Nate Silver on Risk-takers, Politicians, and Poker Players

25:39Do you think that sports analytics has made sports too homogenized and more boring? So right now, for instance, the New York Knicks, they're in a way trying to copy the Celtics. Well, everyone should be a good shooter and everyone should be a good defender. In the 1980s or 90s teams were more different. Should I be happy about this? I think it's the better version of the critique, right? Because some sports, like I think the average NBA style is fairly attractive now, right? I do need three point shots, I would say. Maybe a little bit, but like, I mean, if you go watch, like if you go watch footage of like a game from like the 90s or something, right?

26:14I mean, this is more aesthetically appealing. It shows off some of the athleticism, I think. But no, the fact that you have less variety, this is true in poker too, by the way, right? There are fewer different varieties of like loose aggressive versus tight aggressive poker players. You can't get away as much with having like a flawed eccentric strategy and then making up for it in other ways, which is kind of a shame. Maybe in the long run, it means we're not exploring different branches of the tree as well and that can be problematic. But yeah, I mean, it's a bad time. When things get hyper -efficient, then maybe the quirky players.

26:57I saw a video yesterday about matrily baseball batting stances and I used to be guys that had like very, very funky batting, stances or things like that, right? And those have largely disappeared, right? If it kind of cost you 200s of a point of batting average, so you hit 289 instead of 291, then like there's enough money on the line and enough kind of resources and training and enough kind of sports science where we're probably gonna beat out of you potentially. Well, Joe Lombid, every win a title. I know Darrell Moore pretty well. I think I'm probably a fan of yours. and so I'd say yes, I think.

27:35I mean, and you think Paul George was a good idea. I think it was a bad idea. He's 34. He's had a history of being flaky. He's a very talented player, but he doesn't seem like the kind of guy to put you over the edge. And they need more of a glue guy. I mean, so, so Darryl Mori is very good at finding like the league average players that can like, that can provide the glue guy. No, I think, I think it's a good move. I mean, I think like, you know, look, Darryl understands the importance of swinging for the fences. If healthy, that's a very big, big three, and then he'll find ways to acquire the minimum of salary guys or whatever loopholes there are on the salary cap to get the $10 million a year guys.

28:15And, you know, if healthy, that's a team that can challenge the Celtics, I think. I mean, if healthy, I mean, what's the condition of probability in all three of their big three being healthy? Probably the below 50 percent, frankly. But you know, but you don't want like the average outcome and also the incentives in the NBA And if you try to like model out what the true discount rate is for sports general managers I mean they have some absurdly high Discount rate like 30 % or something like that or 50 % because they their jobs last for like Five years. Yeah, right. And so you know, I think it's a fairly smart play to swing for swing for the fences Luca overrated or underrated Well, I lost a fair bit of money trying to bet against some average in the playoff, so I can't call them underrated or can't call them overrated, I guess.

29:02I think Luca is properly rated. Properly rated. And who's the most underrated player in the NBA? I guess. I guess. I guess. I guess. I guess. I guess. I guess. I guess. I guess. I guess. I guess.

29:23I guess. a little bit. I mean, I think some of the Celtics, like, you know, Derek White, I think is a very underrated player, you know, because I'm not, I mean, I like Jason Tatum and Jaylen Brown, right? But I think, I think, you know, they are maybe respected, like the, you know, seventh or eighth and like the 23rd best player in the league and they were like a great historic team. And I think that, you know, the holidays and the, and the, and the Derek Whites and players like that are maybe like top 30 NBA players, like really really good. I think I'd say, Joe Kitch, who to me is the greatest offensive player ever, not necessarily recognized as such.

29:57Certainly has a very high reputation, but maybe not as high as it should be. No, people are, I mean, even this year, right? You saw people willing to kind of turn on him a little bit. I don't think people, I mean, I think the consensus now of smart NBA nerds that he's the best player in the league, I think people might not realize that this is one of the highest peaks of any player in NBA. Exactly. Every. Yeah. I don't think that's why they recognized. How will AI improve sports analytics? I mean, I think it will improve things in areas like computer vision things and classifying plays and things like that.

30:29I think will help a fair bit. I mean, sports is where, because it's kind of in this medium data environment where it's not quite a big data problem. But you could have more data if you put money into it, right? Yeah. No, I think it'll help more in the sports where they're kind of like less linear. I think things like classifying strategies and soccer and football where you have a lot of things happening at once And you can't kind of have your nice little regression model I think I think as compared to say baseball where baseball is kind of very easy to represent with kind of classical statistics So, you know, I mean, I think you'll probably be able to also be where it enhances like the sports viewing experience in different ways I think it'll help like sports video games a lot.

31:11So our hockey and combat sports gonna use more analytics in the future I mean one of my friends named Sonny Metta is an analyst for the Florida Panthers and assistant GM and and he's an analytic guy from a poker player former jazz musician and just won the Stanley Cup in Florida so so it's transitioning in. In all the sports I think I mean hockey probably of the big four in the US is considered the most old school but yeah I mean the markets fairly fairly efficient and I think people have you know we're kind of. Long past the old boys network in most of the sports probably in hockey if you talk to Sonny he'd say maybe Maybe two thirds of teams are fairly smart and when third of them are still kind of are still kind of dumb I think it probably passed the low hanging fruit from money ball Gaines stage, right?

32:00There's a question I was asked during a Jane Street talk once what is the most underrated basketball statistic for judging a player? Well, it's contextual because they you know, I think like we've gotten on the point now where like But offensive rebounding has gotten underrated, actually. If you try to tease out the effect of rebounding in statistical models, then there are various kind of things where different variables are correlated where, basically, I think if you look carefully, then offensive rebounding is actually quite valuable. I mean, you regain a whole possession that's worth a lot.

32:33Whereas defensive rebounding is kind of, you know, rarely as an individual player doing something right to get a defensive rebound, where an offensive rebound requires like a a lot more skill and provides a lot more value. Cause the expectation is 75 % chance that like, you lose the ball. So, so if you get an offensive rebound, that's like adding like, you know, seven, 10s or eight, 10s of a point, basically. You get a whole possession back. My answer was team wins. At least if you've been on more than one team, like does a good team want you? That's picking up your intangibles. Yeah, look, I think uniquely in basketball, because it's five players in a lineup at any given time, and a good player can control, you know, half the offense or more literally, Luca type player or Steph Curry type player.

33:14Yeah, I think it's a more adequate test in basketball than other sports, or maybe for an NFL quarterback, right? I grew up kind of in baseball as my favorite sport for a long time and there it's more individual and there I was always kind of fighting against the team wins, arguing like I think it's like not, not a major indictment of Mike Trout that the Angels haven't been good very good. But it's not just you causing possible wins, even before you've played for the team, the fact that they want you, says something good about you. So like KCP has been wanted by good teams. His stats are good, but not awesome, but that is a good sign about his quality.

33:48I think so, although we start to get into circularities when people become kind of aware of that kind of thing, I mean, I feel like this way a little bit with like prediction markets too. And I, you know, I consult now for polymarkets, so I'm kind of officially a champion of prediction markets. But kind of when people believe, oh, the traders must be doing something really smart, therefore it's trustworthy. It kind of can become circular logic, I think sometimes, where you can make yourself vulnerable to thinking you have blind spots and kind of having like a bystander problem basically. But yeah, I mean you have to someone actually has to have Alpha they're providing value either providing and then other people can kind of Can kind of drift off that or what's draft off that?

34:28I'm thinking about the cycling term, but now and then Someone thinks that everyone else is vouch for somebody. It's kind of like the story of Sandbackman Fried in the book a little bit that everyone assumed that because he has such prestigious Coat tails that he's hanging out with Anna Windtour and hanging out with you know Bill Clinton and Tony Blair and like He has his name up on a basketball arena in Miami and he's getting his praises sung by everybody and Sequoia capital and things like that that like you know At the heart of it. I mean it was kind of a big fraud. I mean that's a term. I'm choosing Intentionally and what's your model of his risk taking behavior?

35:04I mean, I think he, I mean, like interviews with you, I mean, I think I think he is quite insane. I think as a term, my, you know, irresponsible and insane, but like, you know, I think he was very literal about like, he'd literally be willing to like take the St. Petersburg paradox bat where like if you could improve his version of utility by 2 .001x, like he would like literally say, hey, I'm a strict utilitarian. I'm willing to take that gamble. I think I think he was like, like, you know, in my interviews with me, he was almost proud of the high risk of ruin that he was taking. And he would say things like, if you're not willing to like, actually literally ruin yourself, where you're literally a laughing stock then you're doing something wrong.

35:49Is asking whether he might have been associate path, a substitute for a risk analysis of his behavior or is it a way of getting at the proper risk analysis of his behavior. No, I think that term is properly used, because it's also engaged in with other people and running a giant company that people have deposited millions of dollars with and invested hundreds of millions of dollars in. And I think that's a proper frame. I mean, the kind of combination, the book is all about people who have this. I was going to say risk taking gene. I realized it's a little bit imprecise. I think we probably use genetic in part.

36:25But how is that pair with other different qualities? You know, the most common pairing in the book is being really risk -taking with really analytical, which is a very powerful, I think pairing. And you use this phrase, what those people are in the river on the river? What is it called? It's called the community of the river. So the river is the virtual community of like like -minded people, but that includes everything from poker to Silicon Valley, if you go kind of further upshim as I call it, even things like effective altruism and rationalism. Like one thing that I found in the book is I kind of had this outline of like, here are all these areas that are interesting to me and kind of literally start out.

37:01I mean, the first act I took for the book was I flew to Florida, my first trip on a plane after the pandemic and went to a giant casino in Hollywood, Florida and played a poker tournament and just kind of like and branched out from there. But like, but the commonality you have between how the, how all the different analytical nerds think, right? Right. How the effective altruists and the hedge funders and the poker players and the VCs. I mean, it's like not exactly exactly the same thing. Those are very different groups, though. Don't some subsets of those groups get fooled to an especially high degree.

37:34So maybe not the hedge fund people, right? They face very strict discipline, but the effective altruists, the rationalists, there's something to me a bit clueless about them, maybe systemically. Yeah. I think the EA and look, the book has a very long discussion of EA and in the spirit of EA, I'm sure it'll get reviewed. you it on these different forums and I hope it that's a mostly like E a to be clear. I most like them. There's still some epistemic defect in the people that I observe. I think they're a little bit, I think they're a little bit too trusting is one thing. You know, I think there is a lot to be said for having skin the game as a term that I didn't invent.

38:07But like, you know, I think poker players one of their best qualities is they have really good BS detectors, right? And they've seen like lots of smart SPF like nerds who go on a winning streak and win a couple of tournaments and like, and better bullshippers and like aren't all there cracked up to be. And I think, I think EA's maybe kind of lack that, that BS detecting ability. Do you ever see that old YouTube video when Ali G presents to Donald Trump, pre -presidential Trump, and Trump just dismisses him immediately and walks away? Right? So Trump has the BS detection ability. And how does that fit with your model of the river people?

38:45Isn't he, in other ways, almost the opposite of the analytical river people? I mean, so I will say if you take the EAs and put that in a separate camp, I mean, they are unusual because they have this analytical skill set, but they are less competitive, I think, but then kind of the movement gets you served by this guy Sam McManfried, who's extremely competitive. and I think run circles around them in some ways, even though he's kind of lying about things in other ways. Maybe competitiveness is good. And like, you know, I mean, the book is also against Peter Singer form of kind of selfless utilitarianism where, you know, I worry that people aren't, that aren't, I mean, some of this comes from like your critiques, I think, but like, people that aren't like a little bit partial, then I worry that everything just kind of falls apart.

39:34on some level, right? There's no incentive compatibility without some partiality. There's no incentive compatibility and you know, it's interesting. I think Peter Singer too talks a little bit about how like, he almost thinks people that are like somewhere on the spectrum are actually better, moral reason that he thinks in some ways. There's evidence for this and some papers in fact. Yeah. They have less data, scroll by, yes, they're more impartial in some ways. Yeah, I think there might be something to that. And there are lots of people in the book that probably would be classified as being on the spectrum will reclassify themselves that way.

40:04Poker uniquely, I think, involves some combination of analytical skills and street smarts. If you totally lack the street smarts, then I think it's still pretty hard to get ahead in a kind of competitive world. You're too lucky to be taking advantage of. Your father was an academic. Did you get your street smarts from him or from somewhere else? Probably not. My dad's a sharp guy and he would do things that were difficult problems. like he tried to basically, he was a Sovietologist back in the day and would try to interpret from rigged Soviet data like what the real vital statistics were, right?

40:40How many burst deaths? So he's like yours. Yeah, so it's yeah. Things have become more like criminology all the time in US politics. Yeah, so that involves like making inferences from, from incomplete data, right? At one point he was, you know, offered me part of a team to kind of figure out how many the desk there had actually been in the Holocaust. I think thankfully turned that down because that would be a thankless task for sure. But yeah, but he was starting out by working with data that was imperfect and adequate, sometimes abricated, and trying to find the real inferences from there. But no, look, a lot of it comes from being very competitive, right, being on debate team and things like that in high school, you know, playing poker for many years now.

41:22You know, having a fair amount of life experience, I mean, we've talked about before about how I'm a little bit ran bunches and easily dissatisfied. And at this point, I think I've traveled not like you, but been to a lot of different places and things like that and talked to a lot of people. What's the stupidest risk you're willing to take? There could be, oh, I'd go in a submersible with a billionaire or I'd take a helicopter ride every week or what's your stupidest risk? I mean, maybe not thinking enough about it. I've tried to become more healthy over time as a boring answer, right? but I think I still probably have too much of a short -term bias in terms of not doing enough things to help extend my lifespan and things like that.

42:02I mean, I know. One time when I was like 10 or 11 years old, the one at Sleepaway Camp, one of the instructors dared me to walk around this pond with only a flashlight at midnight or something like that. For some reason, I didn't know why. I think they got fired. It was like a big scandal or something. But that doesn't sound risky if you're walking around the pond. You're not walking on the winter ice, right? No, to be fair, right? But like you're 11 years old and you're by yourself and you have only a flashlight. It's probably not the smartest thing in the world. I think my stupidest risks might just be road trips in places where the drivers are bad.

42:38Oh for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I should do less of that. I went to Costa Rica a couple of years ago, right? And you're like, it's very rainy there. Obviously, it's the part of Costa Rica that I was in. Yeah, and you're probably doing things like, you know, going swimming on these, I mean, the waves and Costa Rica are really something, right? But it's probably, probably like objectively pretty dangerous to be, you know, in the Pacific Ocean without a lifeguard nearby. It's probably fairly dangerous, right? Yeah. Or going up some growl road in the middle of a rainstorm. But I think people need some, you wouldn't want to take that risk constantly, right?

43:12But you have to, I think you have to like live a little bit, you know? But what's the way you would describe or think about what it adds to your life? Because I do know people who don't do any of that. Maybe they're missing something, but what is it? What is it exactly? I mean, I think probably it is genetic in part. There is some like quote -unquote thrill -seeking gene. You know, I like spicy food. For example, right? You know, I like travel. I like experiences that are more visceral. I mean, I think there I think there has to be some innate component and people I've talked to that like I've talked to in the book.

43:42But it's like mostly quants and things like that. It's like, you know, hedge fund people and poker players. There is one section of people who are physical risk takers, people who are like literally like explorers. I talk to an astronaut, for example. And they'll say, yeah, if you talk to the people who are who are mountain climbing, right? Scaling the seven summits where you're up 28 ,000 feet and you actually have some risk of dying, like there are community things. There's something, something genetic about it. They think it's like related to a certain type of stoicism almost. But what's the richness they get added to their lives that maybe I would not?

44:16Because I'm somewhat risky with travel, but I'm not at all risky with physical activities. I think the notion of cheating death has to be kind of, has to be kind of thrilling, right? I mean, you know, I think some of them are maybe a little bit depressed in some ways and it's kind of like a not quite self -destructive or suicidal, but adjacent to that, right? Like maybe a figure, well, you know, I'm a little depressed and so I can kind of like, I can have a lot of fun and cheap death or if I die and then maybe it's not that bad. I mean, I know it's kind of going to a dark place, right? But like some of like, some of Sandvikman -Freed's confidants who are I think in a very different category than like these mountain climbers or things like that, right?

44:59They would say things like, well, he was kind of miserable anyway, right? So he wouldn't necessarily mind going to jail because his day -to -day life, he just, he was depressed and kind of unhappy. And so therefore, you know, that's probably a pretty bad reason to be massively risk -taking. But I think there might be some element of that. I mean, maybe you think of like a... It's going in a slightly dark place, but like an ethnic ordained type, right? is someone who you would think of as being very risk taking and like, you know, like probably traveling to places where it's objectively pretty dangerous.

45:33I'm sure you're like a very adequate crew with him and things like that. He never struck me as a risk taker. I mean, he's always going to places that look dangerous and aren't. Would be my sense of what he did. Yeah, I mean, I guess maybe I'm kind of revisiting now in light of his suicide, right? But like, that's a personality type that like, but you know, but he liked it. He liked to drink and do drugs and eat spicy food and things like that. And I think you kind of see like a cluster, and you had that, you know, some obviously a pension to travel and things like that. I think you see some cluster of personality traits there.

46:03Do you ever think much about how broader world history of politics and political leaders may have been shaped by drugs and alcohol? So there's a book about how many of the Nazi commanders were high on different kinds of speed. I don't know how true that is. There's a book about Soviet Union. It's called vodka politics. Sembank -Mentree, there's various allegations, what he was taking, you see the photo of whatever on his desk. How important are drugs and all of this? I mean, I'm not a historian of drug culture or things like that. But you must have talked to all these people. You've thought about it, right?

46:34Yeah, look, I think in the case of SBF that like drugs are maybe less a part of it than some things. But look, I mean, look, I think in general that history is often quite contingent on very flawed human beings. There's good math. Eglaceous posts about this in the context of decisions about whether people run for president or not from Joe Biden designed a step down to like Teddy Roosevelt and things like that. And when you kind of do have some access to really smart people and kind of the halls of power, I mean, people are often, are often kind of winging it. You know what I mean? Of course. Usually.

47:08Yeah, but you're not. How can you do this with limited information? And no second chances. Really? Often no second chances. You know, I do think that people who are risk -taking tend to prevail for various reasons right? Because they are the people on the right tail of the graph. I think financial risk taking probably has some positive correlation with risk taking as far as substance use, not that high, but maybe like 0 .2 or 0 .3 or something like that. So yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if more important decisions than we think in the history of the world have made in various states of intoxication.

47:42If the status quo bias should political leaders take drugs more, before Joe Biden dropped out, right? We've been a funny scandal. Maybe Joe Biden should have slept with the porn star and taken some shrooms. It would have like changed his evaluation to the way people viewed him a fair amount. And we've had a couple of like T totaling presidents twice in a row, which is interesting, I think. I'll probably give like the standard kind of centrist, left to center answer, which I think probably psychedelics are probably for some people pretty good, probably pretty dangerous for other people. You know, otherwise I, I don't know.

48:23I think probably some people are able to kind of simulate different states of consciousness in different ways naturally. You know, if drugs are one way to kind of get to play, to role play a different person a little bit, then I think that probably is helpful for a fair number of people. Is the US presidency now and an age of what you might call parity in NBA terms, a series of one term presidents, one after the other, just like the NBA champions keep on turning over and there's no dynasty. So we had this long era of dynasty, you know, bush clinton, my goodness, whatever else. And now it's over and there aren't going to be repeats or what's that going to look like?

49:01So I think part of it is a result. And yeah, so if Trump wins again, then I'll be limited to one term. So you would therefore have three one term presidents in a row for the first time since I think like like 1892, which I was trying to look that up the other day. So I think one thing that happened is that like the Canon slogan, I'm 46, so Carter was president I was born, right? But like the kind of Canon that you emerge into when you're kind of first covering politics is post -World War II politics, kind of, you know, 1946 through Bill Clinton, 1996 or whatever. That was a period of historically very low polarization in the United States.

49:39I mean, you have lots of things going on, right? This is like de facto three party system with northern Democrats and Republicans and Southern Democrats, but you know, but you had relatively low partisanship, a lot of bipartisanship. A lot of things are going well. Things are going pretty well. It's a good time for the US. When coming presents get reelected by landslide margins. There you off and there's a lot of goodwill. If you go back though to like the kind of turn of the previous century, so the kind of Grover Cleveland years of every year, the election is separated by two points, right? And you bounce back and forth quite rapidly.

50:12Like that's kind of that's an area of a high polarization and kind of more like the era that we're in right now. So yeah, I mean, even before Biden's age and other problems, the income and see effect if you cheese out carefully has really dissipated in elections for Congress. We have a fairly large sample size. And in the presidency, you know, you may now have two incumbent presidents in a row who are voted out of office. I mean, technically you'll probably come along now. But yeah, so there is precedent for it, but this kind of era of comedy, this kind of post -pollabortou era of comedy that we think, C -O -M -I -T -Y, not C -O -M -E -D -Y, that we all think of as being normal, is actually kind of more of the outlier in some ways.

50:48How long will it be before we have AIs who are better predictors than you are? It depends on... It's like a... let's say it's a centaur model. So the AIs sits down and says, Nate, you know, please talk to me for half an hour, tell Tell me your thoughts, tell me what you know. You give it your best half an hour worth of consulting on say the next presidential election. And then we just get rid of you. I mean, we send you out off to pasture. And the AI does the work. And you're paid like a small fee. And it does the actual prediction. How far away is that? I think election forecasting is kind of like an oddly hard problem where the mathematical the mathematical structure of it is fairly complex.

51:29The data is quite sparse and you often have to make kind of judgment calls based on incomplete information. So that might be kind of one of the relatively more robust areas. But it could have an hour of your time, right? It could pay for more if need be. Okay, then where's the line between me using an AI? I mean, in some ways, the book is like, in a very limited way, but the book is kind of like AI enhanced in different ways, right? Yeah. And so look, I'm not like a, I am not convinced necessarily that we're going to achieve super intelligence. I think it's plausible wish that it kind of like flat toes at very smart, generalist, gaming capabilities and is very good in certain areas.

52:14But I'm not, I become a little bit less convinced just kind of in the last six months, I kind I had to send the book into the printer basically of the inability of achieving super intelligence. I mean, I think that maybe it's not super, but let's say until an AI is as good as one of Phil Tatlox super forecasters, I would say that's three to four years away. It would be my guess, maybe closer to three, maybe even two. What would you say? I would take the over, I think, on that. But over as in 200 or over as in, oh, it's five years away. 15 or 20. 15 or 20. That's a long time. Yeah. Yeah. So GPT five is not going to allow you.

52:53I mean, it allows me in certain I mean, someone who's kind of fascinated with with language, right? You know, I'm fascinated with with the way language is a mathematical size in different ways and you know, one of the in the book there is a lot on AI including like reasons to be Optimistic or pessimistic about p -dume. Your readers probably know what p -dume is. I said, Yeah, okay, if they don't know they deserve p -dume, right? But it does seem plausible to me that like Large language models reveal more about the kind of mathematical structure of language than about Just the intelligence of AI, right?

53:28They can now do math Olympiad problems, right? So there's one forecast by someone working on this that within a year they'll win math Olympiad's Could be wrong, but when you say that it's only a year away. I would take that pretty seriously. I think Prediction is actually a pretty hard skill that probably life experience helps. I mean, you know, sometimes a prediction, right? If you're trying to like, predict like you have a phone book of millions of records, right? And you're trying to predict, you know, what's the likelihood that this spam email will be responded to in result in additional sale?

54:00I mean, I'm sure like AI is already better than humans at that. But things that are less structured, I think, are harder for AI's and hard for humans. And why do businesses not seem to care that much about most predictions? Surely this has puzzled you. So for 20 years, I've been waiting for prediction markets to take off. Obviously in politics, sports, it's more than up and running. But most areas, they're pretty weak. What's the actual problem on the demand side? I think this may be changing. I mean, one of the things I did in trying to kind of figure out my next steps after after 538 slash Disney is, you know, they're talked to different financial firms and hedge funds and mall street firms about different types of consulting arrangements.

54:46You know, clearly there are players in the market who are thinking carefully about political risk and other types of risk that you can price adequately by prediction markets. And I think, you know, I think there probably is some notion of critical mass where you have, when you have enough kind of liquidity and enough volume to have relatively efficient pricing. I mean, I think we may now be, you know, at that threshold, but we weren't like four years ago or something like that, right? But take a truly important commercial question like, will China invade Taiwan or when will they invade? I've looked at different markets or pretend markets on that.

55:23I just don't take those seriously. It's not that I feel I have a better estimate, but they don't cause much updating from me. I think that the time horizons might be too long to be actionable necessarily. In the same way in sports betting, you can probably make money on futures bets, right? If I were to bet right now, and like, who will win the NBA title in 2024 or 25, there are probably some plus EV bets there on the surface. However, that means I would have to tie up my capital for a year, right? There might also be some risk that the site I bet on goes belly up or something or that I die or something.

55:59and so like it's not, it's not these long term bets I think are, but that's not very long term. I mean, that's less than a year away. And T Bill rates, they're higher than they were, but they're not that high. You have some marginal funds and things like T Bill's. Well, you're in good enough health. You don't want to do this admissible with the billion there. Well, like oftentimes your edge in sports betting is like, is like two or three points, right? Yeah. Two or three percent as an ROI. So if you're like, if you know, you can put in the S &P 500 and to make 8 % then it becomes a negative EVB.

56:28But that gets back to my point. People should only bet in essence on US equities and nothing else. And they're sort of fooling themselves in these other areas. And if they want to spend their money that way, I'm libertarian enough. But I'm not that enthusiastic about it. And I don't bet myself at all, really on anything other than buy and hold and diversify. I mean, it is fun. It's not fun for me somehow. Yeah. But I'm a person who's never bet. I go to Las Vegas, I'm not even tempted. I don't bet on any games, I don't do slot machines. Like what's wrong with me from your point of view? No, it's probably rational and various robust and narrow senses of the term.

57:08And again, I'm not somebody who's like that they go in casino gambling, but like, but like it's the intensely competitive nature of things. I mean, if you look at, there's something called like an Aagram, do you know this? Like one of the different personality, yeah. So the two rarest anagram types are the type that the type that's really analytical basically and the type that's really competitive And if I take my anagram chart or anagram, I'm not sure how you say it. Those are the two where I have the highest scores So something about you know, cuz typically you think about oh who is someone who's like Analytical well, maybe they're kind of like an actuary type.

57:42They're they're calculating You know, maybe they're somewhat risk -averse. Maybe they're somewhat maybe they're on the verge of being like a little bit neurotic, right? That's kind of the stereotype. And people in the book are not that, right? They're analytical, but they want to like look a lot of times they had things in their childhood. Like a lot of people like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, for example, I mean they had childhood trauma, but not so traumatic. And they had enough privilege in different ways that they were able to still, you know, have people take their phone calls and things like that.

58:14But like it's often people who something I think went a little bit, hey, wire, and they're not necessarily kind of strictly rational in some sense. Last few questions. First, where do you want to travel next? So I have a good friend who's Korean American. We're hoping to go to Korea in December. That is cold. I've done that. In fact, I love Korea. Yeah, I don't know about December. I've been very little to the Middle East. I'd like to go there. And why we're talking about Israel a little bit before. Last question. What is it you want to learn about next? One of the problems with writing a book where you take all the things that you really love is that you use a lot of your ideas.

58:49I think a lot. I'll give you a dumb idea. I'd like to learn more about pot limit Omaha, which is a former poker that haven't played very much yet. Yeah, I have a list of things. I want to learn more about European soccer, pot limit Omaha, and wine basically. Those are all things that I think I would like very much, but I've never quite explored fully. Again, to repeat Nate's book on the edge, the art of risking everything, Nate Silver, thank you very much. Thank you, Tyler. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.

59:24If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm At Tyler Cowan and the show is At Cowan Convose. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.