Ep 200. Is more devolution in Britain the answer or a spreader of Disorder?

And I want to thank Petko Konstantinov, the Bulgarian-American winner who became world champion at Backgammon.

Gentleman, played with grace, really just kept his head down, played his moves, did what he needed to do.

And I tip my hat to him.

I regret to say that the silver medal is not actually silver, nor is the gold medal that one wins at the World Championships of Backgammon actually gold.

Are they made of chocolate? They're not even plated with silver or gold.

But fortunately, one does get a bit of lucre for winning.

But it really isn't about that.

It's the sense of achievement and accomplishment.

I had to beat... one former world champion, two top grandmasters who play better than me, to come back in a situation where I had been ahead 15 to eight and had over 99.8% in the match.

And then the guy came all the way back to being a favorite.

And what are the skills I would say that I'm proud of having demonstrated is things that seem obvious, like calm under pressure, trusting your instincts, getting a good night's sleep the night before the match.

I am now at a place where it not only is not making me nervous to be there, I would say I get a certain calm and composure from being in the, what they call the cauldron.

So those are kind of just transformative experiences.

And then in terms of the actual play, again, it's going to sound the most obvious thing.

You've just got to play your game.

If you've been doing an activity, whether it's speaking about climate change, and then you get to brief the prime minister, don't change your pitch.

You just say the things that you know about climate change.

Because in the big moment, any attempt to change anything isn't going to work.

You

could choke.

In other words, you feel like you don't know how to do the activity.

Or you could just be having muscle memory dominate, that the muscle memory, all of the training kicks in.

Yeah.

And I think what you're saying about preparation is super interesting and also the way that you likened it to doing maybe the most important policy briefing of somebody's life and how we can be more prepared for those big moments by a kind of constant practice.

I think there's something here interesting as well about ambition and optimism because most people are going to tell themselves I would never win a championship and for most people obviously that's true but it's not true for any of the people who have won and if you decide that it's not true you're making it absolutely certain that it's not true.