​Hac Dang was ranked in the top 10 for all-time-biggest winners for online poker. Since then, he's co-founded Happy Endings Hospitality, a restaurant group in the Northern Virginia area with 6 restaurants and counting.

​Hac joins Chris Sparks to discuss playing Positive Sum Games. This is a conversation about achieving your full potential while remaining balanced and aligned.

How can we become elite competitors in high-stakes pursuits like poker, trading, and entrepreneurship without that competitiveness leaking over into our relationships and personal lives? When is it correct to leave wealth on the table in pursuit of greater happiness and fulfillment?

For the video recording, resources mentioned, and conversation transcript, visit https://forcingfunction.com/podcast/hac-dang

Welcome to Forcing Function Hour, a conversation series exploring the boundaries of peak performance. Join me, Chris Sparks, as I interview elite performers to reveal principles, systems, and strategies for achieving a competitive edge in business. If you are an executive or investor ready to take yourself to the next level, download my workbook at experimentwithoutlimits.com. For all episodes and show notes, go to forcingfunctionhour.com.

It's my pleasure today to introduce Hac Dang. Hac Dang, aka trex313 is ranked in the top ten for all time biggest winners for online poker with lifetime winnings of over eight million dollars. That's a lot. Since then, Hac's cofounded Happy Endings Hospitality, a restaurant group in the Northern Virginia area with six restaurants and counting. Today you're gonna quickly get a sense of just how Hac has been so successful, both as a poker player and an entrepreneur. Hac is incredibly thoughtful, and he's a really resilient human being who acts with clear intention. So it's really a big honor. Gratitude for having him here today. Hac and I are going to be discussing how to play positive sum games and the transcendence of competition.

This is a competition for elite performers in high stakes pursuits. So if you are an entrepreneur, a trader, or a fellow poker pro, there is a certain drive and competitiveness that you know is necessary to make it to the top. But here's the question for today: can you be an elite competitor without that competitiveness leaking over into your relationships and personal life? Thanks, Hac, for joining us. Really grateful to have you here. Can't wait to explore this topic of positive sum games.

Hey, all. What's up, Chris? Thanks for the really kind introduction. I feel like you gave me a lot of credit there.

Well, let's hit the table, shall we? So at one point you were playing in some of the biggest poker games in the world. And I mean, eight million dollars, obviously you did pretty well. For those of you guys who didn't have the honor of sitting down at Rail Heaven, just tell us what was that like for you?

It was actually pretty interesting, because the way that I got into poker it all felt really natural in terms of climbing the stakes and getting to the higher stakes games and actually winning in them. So if I were to break down the strategy, I don't think I actually did anything special to get there, but somehow I ended up there anyways. And I guess, I dunno, like Di and I just started playing poker, and we bought in for like two hundred bucks and we were playing like twenty-five dollar buy-ins and then we were winning, and then we went to fifty and we were winning, so then we went to a hundred and we were winning, and we kept doing that all the way up until we got to the high stakes games, and the next things you know everyone's like, "Oh my god, you're playing so high." And it didn't feel like it was something we did purposely, it just kinda happened. So I would attribute it to the right place at the right time.

And there are probably some nuances to my strategy as well that I could probably discuss, but yeah, most of it was right place right time, I think.

I'm sure there's a lot of nuances, and it does strike me that part of being successful at the top level is to just treat it as just another day. Right? If it becomes this really high-pressure big deal it's going to be really difficult to perform well, and it seems for you the stakes almost—You weren't feeling them. It didn't matter as much as someone from the outside might expect. And I imagine there's a necessary, like, resiliency that you need to have, right? If you're losing hundred thousand dollar pots, like, how are you able to stomach that? What did you do that allowed you to remain disciplined and even-keeled, despite the large swings?

I mean, obviously in poker very early on you learn that if you are emotional, that it's bad for your bankroll. Like, very early on, you know, like it's really hard to climb the stakes if every time you lose the pot you know, you're slamming your laptop or you're, you know, throwing your mouse at the wall. And I'm sure, and you know, you play poker too so you can probably kind of relate, you know, maybe you see some friends that don't have that type of control. But I think that was really helpful for me, because viewing it as a game, understanding, "Hey, I made the best play possible and this is what ended up happening. If I were to go back in time I would still make the same play." And then it allows you to kind of separate yourself, your emotions, from like the actual end result. 'Cause you don't actually have control of the end result. You only have control over what you did leading up to it.

Now, in some cases of course, maybe you made the wrong play, the play that you shouldn't have made, but then that's a different conversation and you're supposed to be able to look at that after the session and be like, "Oh, you know what, I should have done this instead of that." But it takes a certain level of—I don't want to call it robotic, because it diminishes what it is, but it's kind of like, “I feel the emotions, but right now the emotions aren't serving me so you know, we're just gonna keep playing on a more rational level,” if you will.

I think that's an interesting question about the role that emotions play in high stakes decision-making. I think there's a large school of thought in poker and trading that emotions are the enemy, emotions are something to be suppressed, repressed, that emotions are going to cause us to make decisions that we might regret later, that we're going to increase our variance, we're gonna make mistakes, we're gonna tilt. But it seems like emotions can't be avoided. It's more about working with them. And you—I think you described that, it's like, "Does this emotion serve me right now?" What have you found works for you in terms of being able to work with your emotions?

The crazy thing is if you asked me that question like five years ago, I would have given you a different answer. Ten years ago I definitely would have given you a different answer, and you know, now I would probably give you a different answer from five years ago. So like, my lens on that has changed over time through life experience. Ten years ago I was playing, like, the high stakes games. I was swinging like six figures on a regular day. I could wake up in the morning and by lunchtime be up, you know, six figures or down six figures, but if I was emotional about it then that would make it even worse. You know, if I lost six figures and I was emotional that could easily be a very, very bad day, much worse than the six figure initial loss. So I guess ten years ago, because it was necessary for me doing what I was doing to kind of ignore the emotions or have it take a back seat, the answer back then would have been, "Okay, look, your emotions, they are not meant to control you. You are kind of in the driver's seat. If you let your emotions control you then you are not—Almost like you're weak, in a way."

And I think in poker a lot of people will probably agree with that sentiment, because if you're emotional at the table, rarely does it ever help you. I assume in trading it's probably very similar. You know, if you're buying or selling stocks or crypto, and let's say you make the right play based on everything you know, but then the next day your portfolio doesn't look that good, then it doesn't really help to be emotional in that state.

So ten years ago, that was my answer. You know, and I think within the industry I was in, it forced me to be even more robotic about those things. Kind of like, all right, look. I even had a day when I lost seven figures, and I was just kind of like—And I still remember that day, and I remember the next morning I woke, and then for the first ten seconds I forgot I had lost seven figures the last day, so I was feeling great for about ten seconds, then I remembered and it hit me again. And it maybe took me about a day or two to get over that. But honestly, that was—To me that was pretty good. Normally, up to that point in my life I would have thought it would have taken a lot longer.

Now, if you ask me to answer that question today, what role do emotions play now—This is my opinion, and I'm not sure where I stand fully on this yet, but it's—through life you aggregate a lot of experiences, and like through your body and your mind, your emotions are trying to tell you something. The experiences that you've aggregated, they create a lens for you, and then when you see, when you experience something, it goes through that lens of experience, and then you feel something. And even if you can't put words on it, it's there for a reason, and you have to kind of like—In order to optimally understand who you are and what you're capable of, you have to understand where that lens came from, how it was formed, and your emotions is like a key to understanding that lens.

So now I would say emotions probably play a much bigger role, and they shouldn't just be ignored as if it didn't have any type of benefit whatsoever.

Yeah. I think there's a real subtlety to this mindset that is so critical, and it's one of those—You know, mindset's one of the things that just really compounds over the years, especially when you talk about things like resiliency. How do you get out of bed the day after you've lost a million dollars? And it really requires separation from your decision and the result of that decision, especially when you're in a field that's really noisy, like poker or trading, or in a pursuit where there are so many things that are outside of your control like starting a restaurant and the pandemic hits. Right? What are you going to do? So much of luck is timing. So how do you approach understanding your decision-making process? Right? How do you separate out the results of your decision from the decision yourself? You talk about this notion that I find really useful, you know, "What are my emotions trying to tell me?" That everything I'm receiving is feedback, it's useful in some way. Do you have any techniques or strategies for allowing yourself to be objective, especially when things aren't going well?

I do think objectivity is really hard to do, just because by nature you're not objective. Like, your experiences are getting filtered through your own personal lens, and even if you try your best to, you know, take that thirty thousand foot view or that third-person view and be like, "Well, I'm gonna be objective here," that's getting filtered through your own mind, your own body, and your own like, lens, if you will. And so that objectivity is automatically already tainted.

So, in poker it was a lot easier to be objective, and I'll tell you why. In poker, and obviously with trading, I would say with poker it's even easier to be objective than with trading, because in poker you can see your hand and see how you got your money in and see if it was actually a really good result, and then within five seconds after the rest of the hand gets dealt, you know exactly whether you should have made that play or not. In trading it's probably, you know, one step further removed, and I think at least in the restaurant industry it's even like a couple more steps removed because there's so many confounding factors that you can't see whether your action that you took was tied to the end result to measure whether or not you were able to be objective in that situation.

Okay, so the original question was how I try to be objective. I spend a lot of time meditating. I think that helps a lot. I think that when you sit down and you're quiet and you're meditating, you're bringing awareness to your mind. You're starting to get a view of that lens, if you will. Paying attention to your mind while you're meditating, seeing what emotions come up and when they come up, that helps you understand that lens better, and I think that that helps a lot in terms of—I don't know if that helps entirely, but that's at least for me the first step of being more objective. Understanding, "Hey, when I'm around this person my heart's beating faster. Why is that?" You know, that's the first step to starting to understand that lens, and until you can understand that lens I don't think you can be anywhere near objective, so that would be my first step. And that's the first step I've taken in my life.

Yeah. I think that having a practice like meditation that forces you to slow down and listen is really essential. I like to say that if we don't respect our own boundaries, the universe won't respect our boundaries. Right? If everything is urgent, we'll be confronted with urgent things all the time. So it's really important to create the space and listen to what the world's telling us, listen to what our body is telling us, and tune into those signals to treat them as relevant. You've talked about, the last time we spoke, that some of the things that you felt were necessary to succeed in the biggest poker games in the world didn't hit you the right way.

So, in poker, just like trading, it's inherently zero sum. You sit down at a table and everyone is trying to take each other's money. There might be, "Hey, we're here to have fun," all this type of stuff, "Hey, we're friends outside the table," but like you sit down and it's very like killer instinct dog-eat-dog, we are here to see, like, may the best person win. And then there's some second order effects of that. You know, it's hard to mix friendships and work when you're trying to take each other's money, and that there's this competitiveness of always needing to find the source of edge, that it's difficult for that lens with which you view the world, right? As you said, "We view the world through the lens of our own experience." It's difficult for this to not leak over into the rest of your life. I would love to hear a little bit more about your experiences playing the zero sum game, and you know, maybe, what role this played in your decision to walk away from poker.

I guess to talk about the zero sum game thing, like, in poker, like when you go to let's say a casino or like in a live casino in Macao, for instance, and you're playing against people and you've done this before, so you kind of understand—In that casino setting, a lot of times it's not like the best place to be. You know, there's people that you don't know if you can trust. You probably shouldn't trust them, you know. Let's say somebody's down a lot of money. They might do anything to kind of like angle shoot their way back into like, break even, or whatever the case may be. Maybe they're desperate. And so you kind of have to like be on your toes a little bit about, "Hey, is this guy trying to be my friend or is he actually just trying to like get close to me so that he can take my money easier?" And obviously even if somebody is honest in the game, you know, where they're not going to like steal money from you directly, or angle shoot you, at the end of the day when you're sitting at that table, like, in order for me to win that guy has to lose. And he knows in order for him to win I have to lose too.

So at the end of the day, the questions I'm asking in my head, when I'm at the casino or in this type of setting, is, "Hey, is this guy trying to take money from me? How do I take money from this guy? Is he dishonest? Like, do I need to be more careful? Like, this guy's kind of sketchy." And so, you know, you're asking those questions because you need to ask those questions in order to exist in that environment and not, you know, have your money taken from you. But the problem that I didn't realize until after I got out of the game was that a lot of times people say you should leave work at work and you know, home at home, and once you step into your home you kinda like leave work at work. I just don't think that the mind and the body work like that. It wasn't designed to. You know, so the questions that I'm automatically asking every time I go into a casino and try to make money off of other poker players and stuff. And you know, not because I have bad intentions. It's just the nature of the game, and the environments that the game runs in.

I found it, and I didn't know this until after the fact. I literally, like after the fact, the first time I even realized this after I had kind of pulled myself away from the game, the questions I was asking I realized I was asking those questions like even in settings at home or when I meet friends or like when I'm just in a social setting where people are just trying to like make connection and stuff like that, but then I'm just kinda like second-guessing, "Hey, is that dude like kind of like sketch? Does he have ulterior motives?" And stuff like that. And I think you can't separate that line very easily. I think, for myself at least, you can pretend like you can, but you know, you should bring some awareness around whether you can or can't.

So when switching over to restaurant life, in a restaurant, you know, sometimes people play the restaurant game in a zero sum manner, or even it can be played in a positive sum manner as well. So now in poker there was very little room for positive sum stuff in poker. In fact, I don't even know if it existed. Maybe like the friendships that you can form, you know, outside of the game. But in restaurants there are solutions where both sides can win. There are solutions where, you know, I'll wake up in the morning and start asking questions like, "Wait, how do I make this more valuable for the customer so like when they pay five dollars for this thing you know, they're so happy about it that they would have paid like, you know, ten, fifteen, or twenty dollars?" And so you know, they're happy, so they win. If the five dollars makes sense for my business, then we win, and then it becomes like—You know, the pie gets bigger for everybody.

And then I ask the same question about, "Hey, how do I make the work experience even better for, you know, my team?" Because if I can make the work experience better for them and it doesn't feel like work, then they like being there, which is nice for me as a business owner, but it's nice for them as a teammate as well. And then it becomes like this self-sustainable ecosystem where the teammate's taking care of the customers, the customer's taking care of the business, and the business takes care of—And it's like this little ecosystem, and then over time that pie can actually get bigger if you do it right.

Now, I'm not great at it yet, but when I started asking different questions I was able to see different solutions, and I never would have asked those questions in a poker room. And that was a big realization for me.

Good stuff. I think the meta-point here is that a lot of your life trajectory is determined by the questions that you ask yourself, something that I've found over and over again. And thank you for the excellent definition of positive sum games versus zero sum games. So I'll kind of paraphrase that, it's like a positive sum game is where you find solutions where both parties can win. And the point you're making, that if you are looking at things through this lens of, "In order for me to do well, someone else needs to do not as well," then that's going to extend over to the way that you deal with people in all situations. And instead if we can look at opportunities (rather than fighting over the same slice of pie) to expand the pie, then that creates a lot more alignment, and I believe it's probably much more long-term sustainable.

So it also brings to mind this notion that I heard from a friend of mine the other day, Sasha, that when you choose your life path, be very careful about thinking about what context is that life path going to put you in? Right? It's this belief that we talk about at Forcing Function a lot, that all behavior is contextual. The environment that you put yourself in to a large extent is going to affect the behavior that you have, and thus like your beliefs, how you see yourself, all of those flow from that. So if you're in an environment where hyper-competitive behavior is rewarded, you're likely to become a hyper-competitive person. If you're in an environment where altruistic, positive sum behavior is rewarded, you're likely to start to move into that direction.

So if you are becoming a poker player, you're going to hang out in casinos, and people who frequent casinos. If you're going to become a trader, you're going to be hanging out with people who think of the world in terms of one minute charts, and your blood pressure is likely to go up, and you're going to start to think of everything in terms of one minute charts.

So it's really useful to try to abstract a level up and think about, "Well, what are the contexts that I want to place myself in? What type of person do I want to be, and what's an environment that's supportive of that?"

And for you it seemed like it was joining up with Di and taking on this new challenge of opening up your first restaurant. Tell me about that transition. You know, going from high stakes poker to restaurateur. I know it's always a messy one. What was the hardest part of that transition for you?

Oh my god, man. I did not want to open that first restaurant. It was Di's idea. You know, it's always Di's idea. My relationship with Di is definitely a very interesting one where he's the one that kinda pushes the envelope and I'm kinda the one that's like, "Hey, man, how are we going to make this work?" So it's kinda like a push/pull type situation, and Di probably pulled me all the way to the high stakes games, but I'm sure I was probably somebody that helped Di stay out of trouble, you know, not playing in games that were too big for his bankroll, and you know, things like that too. So the analogy that I like is he's kind of like the gas, and I'm the brake in a car. And you need both for it to work well.

Now, Di decided to drive this car into the restaurant industry, and he was kind of trying to floor it into that restaurant industry, and I'm like, "Hey, man. We are doing really well at poker, so why would you want to—We have at least a few more years, you know, doing this until the game becomes, you know, not as worth it. So why would you want to go into this industry that's notoriously known for being the hardest industry?" But I think something about that challenge of, "Hey, like, it is the hardest industry, so let's go see if we can do it." Like, that gets Di out of bed.

So Di decided to open this restaurant. And keep in mind, like, my family has no restaurant experience ever. Zero. My restaurant experience is probably the same as anybody that has eaten at a restaurant. You know, that's about it. So Di opens his first restaurant, and I remember Di telling me, he was like, "Yeah, don't worry, man. We're going to open it, we're going to be in and out in like a month, the systems will be up and running, and then it'll just be printing money." And yeah, in and out in a month. And you know, obviously that didn't happen. You know, this is now ten years later.

So, it was our first month in the building. It's a condo building. And specifically, the landlord was like, "Hey, listen. Never throw your trash into this dumpster. This is for the condo people. The dumpster only comes once a week, like, to pick this up. This is your trashcan, they'll come once every day. You guys have nasty-smelling seafood. If you put it in this trash can, it will be really bad." And then we got to the dumpster, and then the apartment dumpster was full of our trash from the entire day. It was just like, our workers didn't know, and then they were just filling that trash can with empty bags of like crawfish heads and—It's nasty seafood stuff. And then 2:00 AM, I'm tired, Au's tired. You know, I'm making seven figures a year playing poker. I don't have to do this. But then it's 2:00 AM and then I'm like, "Wait, what should we do?" So me and Au just get into the dumpster and then we're just like picking up these bags of nasty crawfish, shrimp juice dripping all over us, and like hucking it into the next dumpster to make sure we don't get into trouble with the landlord 'cause it's our first few months in the building.

And I was in that trash, and I'm like, "What am I doing with my life? Like, why is this happening to me?" And that might have been the most tilt I've been on. You know, I mean I've lost a lot of money playing poker before, but that might have been the best tilt I've been on. So I know perhaps when you were asking the question about challenges, maybe that wasn't the answer you were expecting, but that was at least one very challenging moment. Just like understanding as a business owner, you have to be doing a lot of the stuff up front that, when you don't have your systems down in place yet, you have to be down to like get into the trenches and I guess into the dumpster if that's necessary, and do the work. So that was the hardest part for me, at least.

That's a great visual. Yeah, going from million dollar poker to dumpster diving. And having that realization of like, "Huh, what did I get myself into?" So you talk about how Di gets out of bed by trying to do the impossible. What do you think drove you to do the impossible? Like why—I know you got roped into it a little bit, but like what gets you out of the bed in the morning right now?

Honestly, I mean, I'll give Di a lot of credit for pushing the envelope in many different directions, and I think that kind of pulls me along. Me and Di, we've been hustling since we were like little kids. Like, when we were in eighth grade, we were selling Pokémon cards. When we were in tenth grade, we figured out how to use eBay and we were selling popular Christmas toys before they got hot for the season. You know, stuff like that. We had a lawn mowing business when we were like—I think as soon as Di got his driver's license. And you know, I would help Di. Di would drive the car around, and we would go mow lawns. So we always like—But Di would be the one that thinks of the idea and be like, "Yo, we can totally start this business," or, "We can totally play poker and keep climbing to 5/10, 10/20, 25/50." So Di would kind of push it along, and I'll kinda be like, "Okay, like how do we make this sustainable? How do we make it so that we can win at these stakes, or how do we make it that—" Yeah.

So I mean, I think Di pushes the envelope, and then the thing that drives me is, "Okay, how do we make this sustainable?" I know that we can do this restaurant thing, but I know that we can do it more efficiently, I know we can do it more effectively. When it comes to poker, it's kind of like, "Okay, well these are pretty dangerous stakes, but how do we win at these stakes and make it at least like really plus EV, and things like that. And I had my own strategies around that, and my strategies were completely different from Di's strategies. Because Di likes doing the hard thing, I like doing the easy thing. So, I mean I could go into that a little further about poker if necessary.

But yeah, I think what gets me out of bed is trying to figure out how to make it easier. That's not like the Mamba Mindset, that's not what Kobe Bryant would say, but you know, that's me. It's literally like, "Yo, what's the 80/20, and how do I do that as quickly as possible?" Systemizing things.

I gotta pull on that thread. So why do you think this figuring out, this systematizing, the making it easier, why do you think you find that so motivating?

Okay, this is not going to be a glorifying answer, but it will be an honest answer. I think I find it motivating because I've always kind of been like that. I've always been a little bit on the lazy side, but I've always wanted to still like kind of achieve things. So let's say in poker. You know, obviously I want to win money, but I don't want to be spending all my time in Hold 'Em Manager like reading all the charts and doing all that stuff. So I want to minimize the hard work but maximize the game—So I'm still trying to win, but I don't have the same energy output of let's say someone like Di. Like, Di can literally work eighty hours a week. He can read ten books a week if he wanted to, and he probably does, honestly, and he doesn't get tired and he will outwork the competition, 'cause that—Like, he loves it. I don't know how he does that. I'll do like forty, fifty hours a week, you know, I'll try to keep my work/life balance, but I have to figure out how I can do more in forty to fifty hours if I want to be in the same conversation as someone like Di.

And so I think that's why it's—You know, you aggregate that over the years, and it's just kind of become my thing, and I figure out, "Okay, what's the best strategy here? How do I save the output and make sure that it's efficient and effective?"

I mean, I have an example, like you know, from poker. Like a lot of my strategy—A lot of Di's strategy was just almost like get into whatever game you could and just try to, you know, beat the hell out of whoever was at the other side of the table. And he was pretty good at that. But a lot of my strategy, in poker at least, was once I realized the 80/20 rule and I applied to poker and I looked at my Hold 'Em Manager and I saw, "Oh wait, these—You know, out of a hundred players, these ten guys are giving me eighty percent of my earnings." Well, that changes, you know, how I'm going to go about this. I'm literally just going to abandon any good sleep habits and I'm just gonna be awake any time any of these ten guys log in. And that's what I'm gonna do. And I'm probably gonna make more money playing less hours.

So it's like an easier path to the prize, if the end goal is money. In poker I think for a lot of people it is. For some people it's to be the best, but for me that wasn't the case.

So yeah. So I don't know, I just like shortcutting things, I guess.

I can relate to that a lot. You made me think of—I wrote this post last year called Play To Win that sort of—Explaining why I think that the Game Theory Optimal or GTO approach is an evolutionary dead end. And after I put it out, it's like—"Did I just spend months writing five thousand words to justify why I don't have to do all this work that everyone else is doing?" And there's just kind of a sick enjoyment of finding the most direct path towards a goal. It's like, I have this belief that we don't need to work so hard. I think that's something that really surprises people who I work with. That they come in expecting to learn these secrets on how they can get more work done, and a lot of our conversations revolve around how they can work less but still achieve the same results by obviously working smarter, but being more clear on what they're trying to achieve and what those few actions are that really matter towards that result.

And that's why I really love that analogy you have of driving the car, and one partner is the gas and one partner is the brake, is you really need someone who's bumping into reality, pushing forward, experimenting, trying things, but it would be very easy to burn out if all you had going for you was pure effort. And that's why figuring out the—You talk about in the restaurant industry especially, the importance of systematization, of having clear checklists, turning everything into a process. That's what makes something sustainable. And if you're going after something that's going to take a long time to achieve, whether it's reaching the top of the poker world or building a successful chain of restaurants, you need to be in it for the long term.

There's this—The saying in investing is, "You've gotta stay in the game. If you go broke, you're out." That's really the only way to lose is going broke, so what do you need to do to make sure that you can stay in the game for long enough in order to win it?

So you mention habits. This seems like the most important part of a transition. Poker players just have notoriously bad habits. A lot of this is driven by playing industry hours, sort of like restaurants, where you're up very late. Sometimes you need to play for twelve hours straight, sometimes you know, that really fun player you like to play with is hopping on and you have to drop everything you're doing to do that, and that kind of creates this on-call feeling. And you know, shifting to more of an owner or managerial role where it needs you to show up on time, to be hyper-organized, to think about things at a higher level. How were you able to start to shift your habits from the habits necessary to succeed in poker to the habits necessary to succeed as an entrepreneur?

So, I'm still working on that. That definitely isn't an easy transition. Like I was saying, and like you're saying, poker players definitely are notoriously—They have like some bad habits where like they would get fired from a regular job so quick, you know, just because you have to be on time to things, you have to like, you know—Deadlines are important, like due dates—You know, it's basic things that you probably pick up just from your first couple years at a normal job in poker. And especially for me, like when I'm playing the high stakes games, like I told you, my strategy was once I realized, "Hey, these ten guys were the guys that were giving me all the money," my strategy revolved around tossing out my sleep schedule—You know, you don't know how many times I probably just took some caffeine at 3:00 AM even though I probably should be sleeping because a guy just logged on and no one's going to be there until 9:00 AM. And you know, throwing the circadian rhythm out of the window. I had no idea how bad that was for my body at the time, but that made it so I could stay out on top using the most direct path and the easiest way to get there.

Now, transitioning to a, like, a regular job, you have to be on time to things. I never had to be on time to things. In fact, it actually probably punished me to be on time to things, because if I was prioritizing being on time to let's say that appointment or whatever, I might miss out on a game where I would make a lot of money. You know, I don't know how many times I probably just bumped an appointment just because the guy that I'm playing hasn't finished losing his money yet.

So then you switch to a world where everything you did for the last ten years that rewarded you and you've reinforced these habits, you have to unlearn that, and then you also have to learn new ones. And I'm definitely still struggling with that. I don't have any great tips on that. I do think there are some keystone habits to help. I think meditation was very foundational for me, 'cause a lot of times you can kind of pay attention to when your habits start getting triggered and stuff like that. So I think meditation would be the one habit that I've built that's helped the most with like all other stuff. And I've been trying a lot of stuff too, but I don't have any like—Yo, hey. Aside from the meditation thing, like, I would say if you're not meditating that's literally the one thing that's helping me so much.

I love this notion of a keystone habit where you have one habit that if you're consistent with it acts as this foundation for everything else, and meditation is maybe the best keystone habit in that if you cultivate this ability to listen, to sit still, to be present, to be patient, it's going to have all of these cascading events on the rest of your life. So let's say that you know, we're talking to a poker player who's you know, mass tabling tournaments or cash games online or a trader who's sitting in front of their six screens and all the charts and they're like, "I don't have the time to meditate. I mean, I can barely sit still." You know, you can see them, their hands are shaking a little bit. Like, what recommendations would you have for someone who is interested in the benefits that meditation could offer them but doesn't feel like they're the type of person who can?

Man, that's a tough question. Generally speaking, the people that feel like they can't meditate probably need it the most, I think, personally. Just because I know where I came from in that regard, and you know, when you're just kind of like, "Well, I have too many thoughts, so I can't meditate." Well, did you know that when you meditate you actually start processing some of those thoughts and it kind of clears that inbox out for you, your internal inbox a little bit, and then you start having less thoughts over time? But at the same time you can't be like—Well, it's so hard, because like you—That person probably should be meditating. Or at least like, you know, if you don't got like twenty minutes, you know, just do it for a minute. Like, do it for thirty seconds. Like, just buy a meditation pillow and don't even set a timer. Just sit for as long as you want, and then just get up.

And I think if you just do that every single day, then something might form. But I mean, my advice would be to start super small with meditation. 'Cause I started with one minute, honestly. I started with one minute, I was like, "I could do one minute every day." That's not a big deal. And then once one minute was easy, and it became easy really quick, I was like, "Oh, okay, two minutes." And that's how honestly I started. I started that probably about eight years ago or something like that, and now I'm probably doing, you know, like twenty, twenty or thirty minutes a day. And it builds up over time, but you really have to start with something that you feel like you could probably do every single day, if you're gonna start. And if you don't have one minute, then it's really hard to be like, "Okay, well here's a nugget of wisdom that will give you the same thing that meditation will that isn't exactly meditation." Yeah. I feel like you have to do something, and I feel like if you have to do something it has to be—Like, start with as small as you can. Even if it's ten seconds, it's better than zero.

Yeah. The saying that I love is, "So low you can't say no." Make that amount you have to do in order to check the box so impossibly small, this idea of like, hey. Once you're doing one pushup a day, it's really easy to ramp up from ten to a hundred, but it's going from that zero to one that's the hardest. And this is why it's really, really important to have a low time preference, which is just a fancy way of saying recognizing that you will have the rest of your life to harvest the benefits of that habit. So it's really worthwhile.

I think we've been talking a lot about sustainability. It's really worthwhile to invest up front in making a habit sustainable. Even if there aren't a lot of benefits up front, a lot of those benefits will continue to compound over the course of a lifetime. And yeah, I think you had a lot of wisdom in what you said around the people who feel like they can't probably need it the most.

Something that my meditation teacher likes to tell me is, "If you don't have twenty minutes to sit down and be quiet, you probably need two hours." Right? This is a signal that your mental inbox, as you put it, is just overflowing. And if you aren't processing that stuff, you're gonna be making some really big, costly mistakes. And who knows how that will manifest. Maybe it's making a large trade that's maybe not one that you would have made if you were thinking about things a little bit more calmly, or you blow up at a significant other or a loved one and it's not really 'cause you're mad at them, but because you feel stressed and overwhelmed.

It's really important to have these practices in place that allow our best selves to show up. This is something that I've really seen consistently when I work with a portfolio manager or a trader, if you want to be able to go from zero to ten. Where a lot of people find themselves is in this anxious seven. Where they're just at this low level of engagement all the time. Like, they're eating dinner with their family, they're sitting outside with the sun hitting them on a nice day, and they just can't get that trade out of their head. Like, "Oh, man. Why did I play that hand that way? That was so dumb." And if you operate at this level all the time, you never get the chance to recharge. If you never get the chance to recharge, you can never be fully dialed in. So this is something that you see a lot with high performance, is that when they're not in the arena, when they're not in this performance environment, they're able to completely turn off and recharge so that they can really show up.

An example I love to share is, you know, when I lived in New York, I lived with one of the best pianists in the world. Like top five, in my opinion, piano player. And when he played he would just attack the piano. Just like, ferocity. There's so much energy. You're like, "How do you live with someone like that?" I'm like, "He's not like that, except for like fifteen minutes a day. The rest of the time, he's chilling. He's relaxing, he's reading." You can't operate at that level all the time. You need to be able to unplug and recharge. So I love that you chose meditation, a habit that's such a complement, such an opposite to this necessary mindset of being fully dialed in.

You're smiling. I wanna hear what you have to say about that.

Hey, I know like, picking meditation is almost like, too mainstream now. You know, it's like, okay, everyone's saying, like, meditate. Okay. When I was twenty-five or twenty-six, twenty-seven, around that time range, that was when I started meditating. Now, I was so logic brained back then, like my friends would call me a robot. And it probably served me at that time. But in order for me to be convinced that meditation was something that was important, it was because I wanted to like, perform better. And at the time, Tim Ferriss's podcast, or—He was spouting something like, eighty percent of the high performers that he interviewed for Tools of Titans, the book he had, like eighty percent of those guys meditate. And these were the highest performers of the world.

So that's all I needed to know. So I guess it depends on what you're motivated to do, but I can't see if, you know, somebody's trying to perform better, the guy that's like sixteen tabling, you want to perform better is my assumption. So all these guys that are doing it are the highest performers in the world, so if that's the carrot that you need then that's the carrot that you need to kinda get started.

Now, after I got started I realized—I understand now why high performers needed to meditate in order to—Or have a meditation practice. And one more thing I wanted to say. I mean, your entire life experience is literally—Your mind and your body affect your life experience so much. Like what's going on in your head? That voice in your head if you're thinking, and stuff like that, it affects your life experience so much. And you can't afford to spend ten minutes to sit down and just shut up for ten minutes and just pay attention to it to see what's going on in there? You know? I mean like how will that not get you that ROI back, that ten minutes? You will get that back. For sure. At some point. Because I mean, the mechanism by which you're experiencing life is, a lot of it's internal. A lot of it's like your mind, like what it's picking up on, the voice in your head, like you know, what you're thinking, what thoughts you're having, what emotional experiences you're having like in your body. And most of the time that goes so under the radar you're not even aware of it.

Now, if you want to have a better life (and I think most people do, you know, they want to have better life experiences or, you know, better day to day, second to second experiences), and you don't have ten minutes to check what's going on underneath the hood, that makes literally like, you know, zero dollars of sense. You know, you're just—You're not gonna—So, yeah. So that's my little, like, that's how much it's helped me. So I'm relatively passionate about at least talking from my experience.

Good, yeah. I think there's really two angles to think about this. First I love that you talk about just being overdeveloped intellectually. Like, I used to belong to these forums where we would study rational thinking as if we could turn into robots and be completely rational. And I think a lot of people listening to this can relate, it's like we're just gonna think our way out of everything. And realize that like, like a muscle, I had—Let's say, like, I always skip leg day. The equivalent. I'm always just working bis and tris and I'm super like intellectual and rational and I can just solve everything and the problem is I neglected the emotional side, the spiritual side, my intuition. And if you've never experienced what it's like to just intuitively feel and understand exactly what the right answer is, like, I really recommend it, 'cause it's a really powerful place to work from to just know and be able to move with full conviction. And that is a privilege that really only comes from lots of waiting without waiting, as I like to say. Like you gotta sit without expectations and listen, and it will just emerge. It will pop up.

Whereas the problem with doing everything intellectually is that the rational mind becomes a crutch. When you don't have your models to rely on, you don't have your charts, when you don't have your second brain with all of your notes, you'll be lost, because that part of you that's more intuitive, that draws on your internalized experience is going to be underdeveloped. You won't be able to trust it, and thus you won't be able to move and seize opportunities. So it's really important to try to cultivate this balance in your life, that you have these signals from your body that you can trust if you trust them. Right? The more evidence that you have that what you feel is something that can be acted upon, that you can work with it, the more you'll be able to work with it.

I also think you touched on this other side that I think is equally important, is that subjective experience matters. Like, if you have good habits, good mindset, you will have a better life. And it's crazy to have that caveat. It's like, I think most people want to have a better life, but you look at the evidence of how people act in the world and sometimes it's not clear. A lot of the ways that we like to justify, "Hey, look how successful that CEO is who works a hundred hours a week, man, it would be awesome to be like that." No. You want to be the CEO, but you don't want to work the—No one wants to work the hundred hours a week. You can't have one without the other, necessarily. Right? I would say, everyone wants to be a rock star, no one wants to spend years traveling around in a crappy van drinking beer and eating pizza. Right? Everyone wants to have the final result without all the work. You need to think about the sustainability, how do you get there? And anyone who's listening to this who is like, number goes up, like you know, their poker track or graph, their morning star, their portfolio, whatever it is, the numbers look great but you don't feel happy or fulfilled, this should be a prompt to say, "Hey, I'm missing something. Is this actually sustainable?" Because it matters.

I mean, do I love that, man. A lot of what you're saying I relate to. You know, when you're talking about, "Hey, I was in this forum trying to be like the most rational, you know, trying to figure out if we can think our way through things," I was there. Probably ten, twelve years ago I probably would have been in that forum if I knew about it. You know what I mean? It's one of those things. But then, like, you know, coming from what I know now, I feel like I have a much deeper understanding of how my mind works, how my body works, how my emotions work. And through meditation, I think that was the first step of allowing me to have that level of awareness, but like this mechanism of the mind, the body, and whatever that you're trying to optimize to make it perform higher. If you don't understand how it works, then how are you supposed to optimize it? Let's say you're making all this money, like you know, through stocks or through poker tracker. But then like the number's going up, but then somehow you don't feel fulfilled. You wake up and you're like, you know, it doesn't feel good.

You know, there was probably some sort of belief that you had, "Well, if I had more money I would feel good," but once you understand that that's not true and you don't have the level of awareness to notice that emotion in yourself and then do something about it, then you can go your entire life, even though you have like a lot of money in the bank account, having a sub-par life experience, and that would just be—I don't think anybody would want that. And when we were talking before, I was saying that it's like your car has a check engine light on, and meditation allows you to see. "Oh wait, the check engine light is on. Why is that there?" I mean, if you ever had a check engine light on that you just kinda like left for longer than you should have, then you kinda know what happens eventually to your car. It's the same idea. It's like if you meditate you're actually looking under the hood and like, "Oh wait, this piece is out of place, or maybe I need a new whatever, or maybe I should work on this." So yeah, a lot of what you said, I totally resonate with and I'm really happy you put some light around that.

Well, we got some great questions in the Q&A, so I'm gonna hand it off. This first question comes from Anthony Hu. "How did you shift from the zero sum mindset to a positive sum mindset? It seems like it would be very easy for you to get stuck in the zero sum mindset even after leaving poker.

So I'll be honest, I probably didn't do it intentionally, 'cause I didn't even know it was a problem, if you will. So like when I left poker and then I started asking different questions, and I noticed that these—And I'm sure meditation played a role in this, but I noticed that, "Hey, these are different questions I'm asking. I'm actually trying to figure out how to help this guy get better, and if I help him get better it actually helps me too, and isn't that so dope?" You know, and I had no idea that that was a thing. And so a lot of the questions I was asking, I probably luckboxed myself into it, 'cause I just went into this business and then it made sense. "Oh yeah, if I take care of the customer he'll keep coming back. Oh wait, if the customer keeps coming back then that helps me too, so if I help him it helps me. And then it'll help my employees, then it'll help them—"

So it was kind of like I had to remove myself from their environment where the zero sum thing was happening, if you will. And you know, I didn't do that through sheer willpower of my own, I wasn't like, "Oh yeah, I wanna quit poker and go do this." I mean, there were a lot of different things that made it make sense for me to quit poker, and then after I left the environment that I was in afterwards rewarded you for having a zero sum mentality. And so yeah, I think the answer is it was an environmental shift for me. The people I hung out with were different, the strategies to get success in this new environment were different, and it just required a positive sum strategy. Not required, but it—That was the one I gravitated towards. You probably could win in the restaurant using a zero sum strategy as well. It just didn't feel right for me, so.

I have a follow-up on that. So if the environment is so critical, which I agree that it is, how do you identify positive sum environments or positive sum people?

I think it's hard to tell. It's definitely hard to tell, because if someone is a zero sum or a negative sum person, it's not like they wear it on their sleeve and you know, you go around and you know, you have like a label on their forehead or something like that. I think generally for me, like I try to—I think Adam Grant wrote a book on it called Give and Take, so I mean I'm sure he's articulated it like really well, because you know, that dude's an amazing author. But in his book, and this is—It was weird, because when I read this book it was—I mean, I probably read this book like eight years ago, but it was kind of like game changing for me. So in the book he talks about how there's—He answers the question, "Is it better to be a giver or a taker? Who are the higher performers, givers or takers?" And he also, a nuance, that there's also people called "matchers," that you know, anytime someone does something for them, they'll do exactly the same thing back, because they don't wanna take from somebody but they also don't wanna be the, stick their neck out, either. So, is it better to be a giver, taker, or matcher?

By the end of the book, he talks about how it's best to be a giver, but it's also worse to be a giver. So the highest performers and the worst performers were both givers. And in that book, you know, the idea is around positive sum games, he talks a lot about that. He says that the smart givers are the ones that perform the best. So what they do is they give initially, but then they kind of see how the other person plays the game. If the other person plays the game in a way where they're just like takers, meaning like you give them something and they literally never give anything back and they're just going around, you know, taking, taking, taking, then you stop giving. You know, that's a smart giver. Now a not as smart giver would just keep giving indiscriminately and then obviously get taken advantage of and be also the lowest performers.

So my strategy kind of is taken from Adam Grant, and I would give, but I would try to give smartly and see what other strategies people are playing.

The last time we saw each other in Texas, here, you said something really powerful that really struck me that I've been thinking a lot about since. You said, "I don't have to receive love to give love." And I think this is such a powerful idea that really seems like a natural extension of this Adam Grant, you know, givers and takers idea, that if we are waiting for others to make the first move we might always be waiting, but also that this reciprocity exists. That if we lead with being a giver, with being a positive sum person, people can't help but respond to that, or at least we open the door, creating an opportunity for them to respond in kind. So, yeah. I mean, I thought it was just such a beautiful way of putting how to live a positive sum life, and to just give a freely given gift that others can respond to or not. That the response doesn't matter, but that it's worth doing regardless. So yeah, I just wanted to express, thank you for saying that.

Yeah, man. I appreciate that. Yeah, I don't even remember that I said that, honestly, but I probably said something like that and you probably just made it sound so much better.

I take good notes. So, yeah, you had some good stuff, I'll share. Second question, this one comes in from a friend of mine, Andrew Chen, a fellow poker pro who went into the restaurant game with Halal Guys. I bet you guys would hit it off. Andrew asks, "So, restaurants are generally considered a bad bet. What research did you and Di do before you decided to floor it into the restaurant industry? Were there any key things that you saw that said, 'Hey, despite the numbers saying this is a very dumb thing to do, I think we can actually do this'?"

This will probably be more of a funny answer than a useful answer, but here we are. So. Yeah, Andrew, sorry, I don't have a great answer. I know that as poker players we like to do things based on numbers and obviously be like, "Oh, yo, this is why I made that play." I know Di's really good at it in poker, but it's funny 'cause maybe he's not so great at that with things like restaurants. He literally just floored the car into the—Like we, knowing what I know now we definitely didn't know enough and we probably didn't do enough due diligence beforehand as well. I do agree that restaurants are probably a relatively bad investment in a lot of ways. I don't think we're in it for the money as much as we're in it to see if we can do it in a hard industry, if I had to talk about why Do floored it into the restaurant game. So yeah, I wish I had a more useful answer. But yeah, sometimes I think the strategy here is, "Oh, just get into it, and when you there you'll figure it out." I don't know how I'm gonna get from A to Z, but if I go from A to D then I'm already kinda like making my way, and we're making our way. So.

What skills, attributes, resources did you and Di think that you had that would allow you to make it where others had failed?

Well, I mean at the time we were playing online poker and we were making a ton of money playing poker, so I mean, the saying that if you want to—What is it? If you want to make a million dollars in the restaurant industry, then you go ahead and start with two, and then eventually you'll end up with only one? So I guess we had our own personal financial backing to employ that strategy, if you will. So that was probably the main edge. I personally probably didn't think we had the skill set that would have been necessary for the restaurant game. I'm sure Di was probably like, "Well, you know, I've done harder things, like climb to the nosebleeds on online poker, and that's harder than opening a restaurant, so this should be easy." But I don't think he was thinking in terms of a skillset. Di might argue otherwise, so I will say that with a caveat, but personally from my perspective, I don't think Di was thinking, "Hey, I have these skills, so that I will be able to—" I think that he thought that because he had really good poker skills, whatever the skill sets were with poker, it would just translate into any industry. I don't think that is the case, but me and him will probably argue for days about that if he watched this podcast, which he might eventually.

Yeah, I think you did say something that was interesting, is the implication that a lot of people are in it for the money, and that you guys weren't. So that creates a little bit more of a risk tolerance and a sense of curiosity and embracing the inherent challenges of it because you weren't as anchored on needing to succeed. I do think that's something that I see a lot in life, is the people who are able to make it in something that's really competitive aren't doing it for the money. They have something else that's driving them, and it does feel like there is a commonality of, "Hey, let's see if I can do this," and just being curious about the results.

Yeah. Totally agree with that. I honestly do think Di just wants to know if he can do it, and here's him trying. And he will try his hardest. And I think that's his edge, perhaps, that's the skill set that he brings out I think gives him an edge in the industry. I mean, I think he'll outwork his competition, similar to what he did in poker. But I don't know if that counts as a skill set, you know, it's not like, hey, some restaurant-specific skill set that I have that's something other than working hard.

I do think it's a life skill set. I mean, I think there's very few people in the world who could say with a straight face that they're trying their best, but if we are optimizing for a life free of regret, that's really the only way to go about it, right? If you try your best, if you leave everything on the table, then what do you have to regret? You did the best you could, everything else was outside of your control, let the cards fall where they may. Let the pandemic fall where it may.

Yeah, I agree with that.

All right, last question for today, Hac. Thank you so much, this has been a blast. This question comes from Derek Scholl. Hac, what do you wish you had known before going from a solo poker player to an entrepreneur managing teams of people and entire restaurants?

Lemme try to think back to when I was like, what, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty when this happened. I think I did know some of this stuff, but you don't actually know until you actually get into it, so if I had known it not just intellectually but like deep into my bones, then it would have been better. But for sure the challenges are different. I mean the question specifically talks about managing teams. You know, when you're managing a team and as the team gets bigger and bigger, there are more relationships and people are complex. You know, that is probably the biggest challenge. Like, you have to get per restaurant thirty people aligned and working together, and then you know, people have drama and have issues and stuff. I didn't know how hard that would be. That literally is probably the hardest thing. And it's not people's fault. I mean, it's literally just how people are. And I think one of the major things that makes restaurants hard is because in order to scale a restaurant you have to scale proportionally with people. Like if you want to go from one restaurant to five restaurants, you need five times more people. You can't—It's not like an app where you go from like ten downloads to like a hundred downloads to a thousand downloads, and then it just scales in a log sense as opposed to like a linear sense.

So, yeah. The biggest challenge for sure is understanding that the challenge was about people. But that's also like one of the most fun challenges too, because in order to understand people, the best way to understand people is you really have to figure out how to understand yourself first. And you know, and then when we were talking about meditation and stuff, that's what that stuff is for. So it kind of pushed me deeper down to that path. Like, you're not gonna be able to empathize with your worker if you don't know how to empathize for yourself, you don't know how to have compassion for yourself. So yeah, I wish I knew how hard that was, but you know, I'm also grateful that I didn't know how hard that was, because maybe if I knew how hard that was I wouldn't have even went down that path in the first place, and it probably wouldn't have led to all this self-enquiry of knowing myself better so I could help other people.

In a recent Forcing Function Hour episode with Thanh Phamh where we were talking about how to manage teams, the point was brought up that if you want to do something of any type of scale or impact, it's going to have to involve other people. So I think it's inherent in the question is like, poker, trading, like—You could have support systems, but essentially you're in there on your own and if you want to build a business, if you want to create something of large scale impact, it's going to need to involve others, because you can and should not try to do everything by yourself. In order to have any sort of scale you need to focus on those things that have the greatest leverage, which you do best, and find people who complement you, people who can help accelerate, amplify what you're doing.

So anyone out there who's ambitious, you're going to have to learn how to hire, to manage, and delegate at some point, and recognizing that no one gets it right the first time. I've never talked to a single person whose first hire works out great. You said you brought on this guy with thirty years of experience and a month later you had to fire him, and you're back at worse than square one, right? Everyone messes up the first time, and if you're going to have to pay this tuition, you might as well pay it early. Like, the stakes are not going to get lower, so make those mistakes early.

And I love what you said about hiring being a way to inquire about yourself, to build empathy, to understand yourself. We're really big on this concept at Forcing Function, is like bringing someone on your team has a lot of second order cascading effects of understanding what your purpose is and being able to articulate that to others, to turning all of things that we store inside of our head into a process that someone else can not only follow but hopefully they can own, so that they can run independently. And if you don't have that need, it might not happen.

So this is definitely an area where within reason flooring it makes sense, because the only way to learn this skill is to learn by making all the mistakes up front.

Yeah, I absolutely agree with that, man. Thanks for cleaning up that answer, 'cause I was kind of thinking it out loud, but then you just really tied that into like a nice little bow. So yeah, thank you for that.

Well, speaking of tying things into a bow, man, I feel like we're just getting started. So thank you so much for being present here today. Any final words, any place that you'd want to, you know, leave the listener? Anything else you'd like to share from our conversation today?

I don't really have a strong digital presence, so I don't have a website to go to or any of that stuff. I would just say, you know, thanks, Chris, for having me on the podcast. I mean it was, this conversation's been really enjoyable for me, like a hundred percent, so I really appreciate that. Yeah, I guess if anyone's been thinking about meditation, they should probably just, you know, start.

There you go guys, just start. Just do it. That's all for today. Thank you so much for joining us, Hac, and see you all again soon.

Thank you.

Thank you for listening to the Forcing Function Hour. At Forcing Function, we teach performance architecture. We work with a select group of twelve executives and investors to teach them how to multiply their output, perform at their peak, and design a life of freedom and purpose. Make sure to subscribe to Forcing Function Hour for more great episodes, or go to forcingfunctionhour.com to sign up for our newsletter so you can join us live.