Pushkin. Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making better decisions. I'm Maria Kanakova.
And I'm Nate Silver.
So today on the show, note, we're going to start off by talking about some of the current events that we have been experiencing in the last week or so, some personal ones like poker, some less personal ones, but very important ones like plane crashes.
Continue on this theme of everyday types of risk, we're talking about booze just in time for it not to be dry January. But there is a new Surgeon General discourse out warnings and Maria has and I have some thoughts on these.
And finally we're going to be talking about my area of expertise, the Super Bowl.
There's a lot going on. I'm like, I'm apartment hunting officially, Maria, I played some poker this weekend. I got fourth place in a tournament.
It was.
Four hundred dollars tournament. But you know, look, it's a it's a final table. It was big. Oh, it's a five card high low game. When I started playing, I did not know it was a split pot game. I thought it was a high only game. But nevertheless, luck box my way to a small but fun final table.
That's fun, well before we get into serious stuff, and there's a lot of serious stuff that we need to cover this week. I love that you were able to kind of pick up the game midway through. So should I be registering ina tournament?
It's kind of like, so in different ways, I'm both the best and the worst player at the table, right in terms of like overall tournament experience and like po knowledge. I mean this, I'm sure there are some pros there right, been a pretty recreational heavy field, so in terms of like kind of raw poker ability, But then like I won't know the equities in the hand, right, so you're very vulnerable to like, am I supposed to call a check braise with this hand? Am I supposed to value
at this? Am I supposed to bluff this? You're kind of guessing? And so that battle resulted in a pretty good result. But also you know, also feeling, I mean, when you have relative mastery over Texas Hold, which is a game that both you and I play far more than anything else, right, It's it's kind of frustrating, like I just don't know the answer to this, right, Like I haven't studied this game, and like I'm just guessing and like trying to improvise, and and so it's chat.
One reason I like the mixed games is because, like it's a challenge for your poker brain, right, You're trying to take these concepts and apply them to a different canvas.
Well, I think that that's a really interesting overarching point that we are going to be actually talking about in some of the more newsy segments on today's show, which is kind of the way that our perceptions of risk
can translate to different environments. For someone who is a poker player We've talked about this a lot, who actually does have that innate sense of probabilities, I'm guessing that you were better able to kind of get those risk assessments right than somebody who who wasn't right, who is just trying to go off of random experience or something
like that. So I think that that's a really interesting point because when we talk about things that you know, like plane crashes, you know, risks in our daily life, alcohol, et cetera, it is interesting to try to see, you know, how can we calibrate risk perception based on past experience. And I think that this little this little poker Foray into a game that you had never played before. Is a really fun lens into that. Congratulations on your first final table of twenty twenty five, right.
Thank you? Yeah, no, pretty good start.
I hope it's the first of money Nate. So shall we shall we move on to slightly less fun topics. There has been a lot going on in the news this week since we you know, since we last spoke, both politically and also in the sports news, and we'll be covering, uh, we'll be covering those as well. But yeah, you you had a very funny emergency post on sports.
Yeah, when I was playing this tournament, there's just like esp and my phone's dead. It's like one in the morning at this point, right, and like there's an ESPN alert that Luka Doncic, the Great Dollars former Dallas maverick, uh point guard unicorn, you could describe them as different
positions was traded in this deal. It's like totally inexplicable because usually you get a really high return, but was traded to the La Lakers for Anthony Davis and a bunch of crap and a first round draft pick basically, and yeah, it's probably the most shocking NBA trade in history. If you want to read more about my view on that, go to Silver bulletin my newsletter on substack. Tariff's another story running about this week. This is a very influx policy.
Full disclosure. We're taping this on Monday afternoon, East Coast time. Terrafts went into effect on China and Mexico over the weekend. However, an hour or something ago, Trump suspended for a month tariffs on Mexico after Mexico made some concessions, saying they would deplay a bunch of troops in the US.
Border ten thousand troops night.
We have a lot of leverage. There's a lot of game theory involved, both in terms of the domestic political reaction to the terriffs and in terms of these other countries. I mean, we have I was just looking at this, right, do you know that US exports are twenty six point four percent of Mexico's GDP.
I had no idea that is a high percentage.
Our exports to Mexico are one point two percent, right, so they can retaliate. We're like, fuck you, Mexico. But you know the fact that we're levering these allies is just kind of gross in some ways. But anyway, there's a lot to talk and I'm sure that'll be a theme that will hit on going forward the next couple of weeks.
Yeah, absolutely, I think it's going to be a really important topic. There are also there are a number of other interesting and concerning policies that have come out in the last week. I don't know if we want to get into all of them. Giving Elon Musk's access to treasury payment systems is something that I think is you know, it is notable, but has kind of gone under the radar.
What's going to happen to us for an aid? All of these things are I think topics that we might talk about in the future, but as of now, I think it actually doesn't make sense to talk about them because it's too much speculation. We don't know what's actually going to happen, we don't know how it's going to be enacted, and we don't know how much is Bark versus. But I think that that's kind of the bottom line on a lot of this.
And look, there's also so one thing that like I think poker teaches you, but also life stress. We both have lots of interesting life experience at this point, right, is like can you do with multiple things going on at once and prioritize? And it seems like Democrats are
not good at that. I think both kind of constitutionally that's a whole theory about like different personality traits, but also just like people aren't used to having like all these different stories at once, and prioritizing is essential and like, but people don't do it right. They tend to like focus on Like, so there's all this focus on the first week. Maybe the biggest story until the tariff stuff
and I'm playing crash was Elon Musk's salute. We talked about that in me a little bit last week, and like this is not the most important. We're trying to leverage our friends north and south of the border and Elon controls of Treasury Department payout system and like AI stuff. I mean, all this stuff is like quite a lot more important.
I wrote about multitasking briefly on my substack this past week because I think that it's so important to remember how our brain works, right, and how attention works, because it's really playing in And we talked about this a little bit. To Trump's strategy right overwhelm overwhelm. Overwhelm because our brain is like ooh yay, like I get to do all of these different things. It's really hard to focus, and it's really hard to kind of figure out what's
best on. Our brain is not good at that, right, Like our brain wants to be all over the place, and so this just plays into kind of the worst vulnerabilities in our thinking. That's why what I said last week, I think is still the message, which is focus, right, like, figure, reclaim your attention, focus on what's important, prioritize you need, you need to kind of see, okay, what are our priorities,
what's the coherent message here? And knowing that that, by the way, is not like a Democrat or Republican, that's just like a human failing. Right. Our brains are really really bad at that, right, and Trump is really really good at taking advantage of it. It's like, you know, like social media, right. Social media is designed to take advantage of that brain's inability to focus and the desire to have all of these different things happening at once.
And Trump, like the human walking social media, he's so good as just throwing all this shit out there, seeing what sticks.
Trump and social media and the regular media too, right, But algorithmically and editorially people are very aware of like what things make headlines, and kind of plane crashes are in a classic category where I mean it used to be I used to think when a plane crash in the US, this was like almost a hurricane type story for days. And you know, one reason why that's not as much anymore because there are far fewer plane crashes. Flying on airplanes on commercial airlines in the US is
incredibly safe. But you know, but when there are crashes, then then they freak people out, and that changes the incentives toward more and more safety.
Yeah, so let's talk about that. Obviously, last week was the first major aviation disaster since two thousand and nine, so it's been a one, it's been a minute, right, which goes to your point that general plane travel is incredibly safe, even though our risk perception gets overblown because we do have an outsize focus on events like this, as we should by the way, you know, I think, I think that it's actually important to hold kind of these these sorts of institutions to account in the sense
that one of the one of the things that has come out of this is that oh, Hey, there were a lot of safety concerns that have been ignored, a lot of safety recommendations that have been ignored for years, specifically with the DC air space. There were recommendations that the DC air space was already overstressed, and yet more and more flights kept getting added, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and people ignored them because nothing
had happened since two thousand and nine. So there's some really interesting statistics that near misses have gone up, actually a huge amount, and near misses is accidents that almost happen but not quite so since from a decade ago, we have a twenty five percent increase in runway incursions. So that's near misses just on the runway, which is a lot, right, not not that high in terms of absolute numbers, but in relative terms, something that's a little
bit worrisome. And we have near misses mid air, not just on the runway, you know, takeoffs, landing, all all sorts of things like that. But because everything tends to work out okay, people are just like, eh, it's totally fine. So this is a big logical fallacy that people commit all the time, and it's called the near miss fallacy. So it's almost leads to something that we talk about often on the show over Confidence, right that like, oh, it'll all work out. This means the system's working like
it's all good. No, it means that the system is barely holding on and you've gotten you know, how many times did it work versus you got lucky? And that's such a difficult thing to track, and both you and I know that you know, being outcome oriented is not the way to do it. You need to make sure that your process is intact.
No, And in fact, if you're doing some type of like statistical modeling, then near misses give you data and tend to actually increase the incidence of the thing that you fear going forward. Right, if if we intercept a you know, attempt, a terrorist attack on the Brooklyn Bridge
or something, right, that's not good news. Assuming the attack got like reasonably far along in the planning stage, that means that like the incidence of terrorism is maybe higher than we would have thought, right, because usually you know, when you look back at something like nine to eleven, you're like, how many different things had to go wrong
or right? And how many signals do we have to miss right, And it is true that to pull off like a complicated attack or any type of disaster where there are multiple redundant systems in place, like you know, two, three, four, things have to go wrong. But still if you say, if you say, oh, three things went wrong, but we got lucky in the fourth thing and it saved us. Right.
To take a more recent example, the fact that President Trump, than its cannony Trump was nearly assassinated, really bad news, right, yeah, really bad news in terms of like the rise of political violence in the US.
Yeah. No, the takeaway from that isn't great, but he wasn't assassinated. Sources to worked correctly, the takeaway is, oh shit, you know what happened to make that even possible? And so but the you know, but oftentimes we do the exact opposite, right, and people are like, oh, we don't
need to implement these recommendations. We don't need to you know, spend more money on this, We don't need to really relieve this airspace or whatever it is, because it's all been working out, no crashes since two thousand and nine. So this is you know, what happened was absolutely horrible, and it seems like absolutely preventable, and that overconfidence and kind of a lack of accountability on some in some respects is one of the reasons that we're having this
conversation now. So if there is a silver lining, I hope that it is that, you know, people actually start looking at the process and realizing that the number of near misses that we have both mid air, on the ground, takeoffs, landings are actually important. And as you say, like if you were building a statistical model, all of these things change your probability, and not for the better, right, your priority probabilities have to be adjusted, not in a good direction.
And so I hope that this is a wake up call. Do you think it will be? I don't know.
Okay, now I'm gonna see the controversial thing, right, I am not sure that it's rational to put more resources into aviation safety. Right, defined as follows right. So, the statistical value of a life is a concept we've talked about before on this show. Yeah, and that is how much are people willing to pay. It's not based on some bureaucrats in a back office. It's how much people willing to pay to ensure their risk of surviving or extend their life. Right, and comes out to about ten
million dollars. That if people could gamble and say I'll give you ten million dollars and you have a one n x chance of dying, right, I mean, you know, there's some nonlinearities, but it comes from like things like people being willing to do dangerous tasks, are being willing to have medical inventions or buy safety features, right, and across all different ways this is measured, it's pretty consistently about ten million. For aviation safety. It's much higher than that.
People fear. People fear hijackings, and they fear plane crashes. It would be an obviously terrible way to die, but like you know, not every time that, I mean, the failure rate should not be zero.
Right.
To take a much less serious example, you hear the phrase like if you've never missed a flight, you're not doing it right, meaning that like, if you're flying from New York to Chicago, go there are you know, fifteen flights an hour an hour? But a lot, right, not that much consequence to missing your flight. Obviously, any crash involving what are we up to, like seventy deaths roughly
is more serious. But at the same time, like you know, bad shit's supposed to happen some of the time because the alternative is that you are paying gigantic amounts for safety features. And I mean you see this, right, You see, like in construction of the New York Subway, for example, there are so many commitments to different groups and to safety equipments and a special interest that it just is
incredibly expensive to do anything. So you know, this is kind of more high level bravarian thinking to you, but like being willing to think about in terms of trade, uster, what is the price of reducing air traffic fatalities, right, compared to what we might spend on other things like road safety or medical safety or other things. Right. And the fact is that humans are pretty inconsistent, yeah, about kind of what they're willing to what risks they're willing to take action to prevent.
I think that that is a very valid point that we are inconsistent. However, I will kind of push back a little bit, not in terms of like overall spending, right, But what I'm talking about is how we respond to two different risks and what the takeaway is from near missus. Right. You could reallocate spending, you could not make stupid decisions like adding over sixty flights to an airspace that you've already been warned is overcrowded. This doesn't have to do
with pouring more money into it. This is just risk management, making different decisions, making different process decisions, holding yourself to different accountability, maybe reallocating some of the funds you already have to kind of two different things, looking at training, like looking and looking at models from the bottom up, and reassessing a lot of kind of the decision making along the way, as opposed to complacently saying, oh, everything's
fine or I think it's actually the lazy thing is just to throw money at it, right, because why throw money if you don't even know you know, first you need to figure out what are we fixing, what's going wrong? What's going wrong in the human decision making and the non human decision making? Right, like a where are the systems most vulnerable? And if we don't do that, I don't care if we allocate billions of dollars to the problem,
it's not going to help, right. That's what happens with bad financial decision making, where you just think, oh, you know, pouring money out the problem is going to help. So I think that that's kind of the way of thinking about it, not just like, oh, you know, like let's either allocate more money or not. I think that a
lot of people made bad decisions along the way. And this was also differences in priorities, right because people say, oh, well, you know, Senator X, Senator why, and Senator Z all need direct flights home, and so we're going to add those roots to you know, for that specific reason. That's really bad. Right now, what are you saying about the
value of human life? Right You're saying that this person's preference on when he gets home is much more important than the safety of all of the people who are flying through this airspace. Right, So there have been some questionable decision making results along the way, and I think those are the types of things we should be looking at. But I think your other point is very well taken and something that you know, we do talk about on
the show. But I think it's just something that's really worth stressing over and over because even though I know it, I still fall for it. Right when we do inconsistently take these risk assessments where we do, you know, we are too scared of a plane crash too, scared of a hijacking, not scared enough of, you know, crossing the street where our chance of dying is actually much higher, right and being hit by a car, having something horrible happen.
You know, we do have very inconsistent risk preferences, and that's something that you know, we should just constantly remind ourselves of, constantly remind our listeners of, and constantly remind our brains of, so that we try to behave more rationally, even though at the end of the day, emotion always
gets into it. It's really difficult not to have emotion in your decisions when it comes to you and immediate decision making as opposed to having kind of the time and space and leisure to think through it in a more rational way.
I remember I was in Costa Rica a couple of years ago with some friends and we were like staying at this airbnb on a hill and the coaster is very very wet, right, with like torrential thunderstorms like a lot, right, maybe every day, but yeah, we're like driving down this like dirt road in a thunderstorm in a country we've never been in before. Like, probably not the best idea, even though like they have incredible drainage systems, right, they're
used to this problem. But sometimes you gotta be like fuck it, you know what I mean. I mean, if you never take there's like a portfolio of like you should get like one fuck it card a year. I feel like, maybe, yeah, we could, we could talk about this stuff every week. Let's go on and talk about booze.
Right, yeah, let's let's uh, let's talk about some alcohol warnings. After this break, we have had some news coming out on the alcohol front. I don't know if it was time to coincide with dry January when lots of people decide to, you know, abstain from drinking, but that's that's when it came out. So the Surgeon General earlier had issue to report on the potential cancer risks associated with
drinking any alcohol whatsoever. And so are you know, there are now talks of putting morning labels like you have on cigarettes right on all alcohol saying, you know, sculling cross bones, you're going to die basically if you drink this, and a lot of people, a lot of wellness gurus, health influencers have been saying, yes, this is exactly right, zero drinking, you know, no amount of alcohol is healthy.
This is the way to go. And man, oh man, like I have, I have so many thoughts on this, Like this is like the most little for.
You, because I kind of I saw this news. Uh huh, I'm like, oh, that sucks. You know, it's nice to have some beer and wine now and then, right. I mean, but I didn't really want to process it because I didn't either like want to give myself like an excuse if I thought it was bullshit, or like didn't want to Facebook. I'm going to let you drive this segment because I know you've been researching us a lot.
Yeah. So, so first of all, let's just start off with the fact that all studies of alcohol and health are correlational, right, And the fact that they're all correlational not causational, that they're observational studies in the environment makes all nutritional studies, like not just alcohol, incredibly difficult to do and conclusions very suspect depending on how you parse data.
There are so many other variables because it's not like you take people from birth right and you say, okay, when this person turns twenty one, we are going to give them. We're going to control everything they eat their entire life. We're going to have all these people live in our little lab environment, and when this person turns twenty one, they're going to start getting a glass of wine right a day. And this one's not going to
drink at all. No, that is you know, maybe there's a science fiction novel about that, but that's not the way that this all works in the real world. Right, So in the real world, what we do in all of these cases is ask people, right, and have observational data. And there are some studies that have followed people for decades and decades, and you look at what their habits are. You try to control for stuff as well as you
possibly can, and then you see what happens to them. Right, who's getting sick, how are they getting sick, how long are they living, et cetera, et cetera, and lo and behold. In past studies when they did that, it turned out that moderate drinkers actually did better than people who abstained from alcohol all together. There was one big study that showed that light drinkers, so people who consumed one to three drinks per week, had lower rates of cancer and
death than people who abstained all together. There was a study of nearly a million people that were followed for over a decade that showed that abstainers had higher rates of death chronic disease, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's disease, chronic lung disease than light were moderate drinkers. There are have been a study of you know, millions of people that show that non drinkers had, you know, had higher rates of death than moderate drinkers. But this is all to say
that that was the prevailing wisdom. Now, all of a sudden, you know, we see other data that say, oh no, actually cancer rates go up. What the fuck? Right, Like this is true of so much nutritional advice, where we just get really really bad advice for a long time, and then it's upended, and then it's upended again. Cholesterol good, cholesterol bad, cholesterol, eggs, right, all sorts of stuff that's good for you, that's bad for you. Butter is horrible.
You should have margarine. No, margarine's going to kill you because of the chemicals in it. You should have butter. Right, All all of these things just go round and round
and round. And I hate when people make it into a moral crusade, which is by the way exactly what is happening right that like, oh this is good and this is the way to a long life, and this is bad and this is you know, this makes you a bad person and you are going to die because the other, the other flip side of it is even if you know, if I have a drink, if I have a glass of wine with dinner, and my risk of breast cancer goes up by one percent, right from an a you know or whatever it is that I
just totally made up that number, by the way, Okay, you know I'm willing to have that because it you know, do I want to live a life where I just don't do anything, don't drink, don't eat this, don't do that, don't do this, and just spend all day trying to live longer. No, right, Like that's that ain't the kind of existence I want.
Who's that Brian Johnson guy who's like drinking his son's plasma.
Anyway, Yeah, exactly, I'm measuring his son's nightly erections. Yes, I don't want to be that guy.
But this is like, oh my god, this is like a little bit of like a Silicon Valley thing now where like you know, I'm not sure, it's exactly straight edge living as people say, oh yeah, I'm silver, but then they'll take different types of drugs from psychedelics to whatever else can be included in sobriety, right, I mean, you know, it gets very difficult. And I do think there is this like I don't know, if you'd call it puritanism.
I would call it puritanism exactly.
There's kind of like a self improvement culture that you know, it's a little ascetic acsc I don't know how you're supposed to say that word, but like there's something about that, like, you know, even like even like the effective altruism movement in Silicon Valley is I don't know. It's also it's also kind of like a California thing, where like because if you're drinking socially in California, then you have this constant problem of like how to get places without drunk driving? Right.
Yeah, Well, I think that there are two things going on, and they do go back to the Silicon Valley in California, and in another way, one, I think it is puritanical, and I think that there's kind of this like moral judgment that comes with it that's like a part of
American culture and has been for a long time. But the other thing is simplifying, oversimplifying, right, this desire for like one solution that will make you live longer, where you take tons of data that is really complex, really difficult, where you can't actually draw conclusions, and you say cold plunge, right, yes, cold plunge a day, and all of a sudden, you're going to improve your health in your life, and for red saunas right, and that you don't actually look to say, oh,
that study was done on ten people and they were all finish and right, and all the confounders and all of a sudden, we have all of these things. So you see these things that are like these solutions that if you just do this one thing, if you do this and this, then all of a sudden, you're going to hack your you know, hack your health and this biohacking will make you live longer, be smarter, and all of these things. And so I think that alcohol is kind of one of these let's simplify and let's just
say you know, absolutely no, and it's wrong. This is and the best way to think about it.
You also find that you have people who are concerned about harm reduction or if you want to put it more in NATO Maria terms, kind of ev maximalization. Right, you get some benefits out of drinking. Maybe it's enjoyable, maybe it's good for your social life. Not advocating it either way, but like you know, people are doing it, and there's some costs in terms of health outcomes and other risks, right, and like you know, how can you reduce the more harmful ways to use this product? I
mean this comes up a lot, right with nicotine. I'm not to date with this literature, but like there are all these alternatives to cigarettes, zin and vapes and everything else come and you know, sometimes they're advocators, oh there are safe products, right, because they don't evolve the tar of cigarettes. Sometimes they're wrapped up and say there's just another gateway drug. I don't know what the liture on
that is. But like, but you actually have people who want to do harm reduction and people who are who are prudes. Right, And then you have that when it comes to like COVID stuff, you would hear things will mass just provide a false sense of security, and the alternative often imply was just stay at home and don't do anything for a year and a half until vaccines are widely available. So that's always that's always tricky, is kind of what are people's actual.
Mone for sure? For sure? And then I will also just close this out by saying that you know, the proposed let's put these warning labels and like basically say that you know, alcohol's terrible and is going to cause cancer. First of all, life causes cancer, right if you look at the cancer risks, almost anything causes cancer. So like, let's just let's just put a warning label on life. Life also causes death. You know, it's a it's a
really it's a really bad thing. But the fact that we're embracing marijuana the way that we are and vilifying alcohol is just absolutely like mind boggling to me because the data yet, yeah, the data on like the harm that can come from marijuana consumption, especially now where it's much stronger than it used to be, is a ton of long term damage that can happen to your memory, to kind of reaction time, to all sorts of things.
We don't talk about that, and we're like, yeah, pot good, because you know, for some reason pot is now good and alcohol bad.
People have to be like honest with themselves about what things they enjoy more or less. Right, Like, you probably have some matrix of like what is the risk of something relative to the personal amount of exactly enjoyment that it brings you? Right, And you know, sometimes I watch it knew more about the risks to a little you know, I have some heuristics that so this is really bad deep fried foods seem really bad. And then but sometimes they don't care. Sometimes you know, it's kind of your
every now and then you're indulging. But like but like, but having you know, really out that matrix would be helpful because you get confused, you hear, like sure, mixed vesteras a lot. They are different objectives, right, If you're trying to lose weight versus trying to reduce cholesterol, those are very different diets that you might consume.
Right.
I don't think we are going to do like a ton of like personal health stuff on the show, but we'll promise that when we do, it will not be like judge because a wee be like hypocrites and we trust people to make their own decisions. But like, you know, yeah, I would often like more straightforward information about is this thing that is build as being really bad? Is it actually bad or.
Absolutely you know?
Or not? Right?
Absolutely? I think I think that that's something that that we can all aspire to. And the unfortunate truth though is when it comes to nutrition, it is tough, but we can we can do a little bit more about that in the future. But do you want to take a break and then end on some super Bowl predictions or prop bets or just thoughts.
Yeah, let's do a few Superbowl bets.
Okay, Nate. So I'm so proud of myself because I, in order to prepare for this segment, I figured out who was going to be playing in the super Bowl. This is my level of interest. I was like, I was like, I got to I have to know who's playing. So I was I was very proud of myself. That is the extent of my super Bowl knowledge. So let's have you take it away. We've already talked about, you know, the odds of who you should be betting on the
Eagles or the Chiefs given where the odds are. But let's talk about some Super Bowl prop bets because this is something that you know, I think a lot of people are interested in and more and more sports books are offering just a whole array of them. How do you think about it? By the way, do you think that they're like, would you ever put money on prop
bets or you know, real money? I mean, maybe you'd put on ten bucks because you think it's funny or fun but would you ever actually like bet real money on prop bets or do you think that that's not kind of a smart way of looking at these things?
Oh? No, I so, actually in my book On the Edge, there is discussion about Super Bowl prop bets. But wanted to meet a guy named rufus pea buddy may be familiar to fans of the show. He has his own gambling related podcast with Jeff ma also featured in the book. And yeah, so he is somebody who like builds computer models and specializes in Super Bowl prop bets and is very high ev in them to the point where of course he gets limited, and you know he'll like, literally,
go is the West Gate the super book? Get the West Gate? I think casino where they're famous for their prop bets, will like set up camp and bring thousands of dollars where you are all have to make like two bets at a time, and you just like go to the back of the line, right, But like you these are these are beatable if you do research, and I haven't done the research, but they're chaunting on people
being lazy, right that they're recreational bets. They're a lot of fun, right, and so if you're sharp, And it's probably true by the way, for the Super Bowl in general, is that there's so much public money out there, everybody is making a bet that there isn't enough sharp money. There's not enough roofous pea buddies in the world to gobble up all that all that expected value, right, And so like you know, as of today Monday to third, seventy seven percent of the money on the point spread
is on the Philadelphia Eagles. That's probably a good sign that you should bet on the Kansas City Chiefs. See of course are sixteen and one, right, who have won two balls in a row have often had very hairy escapes from games this year, right are are are you know? But anyway, do you want to do some crop betting?
Yeah? Yeah, Well there's there's one that I know that people do bet on, but it's just to me, it's like so mind boggling, which is the result of the coin toss, right, Like, why would you bet on that? Of all the things that could be you know, predictable, modelable, et cetera, it's a coin toss. This is what we base a lot of our statistics on, right, the fact that a coin toss is fifty to fifty and yet and yet night it's like the.
Face tattoo of of gambling. Right, It's just you're so. I mean, first of all, heads does win like fifty point five percent of time or something?
Right, Well, in our limited data set of Super Bowls.
Well, no, but the reference class is like, isn't there wasn't that a study? Have we talked about this for like where like a coin flip is not actually random whatever aerodynamic shit it lines on.
The Yeah, well it depends on the coin.
Yes, and I guess it's a special Super Bowl commemorative coin with I don't know what the fuck on this.
I don't know about that one. But no, the study you're talking about there was. There was a study where it turned out that the two faces were not actually weighted equally.
If I were the Kansas City chiefs for the field of fit Egals, I would have a fucking intern spend the week researching what coin will be flipped and which side is like heavier, Right, I would optimize that strategy if possible.
What if you find out that neither side is heavier?
Uh, come on, I'm not gonna I think the side it's like once I with like a little l i X it's Super Bowl licks l I X. That looks heavy, right, there's like a lot of embossing and shit like that. So I bet on the on the LICKS side. I think, which is a heavier side, fall tend to come up on top.
No, the heavier side is going to be on the bottom, Okay.
So bet against licks. I think bet against the side with a big Super Bowl logo on it. And I don't know if that's heads or tails, so and probably not enough to whatever. Where are they are?
There?
Are they giving like minus one ten on this bets? You're risking eleven dollars to win ten? Right? But like if I don't know, I think there's some edge there, maybe with minus one oh one or something.
Well, we'll see, we'll see. And also do we know so maybe this is we're getting into the nitty gritty of coin tosses. Guys, do we know whether they always position the coin with the same side up before the flip or is that also random? Do they flip a coin to know where their heads or tails is going to be up when the flip starts.
I'm just telling you, this fucking Super Bowl logos had looks pretty fucking heavy. You know, I can't tell if it's in bosted or not, but yeah, Google superb commemorative coin.
All right, Well there's your.
Coupon code risky business for no I'm just kidding.
That would be hilarious. But yes, okay, okay, fine, we could do some research, but it's still likes. That's about as DEGENNI of a bit as as you can get. I think the coin toss. But there are also a lot of other lines that are available, such as will a player or a coach cried during the national anthem? That seems like a gimme, right, someone's gonna cry?
Yeah, minus three hundred, I think.
Minus a million.
Okay, look, I'll take I'll take no crying at plus five hundred.
All right, all right, let's say we could talk about that.
Okay, I'm betting twenty bucks at plus five hundred on no crying. If no one cries you owe one hundred bucks. Okay, let me.
Think about it. How do we define crying? It's tearing up? Is tearing up? Is tearing up a because I think I mean like you. I don't mean someone's going to like full out bawling, but like tearing up. I think for me counts. That's that's when I said, like minus a million, you have to.
See a tier. Okay, not merely watery. You have to see a tier.
But what happens? But we can't see everyone either, So who actually decides this?
But on the official whichevery Networks till us in the game, which should probably no official broadcast. It's on Fox on the Fox News US, not Fox deport this or whatever? Right the Fox News US feed during the national anthem? Is there a player or coach who has a tier in the ride during the national anthem? Picture on Fox?
All right, we can do it. How about ten dollars? Not twenty?
Okay, okay, fine, okay, we're we're.
Do you risking? And then and then you're on let's do it?
Any of their bets.
First song performed by Kendrick Lamar.
I look these odds up.
Does Polymarket, by the way, have odds for all of these Super Bowl bets as well.
I'm I'm and I'm an investor to POLYMCA. I'm sure, I'm sure you can. You know, Dja hard your heart's content, okay, not like us. Plus one humble plus two ten for you, plus three hundred by the weather is also a plus seven to fifty chance of a Taylor Swift cam girl friend of the Cansallity Chiefs taught in I have you know? Taylor Swift guests appearance is plus seven fifty. I guess I kind of like that. I mean she's in the stadium, right, Yeah, I don't know, I mean it would be Actually I don't.
I mean, I mean overexposure is a problem.
Right, what's this true? This is?
But yeah, you can, like, look, you can bet on everything, basically, any any other bits you want to make with me, though, Maria, No.
We got one. We got one. We'll report back on the risky business prop bet, I say, sadly, Nate, I'm too, I'm too Uh, You're you're too good. I can't. I can't bet against you, and I know nothing. The funny thing is, though these types of prop bets, you need to know absolutely nothing about football or about the actual kind of results of the game.
But there is like, what's a chance that like a foam ball return in the second quarter results? And you know, I like that kind of stuff.
Yeah, there are prop bets that are actually very much related to football knowledge and to the actual gameplay, but the ones we've been talking about are completely random. So I guess, Nate, you don't have any special insider knowledge. And I'm hoping that my knowledge of human psychology will render me on top on our crying that someone will tear up I believe where.
You actually find that. On Thursday, there's going to be a silver bulletin post about historic crying during the Super Bowl and empirical rates of crying every time. And now that's changed.
What was that voice? I like that?
I don't know. It's a blogger voice. I don't know.
Would blogger your blogger voice? Got it? And on that note, Risky Business listeners, we will see you next week where we will know whether crying did in fact take place. Let us know what you think of the show. Reach out to us at Risky Business at Pushkin dot fm. And by the way, if you're a Pushkin Plus subscriber, we have some bonus content for you. We'll be answering a listener question each week that's coming up right after the credits.
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Risky Business is hosted by me Maria Kanikova.
And by me Nate Silver. The show is a co production of Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia. This episode was produced by Isabelle Carter. Our associate producer is Gabriel Hunter Chang. Sally Helm is our editor, and our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein. Mixing by Sarah Breuger.
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