strategic difference? | ||
| Like, how you approach it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
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 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. Button, blind, flop, all that. | ||
| River, all that's poker talk. | ||
| Yeah, poker jargon. | ||
| So how much of it, like this expression, this is a big one, the... | ||
| The big one is a poker face. | ||
| Having a poker face. | ||
| How much of that is real? | ||
| Do you read a guy or do you worry? | ||
| In live 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? | ||
| Do you feel it? | ||
| Do you sense it? | ||
| Absolutely, you do sense it. | ||
| There's just a gut thing that happens, for sure. | ||
| 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 aren't confident when they get those gut feelings and go with them. | ||
| But there are specific things you can look for, too. | ||
| Like, you can... | ||
| 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 and 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So you see... | ||
| So you're staring at someone's neck. | ||
| In that sense, it'd be good to be a fatso, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A bunch of people wear scarves while they play so that you can't... | ||
| What? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's crazy. | |
| All the top German guys now are wearing scarves while they play because... | ||
| Fucking 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? | ||
| See if you can see how fast it's going? | ||
| Yeah, you can see it going faster or like the blood pressure raising when they're really tense. | ||
| Wow, that's crazy. | ||
| I never would have thought that. | ||
| Or how deep someone is breathing. | ||
| You can watch the rise and fall of their chest. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| One thing people do is 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 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 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. | ||
| Like in what way? | ||
| Any of those things. | ||
| 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 and he's going to start tapping his foot because I've just said that that's something I'm looking for for evidence that they're strong. | ||
| So when you see someone... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Or like... | |
| I'm sorry. | ||
| A thing I used to do sometimes, 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 bullshit and in control of my physical stuff. | ||
| But something I would do is I would sit like this while playing in general. | ||
| With a hand on your face? | ||
| And when I wanted to fake being nervous, I'd lean into it. | ||
| LAUGHTER And you can 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 front of a mirror? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, why not? | ||
| If you can make $1.6 million your first year, I'd practice a lot of goofy shit, too. | ||
| Fake tells can be real subtle. | ||
| What about guys who play with sunglasses on? | ||
| Is that super common? | ||
| It's very common. | ||
| Tells from your eyes are... | ||
| It's a factor, but it's not one of the biggest ones because you're used to people looking you in the eyes. | ||
| You're practiced at lying with your eyes. | ||
| You know people are looking at your eyes. | ||
| Isn't that an eagle song? | ||
| You can't hide your lying eyes. | ||
| Sounds like an eagle song. | ||
| I believe it is. | ||
| So the glass is not a huge factor. | ||
| Not a huge factor. | ||
| What's the biggest one? | ||
| The lips? | ||
| The neck? | ||
| Hands, general posture, legs and feet even. | ||
| People are not on top of that one. | ||
| How many times have you been faked out by fake tells? | ||
| It's hard to tell. | ||
| You don't necessarily know it was a fake afterwards because sometimes it's not fake and you're just wrong. | ||
| You're wrong with your hand, you mean? | ||
| No, you're... | ||
| The tell is genuine, but you interpret it incorrectly. | ||
| 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 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. | ||
| 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 mean, I think that's... | ||
| Give an example. | ||
| In what sense? | ||
| 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 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 fucking cleaning up. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, clearly there's nobody who can just sit across the table from you and read your mind every time accurately. | ||
| Yeah, because I would think that 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'd be a lot of them. | ||
| Stock market would be a good one, playing the lottery, obviously. | ||
| Well, that's getting into predicting the future versus reading minds, which, I mean, 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 of... | ||
| But reading the future is kind of interpreted as psychic, right? | ||
| Isn't it? | ||
| Yeah, I mean... | ||
| In some way? | ||
| They're similarly crazy powers that some people claim to have. | ||
| Does, like, socially, does that, like... | ||
| It seems to me that, like, the ability to read tells 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 sorry that's like a little fucking 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 also, if you've communicated with a bunch of bullshitters, you kind of recognize it. | ||
| So we feel like being a good poker player makes you 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. | ||
| I think I have a more studied and self-aware approach to it than a lot of other people do. | ||
| I think I may have started from a baseline of being a bit below average at that kind of thing. | ||
| Where somebody might say, that story felt kind of bullshit. | ||
| 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 shit. | ||
| His eyes were darting around a lot. | ||
| So 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. | ||
| One of the main things that I'm fascinated with with poker is the ability to read minds. | ||
| Or read tells, rather. | ||
| The ability to sort of get this sense of where a person's going with things. | ||
| Get this sense. | ||
| I think that's fascinating because I know that that exists in real life. | ||
| I know it does. | ||
| I know it exists. | ||
| Like, that thing exists with human beings. | ||
| I just don't know exactly what it is. | ||
| I've always wondered. | ||
| I've always wondered what exactly is going on when people are looking at each other. | ||
| You know something's off. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just a sense. | ||
| There's a perfect story. | ||
| I've told this before, but my friend Brian Callen, he's a great guy, but he used to date some of the craziest fucking people of all time. | ||
| 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'd be like, what do you do? | ||
| This guy's a fucking bullshit artist. | ||
| He couldn't see it. | ||
| For whatever reason, just couldn't see it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And he introduced me to this girl... | ||
| Within five seconds. | ||
| He goes, hey, this is blah, blah, blah. | ||
| This is my friend Joe. | ||
| I go, how you doing? | ||
| And she goes, oh, hi. | ||
| I go, come here, Brian. | ||
| I pull him aside. | ||
| I go, she's fucking crazy. | ||
| I go, get out right now. | ||
| Whatever you're doing. | ||
| He goes, no, she's not crazy. | ||
| She's nervous to be around you. | ||
| I go, dude, trust me. | ||
| I have a spidey sense for real crazy. | ||
| I go, that girl's fucking crazy. | ||
| Turns out, of course he didn't listen, moves her in, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| Turns out she's on meth. | ||
| Completely out of her fucking mind. | ||
| Is a prostitute. | ||
| Has these Johns in her life and fucking pimps in her life. | ||
| And then he gets rid of her. | ||
| And then years later, he's at a bar on Sunset and about to walk in. | ||
| And she walks by and she's streetwalking. | ||
| 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 was interested in, I wonder if I'd be able to pick up tells. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I mean, picking up tells has some in common with looking at somebody's stance and picking up that they're about to throw a kick. | ||
| Hmm, that's interesting because looking at someone's stance and whether or not they're gonna throw a kick is based on data You know like like sometimes I'll say like during 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 thrown kicks at you. | ||
| Or because you've tried to hide it on people when you've thrown kicks at people. | ||
| You know, there's a thing that you see. | ||
| But it's... | ||
| There's... | ||
| There was a book on this. | ||
| And it's not about martial arts, but it's about just acquiring... | ||
| Massive amounts of data about very specific things and then being able to see these things coming. | ||
| I forget the term that they used, but it was just about that, about how for a person who doesn't have this data in their mind, it seems like, how's this guy seeing this? | ||
| But for someone who has all that data, it's like, oh, there it is. | ||
| Yeah, it's exactly the same thing with picking up tells in 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'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 shit, right? | ||
| I would guess so, yeah. | ||
| That's really interesting, man. | ||
| That's really interesting. | ||
| That guy should teach tells, right? | ||
| If you're that old, you've been around for that... | ||
| How long has that guy been playing? | ||
| A long time. | ||
| 50, 60 years or something? | ||
| 50 years. | ||
| More like 60, yeah. | ||
| 60 years. | ||
| Dude's in his 80s, I'm pretty sure. | ||
| That's amazing, man. | ||
| All those years of accumulating that data. | ||
| And a guy like that has really been around for the transformation of poker, too. | ||
| It was a real different thing back in the 60s. | ||
| Yeah, it was like you'd 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 led to this poker revolution that we find now? | ||
| I mean, fucking 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. | ||
| And have every year for... | ||
| I guess World Series started in 69, I think. | ||
| So 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 of the cards. | ||
| Being able to see people's hands. | ||
| That was huge. | ||
| That was huge in making it spectators. | ||
| 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 was a huge leap forward. | ||
| They had tried televising poker tournaments before that, but it's, especially to a casual viewer, a lot less interesting. | ||
| But you see less of it, at least for the non-involved observer like myself, you see less of it on television now. | ||
| In the U.S. In the U.S. 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? | ||
| Online poker sites. | ||
| Online poker sites can't advertise in the U.S. anymore. | ||
| Motherfuckers. | ||
| So in Canada or England or France, poker on TV is still huge. | ||
| So in Canada it's legal to bet online? | ||
| It is ambiguous. | ||
| Ambiguous. | ||
| In most of the world, it's ambiguous. | ||
| It would seem like if you were a poker player and you live in America, you just moved to Vancouver. | ||
| You play online in Vancouver, travel down to America, give up U.S. citizenship. | ||
| Giving up U.S. 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 U.S. 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 live in Malta now? | ||
| Is that your move? | ||
| Mostly. | ||
| 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 fucking pimp. | ||
| Look at you. | ||
| Kid goes from... | ||
| Hating school, trying to figure out, gets the love of his parents, fucking 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, how many years was it until you kind of had to make this move out of the United States? | ||
| Three. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I lived in Panorama Towers. | ||
| You spend a lot of time in Vegas, you might know it. | ||
| It's the apartment complex next door to Vanderlei's Gym. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Yeah, I know where that is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Nice spot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it was just full of poker players. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| So it was like a big poker player party. | ||
| Some friends of mine from college moved out there with me at the same time. | ||
| I had two friends from college who... | ||
| One still is a professional poker player. | ||
| One was for a couple years and went to law school. | ||
| They moved out to Vegas with me. | ||
| 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 2008-2009 was just insanity. | ||
| The whole building was just poker players and strippers. | ||
| And empty apartments. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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 don't know any details of that sort of thing. | ||
| Good for you. | ||
| Stay on the straight and narrow, son. | ||
| Avoid the divorce that fucking traps hedge fund managers and sends them to their doom. | ||
| So you live in Vegas. | ||
| You're doing the poker thing in Vegas. | ||
| In Vegas, but mainly online. | ||
| Mainly online, still. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Is it more profitable? | ||
| Easier? | ||
| More profitable for me at that time, given my personal skill set and inclinations. | ||
| There's money to be made doing both. | ||
| The advantages with online poker are you can get a lot more hands an hour in. | ||
| 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, live cash games, involves a lot of waiting around for your turn to get to play in the game. | ||
| Yeah, I would imagine. | ||
| And then once you get in the game, you play 30 hands an hour. | ||
| Online, I'm playing 300 or 400 hands an hour, and that'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? | ||
| 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? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| You're not doing anything sneaky or bad by playing multiple tables. | ||
| Now, when you have a thing on sites, do you have a time limit? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, pretty short. | ||
| 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 seems like, yeah, like, why would anybody go anywhere if you could play it online like that? | ||
| 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. | ||
| When you're playing online, do you have to worry about bots, or is that nothing anymore? | ||
| That was something that people really worried about for a while. | ||
| It's a concern for sure. | ||
| The biggest and best sites, I think, are doing a pretty good job at enforcing against it. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Do they run programs or something like that? | ||
| The site has various data to work with based on what you're giving them. | ||
| They're not 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 human-like fashion and evade this detection. | ||
| They track your... | ||
| Playing hours, if you're just regularly playing for 48 hours straight, that's pretty suspicious. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Unless they get a nice fucking webcam video of you doing crank sitting in front of your computer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Occasionally it comes to that sort of thing. | ||
| Like, a guy I know was playing 60 tables at once, and they're like, that's... | ||
| You're a bot. | ||
| A person can't do that. | ||
| And so he uploaded a video of him doing that. | ||
| And he's like, no, I fucking can. | ||
| This is what it looks like. | ||
| What does he have, like a bank of screens in front of him? | ||
| No, I think it was just all on one screen, all the tables stacked on top of each other so that whichever table you have to act on pops to the top. | ||
| and you just click and it goes to the side and the next one you have to act on pops to the top. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And he's just pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. | |
| 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. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| I don't know what they're doing, so it's even more amazing to me. | ||
| Yeah, same. | ||
| Duncan. | ||
| Every now and then I watch those videos, and it's nuts. | ||
| Duncan's obsessed with that shit. | ||
| He was a silver whatever the fuck that is. | ||
| On Starcraft for a while, and then he lost his silver standing. | ||
| He's very, very upset. | ||
| He's very embarrassed. | ||
| But I would watch him get obsessed with that stuff, and he would watch the videos, and his eyes would light up, and his pupils would dilate. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Those videos are insane. | ||
| And it's a huge spectator sport in Korea, right? | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| Huge. | ||
| There's, like, TV stations devoted to just that, I'm pretty sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I need to talk to one of those pro StarCraft dudes. | |
| Apparently, it's a very, very, very difficult game, too, that is, in a lot of ways, very chess-like in that sense. | ||
| It's very strategic. | ||
| 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 in playing games like Unreal or Quake or Doom or any of those crazy fast twitch games. | ||
| There are quite a few competitive gamers who transitioned to poker and are now professional poker players. | ||
| But imagine that people that just have this inclination towards figuring things out in a game sense, 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. | ||
| A lot of pool players go into poker because they can actually make money doing it as opposed to pool. | ||
| It's very difficult to do. | ||
| So when you live in Vegas for a little bit, hanging out with strippers and poker players and strippers and poker players, so you decide how do you go with Malta? | ||
| It's a weird story, actually, how I ended up in Malta. | ||
| Originally, it had a lot to do with... | ||
| Where is Malta? | ||
| It's like right next to Sicily. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| It's like a couple hours on the ferry to Sicily. | ||
| Hmm, okay. | ||
| That's where my grandparents are from. | ||
| Oh, cool. | ||
| Malta's real nearby. | ||
| I drink a lot of Sicilian wine and need a lot of Sicilian pizza there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I bet, man. | |
| The food there is supposed to be sensational. | ||
| The seafood is supposed to be amazing. | ||
| The local red king prawns in Malta are some of the most delicious things I've ever eaten. | ||
| Wow, okay. | ||
| So what makes you live there? | ||
| Is it a tax thing? | ||
| Is it a gambling thing? | ||
| A residency thing. | ||
| It's easy? | ||
| It looked like it was going to be when I started looking into it at the time. | ||
| 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? | ||
| We 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 written in like Roman characters, like the alphabet you're used to. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Not like Roman numerals. | ||
| No, not Roman numerals. | ||
| I'm thinking like V's instead of U's. | ||
| No, the alphabet we use for English and French and Spanish and Italian. | ||
| Wow, but it's a Semitic language. | ||
| But it's a Semitic language, so it's just full of X's and Q's and G and H'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 it was called Cormi. | ||
| It's spelled Q-O-R-M-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 Cormi. | ||
| It's not a big island. | ||
| There are like 500,000 people there. | ||
| You can drive from one end to the other in an hour. | ||
| I say it again. | ||
| I show it to him on the piece of paper. | ||
| He says, Oh, Ormi! | ||
| Yes, we can go to Ormi. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It starts with a silent Q. A silent Q. Q would have guessed. | |
| Silent cues? | ||
| Why use it? | ||
| How weird. | ||
| What a strange thing. | ||
| That whole part of the world is so bizarre because it's sort of the echoes of the conqueror movements of thousands of years ago. | ||
| Oh, yeah, and you can really see it in Malta. | ||
| I mean, it's been conquered by so many people over the years. | ||
| Obviously, the language is... | ||
| Semitic because at one point it was under Moorish or Arabic control. | ||
| Which is why that scene from True Romance with the Moors in Sicily. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| With, you know, where it's saying that, yeah, it's a racist scene for all the black people. | ||
| I mean, that's the reason why so many Sicilians have dark skin and curly hair. | ||
| Maltese people look roughly like Lebanese people or something. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| They're pretty dark skinned. | ||
| They speak a language that sounds a lot like Arabic with an Italian accent, basically. | ||
| So did you do a lot of research before you decided on Malta? | ||
| Medium amount. | ||
| Did you know anybody living there already? | ||
| I knew a few people who had been there. | ||
| So you just fucking moved to some strange island? | ||
| Well, what happened was the Department of Justice cracked down on the poker sites happened in April 2011, and a few weeks went by. | ||
| We're thinking, 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. | ||
| 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 Malta 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 don't know about this. | ||
| Yeah, that sounds weird. | ||
| But she went over there and ended up loving it. | ||
| It's like, Malta's great. | ||
| Let's go there. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, it came back. | ||
| Where'd the other poker players go? | ||
| Anybody follow you over there? | ||
| Two other guys came with me over there and didn't stay. | ||
| What a fascinating vagabond lifestyle you guys have. | ||
| Yeah, it's nuts. | ||
| 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? | ||
| One dude out of my, like, close group of ten friends or so, and a 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. | ||
| Playing against other people in Nevada? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So there's 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 is playing mainly in casinos. | ||
| Now, is there any movement to change this as far as the online laws? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| What year was this all implemented? | ||
| The UIGEA passed in 2006, but it's not really even clear how much that had to do with anything. | ||
| What happened right after the UIGEA passed in 2006 was that some poker sites voluntarily pulled out of the U.S. market, and that doing transactions with poker sites became more complicated. | ||
| Remember what I was saying about the UIGEA? It didn't change what was illegal. | ||
| 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 U.S. 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 if you just decided to stay in Vegas and keep playing online, what would be the risk? | ||
| The sites wouldn't 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 have to do all sorts of identity masking bullshit 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. | ||
| There's probably not going to be a federal bill anytime soon. | ||
| There have been some attempts, 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| This is Canada. | ||
| Close. | ||
| Canada's 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 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 think California's actually higher than 22. 34. 34.8. | ||
| California or Canada? | ||
| Canada. | ||
| 34.8. | ||
| I want to say California's close. | ||
| I mean, LA is 12 or 14 already? | ||
| 38. California's 38. So yeah, California's a bit bigger than Canada. | ||
| So pretty close. | ||
| 38 and 35. And then those are pretty comparable to the larger European countries? | ||
| LA's 20 million. | ||
| LA's 20 million? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| That's what 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. Yeah. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's the whole idea, that they're here illegally. | ||
| There's no documentation. | ||
| Yeah, I guess you could, like... | ||
| You could guess, somehow or another. | ||
| Yeah, you could track indicators of economic activity, like... | ||
| How many fucking bags of rice are being sold at the supermarket? | ||
| Racist! | ||
| I don't know if that would work. | ||
| I mean, track how much food is sold in L.A.? 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 squirrely. | ||
| Because a lot of folks in the illegal community, they work... | ||
| For cash. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They spend cash on 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, because you'd have to check those weird markets, weird Spanish names. | ||
| You drive by, like, you go down Van Owen, you see those... | ||
| I mean, you check all the markets. | ||
| Yeah, I guess. | ||
| And then 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 have you been in Malta now? | ||
| Since September 2011, so like three years. | ||
| And any plans on... | ||
| What about, like, Monaco or any other places where you can... | ||
| Monaco's creepy. | ||
| I don't want to go to Monaco. | ||
| Is it creepy? | ||
| Everyone there has so much fucking money, and they're so snobby. | ||
| So says the guy who made a million six his first year of playing poker. | ||
| Eh, those fucking rich assholes. | ||
| 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 a fucking McLaren or something, for sale, 1.5 million euro. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Handwritten 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 shit about cars. | ||
| I may be guessing the wrong name. | ||
| I know you, but yeah. | ||
| Real fucking expensive sports cars. | ||
| Wow, that sounds crazy. | ||
| Why wouldn't they go to a broker? | ||
| The taxis there are all Cadillac. | ||
| If you have that much money, why wouldn't you go to, if you have enough money for a fucking McLaren, not a, there's different McLarens. | ||
| 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 McLarens don't sound very good, and then they said, what about, this sounds awesome. | ||
| That's the million dollar McLaren. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's a million plus dollar McLaren has this amazing sound to it, but the regular McLaren that's like, I think 200 plus thousand, it doesn't sound bad. | ||
| It just doesn't sound like a Ferrari. | ||
| Like, Ferraris have this... | ||
| Part of the beauty of a Ferrari is the sound it makes. | ||
| People underestimate that. | ||
| That's one of the reasons why turbocharged cars aren't appealing to a lot of real sports cars fanatics. | ||
| Because they just don't have the same sound. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| Yeah, the forced induction with the air. | ||
| It just doesn't give 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 the BMW M5. You could turn it off, praise Allah, because it's really gross. | ||
| And 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 because it was too quiet by default? | ||
| Well, they used to have a V10. And the V10 was a monster engine. | ||
| It was just an incredible, incredible engine. | ||
| And it made so much cool noise. | ||
| It was just like this fucking throaty, deep, powerful... | ||
| I'm pretty sure it was a V10. Hold on a second. | ||
| BMW V10. Let me pull that off real quick. | ||
| WV10... 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, 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 the delay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Let me find this fucker. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Nobody's happy about the fact that you turned up. | ||
| Like, 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 you're there? | ||
| That there is like some young American dude who doesn't speak French who is in Monaco. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| So it's just a millionaire, billionaire playboy place. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they want it for the rich French-speaking people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Hmm. | ||
| But doesn't, like, George Clooney live there or some shit? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there are a bunch of people who are not French. | ||
| He's probably got, like, chateaus all around the world. | ||
| For sure he does. | ||
| Chateau. | ||
| a shot too. | ||
| That's what a BMW with a V10 sounds like. | ||
| That's a serious engine? | ||
| The new one sounds like a little bitch. | ||
| But the new one's a better car. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Catch-22. | ||
| It's like, what are you going to do? | ||
| If you keep going with these bigger, crazy, throaty engines, they just eat the gas, and then they kill the seals in the Arctic shit. | ||
| Drown the polar bears, the frozen glaciers, and all that good stuff. | ||
| What is the economy like in this Malta place? | ||
| What's it 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 some of the lowest tax rates in the EU. So, like many small countries, it's, like, you know, Antigua or St. Kitts. | ||
| There are a bunch of, like, island nations near the U.S. that have carved out an itch for themselves as tax havens and... | ||
| Business-friendly economies. | ||
| 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 pay taxes there and here as well? | ||
| Is that how it works? | ||
| Only here. | ||
| If I had become a resident like I was planning to, which I never really finished that story. | ||
| If I had become a resident like I was planning to, yes, I would owe taxes there. | ||
| They have a tax treaty with the U.S. so I can... | ||
| Deduct what I pay there against what I would owe here. | ||
| You don't end up getting double taxed. | ||
| But, since I'm not a resident, no, I have no tax liability anywhere other than the U.S. But if you do become a resident somewhere else, you have to give up your residence here, right? | ||
| No, not always. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not always? | |
| 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 Maltese passport or anything like that. | ||
| I get a sticker that goes inside my U.S. passport saying that I am a registered permanent resident. | ||
| Yeah, there's a thing like that with Mexico. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like you had 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 are all kinds of visas. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's a pretty decent place to live. | ||
| 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 getting ready to move there from Vegas just before the DOJ crackdown. | ||
| Just because of the atmosphere of the town? | ||
| Yeah, it's a nice place. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a great place. | |
| Very smart. | ||
| It's one of the smartest cities, I think, in the country. | ||
| It's also one of the most tech-savvy. | ||
| There's so many tech people there. | ||
| A lot of complaints, though. | ||
| The folks who were there for a long time are complaining about the real estate prices. | ||
| They were shot through the roof where regular people can't even afford to live there anymore. | ||
| They can't afford to buy houses. | ||
| I looked at the housing prices in San Francisco. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| A four million dollar house is like this regular house. | ||
| How is that a four million dollar house? | ||
| It's a million dollar house maybe, but it's not a four million dollar house. | ||
| I have friends who live in Atherton. | ||
| Do you know where that is? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's one of the richest neighborhoods in the country. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And it's just outside of San Francisco. | ||
| And it's fucking 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, Nebraska or anywhere else. | ||
| It's just large for this one fucking 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 fucking house? | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| Yeah, that shit's crazy to me. | ||
| But it's called all those wacky fucking billionaire Google people live out there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's just too much money. | ||
| So, yeah, I mean, it's supply and demand. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| 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 have to, like, leave the country to do what you do for a living because of some fucking goofy laws that were obviously put in place by criminals or people that are just shady as fuck. | ||
| Yeah, I don't love it. | ||
| No, it's fucking awful. | ||
| It's awful. | ||
| So if it does change, will it be something that's going to happen within the next decade? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| Yeah, I mean... | ||
| Does PokerStars.net, do they try to work on that? | ||
| Are they... | ||
| Yeah, there is a pretty good chance that they will be in the New Jersey market in the next year or so, because you need to get regulatory approval, and obviously the U.S., Casino interests are trying to keep PokerStars out. | ||
| It's not a company owned by Americans. | ||
| They should just send donuts to that Chris Christie guy's house over and over and over again. | ||
| He'll let them in. | ||
| Donuts and hot dogs and maybe cheese and pizza. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just keep sending food to that guy's house. | |
| 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. | ||
| 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 fuck. | ||
| 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 fuck anything up. | ||
| But Tesla, New Jersey, Christy. | ||
| He's just gross. | ||
| Christy says Tesla criticism is complete crap. | ||
| He's such a fucking slob. | ||
| 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 does that mean? | ||
| They had already been selling cars in New Jersey. | ||
| They have a law in the books that they could interpret to stop them from doing that, but they didn't for a little while and then decided they would. | ||
| The company cannot sell their cars from the showroom. | ||
| They have two showrooms. | ||
| The company cannot sell their cars from the showrooms or offer their customers test drives. | ||
| The Jersey law on the books 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. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| Okay, well that actually makes sense. | ||
| Yeah, so... | ||
| He probably was spitting food out when he said it, though. | ||
| Probably had shit flying out of his teeth. | ||
| Somebody sued or whatever and they couldn't ignore it. | ||
| No, maybe. | ||
| Yeah, probably. | ||
| Or someone paid someone off or something like that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's just gross. | ||
| I don't understand. | ||
| First of all, it doesn't make any sense. | ||
| Why would you have a law like that in place? | ||
| The only reason why a law like that would be in place is because someone paid somebody off. | ||
| I mean, 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. | ||
| What? | ||
| I guess. | ||
| The rule is actually a result of a backroom deal. | ||
| Electric car makers chairman charges. | ||
| Hmm, 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 NewJersey.com. | ||
| Oh, 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 a 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, 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. | ||
| It was 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 lobby... | ||
| When it became apparent to the auto dealer lobby that this approach would not succeed, they cut a backroom 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 bullshit artist, 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 Marijuana from being legal in his town that it won't be legal in his state rather on his watch because of the children How about the children looking at you as their leader, this morbidly obese person that's giving out any health-related advice whatsoever? | ||
| It just drives me fucking bananas, that kind of shit. | ||
| And, of course, they have... | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| No. | ||
| I'm just fucking around. | ||
| I'm just fucking around. | ||
| Bad example for the children. | ||
| No, if they're really good at their job, fuck 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. | ||
| My issue became only with the marijuana thing, which is marijuana is near and dear to my heart. | ||
| I think it's a fucking fantastic plant and I think it aids evolution. | ||
| And so I see some non-evolved, 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, non-biased studies that he doesn't understand at all. | ||
| Yeah, the government studies on that stuff are 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 gonna smoke weed whether or not you tell them it's legal, and if you make it illegal, then they're gonna have to deal with criminals to do it, and they're gonna be putting themselves in danger, and there's gonna 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. | ||
| I saw that, yeah. | ||
| Fascinating. | ||
| Absolutely fascinating. | ||
| I think it's 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. | ||
| I've gone over this a thousand times, but go to any corner liquor store and you can drink yourself to death. | ||
| Go to any drug store, 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? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What's it like? | |
| No, Malta is pretty repressive on the drug laws. | ||
| Really? | ||
| It's a Catholic country. | ||
| Ah, those fucks. | ||
| So what happens if you get caught with a joint in Malta? | ||
| Death. | ||
| Potentially a good bit of time in jail. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| A joint? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| The fucked up thing with multi-drug laws is that they really don't draw a lot of distinctions between one drug and the next. | ||
| And there's a 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's 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 as sophisticated. | ||
| They tend to lump drugs together, and oftentimes they also tend to prosecute people based on the weight of the plant, and they pick up the pot with the plant, like the pot that grows in, the dirt, the soil itself, and they count all that as your drug. | ||
| If you found someone who had marijuana plants in their house, and you weighed everything... | ||
| It's like probably a few ounces of smokable marijuana, but it's like dozens of pounds of stuff associated with it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like a sneaky little fucking loophole that prosecutors use. | ||
| You know, it's just gross. | ||
| It's just when you make criminals out of people that are just doing what they want to do that doesn't harm anybody else, 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. | ||
| It's getting to the point that everyone's a criminal and that they can just pick and choose who needs to be taken down and sent to jail. | ||
| And so 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 shit you do on the internet's a felony, a bunch of the shit you own in your house is a felony. | ||
| If you do both of those, you're a fucking double criminal. | ||
| Smoking pot and gambling online, you dirty bastard. | ||
| Or just downloading videos that you didn't pay for. | ||
| Yeah, well, that's a tricky one, man. | ||
| That's a tricky one, because I think that as time goes on, it does seem to be changing in making access to legal, purchasable versions of these movies and things. | ||
| It seems to be much, much, much easier than it used to be a while back. | ||
| 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? | ||
|
unidentified
|
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 if 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. | ||
| Applying property laws to ideas gets pretty complicated. | ||
| Especially ideas where you're not stealing the idea for a profit. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like when you're 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 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 fucking them over. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It is, but I think that there's room in this country for ethical consideration by the consumer. | ||
| To put it this way, 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They would say, hey, I owe this guy. | ||
| This fucking 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| 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 shit going on. | ||
| How is it different that you can download music for free? | ||
| How is that different in some ways than the radio? | ||
| Is it just because it's a better copy? | ||
| Because the fucking radio is playing your music all day long. | ||
| Because 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 squirrely. | ||
| Yeah, it's all pretty complicated. | ||
| 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 fucked up situation when the laws are such that if the government decides to, they've got a reason to put fucking anyone they want in jail. | ||
| Well, especially now that they're literally downloading every single voicemail that you've ever said, every single email that you send from now till fucking who knows when will be in some NSA database somewhere, and they might go look through your shit, and who knows, you might have said something completely joking, like, look, this poker shit isn't working out, so I'm going to start robbing babies and fucking, you know, whatever. | ||
| take the other money and then they say oh that's criminal intent and this is a terrorist threat the super fucked up thing that they do is they i'm pretty sure this is accurate um if i'm spouting conspiracy theory bullshit here someone call me out on it but i'm pretty sure they find that shit | ||
| 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 because the NSA got it illegally and just gave it to them. | ||
| Yes, that's exactly what they do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| That should be illegal. | ||
| That shit's insane. | ||
| That's sneaky as fuck. | ||
| Well, depending upon what you're doing, and that's where it gets squirrely. | ||
| If it turns out you're involved in trafficking, human trafficking, and selling children to sex slavery... | ||
| Yeah, there's shit 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. | ||
| And also, if our society was just and if all the laws that were in place were in place in order to actually protect people. | ||
| Protect people from being victimized by bad people. | ||
| But that's not what's going on. | ||
| Especially when you're dealing with most drug laws. | ||
| No one's getting victimized by pot. | ||
| They're just not. | ||
| They tried to push it for a while that they were. | ||
| Do you remember when they used to have those commercials where these two fucking no-nonsense guys would be eating dinner and the guy would be saying that if you buy drugs, you support terrorism. | ||
| Period. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And he kept eating to tell you. | ||
| It was like giving you this feeling of authority like it's your dad that's tired of your fucking 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 fuck 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? | ||
| It's 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, there's no terrorism involved there, man. | ||
| They might have terrorized some fertilizer, popped the top, and poured it into the ground! | ||
|
unidentified
|
No! | |
| It was just so silly. | ||
| I mean, there is a little truth to that. | ||
| Like, if you buy cocaine... | ||
| Somewhere up the chain, there are some fucked up people involved in getting cocaine to you. | ||
| And you know why? | ||
| Because... | ||
| Cocaine's illegal. | ||
| It's illegal, yeah, of course. | ||
| If cocaine was legal, you'd be buying it from Murtec or fucking, you know, GlaxoSmithKline or something like that. | ||
| They'd be selling cocaine. | ||
| They're, of course, just ethically fine. | ||
| Hey, just like Jack Daniels. | ||
| They have a commercial for Jack Daniels. | ||
| Have you seen it? | ||
| Pull it up? | ||
| Yeah, pull it up. | ||
| Let's watch this fucking goofy-ass commercial because it's quite hilarious how they treat you like you're a fucking monkey. | ||
| Let's take a look at this. | ||
| Yeah, this is exactly it. | ||
| This is so funny. | ||
| Watch this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a ploy. | |
| What? | ||
| This drug money funds terror. | ||
| It's a ploy. | ||
| Ploy. | ||
| A manipulation. | ||
| Ploy. | ||
| Drug money funds terror. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, why should I believe that? | |
| Because it's a fact. | ||
| A fact? | ||
| F-A-C-T fact. | ||
| So you're saying that I should believe it because it's true. | ||
| That's your argument. | ||
| It is true. | ||
| So, the guy on the left, the first guy, is a moron, the handsome guy, and the older gentleman That's a weird ad. | ||
| It's the dumbest fucking ad ever. | ||
| Because there's nothing being said. | ||
| It's two dickheads. | ||
| 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 fucking 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. | ||
| Because it's so fucking stupid. | ||
| They treat you like you're a moron. | ||
| Like, somehow or another, that's all you have to say. | ||
| Like, first of all, 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-C-T. Oh, you can fucking spell fact! | ||
| You must be right! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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 fucking Vitamix. | ||
| Splice him up, you silly bitch. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| It's a ridiculous way to express an opinion. | ||
| 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, it's a really complicated issue. | ||
| It is as complex as biological life itself. | ||
| It 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 productivity like caffeine and things that kill you and things that are bad for you and things that makes 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. | ||
| Because you're a fucking drug user, you crazy asshole. | ||
| You're going to have a whiskey on the rocks like a gentleman, you piece of shit. | ||
| It's madness. | ||
| And that's all the kind of shit that was available... | ||
| You know, that they, or was out there before, you know, the social media aspect of the internet made that preposterous. | ||
| Could you imagine the Twitter response if somebody tried to put a fucking video like that? | ||
| You know, hashtag yes all drugs. | ||
| Hashtag yes all drugs would be the fucking, the parody attack of it. | ||
| They're still out there? | ||
| They're still putting out pretty, not that bad, I guess. | ||
| What is one that you could think of? | ||
| Um... | ||
| Jamie, see if you can 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 fucking meaty pulp. | ||
| Because it's just a waste of money. | ||
| It's a waste of taxpayer money. | ||
| Not only that, most of that shit, when you see that, remember that talking dog? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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 2008, and it was just mocked mercilessly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I wish you wouldn't smoke pot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're not the same when you smoke pot. | |
| I miss my friend. | ||
| Fucking retarded 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 pretty much like alcohol companies making commercials against pot and There's | ||
| 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 guest, and what was the name of his book? | ||
| Remember his book? | ||
| Here, I'll pull it up real quick. | ||
| Dr. Carl Hart. | ||
| He had a great point, and one of his... | ||
|
unidentified
|
High price. | |
| High price, yeah. | ||
| He's brilliant. | ||
| Just a brilliant guy, and he's the... | ||
| Associate Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at Columbia University, and he is well known for his research in drug use and abuse. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| Drugs are technology. | ||
| The reason they exist is because they're effective. | ||
| It's 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 be used to the greater good of mankind. | ||
| And a drug is just like that. | ||
| It's just like a tool. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Do you have a commercial? | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's a bunch of them. | |
| Just play one of these goofy fucking things. | ||
|
unidentified
|
...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 easy for them to get pot if they wanted some. Seven out of ten teenagers have been offered an illegal drug. | |
| Okay, well that's a good commercial. | ||
| I mean, that's like talk to your kids. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| Yeah, that really wasn't bad. | ||
| Also, seven out of ten kids get offered drugs in high school. | ||
| I want to know who those other three are. | ||
| Those fucking losers. | ||
| Nobody's offering you drugs? | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| What fucking parties are you going to? | ||
| You're not getting something? | ||
| Yeah, don't take pills. | ||
| You don't know what they are, alright? | ||
| 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 Portugal has instituted a countrywide decriminalization of all drugs. | ||
| A while ago. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's going great. | ||
| The results have been fantastic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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 can't suppress people. | ||
| You know, I know this... | ||
| As a parent, 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 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 as soon as you fucking tell people, like, because it's a drug, because it's a fact, F-A-C-T fact... | ||
| I just want to beat you to death, you fucking dunce. | ||
| You shitty propaganda machine walking around with a fucking pair of glasses eating salad. | ||
| Asshole. | ||
| Asshole face. | ||
| Just did your fucking shitty commercial. | ||
| That's my least favorite commercial, I think, ever. | ||
| Because it's a fact. | ||
| F-A-C-T fact. | ||
| So you're telling me that it's a fact. | ||
| I'm telling you you're both assholes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Who talks about anything like that? | |
| Because it's a fact? | ||
| Your dad. | ||
| It's like a dad thing. | ||
| That guy is like a dad. | ||
| I have a friend who has a dad like that. | ||
| I know people who have dads like that. | ||
| I can't talk to him because I'd be like, you're a dunce and that's why your son doesn't accept your thoughts. | ||
| You don't even understand this. | ||
| He gets away from you. | ||
| He mocks you. | ||
| Okay, I gotta go, because I can't have this conversation. | ||
| I'll fucking yell at you in your own house. | ||
| I wouldn't really, but... | ||
| But that thing, that fucking Mr. No-Nonsense guy, that Mr. No-Nonsense guy intimidates people. | ||
| Because it's fact. | ||
| F-A-C-T fact. | ||
| Anybody who fucking spells fact out like that, you should be able to just spit on them. | ||
| It should be an automatic... | ||
| What the fuck? | ||
| It seems like the appropriate response. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Spit. | |
| S-P-I-T, spit. | ||
| It's not assault, but it's gross. | ||
| Clearly too late for an intellectual discussion. | ||
| Yeah, you're going to hit him. | ||
| Hit him with rocks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What the fuck? | |
| Pee on his leg or something. | ||
| I've taken this fucking way out of the boundaries of normal thinking. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Assholes. | |
| But, you know, those kind of commercials are really insidious. | ||
| They're insidious, and the roots of them is what's most disturbing. | ||
| When you find out this partnership for a drug-free America, it's essentially just a business ploy. | ||
| 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 enough. | ||
| I was saying that it would be like a really shitty movie that's attacking, like, a really awesome movie. | ||
| You know? | ||
| For being, you know, because they don't want you to, I mean, that's what it's like, kind of, in a way. | ||
| That no-nonsense guy. | ||
| That is something that for whatever reason... | ||
| Even the ineffective way that the first guy communicated... | ||
| So you're trying to tell me? | ||
| That's what you're trying to tell me? | ||
| He's not telling you anything! | ||
| Are you guys both dumb? | ||
| 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 fucking salad argument. | ||
| Weird. | ||
| And Malta? | ||
| Worse, huh? | ||
| In terms of drug laws, yeah, it's pretty bad. | ||
| You can end up in jail for a very long time, for not very much. | ||
| You do some fucking Midnight Express type shit, right? | ||
| You ever see that movie? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I've seen no movies ever. | ||
| It's embarrassing. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just playing poker like a madman? | ||
| How many hours a day do you play poker? | ||
| Not that much. | ||
| 20? | ||
| I'd say, like, I probably average 30 to 50 hours a week. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| 50 hours a week is still like a real work job. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| So it's a real job. | ||
| It varies a lot throughout the year. | ||
| It's a lot of sitting. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I kind of buy it. | ||
| I mean, my back is way too fucked up for a 28-year-old. | ||
| Is it really fucked up? | ||
| Do you stretch out or do 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 discs 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. | ||
| It's pretty cool. | ||
| This knee thing. | ||
| But I decided that I like sitting up straight in this 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 a... | ||
| It's like a kneeling chair. | ||
| Yeah, I do know those. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's not the most comfortable thing, but it definitely forces you to sit up straight. | ||
| A buddy of mine has started playing from a treadmill desk. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| So he's on his treadmill while he's... | ||
| 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, two 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 while he's on his computer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's clever. | |
| That's probably way better for you. | ||
| He's liking it a lot. | ||
| I may do that eventually. | ||
| Treadmill desk. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I love it. | |
| What if it gets to some virtual reality type shit? | ||
| Some Oculus Rift poker playing? | ||
| That would be kind of dope. | ||
| You aware of Oculus Rift? | ||
| I'm not. | ||
| You're not? | ||
| Oh, but I have to tell you. | ||
| Oculus Rift is the newest, latest, greatest 3D virtual reality helmet that they've created. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| My friend Duncan, who's a big proponent of it, he loves this shit, because 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. | ||
| It was like Quake 1, like old school video game-y. | ||
| There's no way you could misinterpret what it is. | ||
| You know it's not. | ||
| Do you remember that really old Nintendo one came out? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Virtual Boy. | |
| Virtual Boy, that's what I thought it was. | ||
| That thing was insane. | ||
| It was red. | ||
| Red? | ||
| 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 a boat sickness, like motion sickness on boats, seasick. | ||
| That would make sense. | ||
| Yeah, it's an inner ear thing, apparently. | ||
| I think maybe that's a genetic thing. | ||
| You either get it or you don't get it. | ||
| Because my kids don't get it, but my wife gets it. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| Because I think my kids get their robustness from the fucking old man. | ||
| But 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 fucking frothy. | ||
| He's like, dude, what I just saw is going to change everything. | ||
| The world is going to change. | ||
| This is bigger than the internet. | ||
| He goes, this is bigger than the invention of the wheel. | ||
| This is bigger than... | ||
| He goes, it's fucking crazy. | ||
| He was fucking frothy. | ||
| Frothing at the mouth. | ||
| I wish I could see his fucking beady eyes bulging out of his head. | ||
| He was so happy and excited. | ||
| He went to this 3D 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 low-level sense, like developers. | ||
| 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 see it as if the camera, like you're looking. | ||
| There's no breakup of the motion. | ||
| It's completely smooth. | ||
| And it's completely HD, three-dimensional, like a movie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Like you're watching perfect three-dimensional 4K video. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| Yeah, and 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 move near him, you can move around him. | ||
| It's all been filmed. | ||
| You can change where you're going, and the video follows you, and he said, it's fucking nuts. | ||
| The sound, he said, is like 3D, stereo sound. | ||
| The guy playing the piano, he goes, you feel like you're in a fucking room with this guy. | ||
| He said, it just changed... | ||
| It changes everything. | ||
| That is crazy. | ||
| Yeah, he was going nuts. | ||
| He was going nuts about it. | ||
| And based on his original one that I fucked with, which was, like I said, very pixelated, very old school, like 1990 video game-y type, it was still pretty fucking cool. | ||
| Even then, they have ones now where- Yeah, Virtual Boy was fun. | ||
| Was it? | ||
| Well, pull up Virtual Boy. | ||
| I've never seen that before. | ||
| I'm actually enjoying this chair. | ||
| It's like 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's what the games looked like, basically. | |
| There was very little detail. | ||
| Oh god, it's all red like that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Ew, it was gross. | ||
| But it was slightly 3D. Well, pull up Louis from Unbox Therapy, our pal Louis. | ||
| Lou has a video on that one that they made with an iPhone. | ||
| It's a cardboard box. | ||
| He had it here. | ||
| Oh, yeah, I've heard about this. | ||
| 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 like so low rent. | ||
| And apparently they made it that low rent on purpose to mock the Oculus Rift. | ||
| Because the Oculus Rift is this gigantic, huge, you know, silicone. | ||
| And this is, uh, he's, uh... | ||
| How crazy is that? | ||
| Or a VR cardboard cutout that uses your phone to create a headset. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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 heads, so it all nuts cut out and 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 pre-configured 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 gets the hits. | ||
| But it's Unbox Therapy on YouTube, and he's got that. | ||
| You can see that, as well as the recent video of us shooting the iPhone 6 glass with a bow and arrow. | ||
| But he got a copy or hold of the newest glass screen for the iPhone 6. It's a sapphire glass and you can bend it. | ||
| You can scratch it with keys. | ||
| It's like really super, super durable. | ||
| That sounds like a thing I would have some use for. | ||
| This is what my iPhone looks like. | ||
| Ah, there. | ||
| It's taking a beating, huh? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Most of them have. | ||
| But what you can't do with that, we found, is shoot an arrow through it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did not deflect. | |
| Yeah, it did not deflect. | ||
| Went right through it. | ||
| It destroyed it. | ||
| Yeah, arrows and phones don't mix. | ||
| But, you know, how often are you going to get shot by a fucking 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 the least of your concern. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, you better be worried about your fucking personal health. | ||
| Some shit's going down, son. | ||
| You're being attacked by Mongols or something. | ||
| Usually the arrows don't come one at a time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, I don't know how we got on this virtual reality headset thing. | ||
| Yeah, I don't remember where that started either. | ||
| Oh, I remember. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, we're talking about poker ergonomics. | |
| Being able to do it sort of like in the Oculus world, I think eventually you're going to be able to grab... | ||
| So you're sitting at a virtual table? | ||
| Yeah, physical objects. | ||
| Looking at virtual cards? | ||
| 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 around. | ||
| That's not too far away, I don't think. | ||
| I bet it's not. | ||
| You know, I really love this idea this guy's doing of walking really slowly. | ||
| You know, a lot of people claim, writers especially, 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 they walk their dog or something like that, talking to a tape recorder. | ||
| Yeah, I can see that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's something about moving, like the movement. | ||
| Just getting, nothing heavy, but a little bit of blood flow. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| But your back's fucked 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 kneeling chair. | ||
| I just started doing it recently. | ||
| I did it now and I love it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm going to try to do podcasts like this. | |
| Stand up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you think there's any 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. | ||
| It's not bad, right? | ||
| The standing up thing, I've actually been messing around with that a little bit recently. | ||
| I started playing poker 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. | ||
| Yeah, I'm liking that. | ||
| So you can kind of lie on 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 played poker just on my laptop lying in bed before. | ||
| I feel like I'm less mentally engaged when I'm lying down. | ||
| I think sitting upright or standing are a lot better. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I wonder standing writing. | ||
| Because 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... | ||
| You want to like get in that flow state? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I wonder... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| It seems like it would work though. | ||
| Yeah, I don't see why not. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| Dictating would work well, I could see. | ||
| Dictating standing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Because 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 fucking incredible now. | ||
| Just the dictating software that you have on your phone, the voice recognition software on your phone. | ||
| That's gotten really good. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It's like the ability to pick it up. | ||
| Like, you could get on these note things on your phone and just talk into it, and it just picks it up incredibly well. | ||
| Like, look, I'll give you a... | ||
| Hello, you dirty bitches. | ||
| I'm tired of writing, so I just figured I'd talk into my phone. | ||
| P.S. Fuck you. | ||
| Period. | ||
| Bam. | ||
| Pretty good. | ||
| Nailed it. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| P.S. Fuck you. | ||
| Period. | ||
| The whole thing. | ||
| We live in the future. | ||
| Did it put a period or did it put the word period? | ||
| No, period. | ||
| If you say period, 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 write the Jurassic dot? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Does it have context, please? | ||
| The Jurassic period. | ||
| The Jurassic. | ||
| Okay, hold on. | ||
| How about this? | ||
| Period, the word. | ||
| Period, the word. | ||
| The Jurassic, P-E-R-I-O-D. 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 pussy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
period it's fucking confusing I was confused. | |
| Let me try that again. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| The Jurassic period was a time where a lot of dinosaurs got a lot of dinosaur pussy. | ||
| Period. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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. | ||
| I guess you keep going. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It keeps going. | ||
| It thinks of it as period. | ||
| But if you want to say, no, that happened during the Jurassic period. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| 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 Jurassic period. | ||
| Period. | ||
| I'm going to trick this bitch. | ||
| Ooh, 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. | ||
| Ooh, we got it, man. | ||
| We fucking got it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It'll just show it to you on a scroll, like one of those king scrolls. | ||
| It'll appear out of thin air. | ||
| How long do you think you're going to do this poker thing? | ||
| This is it for your life? | ||
| You're 28? | ||
| Ride this bitch right into the rocks? | ||
| I mean, at some point, I'm not going to be able to compete at the highest level the way I do now. | ||
| 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? | ||
| People's brains slow down. | ||
| Do they, though? | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, but it's like... | ||
| 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 he 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 won't be able to come back to America, where... | ||
| Do you have a strategy of how many years you want to do this? | ||
| Or are you just 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... | ||
| There was an article that I posted recently about the death of politics. | ||
| It was technology and the death of politics, and the idea was that data was going to 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 politics. | ||
| That makes a lot of sense. | ||
| Totally makes sense. | ||
| I would hope that that would also have a similar effect on things like your business. | ||
| It frustrates me to no end that you have to live in some fucking weird island in the middle of nowhere to avoid being locked in a cage. | ||
| 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 they're going to steal your money. | ||
| They might steal your money, yeah. | ||
| Steal your fucking money, son. | ||
| The DOJ 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 California. | ||
| It was hilarious. | ||
| They would 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 a million dollars here, a hundred thousand there. | ||
| It happened to a friend of mine who's 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. | ||
| He's an 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 Atlanta Airport. | ||
| And he had $80,000 in cash on him. | ||
| And he had all the receipts from, I sent this bank transfer to the casino because 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've 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 fucked. | ||
| Well, not only that, $80,000, it seems like they could be eaten up pretty quickly in legal fees. | ||
| I think he ended up suing for the fees as well, so he got paid... | ||
| The money back. | ||
| He got paid his costs. | ||
| Well, that's nice. | ||
| But still, the interest and all that jazz. | ||
| 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 as he landed or had it cleared in advance. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| 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 contact a lawyer and arrange to have everything taken care of as you get there. | ||
| Is there a way around that? | ||
| I mean, 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? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And it's no issue? | ||
| It's almost always no problem. | ||
| It's legal to carry money if you're carrying more than $10,000 across the border. | ||
| You have to fill out a form saying you're doing so, but you fill out the form. | ||
| They say, where'd you get all this money? | ||
| What are you doing with it? | ||
| And I say, I'm a professional poker player. | ||
| I won 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 euro. | ||
| What's that in dollars? | ||
| About 100,000. | ||
| Damn, son. | ||
| Walking around with 100k. | ||
| And a briefcase? | ||
| With a fucking big chain attached to your wrist? | ||
| In a bag. | ||
| A bag? | ||
| 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 with a bunch of money. | ||
| You don't want handcuffs. | ||
| Handcuffs attached to the fucking... | ||
| They'll just chop your hand off. | ||
| That's what they do. | ||
| That's what I heard. | ||
| Yeah, it seems like, yeah, the arbitrary limit of $10,000 always drove me crazy, too. | ||
| You're carrying more than $10,000 in cash. | ||
| Like, well, what's $10,000 to Bill Gates, and what's $10,000 to the regular person? | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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 like, why do you have a billion dollars in cash? | ||
| It's like, because I'm Bill Gates' bitch. | ||
| I just like to roll around with a billion in my pocket. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Could you even carry a billion dollars on you? | ||
| No. | ||
| Is there a thousand dollar bill? | ||
| What's the largest? | ||
| Hundred dollar bill is the largest? | ||
| Hundred is the biggest U.S. bill. | ||
| It used to be larger though, right? | ||
| There used to be thousands or maybe even ten thousands, but they were not in general circulation. | ||
| They were printed for banks to hold onto and pass between themselves. | ||
| Oh, I see. | ||
| The 500 euro 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 euro notes if it's giant amounts of it. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| Because a 500 euro note is like 700 US dollars and takes up the same amount of space as a US hundred. | ||
| 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. Oh, okay. | ||
| God damn. | ||
| Who's that creepy dude on the cover? | ||
| I think it's Woodrow Wilson. | ||
| Creepy looking fuck. | ||
| He's responsible for some shit, guaranteed. | ||
| Looking at his background. | ||
| What is the most money that you ever won in a poker tournament? | ||
| In a poker tournament? | ||
| Or playing poker. | ||
| Any event? | ||
| Yeah, the biggest cash I've ever had in a poker tournament was... | ||
| About $3 million. | ||
| Damn! | ||
| I 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 at that tournament. | ||
| I didn't put up all the money myself. | ||
| And 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Oh my god. | ||
| But you came in second. | ||
| I came in second and ended up making some money. | ||
| How much does that pay to come in second? | ||
| About three million. | ||
| I don't actually remember the number off the top of my head. | ||
| You could google it real quick. | ||
| I think it was two point 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 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh my god. | |
| And then four days later is the 250k. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| And I show up for that and bust right away. | ||
| You have major league balls, son. | ||
| Giant, huge, iron fucking balls. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Six times in a day. | ||
| It was a rough day. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| How do you sleep that night? | ||
| What is that night like? | ||
| Because you obviously can't do that too many times in a row. | ||
| Nobody can, right? | ||
| Well, with that exact one, the re-entry period was open until the start of the second day of the tournament. | ||
| So after the first day, I was getting bloodbathed and down a ton of money and still had to come back the next day and play for real. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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 Shiraz and a long, long sleep, and then a couple days off, and then the $250k. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| That's crazy. | ||
| That's digging into the account there, huh? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck. | |
| I'll do some damage. | ||
| So when you look at 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? | ||
| The place where you get more conservative is your bankroll management rather than your play. | ||
| The play from one hand to 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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? | ||
| In dollar amount? | ||
| In period? | ||
| Dollar amounts. | ||
| Let's see... | ||
| Have you ever gone through a couple million dollars in a weekend? | ||
| In games where I had sold action and didn't have all of myself, yeah, I've lost... | ||
| I guess my biggest losing couple of days was on the order of... | ||
| 50 million Hong Kong dollars. | ||
| Hong Kong dollars, which are bigger. | ||
| Or less, rather. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So only like 6 million U.S. Oh my god, son! | |
| Only 6 million U.S. dollars! | ||
| And personally, I had a small share of that, so I didn't personally lose 6 million dollars. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What does that mean? | |
| What's a small share? | ||
| A million? | ||
| Two million? | ||
| What's a small share? | ||
| 10%-ish. | ||
| Okay, 600 grand. | ||
| Still, that's a lot of fucking money. | ||
| Yeah, it doesn't feel good. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And then, of course, a bunch of my friends lost a shitload of money, too, and I have to send out the email, hey guys, didn't go real well. | ||
| That's the worst part of it for sure, is the hey guys didn't go real well email. | ||
| I'm sure, because everybody's like planning on making a profit based on your success in the past. | ||
| So it's rare that you hit these dark spots. | ||
| What do you attribute them to? | ||
| Is it just luck? | ||
| I mean, it's not that rare. | ||
| Like any given day that I play poker, I might be... | ||
| If I'm playing cash games, maybe like a 52% favorite to have a winning day. | ||
| Maybe less than that. | ||
| If I'm playing a tournament, I'm a favorite to have a losing day, because tournament, they pay about 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. | ||
| How do you feel about this as a human being trying to make a living in this incredibly... | ||
| It feels like you're navigating a minefield, like... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Obviously, you've been very successful with this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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 racing and battling these numbers. | ||
| You're talking millions of dollars back and forth and down and up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| What is that? | ||
| Do you do something to mitigate that? | ||
| I like to meditate every day. | ||
| What kind of meditation? | ||
| Just breath focused. | ||
| Basically just sit quietly for anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes and attend to my breathing. | ||
| Just concentrating, breathing in and breathing out, just trying to stay calm. | ||
| And 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 what that exercise does is helps to bring you into the present moment and to see that it's difficult to have thoughts about the present moment. | ||
| 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 process is really good for bringing you into the present moment. | ||
| And that's great for poker because all the shit 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 fucking bad. | ||
| What am I going to do? | ||
| Or I'm going to win all this money and then I'm going to buy a fucking yacht and... | ||
| Sail off into the sunset. | ||
| And both of those are things you can think that take you out of the moment of, alright, he just bet. | ||
| What do I think he has? | ||
| What's the right play? | ||
| So in that sense, poker is a lot like life. | ||
| 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 treatments or sessions in the isolation tank? | ||
| I haven't. | ||
| I really want to. | ||
| Why don't you get one? | ||
| You're making banks, son. | ||
| Yeah, but I'm traveling around all the time. | ||
| Ship one of them bitches out to Malta. | ||
| I don't know how to get something shipped to Malta. | ||
| I can't fucking figure out how to get them to send me a desk chair in Malta. | ||
| I guarantee you somewhere in Europe they have sensory deprivation tanks. | ||
| They have a couple in Malta. | ||
| I looked it up. | ||
| They do have one? | ||
| I didn't get around to go into one. | ||
| But it's an hour across the whole island. | ||
| Yeah, no, it's right fucking there. | ||
| I'm just 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 in 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. | ||
| I'm pretty sure that's where I tried to go. | ||
| I mean, JC took me there. | ||
| Oh, it's amazing. | ||
| They're the best place too. | ||
| The best place in California for sure. | ||
| I should check that out for sure. | ||
| Yeah, well, I'll try to see if I can hook it up once you get out of here. | ||
| Cool. | ||
| But we're out of time, man. | ||
| We're going to turn into a pumpkin. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, alright. | |
| So, we're three hours in. | ||
| That was three hours. | ||
| Isn't that incredible? | ||
| That flew by. | ||
| Yeah, follow Ike on Twitter. | ||
| It's IkePoker, I-K-E, poker on Twitter. | ||
| Anything else? | ||
| PokerStars.net, your sponsor. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Real quick, I want to... | |
| I want to plug my dad's book. | ||
| My father, Brooks Haxton, 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 shit 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. | ||
| And that brings us to our sponsors. | ||
| Audible. | ||
| Audible.com. | ||
| Thank you to Audible. | ||
| Go to Audible.com forward slash Joe. | ||
| Get a free audiobook 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 Brooke Saxton. | ||
| Write it down, bitches. | ||
| I know your memory sucks. | ||
| Thanks also to Ting. | ||
| Go to rogan.ting.com and save $25 off of any of their brand new Android devices or the Apple iPhones as well. | ||
| Thanks also to onnit.com. | ||
| Go to O-N-N-I-T. Use the code word ROGAN. And save 10% off any and all supplements. | ||
| That's it for this week, you dirty fucks. | ||
| We'll be back next week. | ||
| Until then, much love. | ||
| We'll see you Friday night at the San Jose Performing Center. | ||
| Go to my website, JoeRogan.net. | ||
| All the details are there. | ||
| I don't remember shit. | ||
| Much love. | ||
| See ya. |
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