Risky Business with Nate Silver and Maria KonnikovaNate and Maria start with something light: p(doom) and the possibility that AI will bring about the end of life as we know it. Then, Nate breaks down the news about the presidential debates and makes a shocking recommendation to the Democratic Party. And – most importantly – our hosts preview the upcoming World Series of Poker in Vegas.
Further Reading:
“OpenAI: Exodus” by Zvi Mowshowitz
“Democrats Have a Better Option Than Biden” by Ezra Klein
“21 Tips for Acing the World Series of Poker” by Nate Silver
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“The Leap” from Maria Konnikova
“Silver Bulletin” from Nate Silver
Pushkin. Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making better decisions. I'm Maria Kannakova and I'm Nate Silver.
We're going to kick the show off with a lighthearted topic, what is the chance that artificial intelligence will destroy every last human being and all animals speaking us on Earth?
Yeah, Nate, that is a very very lighthearted area of discussion. I'm looking forward to it. Then we're going to move on to the presidential debates and how important they are and what they mean for the elections.
And then for our serious segment, the World Serious Poker begins next week in Las Vegas. We're both going to be there. I already got my wired transfer to whatever new payment provider the world series uses, So we'll do a preview of the series on today's show.
All right, Nate. So you know, I did not think that twenty four was going to be the year that I would be talking about Scarlett Johansson in reference to artificial intelligence and open Ai. But here we are because open Ai, which is one of the biggest companies in AI research and the fourth behind chat GPT, just unveiled the new voice of their newest AI assistant, and that voice sounds eerily like Scarlet Johansson, which I guess is not surprising since there was this movie Her where Scarlet played this AI assistant who becomes very very human like and engenders very human like emotions in her co stars. Right, and then we see this announcement from Sam Altman, who is the founder of Open Ai, about their new voice called Sky, and I want to go back to the name of the voice in a second when we talk about the more substantive issues in open AI, but he references her when he tweets about it, and the voice sounds early like Scarlett, and she issues a statement that says, hey, guys, you know that is not me. I did not agree with this, and we're getting some lawyers involved. And then the voice is very quickly taken down.
Yeah, because he had tried to make a proper deal with her. She had said nah, cold feet. And then they come out anyway with this product that sounds a lot like her. So it's I mean, look, this comes up in my book a little bit, which I'm always pitching, I guess on the show, But I think Silicon Valley does not understand politics very well. Right, you have this very popular actress people left, right and center. Literally my Twitter feed, we're pretty upset for how brazen Sam Altman and openay look about this, and that matters. I mean, Congress has a lot of power to regulate AI. There is actually a broad bipartisan support for more a regulation. Theydy the AI might be dangerous in different ways, maybe not quite in the way that the people will talk about in a moment. The doomers think about it, but people think it I'll take their jobs, and people think it will make misinformation worse, all types of problems algrethmc bias. So people have to be people have to be careful. I mean, look, I kind of hate politics too, but unfortunately they have a lot of regulatory powers. You have to you have to put up with some of that stupidity and not egging on by doing something twice as stupid yourself.
That's absolutely right, and Nate, I am going to show the world how much you're already rubbing off on me. In terms of using a sports analogy, this is akin to what we would call an unforced error, right, like this did not have to happen, And this is in a week where open ai desperately, desperately needs some positive publicity, because what we really want to be talking about isn't Scarlett Johansson, as gorgeous as she is and as amazing as her voice is and as much as we love her. But the other really really big news from open AI this week, which is that one of their co founders and chief scientist Ilia Sutskib has resigned. And he is not the only one.
Yeah, I'm not going to pretend I know all these names. It's not like their NBA players or how to pronounce them, but yeah, unlike a Leopold Aschenbrenner, Pabel Isma Lov, all these people that, again I don't know personally, but like credible people think are safety oriented open air researchers, and a half dozen of them have left in the past half year or so. It's a pretty bad sign for a company that's marketing itself as once having been a nonprofit that was concerned with doing AI the right way. Is that people in that coalition are are now leaving in some significant number.
So the reason that people, including the two of us, are so incredibly worried about this or thinking about this and trying to figure out should we be worried about this is because this was the super Alignment team. This was the team responsible for making sure that AI doesn't destroy the world. And by the way, I'm just going to harken back to our Scarlett Johansson discussion for one second. They called the sky and like, were they trying to refer to Skynet as well? Like, were they just trying to put a terminator in the reference right in there, saying like, hey guys, we're unleashing something that might destroy the world.
So I think there's a detached irony. Like, look, I think Sam Altman's Twitter feed is kind of funny, right, And it's kind of funny, and he's combative and he battles. He's a poster which if you're like me, who the fuck cares? If you're running open AI, then maybe you have to be a little bit more buttoned down. And they're kind of aloof right. San Francisco and the Silicon Valley have always been kind of detached from the rest of the country. They're all very smart, all very rich. They're also very you know, male for the most part, They're probably in a bubble in certain ways. And I don't know, like I said before, I might think Congress is stupid. I kind of sympathized more with the Silicon Valley side and the argument in many ways than the DC side. I think they're more innovative. I think technology has been good for society. We're all, but like I think there is a lot of arrogance there that might not end well. You look at what Congress did to Napster, for example, or other businesses that we're seen as having gotten out of line. And there is a pretty broad bipartisan sense of weariness about AI for different reasons. Democrats might be concerned about algorithmic bias. Both parties might be concerned about jobs being taken over. But the political climate on this could shift quite quickly, and that would be very bad for Sam Maltman's business.
So let's talk about this concept known as P doom. So do you want to just first to say, like, what is P doom?
I pronounce it more like pay doom because looking myself, like you look like a urinary tract problem or something.
All right, P doom.
So pay doom is a shorthand for probability of doom, which is a shorthand for what's the chance that AI destroys civilization or substantially impair civilization, which is actually like a pretty big distinction. People have different definitions. Eliezer Yudkowski, one of the most prominent doomers, meaning people who are very worried about AI risk, defines it literally is all human beings and animal species perishing, right, every single living being. He has said in a Time magazine article last year. I think so he's being very literal. Someone like Ajaia Kotra, who is an AI researcher, uses some more inclusive definitions. I mean things where humanity loses agency if, for example, we are no longer really in charge, maybe our lives are okay, or some very rich people in Silicon Valley have some agency. But if we kind of hand over the keys to machines and it becomes kind of dystopian, and that could qualify as p doom as well. That's a big distinction. And people also have very wide ranges, which when they cite this chance you can get people who think it's you know, ninety nine percent in this coming from Eliezer Yukowski. The consensus, and again if you kind of put aside the fact that the different definitions of it is probably in the range of five to ten percent. If you survey AI experts, AI researchers give them different definitions, they kind of gravitate toward that five to ten percent range. Some people in the safety community are higher, maybe more the range of ten or twenty percent. And by the way, let's not be too abstract here. If it's true that there is like a ten percent chance or even frankly a two percent chance of humanity going extinct from AI in the next one hundred years, this is a tremendously important problem. Yeah, so figuring out how reliable those estimates are is an important challenge that the show will tackle from time to time.
Yeah, and I just took round it even more. Let me kind of talk you through a problem that has nothing to do with AI that I had to deal with quite recently, where you kind of start realizing what it means, what five percent means, right, what ten percent actually means? So I had a leak in the shower, right, you know, like that just completely really annoying, like drip drip drip from the show our head, and so you know, you look it up online, you try to figure out, like what's going on? How do we fix this? And turns out that you know, this is a gasket problem, and according to YouTube, it's super easy to do it yourself, right, you just you know, you take it off, you replace it, put it back on, and voila, everything's done. So this happened in a big apartment building and I had to reach out to the management and be like, hey, how do I turn off the water in my apartment? Because that's step one, right, you turn off the water flow. And so they ended up sending someone and she was like, are you insane? You do realize that you could end up flooding the apartment below and if you do that, you're going to be liable for all of those repairs, which could go into the tens of thousands of dollars. Now, of course, like normal people walking around aren't going to give me a percentage and be like, you know, Maria, your p flood is approximately fifteen percent here, But she made it seem like it was certainly great than five percent, and maybe you know, greater than ten percent, especially because the building has very hard water. And so there's isn't.
A real thing that sounds like some bullshit.
It is a real thing. Date, It's a very real thing. As a female who washes my hair all the time. Let me tell you, as someone who doesn't have nearly as much hair as I do. Sorry, Nate, but that's just Them's the facts. God, that hard water is a very very real thing and has a very different effect on your face, on your hair, on everything, and apparently on the level of corrosion when fixing a shower on your pea flood. And so here I am trying to figure out, okay, well what do I do, like, how do I actually decide this? I ended up asking my dad, because you know, daddy knows best, and he had a very good way of thinking about it. He said, do it if there's no visible sign of corrosion and it's super easy to take it out, don't do it otherwise. And so I, you know, opened it and there was tons of corrosion. It was very clear that I could not take it out easily. Hired a plumber, got it done. But it made me realize that those tiny chances, when there's a huge risk involved that can actually translate to a lot of money, you have to take that seriously. And obviously this is so ridiculously silly, right me destroying someone's bathroom below mind versus humanity going extinct. But it just illustrates that even if you said, you know, the p doom is five percent, and that's not just five to ten percent, but five percent or two percent, that is absolutely astronomical when the actual cost is the end of the world.
Yeah. In fact, I'm not even sure that it makes sense to think of it an expected value terms, because expected value is the average or some number of outcomes.
Right.
I made a bet on a soccer match the other day that you know, I had to win one out of six times to be profitable. It did not win, but in the long run you would make money from that ben Right. If you destroy civilization, however, you don't have at no longer, I don't have a view over.
This is a very very important point. Yes, if I destroyed the downstairs apartment, I will be able to pay for it. So this is a risk that I can think about. If I destroy the world, I'm not going to be able to make it all better with a band aid.
And what's very weird about the politics of all of this is that the people who are most worried about p doom tend to be the people who are building the AI systems. Which to me people try to like over complicate this and say, well, maybe they have some marketing and go like, that's fucking stupid. They're worried about it because a it's made progress much faster than people anticipated, at least recently. I mean, I think very few researchers would have thought that large language models like CHATCHYPT can accomplish as much as they do right now. Or they can, you know, answer any question with a degree ranging from somewhat competent bullshitter to actually very good on many questions. They can like solve some mathematical equations, they could do some programming, they can draw shitty art, they can make mediocre music, right. But like, these are all things that would have surprised most experts if you'd ask them five years ago. The other thing that worries experts is that we don't really know how all of us works. You kind of feed a giant, you populate a giant matrix of what are called tokens, which are words which are kind of compressed into vector space. I'm deliberately using some terminology, but like the inner workings of these transformer models are not entirely understood. To be fair the inner workings of the human brain are not very well understood either. But to have a very powerful technology that purports to do superhuman things within a span of five or ten or twenty years and which we don't understand very well seems like kind of self evidently a risk we ought to be concerned about. That's kind of like the short Steelman version of why it's not ridiculous to be worried about about ped doom.
Well, and I think that an even shorter version is something that you said right at the beginning, which is that the people who are designing it, that's the same subset as the people who are most worried about it, and whose p dooms tend to be very high. That tells us something, Right, if everyone who was actually working in AI said nah, this is fine, like it's all good, and we were hearing this from pundits and from politicians and from you know, people on the other end of it, then we'd say, oh, you know, maybe we should discredit some of this. But it's coming from the people who are actually doing the designing, who are actually doing the building, And so that makes me, as someone who doesn't know anything about these black box workings worried, especially because we know that other processes that have had black box components have gone off the rails and have gone wrong and have glitched in the past. I mean, we've had this with trading algorithms, right, Like this shit happens all the time.
Yeah, Look, there are an abundance of scenarios, including that people are over confident about AI capabilities and therefore hand control of key systems over to AIS and they fuck up. Right, I don't see the concerns that kind of DC has about AI and the one Silicon Valley does that's necessarily mutually exclusive. They could both. You know, there are various categories of mild, medium, and terrible things, but there's also like a lot of upside in general. I don't know if there's some way to quantify this, but the best majority of technologies move humanity forward in different ways. Like, you know, the human condition is much much, much much better than it was centuries ago because of modern technology. People who don't know that are basically totally misinformed. And like I we'd bet that half of people, even I mean our listeners might know, but like the average voter probably doesn't know very much about kind of economic history and things like that. Technology has been a force for good mostly, but we haven't dealt with that many technologies that were predicted to have the power to like destroy civilization. And by the way, nuclear weapons, you can say, well, you know, nuclear weapons have gone okay so far, well only since nineteen forty five. If there's like a one percent chance risk every year of nuclear weapons been used in common, which, by the way, happened in nineteen forty five Nagasaki and Hiroshima. You know, seventy eighty years of data are not enough to nullify a one in one hundred chance.
So, Nate, I remember someone when I was kind of reading about all of the open AI stuff, something that really jumped out at me was a CEO who described Sam Altman's approach to open AI regulation and open AI in general as ready fire aim And that to me is a little bit backwards. It doesn't mean we can't fire, but we should probably be aiming. And the people who left, the people who've resigned the most high profile departures, those were our aim people. So Nate, I think we should be revisiting our p DO estimates in the coming weeks and the coming months to see what happens. I think I'm a little bit more pessimistic than you are, and I think probably these departures have made both of us slightly more pessimistic than we were before. And I would just absolutely love to be proven wrong here. This is one area where I hope that ourp dooms are all way too high. And you know, we can revisit this in fifty years and say, ha haha, remember when we were all so scared.
So nate.
As you know, we are in an election year and there were actually some big news for this early on, and they had to do with the debates, the presidential debates. This has been something on everyone's minds, and it seems like Biden and Trump have mostly agreed for their debate terms for their first debate, which has now been pushed up from the fall to June twenty seventh on CNN. So that is like that's in a month, right, that is coming up right around the corner, and then there's going to be another debate in September. And this is big news for a few reasons. So I'd love you to talk us through why this is important and why we should you know, actually care about this news, about the presidential debates.
So the reason you should care is that we are how to put this nicely, You.
Don't have to put it nicely, Nate. I know we're among friends here.
I think this benefits. This maneuver by Biden, which I'll explain in a moment, benefits from people who understand incentives and strategy and kind of revealed preference versus stated preference, all those fancy terminologies, fancy terms I should say. So last week, Biden does a tape segment on Morning Joe. By the way, I can't even like actually go live on the show. You know, if you think you could debate anywhere anytime, you could do a live interview, but leave that alone for a second. Does a tape little segment saying I challenge you Donald to not one, but two debates. Half an hour later, his campaign puts out a memo which does confirm that he has challenged Trump to two debates, and also says in the third paragraph, by the way, we are actually pulling out of the Commission on Presidential Debates the three debates that they had planned for later this year. And look, the CPD has problems. I mean Trump ragged them all the time. In twenty and twenty. He also didn't do any GOP primary debates. But basically Biden traded three debates after Labor Day for one debate after Labor Day and then one on CNN, a cable network that will happen in the middle of June that probably everyone will forget about by the time the conventions happened in July and August, and certainly by the time we get to the stretch round of the campaign. So what Biden is actually doing here is reducing his exposure to debates, which is interesting for various And by the way, if you have doubt about that, Biden says too, Trump agrees to two, they say how about two more, and then Biden's campaign chairwoman says no, no, no, no, no. That would create chaos. When they just create a chaos that morning by blowing up the schedule. It's an interesting kind of game theory problem because on the one hand, the debates are zero, one candidate gains more than the other almost by definition. On the other hand, if you duck the debates, that might be seen as worse than even a bad outcome of the debate. So it's kind of like the opposite of prisoners subletment, where you have an incentive not to cooperate. Here, you have an intetive to reach an agreement. You want to look too difficult or diffident. But usually when you're the candidate who's behind in the race, as Biden is in the swing states in the large majority of polls, you want more uncertainty and more variance, meaning that you want to take more risks. You should want more debates because they add volatility the election, and instead Biden wants fewer. That to me is a really really, really really bad sign for his campaign. It indicates his campaign either is delusional and doesn't believe the polls, and there's a lot of reporting that they don't or that they think their candidate is unlikely to commit himself well in spontaneous public interactions because he's eighty one years old, he has always stammered a lot, but you know, seems like audibly and visibly worse now. That is a bearish sign that you're constraining your stategic options, your chances to come back because you're worried about how well your guy will perform. That's a pretty fucking bad sign. And I don't know, you know, you want to make me to make the subtext text Maria here, sure, let's do it. Democrats might be better off replacing Joe Biden on the ticket. I say might, because that's a very very very very very very very risky strategy. You would have to draft a candidate who was not planning on running for president. There is no one Democrat that unifies the field. Kamala Harris is roughly as unpopular as Biden. If she were the nominee, you would have a huge fight at the nomination process. You could have someone who's quite far left with the nomination in general, simprist candidates to bear it from another segment, but like, if you were really as concerned about defeating Donald Trump as Democrats claim they are, then you should be doing everything in your power to maximize a chance that you win.
All Right, Nate, I'm gonna stop you there for a second. Did you just say that the Democrats should consider replacing Biden as the candidate?
They should certainly consider it.
And wait, let's be very precise about this. How seriously should they consider it? And what is the percentage chance that you are giving to these different outcomes? Like why are we considering this?
Because that is.
I mean, that is just like a very very buld assertion. Less than a year before the election.
Biden is trailing in the polls right now. His big problems don't seem to be soluble, one of which is the fact that he is eighty one years old and often looks and acts like it. His approval rating is thirty eight thirty nine percent, generally well below the number where you get reelected. I mean, the fact that Trump is his opponent. Trump is also very unpopular is what keeps Biden in the race competitively. People thought, well, the economy will improve and then Biden's numbers will pick up. They haven't really. People thought, well, Trump will go on trial, the numbers will improve, Well, they haven't really. Well, the kind of narrative will improvably, less focus on his age will Actually, it doesn't matter kind of what the New York Times says about Biden's age. Most voters aren't really in the New York Times. So like, let's say we get to August, and let's say Biden has a mediucre debate. By the way, if he is a terrible, terrible debate. One reason I think this play is smart is because if Biden totally shits the bed in June, totally seems incompetent, then you can kind of pull this emergency lever.
Let me just ask you a technical question, right, like, let's assume that, Okay, Biden performs poorly in the debates, the debates matter enough that this really swings public opinion, It swings the opinion of the parties, and they do end up wanting to replace him as candidates. Can they do this in August at the DNC.
Yeah, I've been being a little bit sloppy with my language. They means that they would have to persuade Biden to do it, because Biden right now has a majority, a large, overwhelming majority of pledged delegates. If Biden says I'm not a candid nomination, those pledge delects become free agents. They can vote for whoever they want. Pretty much, I think would be loyaled to Biden, by the way, because he did decide who the people are, so he would have a pole to dictate maybe who who the future nominee would be. Their placement would be. But when I say they, I mean I mean Biden, and that they are people who were pressuring Biden publicly and privately to say, Joe, you're gonna elect Trump unless you stand down and let us take a puncher's chance at somebody else. And again, I'm not sure it's the best play. I'm just saying you have to have that mentality keeping up in mind toward it.
Okay, but what we're talking about a decision like this, which is so monumental, you do need to weigh the risks on every side. Right, so we can say, Okay, Biden does have these issues as a candidate. I think everyone acknowledges that. You know, I'm voting for Biden. I acknowledge he has issues. Obviously, so does Trump. Obviously. I don't think we should be having an election where we're dealing between these these two candidates, but here we are. So I think, though, you need to weigh the risk of that versus pulling him out and introducing an entirely new candidate in say August or September, when the election is in November. So how do we actually wait that? How do you actually try to create that game tree where you figure out which of these you know, if I'm playing poker, which of these is the least bad option? Because to me, it is not clear that yanking Biden out is going to be the least bad option. It might actually end up being much worse. But we don't know right these are things that are in the future. We don't know who the replacement candidate would be. There are so many unknowns in this particular equation, and that makes it incredibly incredibly difficult to calculate any sort of probability with any sort of confidence.
So one thing I'd say, we will have more information in August when the Democratic National Convention is held. We may know the outcome of the first of Trump's criminal trials, We'll have more information about Biden's first debate about the economy. It is a very, very big risk. I don't think I should do anything now. I think they should play their hand with a mind toward having this option down the road in August. If the make goes badly, if things that are supposed to be good for Biden, like the economy improves, and the numbers are still stagnant or they get worse, then I think you have to like have that option available now. What I would do is backchannel talk to Gretchen Whitmer and Raphael Warnock and people like that. Gavin Newsome, who I'm not a huge fan of, but like certainly seems like ready to fill the position if you were asked to, you know, I might back channel very very very very very carefully that, like, we need a couple of backup options in case something I knew, some bullshit pretense, in case there is a health emergency or something. Right, maybe just in case, right, maybe get your kind of nomination speech ready.
So from that perspective, it seems like it's actually a very strategically sound decision for Biden to move the first debate to June.
Let me get so, look, I think they tactically played it very well, in part because they actually reduced the num of their debates, which they apparently wanted to do, and kind of were credited for being the protagonist and pushing footward the debates. Right, That was like, very very very clever tactically. If you have a shitty hand to play, right, they pull off a good bluff with like seven deuce off suit. Maybe it's a little unfair, maybe they're playing like jack seven off suit or something like that. Right, not your favorite hand. You got a little bit of equity jack six off suits somewhere in their nine to four suited. You know you've seen worse hands, but like they pull off a very good tactical bluff in reducing their exposure. The fact that they want to reduce their exposure when they're losing, when their candidate won the debates four years ago, gives credence to the argument, along with the lack of media availabilities that Biden does. Where you might have a hostile setting or a spontaneous setting that they know their candidate is too old. They know it does not come across well to voters in those settings. They want to minimize that risk. And when a campaign, through turnout and through ads and everything else, that may be playing their hand the best they can, but maybe you have to fold and play a better hand.
So, Nate, this is a really really important week for both of us because it is our last week of sanity for the rest of the summer. Because do you know what starts next week on May twenty.
Eighth, uh meteorological summer that's not until June, but Closeky It's It's the Factor World de facto Summer Summer Vacation, Summer Camp, the World Series of Poker.
Summer Camp YEP summer camp for poker players. The World Series of Poker, which is like, I mean, it's called the World Series of Poker for a reason, but it's a big deal, Like this is the single biggest poker event of the year. I mean, it's something that people plan for, prepare for forever, and for some people it's their life's dream to come to Vegas and play in the World Series of Poker.
Yeah, there's nowhere else where for seven weeks if you want it. There is such an abundance of poker, not just tournaments at the World Series, but there are eight different poker rooms around town that host their own tournament series. There are cash games, there are friends to hang out with, degenerate bets to make to your heart's content.
Yes, this is very true, And the two of us are both heading out there next week on Monday, so that we can both play the same first event, which is the opening event of the World Series of Poker, the five thousand dollars Players Championship.
That's new, right that you should have some stupid little now get real money for the first event. I like that resolutely.
And it's a freeze out, so for people who don't play poker, The World Series is a series of poker tournaments that probably has right now the greatest proportion of freeze out events, which means you only get to enter or one time, and if you bust, you're done. That's it. And that's becoming increasingly rare, and I think that that makes it really.
Special, absolutely, and that changes the whole strategy, both in terms of your mindset and your opponent's mindset. So one thing I think people don't realize. I actually have a uh blog post up newsletter at Silver Bulletin with twenty one tips for playing the real series of poker.
Ooh.
One of the most important tips is don't be afraid to bluff, which sounds obvious, right. If you're like a professional poker player, you don't need that tip by help, right, But if you're like, you know, some amateur and you're like, well, I'm kind of the World Series and like it's a big deal for me, and also all these players are bad, so like win without bluffing, No, dude, you have to bluff in part because people are terrified and people will fold, and bluffing is an essential part of poker, but especially in those like freeze out tournaments. If you are what we would call a weekend warrior who a few times a year gets to play in a local card room in Philly or something and then makes your be week long trip out to the World Series and plays two or three or four freeze out events. You are absolutely terrified to lose, right, and you'll show it with every action that you take. I mean, people are utterly transparent and predictable about kind of letting you know how much they care about maximizing the amount of money they win versus maximizing how long they get to play for.
Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. And also, thank you so much for that great advertisement for my last book, The Biggest Bluff, so bluff bluff, bluff, bluff bluff a lot. I think that's great advice. And I will also say for those weekend warriors for professional players, the one big tip I would have is have fun right Like this is summer camp. It's a really unique experience. I remember my first time walking into the World Series of Poker and it was just it took my breath away, the just sheer energy and how exciting it was and how democratic it was because anyone can enter, right if you have the money like you can pay that buy and you can play and you have a chance to win. And that's not true of any other sport. So take advantage of that.
Two years ago I played against Naymar, who is the extraordinary Brazilian soccer player. I play against the boxer Ryan Garcia in the main event last year. I seem to get Phil Helmu at my Table's a fair bit, right, and who knows you might even get like a Maria or a Nate. Remember we are.
Never bluffing, No, never, never, always fold not in our vocabulary.
Yes, we would never bluff a risky business listener.
This is true. This is absolutely true. So yes, we'll be sharing tips like that one, and we'll be sharing our journey along the way. And I want to propose something to get us in the spirit. I think we should have a bit.
Can I eight one hundred big Max in twenty four hours?
No, well, I don't think I can. I don't think I can do that bet. I might as well just pay you out. Now, let's see which one of us gets unluckier during the World Series.
So you want to be unluckier?
Yeah, in this case, if you want to win the bet, you want to be unluckier. You want to be the person who runs worse, who is on the wrong side of variants the most.
I love that. I'd love to actually quantify that. So so we have, I think discussed privately a method for doing this right, because there are, by the way, many forms of luck and poker that are hard to quantify. If you get cooler, meaning I get pocket kings and Marie gets aces, if she wins, she had the better hand, it's not a bad beat per se, but like it's pretty unlucky for me. But one way where you can objectively, unquestionably quantify luck is when you go all in. There are more cards left to come, might be before the plot, might be before the river, et cetera. And you see if you get a run out that makes you the best hand or not. Right, If I am all in with ace king against pocket queens, I have whatever at six fortyence of winning depending on the suits of the cards. You can track that we can kind of compare our realized value against our expected value, and whoever does worse gets money gets paid off by the person. Is that how it works.
So basically, what we're trying to bet on is who runs better and who runs worse in all In situations where there are no more decisions, where all your money, you know, all your chips are in the middle, what we need to figure out is do only all ins before the flop count? Does it count if we're all in on the flop, right? Does it count if we're all in on the turn?
Any any all in before the river?
Right?
Yeah? And by the way, if you're not a poker fit, you know, if you go on on the river all the cards are revealed, there's no luck. There may be luck and you happen to run in like a good opponent's hand, right, but there there's no more turn to the turn of the deck too, all right.
So every single time the two of us are all in, we are going to record the exact hands that we have that our opponents have, if it's against one or if it's against two, and then we're going to run all of those equities. So we'll be able to ca at exactly what the percentages are, and then we'll see if we won, we'll see if we lost, and we'll be able to have an objective measure of which one of us was luckier and which one of us was unluckier. So in this particular case, the person who wins the bet and wins the money is going to be the person who got unluckier. Right, I think that's fair.
It's kind of like insurance. Right, we're hedgin. How much do you want to bet?
Well, Nate, you suggested a very devilish sum when we talked about this before the show, six hundred and sixty six dollars and.
Sixty six cents. Marie, I don't forget those sixty six cents.
Absolutely, six hundred and sixty six dollars and sixty six cents. Let's do it, all right, it's a bet and one I might add that I hope you win.
No, I insist I hope you win, because almost certainly the person who wins at six sixty six dot sixty six will have lost far more than that and expected value loss. Right, it'd much rather. I mean, it might be literally worth tens of thousands of dollars Maria in terms of how well, maybe probably more than that, frankly, right, I mean you're gonna be playing the whole series. I'm not. I'm coming and going. It's a fucking election year, right, I'll play as much as I can probably three weeks total, but you're playing the whole thing. You're gonna have like literally.
Mostly mostly I'm taking a few weeks off, but yes, but I'll be there for a lot of the time. But I think that this is going to be fun for people to pay attention to and to follow along. But I actually also think that this is an important prop but for a different reason, because it I think it's a really really important calibration of your decision making process. So what I always like to tell people, whether they're poker players or not, is that you know, poker is a skill game, right, but there's an element of luck. And I think that's true of almost everything in life. There are a lot of situations where you know decision making skill, but then you have to get lucky as well. And so what this is going to help us do is actually put something precise on the luck element. Right, how often did we make the right decision because at that moment of the all in, were we ahead, were we behind? How solid is our decision making process versus the cards? What we don't control, right, the outcome the deck and the order of the deck. That's the luck factor. And we're actually going to be trying to put a number on that, and I think that that's such an important exercise in decision making in general, to try to evaluate whether you're making good decisions and running badly or whether you're just making shitty decisions.
Because it's very possible to feel as though you're getting beat up by the luck of the cards, right, because you tend to remember those times. So one thing, by the way, is that, by definition, when you lose a poker tournament, it almost always happens in some frustrating way. Either you take a bad beat, or you take a cooler or you make what you thought was a plus EV bluff and it doesn't work out, or you call off and the opponent wasn't bluffing. So because tournaments on most always end in failure except for the one in whatever five hundred time that you win a five hundred person tournament, it's easy to like not account for the good luck that you had too, and that can impair your self awareness about how you might be playing.
Frankly, absolutely, one of the most edifying things that I've ever done, and I do this during multiple events, is write down every single hand of a tournament. And I did this for the tournament that I ended up winning that kind of launched my poker career in a way, and that was the PCA National Championship. I wrote down all of the hands and it was really really important to me to look back and see how many times I just got so lucky, because it's so easy to forget that. You know, the moment where I got pocket seven's in against aces, right, I should have been out of the tournament and instead I ended up having a straight and I ended up doubling. So there are moments like that, and it's I think that in life in general, it's so easy to just freak at those moments, but it's so important to remember them.
By the way, we talked last week about focus during poker tournaments, this is a little hack. If you feel like there is a day when you would like more focus, then forcing yourself to write down every hand you play will require you to concentrate more. You can't do it every time. It does take a lot of work. But like if there's a little bit sleepy, tire, jet lagged, hungover, et cetera, then that's a tip that I use. I pull out now and then.
Yeah, that's that's a great tip night, and it will just be it will be helpful to you to become a better poker player. I encourage people to do this even when they're not playing poker, when they're making decisions in an unrelated area. When people are like, oh, how do improve my decision agame? Like, you should actually write down your entire thought process during the decisions, what you're waiting, you know, how you're doing it, how you're thinking about it, so that you have an objective record going back, because otherwise self serving bias, you know, is very strong.
I am considering what type of pizza to get for lunch, Marie, I'm going to write down the thought process. Right, we'll be like a Grandma Square or like Pepperoni or Suprema, I don't know.
I mean, Nate, you're going to go for Detroit style, right, given your.
Meal out, Decroit style is kind of fake. I mean, it does exist in Detroit, but the real pizza of Michigan is Domino's and Little Cauzers, of which I prefer the latter.
All right, And on that note, Nate, I wish you luck next week, and I wish me luck as well, and I hope we both do really well and for people who want to follow along are you are you going to be posting updates? Are you going to be posting any action? Can people buy a steak in what you're doing?
Or now I haven't historically sold action, maybe I will all I can figure it out, just for just for fun.
Yeah, yeah, so I actually decided partly for risky business audience. But in general I've posted action for a few events on the two biggest poker staking sites, which is poker steak dot com and steak kicks dot com. And most of those events are listed at no markup, which means you get it at face value. They're small pieces, you know, But I think it's a fun way for people to be able to follow along and nate if you do that too, maybe we'll do some sort of risky business action package.
Just to be clear what you mean by this, Maria, this means that people are basically buying a piece of equity in you. If they buy one percent of your action and you cash de terment for one hundred thousand dollars, they therefore get one thousand dollars for example.
This is correct. This is correct, And I'm not listing every single event that I'm playing, but I have a few I think five or six on there, and then you are invested in my wins, and unfortunately you're also invested in my losses, but your downside is capped. Unlike mine, I've got unlimited ownside. One last thing, Nate, before we say goodbye to our listeners, I would just like to say thank you to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority for listening, for tuning in to last week's episode of Risky Business and taking the gender pay gap in professional basketball seriously, because it turns out that the other day they announced a deal to provide one hundred thousand dollars in annual sponsorship to every single ACES player for this season and for twenty twenty five. Now, of course they're now going to be investigated by the WNBA, but let's say kudos for a very innovative way and a very Las Vegas way of handling the gender pigapp.
In Las Vegas, everything has a price, including gender equity.
Risky Business is hosted by me Maria Kannakova and me Nate Silver. The show is a co production of Pushkin Industries in iHeartMedia. This episode was produced by Isabelle Carter. Our associate producer is Gabriel Hunter Chang. Our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein.
If you like the show, please rate and review us who other people can find us more easily and if you want to listen to an AD free version, sena for Pushkin Plus for six hundred nine a month to get access to ad free listening. Thanks for tuning in.
