I’d first heard of crypto in 2015 through the Wired Silk Road article although I didn’t really start allocating significant capital towards it until early 2017.
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However, the disappointment of a close result in the SuperHighRoller Bowl and the lack of excitement for gearing up for another full year of poker study, travel, and play led to my unofficial retirement in July 2017. The WSOP 2016-WSOP 2017 season was possibly my best ever and included an EPT Highroller trophy. He suggested I begin listening to the Tim Ferriss podcast focusing on Stoicism and Buddhism, especially one from a guy called “Naval Ravikant.” 2 I began to get healthy, start working out, and listened to podcasts non-stop. The pursuit of money, and money alone, has many fellow travelers. During the tournament, I got dinner with Kory Kilpatrick and he told me that he’d been in a similarly dark place recently.
I went to the Bellagio WPT Five Diamond Tournament in Las Vegas having torched 90% of my wealth from peak net worth in less than a year. Turns out a diet of KFC Zingers and red wine isn’t conducive to a healthy bodyīy December, I found myself at a crossroads: depressed, overweight, nearly broke, and alone. I put on fifty pounds and gambled more and more in tournaments in a chase to get back the money I’d lost. I began drinking heavily, eating heavily, and partying like a maniac. However, after being so close to the mountaintop, I suddenly encountered a string of bad luck that compounded into bad play that led to a massive downswing.
The dedication and singular focus had cost me a relationship, but the goal of accumulating a retirement nest egg before 30 and never working again seemed within my grasp. In 2015, I was ranked #2 in the world on the Global Poker Index and privately boasted to friends I was the best player in the world. This is a comforting story that people chasing self-glory often tell themselves. The more money I made, the more I could direct money towards noble causes. I assuaged any personal doubts I had about whether this was a selfish goal by telling myself I would donate to charity after I made enough money. One of the rational things I wanted to do was make as much money as possible and retire at a young age. As the religion most familiar to us in the West, Christianity is the easiest and safest one to dismiss. Through reason, you could arrive at better moral principles than the Bible.
Christianity was a mental error, akin to a cognitive bias or logical fallacy. They had something broken in their brains that caused them to believe in a God, despite all evidence to the contrary. These were simply people who were not rational. Like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, he mocked the backwards beliefs of religious people. Yudkowsky proposed that morals could be derived from reason. All religions were largely the same and full of hypocrites who proclaimed themselves morally superior while committing immoral acts.Īfter college, I began to read Eliezer Yudkowsky and other writers from the rationality movement. There was no scientific evidence behind them. These were myths that had been passed down for generations and that people believed solely based on what their parents taught them and where they’d grown up. My parents were Hindu and I followed their faith out of filial piety until college where philosophical and scientific books convinced me that there was no justification for any religion, let alone Hinduism. They wasted their time while I zoomed ahead, victories and accolades piling up in the real world. My classmates would come in on Mondays talking about their experiences at church while I’d spent the weekends studying for the Spelling Bee and Geography Bee. I grew up in Colorado Springs, a deeply conservative area in Colorado home to Pikes Peak, the Air Force Academy, and megachurches.
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