Pushkin. Welcome back to risky business show about making better decisions. I'm Maria Kannakova.
And I'm Nathaniel Silver.
You just can't leave it alone. You can't just mean Nate Silver. I'm gonna call you Nathaniel. This entire show just watched you go to.
Spend a litle time in Florida and there, Nate, n Ate is very often Nae if you have like for an example, Aver, so you know, Nathaniel might be might be needed in the mix a little bit here.
All right, Nate, let's uh, let's get going today on the show. We have some poker drama.
Nate.
We haven't oh sorry, Nathaniel, we haven't. We haven't done poker drama for a while. But this is poker drama that's squarely in the intersection of the poker world and the non poker world. And that as a writer as a creator, really grabbed me and I'm guessing grabbed you as well. And it has to do with the No Limit documentary series that was released a few weeks ago. But no, dear listeners, you will not be able to find it anywhere because it has since been scrubbed from
the internet. So Nate, do you want me to give a little bit of a rundown for.
Yeah?
All right, So, first of all, this was a documentary that was created by a collaboration between Gigi Poker, which owns the World Series of Poker, and Artisans on Fire, specifically Dustin Ayanotti, who followed last year players during the inaugural twenty five thousand dollars Super Main event in the Bahamas, which was the just ever guarantee in poker history. Lots of compelling storylines. I mean, it was a huge, huge event. I definitely remember seeing it from Afar. I was in
Vegas at the time. I did not play in it, but being like wow, like holy shit, this is huge. So Dustin I Andatti followed players around. According to their original release, they had over six hundred and fifty hours of behind the scenes footage from the event. Six hundred and fifty hours, Nate. That is a lot of hours, and it was edited down to eight thirty minute episodes. Six of them had been released by last week when
it came out. And I say it came out because there was no you know, there were no intimations or signs that this was the case. But one of the main characters. Alan Keating had watched one of the episodes where he appeared and was like, hey, I didn't say this stuff, like what is actually going on? And he called out the documentary on Twitter and was like, hey, guys, what's going on. Dustin admitted that he had used AI to advance the narrative and put words in Keating's mouth
that Keating never actually said. By the way, both Keating's original call out and Ionatti's Mia Coolpa have since been taken off. Anyway, long story short, he said, oh, but this is the only time I used it, Like, not really a big deal. Then there was another Keating who's not at all related, Alex Keating, who's like, actually, wait no, I'm going to raise my hand to because also you know, I see it in my stuff. Anyway, documentary has been
taken off. WSP apologizes and says that they are going to re edit everything and that's kind of that's where we stand right now. I have some very strong feelings on this that go far beyond this the poker world, and I'm sure you do too. I'll let you start since I've kind of been hogging the mic with the background of the drama.
Yeah, Oh, it was a one off thing.
It's like when people are like accused of handsiness or sexual harassment.
Right, usually not a usually not a one off thing.
It's usually a chronic behavior where you don't recognize a boundary of permission. Yeah, by the way, if you ever interview me for some shit like this, I hate watching myself on TV, so you could probably.
Just make me say whatever.
I mean.
You're too lazy to ever check it.
It's so funny that you said that. I was actually talking with my husband about this, and I was like, I would lose my shit if this happened to me, because I think both of us have appeared in dozens of documentaries, like I don't even know how many, but I never watch myself back, and I don't actually think that Keating watched himself back until somebody quoted him back to him and he was like, wait, I never said that, and then he watched Now.
Look, in all seriousness, I am reluctant to give any interviews for something that can be edited, even fairly or relatively fairly.
Right, if you're you know, if you're.
Tapping an hour with me and you're gonna clip five minutes out of it, or maybe fifteen seconds out of it, right, Like that makes me very nervous, right, yeah, you know, and I kind of feel like, and this is kind of advice to people in general. I'm sure we have a lot of influential listeners. Is like, yeah, you should understand kind of like what the journalist's motivation is. If the story's about you and your kind of primary character,
that's one thing. If you're kind of invited in to provide like color commentary, then yeah, I.
Would be a little bit wary.
But look, I think there are a couple of things going on here right, Like one is like a lack of recognition of what like good journalism or even journalism.
Good or not really is So, what's the guy's name, like Ianetti.
Some Dustin, Ionotti, Ionatti. Yeah, he I apologize if I'm mispronouncing it, and it's whatever.
It's a it's an American eye.
You go with Dustin, we get to pronounce the you know, if you're like Dante or something, then maybe you can italian ify it.
Whatever. Dustin, we get to pick how to pronounce your last name.
I feel like, Dustin, you're giving up your anyway. But mister Dustin posted a lot of not pretentious, but a lot of very long tweets on X where he's like, you know, poker is losing mind share to chess and f one and all these other things that should be
comprolled to poker, and we do much worse. And there are a lot of reasons for this, but one of the reasons is that we're not We're not good enough at like storytelling and narrative, right, which, Okay, I think people some people might say, well, okay, is it used okay to use chatchpt to do like a little copy of it on your on your script. Sure, I would think it's totally fine. Right, Is it usefull to use AI tools to clean up literal visual defects? I mean,
I think sure, it's probably fine. When you are attributing though a quote to some person, then you're not allowed to do that.
It's like a basic journalism thing. It's also weird.
It's also just weird because like, you tape all this footage and like, yep, can you really not make the story.
It's two hundred and fifty hours. I just keep saying that because it is mind boggling to me that you would have that much footage and say that for the sake of narrative, you needed to create something that you didn't have.
Yeah, it's kind of it's kind of lazy, you know what I mean, Like that in all that footage you can't find.
The quote.
I mean, look, yeah, sometimes when when you're writing, you're like, boy, I wish the subject had said that, right. Well, you can do though, if you're a writer.
You can actually say it in your own voice.
You're like, that's a good idea, right, or you can or or they are like legitimate ways to paraphraate. Well, you know, sometimes if someone like jumping around the meaning of something, then I mean, this is a little bit of a fine art. The BBC got in trouble recently for like splicing together two stippets of a Trump speech on January sixth that were like thirty minutes apart or something and made it seem like He's like.
Go attack the capitol right now.
Right, it was kind of like we need to go to the capitol blah blah blah, half an hour.
Blah blah blah.
He was long winded and go march there right now, and like okay, like that clearly was taken out of context, right like yeah, like I don't know when you use like the ellipses anyway, I'm getting like weird journalism stuff.
The point is it, like no, but you know what, this weird journalism stuff is actually important because it's been around for a very long time, and there are standards for a reason. For instance, the New Yorker and I think most magazines actually that I've ever written for do not actually allow you to allow sources to look through their quotes before you publish, right, Like that's because you're you know, you don't want someone to be like, well, you know, I don't actually want you know, to be
quoted saying this, Like you're on the record. You give the interview, like that's it, but you record, right, You have recordings, you have notes, you have all this stuff. You give all of that to fact checkers who actually go through and make sure that this all happened and
this all exists. The reason that we do this is that in the past there have been egregious malpractice issues with journalists who made shit up right and who actually did craft the perfect characters or the perfect stories because it suited their story whatever they were trying to tell,
and some of them got away with it. So at The New Yorker, someone who absolutely broke my heart was Joseph Mitchell, who died before I don't know if he died before I was born, but you know, this is a different era of New Yorker journalism, and Joseph Mitchell was someone I had really really looked up to as like a cub writer because his stories were just filled with these amazing characters, these amazing quotes, these amazing scenes, and I was like, wow, I wish I could do that. Right,
he writes nonfiction that's like fiction. He finds all of these amazing things and he brings you there, and it turns out his nonfiction was fiction. So as it turns out he actually did exactly what you were suggesting that and he's like, I wish this quote existed. I'm just going to make it up and I'm going to create a composite character based on the reporting I did, who says all of these things that are very convenient for
me to say. Now. Like I said, different era, at different time, the vaunted fact checking department did not work the way that it does today. It slipped through, and like I said, it broke my heart because it sets you to an absolutely unattainable standard. I was looking at this like, oh, this is what journalism is. No, this is what fiction is. And the reason it was so clean, with you know, all the bows beautifully tied, is because it was fiction. Now he's a beautiful writer. But he's
a novelist, right, He's a fabulist. He is not actually someone who is a journalist. And the reason I felt betrayed was because he wasn't saying this is inspired by He was portraying it as this is literally what happened,
and these are literally the people I talk to. When you are a documentary filmmaker, you are saying I am a documentarian, and we're not talking about someone like Ken Burns, right, who's doing a historic documentary about people who are no longer alive, and you have historic recreations, et cetera, et cetera. What you're trying to be you know, true to the characters. But you know John Adams and alive. Sorry so we
can't go and interview him. But when you're doing a documentary in the modern era, in real time where you're following people around, and you are saying, I am creating a real experience, and I am showing you the unvarnished truth, and then you use AI however, you use it without telling anyone that you're using it, without asking people is it okay to use it? There are just so many issues here that I think are going to become more
and more important to deal with as AI becomes more prevalent. Right, but this is something that's existed in journalism long, long long before AI.
Yeah, there's like Jonah Lair. I mean, look, I would see as a kissing cousin of this at least is also the data fraud scandals in yes, academic absolutely which often kind of found was like Jonah Lair, who is
Stephen Glass. Jason Blair was another or maybe young but like but where like, yeah, it makes a narrative a little bit too meet and perfect, right, And maybe I have like a more general critique of like journalism where like, you know, whenever I hear the word storytelling as it pertains journalism, I get a little bit nervous, right, because I think that often involves, at least over simplification. It often involves you know, turning characters into like good and evil,
sometimes caricatures a little bit. And look, I think I mean in Marie, the books that we write take a long time and involve a lot of research, right, you know, to me, it's also laziness kind of thing, right, where like you should be able if you know, I talked to two hundred people from my book, I should be able to find and I can also consult source material, I can read other books, right, Like, if I can't find interesting stories out of those two hundred interviews, yeah,
then okay, that's a problem.
It's a problem. I mean, what's weird about this world?
Shirts poke video is like the quotes from uh Keating are like similar to things that he would say.
And they're not really advancing them there.
It's like it's just no, it was just it was just it was very Yeah, I don't understand. But by the way, for listeners, just a bit of context. You threw a lot of names out. Jonah Lair was a journalist with The New Yorker as well, and he was fired for just major issues of fabrication. The reason he was caught was inventing a quote by Bob Dylan, right, the one person who you would never invent a quote from because the fans Bob Dylan fans man, first of all,
Bob Dylan's still alive. Secondly, Bob Dylan fans, they have gone through every single word that man has ever said with a fine tooth com and believe me, immediately when this quote came out, people were like, oh my god, when did he say this? It's such a beautiful quote about the nature of creativity. Never said it right, but
it was. It was very convenient. So that was yeah, that was jonah Laire And I think your similarity the similarity with data fabrication is if you're a scientist who has kind of a hypothesis in mind and the data almost fit, you know, it can be very tempting to be like, let's set massage this a little bit, right, let's take out these data points, let's control for this variable.
P hacking right, Like that PA hacking is the nice version of it where you don't actually fabricate anything, but you start controlling for random things so that your P value becomes significant, so that you hit that significant point five thresholder and you're like, ha, I told you. But then when asked like, hey, why did you control for this? Like why did you control for that? Like is there
any a priori reason or hypothesis. Oftentimes the answer is like, well, because it became significant only then, So that's kind of the benign version. And the less benign version is when you literally create data points or take away data points, or fabricate data out of out of thin air, which happened with allegedly happened with Dan Arieli and Francesca Gino in some of those studies that are being investigated as we speak.
I'll be right back after this break.
Yeah, you get different rationales for this, right. Sometimes it's kind of this like post modern Oh, everybody's doing it.
It's all a game for power and influence. Right.
Sometimes it can have like more of an ideological basis, like you know what, we're on the right side of things and the other chide embellishes and cheats and so like. And by the way, you can play plenty of examples of Democrats doing this, but like one that comes to mind is jd Vance, the vice presidential nominee in the campaign last year, was like, Yeah, these media narratives I'm paraphrasing, this.
Is not direct quote.
These media narratives about Haitian immigrants and dogs and cats might be a little bit exaggerated. However, democrats lie about shit like this all the time, and we need something to grab them me to use attention. It was kind of like a masscof moment where he's like a little bit more honest about that, and and you know, you see that kind of thing happen all the.
Time, right, I mean I don't know.
I mean, you know, and there's a difference again between like lies and exaggerations. I mean, some of the during the racial recogning, I think, you know, the behavior of certain people was exaggerated very much. I mean, there's lots of misinformation out there. Still, there's a lot of information about like there's a big controversy on Twitter about like AI data centers and how much water they use. I mean there's a lot of but like, but it's also
sometimes like a lack of like formal training. Right, if people kind of get into, like I guess more and more people that kind of get into like content creation don't kind of I don't know if it's actually empirically true, Right, I imagine a fewer them kind of go to school for journalism or whatnot. Right, they can kind of go like viral in their own ways potentially.
And.
You know, Yeah, when I was kind of the editor in chief of five thirty eight, which is partly a ceremonial title, but you did kind of notice difference. We mostly did hire people that were like, had a background in kind of capital jay journalism, and I think that helped with this kind of thing at least.
Sure. Yeah, well, you know, I think you're making a really important point in that, you know, we are living at a time where it's it can be really difficult to discern, you know, what's the truth and what isn't right, where like the lines are so fungible, like there's so much misinformation on every side, and it's true in politics and and everything, that it feels like when you then intentionally do it right, like you're you're just muddying already
muddy waters. And to me, it's all, you know, as as our listeners know, I'm working on a book about cheating, and it's all kind of these you know, forms of
kind of cheating with what your profession is supposed to do. Unless, like I said, I don't actually necessarily have a problem with using AI if you say, like how you're doing it, if you ask people for permission, if you kind of explain what you're going to be doing if you disclose it, right, if you say, like, hey, like this some of this has been generated with the help of AI for narrative clarity, right, like whatever it is, I personally wouldn't do that, but like,
at least do that and at least kind of have the decency to ask permission from the people who you are interviewing, right to say, like, is it okay if we if we edit you in this way? Is it okay if we use AI to kind of to move forward the narrative. I don't even remember what the wording is. But you have to ask for permission. Nay, I'm sure that before you do documentaries like like I do, you go through an appearance release form right where you actually
have to got all these things and sign it. I read that shit, and I actually read it really carefully, and I make changes, and I make changes that say that no, like, actually, you can't edit this way. No, I don't consent to the use this way. No, you must ask my permission if you're doing this or that all of these things. And I've had times when I've walked away when I haven't appeared in projects because they
weren't okay with my edits. And I had one particular time last year that was really frustrating because it was for this huge Canadian show and we spent multiple hours filming and it was all this stuff, and then they gave me, like almost as an afterthought, this absolutely batshit crazy release that I then edited the crap out of and we couldn't come to an agreement. So it was they had spent tons of money, right, they had flown out a whole crew, rented at a hotel room like,
done all this stuff with me. I had spent all this time, you know, it was a day gone out of my life. And I was like, you know what, but I'm sorry, you're not going to be using this because I'm not comfortable with the liberties that you may or may not take. Right. Maybe they it would have been unedited, but the things that I was agreeing to, I was like, I am not okay with that. I want to know exactly how the things. And it was political too, right, it was about Trump, so Nate, you know,
like that kind of stuff. You just have to be so careful that people are not going to be using it out of context, juxtaposing it with images or with things that make it seem different from your intention that they remain true to kind of what you said and how you intended it to be perceived.
Yeah, anything, This is very inside baseball. Anything involving traditional produced television or video or film, right, is like quite labor intensive relative to the amount of time that the eventual and product uses up, including what they able to shoot a lot, a lot a lot of footage with you and you got to go to some studio, and
it just usually it always takes there's multiple takes. It just always takes longer to produce good taped television than you might think, right, which is kind of why I'm I'll go on a podcast, you know what I mean. I don't have to like retake things. We very occasionally retake things because we stumble on our words and stuff, Maria.
But like, look a.
Lot of times when there's bad behavior, people say, well, what about this other thing that's also bad, and it's like, okay. We can debate about how much of an ethical sin is it to quote somebody out of context, or how much of a sin is it to let's say, you give a long interview to documentary and they take fifteen seconds out of that it's meant to portray you in a bad light out of the three hour interview for whatever grudge that they have.
Right, we can.
Debate is that unethical? Is it tantamount to like a journalistic sin?
Right?
And I might say more than most people that it is actually right. However, the things that are clearly journalistic sins we should not absolve because of the EDU case.
This is not an edge case, right, This is not this is this.
Is not an edge case. And I hate the excuse that, oh, well, it's not that much in the grand context of things. Right, it's only a little, it's only a few lines here, it's only it's not all the players, it's only no that that doesn't make it more okay, Right, Like I only fabricated this one quote in my article, Natee. The rest of it is from well almost certainly, No, I only I only fabricated that one data point to make it all max, which.
Is almost certainly.
Like why would you like, yes, you know, yeah, I mean if you're like, oh, I have this one annoying thing that like it's going to take extra time, but in order to do that, I have to like cheat and like, you know, just so it's just so it was also like it it's also kind of arrogant to think that I believe this guy, by the way, isn't he like the video producer for Alan Keating too?
He is? Yeah, that's the weird thing. So this guy who actually blew the whistle is someone who employed this company to run his is YouTube channel and so had
been working with them for about a year. So that's honestly, like to me, that's even that makes it even worse, Like Nate, imagine like one of our producers on Risky Business, right, we've been working with them, and all of a sudden we find out that they just ai generated an episode for us without asking us, Like that would that would make it worse if they actually then said like, hey, but we've been working together for multiple years now, so
we have a great working relationship. So it's okay, Like we and we remain true. We know Nate and Maria. We've worked with them for so long that we know what their thoughts are and where their minds are, and so we promised that this episode was true to their spirit unless we both die in a fatal accident, which I hope doesn't happen.
I hope, there's.
Never imagine let's I mean, now there's these things, these fucking AI companions like your dead fucking husband, yeah.
Child or stuff animal.
By the way, producers, producers just like just to just to make sure that you understand, it's still not okay if we die tragically, just do an episode yourself.
You can.
You can introduce yourself as hosts and and talk about you know what pain pains in the asses we were to work with while we were still alive, and do
a nice episode without our own voices. Yeah, it's just you know that in some ways makes it even worse because they're betraying an existing relationship, right, there's a level of trust there where like, if it's someone I've worked with a lot, I would trust that they wouldn't do that to me, right, that they would actually respect what I said, how I said it, et cetera, et cetera. To have someone it's almost it's worse to have it be someone I've worked with than to have it be
someone that I'm working with for the first time. So I don't actually think that that absolves them in any way. And you know, it was actually a very interesting impulse on Allan Keating's part two air this on Twitter as opposed to going directly to the producer behind the scenes, because if he had gone behind the scenes, I don't think any of probably this would not have come out. But I think that he clearly felt betrayed, right, Like, that's a very public way of doing it. And then
the original apology. I don't remember what his response to it was, but it was like, are you kidding me? Like the snow like that's not an apology. Yeah, apparently he said that the apology does not deserve a response, and you know why, So he was pissed, right, So this is a way to take it to the public form. I'm not actually sure why he took it down.
These guys who are like very promotion e They're like, oh, y'all help promote your shit, and you're like, yeah, this guy seems a little cringe. But maybe I need some cringe help, right, Maybe need some cringe help who will boost my social media channels and blah blah blah. I mean, how much poker content do you watch?
I watch poker content in the form of like instructional videos, right, Like I will watch run it once videos, I will watch the course that Isaac Caxton and you know, Nick Petrangelo and Dan Divores put out for gto lab I will watch kind of some of the videos that like gto Wizard does. I usually watch poker content to learn, and I don't usually watch kind of the dramatic what's happening in the world of poker content. I did watch
the first episode of this documentary. I ended up watching it on two time speed because it was really I'm sorry. Even before I knew about the AI, I was not enjoying it. I found it quite boring. I don't usually like to say I didn't say this at all publicly because I didn't. I don't like to say anything negative about content that might bring more people, you know, into poker or whatnot. Like it's not like there was anything bad about it. I just didn't really I think it
was good. But now that we know that it was boring while taking these liberties with with people's uh speech, now I feel perfectly entitled to say that after one episode, I did not think it was good and I never watch video on more than one X speed. I actually am someone who listens in real time. I do not speech it up. I spoke up that tells you something.
I'm a you know, I'm a good one point too.
By the way, Listen, you gotta be careful with the one point two one point three in the show.
I'm a pretty a pretty fast talker.
You can't apply your generic one point two's and one point two fives and one point threes to risky business.
I'm telling you. I'm telling you that much.
Yeah, there's this perpetual debate in the kind of poker media world about like content that's made for pros versus content that's made for for.
New players rec players.
Right.
You know, I think I probably agree with a critique that, like, too much of this content is too pro driven. Right, the content has shifted more toward heigh stakes cash games stream cash games because like you get a little bit more personality in there.
I mean, all the.
Critics are like partly true. Like one critique is that like before computers and solvers, there was more variety in how people played, and so you have more personalities and more different playing styles.
Right, I think that's basically true. Right. I think now that like with a theoretically unsound.
But good poker sense kind of skill set, I mean, like this Rocky might have that, frankly right, which is part of why he was instantly inducted into the Hall of Fame.
And for people who don't remember, Mike Musraki is the winner of the World Series of Poker main event this year, the Grinder, and he also won the Players Championship, and yes, was immediately inducted into the Hall of Fame after unprecedented no one's ever done that before.
Pretty good, pretty good summer, I would say, But in general, you've had a shift away from like mainstream broadcast stuff toward.
Like poker Go. And you know, I like poker Go, I like their tournaments.
However, that's a subscription service targeted toward people like you and me that are either proker junkies or have some
professional or adjacent to professional interests in the game. Ye you know the large field WPT and World Series of Poker tournaments right where like you have a big four or five day event and then you narrow that down to a small handful of players, a few of which you just by luck of the draw, have good stories, right Like is is the main evouent of the World Series even on like linear TV anymore like a little bit on.
CDs, right yeah, it is. It is after the fact,
so not so during the event. You have live streams and then those are edited down to I believe thirty minute kind of broadcasts that are more made for TV, and so there are kind of there's limited uh, limited coverage after the fact where you have new announcers, sometimes new announcers, sometimes the same announcing team, where they actually kind of do new coverage, new kind of new soundtracks and make it into more of a polished final product as opposed to, you know, let's watch all of these
hands hand by hand so that it looks more dramatic, right, And you know, I totally respect that. I think if you're going for a wide TV audience, poker can be so boring day right, Like you you can sometimes be like sitting and for.
Us like work, oh yeah, I'm gonna be in Vegas, but mostly playing poker.
They're like, can I come watch you? I'm like, yeah, exactly can. It would be table be boring as.
Fuck, right, even at the final table. You know, I actually always encourage people like it's nice to have people on your rail, which are you know, the people who are watching. But I would never force someone I love to come on the rail and watch because you can't see the cards. It's much more interesting to watch the stream on a screen where you can see what people have and you can follow along when you're there live, like all you see are the all in confrontations or
when you know a hand goes to showdown. You don't see the cards otherwise, But even if you're watching on screen, it can be quite boring because there are so many different things happening. So I understand the desire to bring people to you know, to craft narratives, to have drama, to bring people to the game in a way that makes them excited about poker. But you know, how did people, you know, craft narratives that make people excited about chess
or or Formula one or whatever it is. It's by being a good storyteller, finding the stories, finding the people using the material that you have, rather than kind of taking liberty and creating material on your own. So just to kind of bring this full circle, I think that you,
by the way, like we would be doing this. I think we'd be having this conversation even if this documentary had just smashed everything in the sense that people were like, oh my god, this is phenomenal this is so good, and it had just like through the roof viewership, which
it did not. Someone took a screenshot of the number of views of each episode before they were taken off of YouTube, and it was like, I think it was like twenty thou thirty, Like it was not big numbers, right, Like, it was much worse than a lot of the great poker content creators who actually have, you know, many more views. I think the biggest one had like forty thousand views or something, and with every episode, it just like it
went down. And so if it had been huge and hugely kind of successful with millions of views, this would have, I think, in some ways been even more of an issue, right like that you had to create that, you had to lie that, you had to make shit up to bring in an audience. But now like you did that and and it was boring, right Like, you did that,
and you didn't do anything new. You did that, and you didn't actually craft drama bring people in, like, you know, come create something that made people excited about the game that wasn't already somebody who loved the game, right And so I think that that that's sort of beside the point, and it's and it's also it's absolutely not an excuse.
In some ways, the more people, like if you're writing for an audience of one, Right, like if I had a private newsletter that was like on a private thing, and I used AI to try to experiment and do things that I didn't really have to do, Like I don't have to tell anyone, Right, I'm my own audience. Right, I can just do I can just do whatever and like play around. But if I have as my audience grows, then I start having a responsibility to other people to
actually kind of uphold some sort of standards. And so in some ways, like the bigger the success, the more responsibility you have to your subjects, to your audience, to
the sport. Right, you have a responsibility to poker. Why is it nate that every single time we talk about poker, unless you or I have won something and there's like fun news that way, it's almost always some sort of a scandal, Right, It's something it's something negative, like why don't we actually try to do things the right way to bring people into the game for the right reasons.
We'll be back right after this.
One problem is that there's a shipload of variants you know what I mean, Like, what's the chance this year is an exception that the main event of the World Series of Hooker will be won by somebody that like.
Even you or I had both.
Heard of, let's say, in events of the tournament, right, like right, and we probably know a lot of people, and I do think there are large edges to like the pros and the main event, right, but like, yep, yeah, by the way, some of the names that one.
Eth it now our household names. I would not have known that name.
I'd be like, that guy look like some fucking Norwegian player, right, but like I wouldn't know that fucking person.
Yeah, No, I love Espen. We're very friendly now. But prior to Espen winning the main event of the world here as of poker, I had no idea who he was. He's a lovely, lovely human, great guy. But yeah, yeah, but but if you but if you actually I actually have done this. I've gone back like ten years and started looking at the winners' names. I don't know most of them, right, they were probably players who people knew at the time, and like, if you were.
You're still and I'm trying to the banners.
Ryan, I know, Ryan and I know Martin, but but there are a lot of players who I'm like, I've just I literally have never heard this name before, which which is to say, yes, there is a lot of variance. But there is drama. There are all these stories, and there is I mean, there is good material here, right, Like you actually, you absolutely can make something that's compelling, and I would, I mean, you know, that's a hill
I'm willing to die on. Like you can make compelling television and out of poker and people have and you know, it's not just like the high stakes shows of the past that had a huge viewership. But there are fictionalized accounts like there are there are documentaries, there's reality TV. By the way, these are all different things, right if you're making a reality TV show, like okay, that's script, that's not a documentary series, you already know it's going
to be used differently. But you can make a compelling documentary. There are human stories, there's human drama. You just have to be a good filmmaker. You just have to be
able to find those threads. Two journalists can go to the exact same assignment, right and write a story like have the same assignment, write this story, and one can craft a Pulitzer Prize winning masterpiece, on the other like just a boring piece of who knows what, like on the exact like even talking to the same people, because somebody can see the story, can see the vision, knows how to kind of make it into something great, and
the other one doesn't. And that's what I Oftentimes people like when they find out what I'm working on, They're like, oh, aren't you afraid that someone else is going to steal that idea and write the same thing. I'm like, no, because no one else is going to write it the way I do, right, Like every everyone like.
Probably like this person.
I'm like, yeah, but they they suck. They suck, right, not everybody. Sometimes they suck. And I'm like, I don't know if I can care they suck. Their upside is cat But yes, it's hard. It's hard to plant around like this content when like your stars are are usually not going to win, right. I mean, this year's World Series mainavment had like way way wait, it was like the ninety eighth percentile interesting character.
This is very true. So do you know what you do? Nate? In that case, you tape six hundred and fifty hours of content. You follow all of these different storylines and you don't know which ones are going to end up being the prominent ones and the ones you want to use, and then you actually make something that's good and compelling
out of it. So let's I mean, I would like to issue at the end of the show, I don't like to issue a challenge to creators, not just in poker, to always just be here, like, do better be good, use you know, use whatever tools you need to use, but be honest, do not cheat, Do not be lazy. You cannot tell good stories if you're being lazy. Nate, You've said the word lazy multiple times in this episode, and that's exactly what it is. It's intellectual laziness. It's
just it's just laziness all around. So don't be lazy. Actually find the good stories. And yes, in poker, it is hard, right, It's not like Formula one where if you follow the best drivers, you'll probably be following the winner. Like, but but if you cast a wide net you can still figure it out. You can make it happen. Do it, like, let's create something good and.
You the passage of time, right, you know, shooting six hundred hours of footage at like one tournament won't give you the passage of time for like narrative arcs and people's lives get better and worse, And hooker does created share dramatic moments.
Maria, Yes, it does indeed. So that is our take on documentary Gate twenty twenty five. Let us know what you think of the show. Reach out to us at Risky Business at pushkin dot FM. Risky Business is hosted by me Maria Kanakova and by.
Me Nate Silver.
The show was a cool production of Pushing Industries and iHeartMedia. This episode was produced by Isaac Carter. Our associate producer is Sonya gerwit Lydia, Jeane Kott and Daphney Chen are our editors, and our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein.
Mixing by Sarah Bruguer.
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