Pushkin.
Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making better decisions. I'm Maria Kanakova.
And I'm Nate Silver.
Today on the show, Nate, we're going to start by talking about brackets. I don't sound very excited because I'm not doing well, but we'll do a full catch up there and talk also a little bit about free speech, what's going on right now in college campuses, and then go into twenty three and meters and whether it's a good idea to send your ganic and data to a private company. Tough one, tough one, Hey, tough one. And then finally, let's talk about how we value our time.
So you know, how do you make decisions that trade off time against other things? How do you actually think about that? Let's get into it with some march madness, Nate, I have watched more basketball in the last week than I think.
I have or something.
No, I've actually watched multiple games. I've watched multiple games because I was first rooting for Tennessee. You know, I was anti sweating Florida. There were so many games that just did not go way. I have quite a chat going with Monty who if people were not listening to
our show. A few weeks ago, Monty McNair helped me with my brackets, and on Saturday I texted him and said, I'm anti sweating Florida hard, to which he said, we've made you a college basketball junkie, given how often I am texting him now, And I said no, I just I said, ha ha ha, We've got to beat Nate and he said, for sure, this would help, and then Florida made a comeback.
So you need are you drawing?
No? I need Duke to win.
Oh, if Duke wins, I win, I'm not drawing dead.
I think I fucked up the whole game theory because I should have just picked Dukes if I was going to be ahead, and I out psyched myself. So yeah, anyway, yeah, I'm already pretty anti Duke, justin general in life and also in some of my real sports tie way, you want a little you went a little tidbit into like the sports betting, the sports betting.
Life, right, Yeah, it's dark always so far.
I bet Let me see here, I have bet one hundred and twenty units on the NCAA tournament. Both the men and the women were equal opportunity here, and I'm ahead by zero point six. Oh wow, this is yeah, this is how it often goes where but you're ahead, which is better than ninety eight percent of people. I would imagine we would really like it if Houston wins. We would like it if Florida went, both for our
bracket and for my old bets. I mean, like, if this South Carolina win and win, so that happens, we end up underwater probably.
Well, I would like Duke to win. I am now one hundred percent on Duke. I you know, it's so funny. This is, as I told Monty, this is why I do not watch sports normally. It is wild because Florida so nate because you have Florida winning. I was anti sweating them right because they were behind in that game and it looked like they might lose, which would be great because I need Florida to not win along with
Duke winning. And I just had to say, this is why I don't watch sports, to which you said it's an emotional roller coaster, which it really is, but we are still alive, and it does They'll make it a lot more fun to be sweating anti sweating. It's kind of like poker, right when I know the people playing. It's always fun when I like people to root for, and it's also really really fun when I dislike someone and I'm.
Just actively.
I do not answer that on a public podcast that is being listened to by tens of thousands of people.
Maybe a gender and a nationality that doesn't really narrow it less, like Slovenian or something.
Well, one of the people. I can't give you a nationality, but my mail.
Okay, thanks, thanks mail. Oh okay.
One of the people I most dislike is male and uh oh fuck no that that that's gonna that's gonna error.
I don't want to be mean. I I don't.
I don't want to be mean, but I think some of these people, oh male an American. Here we go, I know one of the people.
I'm you're not allowed to give an answer.
There you go, but it's true to you.
Okay, okay, But.
It's always it's always very fun to anti sweat as well. That's that's mean of me, isn't it.
No, That's how we get our pleasure in life. I mean, that's why people, this is why humans are human beings. Right. We fight for honor, we fight to the death, you know, and the people in charge of country also seem to be fueled by grievance. I don't know if we want to talk about politics or net.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think the one thing that I would like to talk about, just briefly, because I think it's really important, is what's happening right now with you know, free speech in this country and with how college's universities are reacting to pressure from Trump. Not just universities, by the way, this is happening everywhere law firms. You know, there's just this big muzzling where where people are just
caving left and right. But one of the things that, you know, it's very personal to me because first, my graduate alma mater, Columbia University, just completely cave to Trump, making me, frankly, just very upset that I went there, like kind of embarrassed that I have a Columbia degree
by how it handled this whole thing. And now there was a threat made against my undergraduate alma mater, Harvard, to withdraw nine billion dollars worth of funding, and we got this lovely email from the Harvard president and other people basically saying all of the ways that they're going to give in to the Trump demands before he's even
made anything so that the funding is not cut. And the Crimson, by the way, the Harvard Crimson, which is the Harvard student newspaper, ran an editorial by students last week which was like, you can't cave in, right, you need to stand up for academic integrity, for free speech. And now the Harvard administration's like, yeah, you know, we're
just going to quietly and meekly do this thing. And to me, if you're looking at this kind of through a game theory lens, right, everyone is showing themselves to be completely risk intolerant, like knits to the twentieth twenty millionth degree that they are just saying, we're going to cover our asses. We're not going to speak out in solidarity, we're not going to do anything. We just want to protect ourselves right now. And that's incredibly shortsighted, I think,
because this is not a single iteration game. This is going to be a repeat game. And if you give in right now, you know, what are you doing right? What is happening to your ability to take risks in the future, to research, to just everything. And I'm looking at this and I'm saying, you guys, like, you really need to speak up and stand up to this. Harvard can afford to, right. I realize that billions are a lot, but Harvard has the second largest endowment.
In the world two billion dollars three billions sorry ms billion here there.
This is, I mean, this is what it's there for, right to protect academic freedom and the future of the research and the work that you do. So if Harvard is caving, if Columbia is caving, there's just no future for the rest of it. And we have to remember that this is where some of our most important research, ideas, just everything come from. And it's just it's also we don't even have to talk about how, you know, hypocritical.
It is that Trump was saying that he was going to be supporting free speech and now this is happening. But I think we can could have predicted that. But anyway, I think it's a very scary response because this is you know, shutting up, being quiet, being meek, not taking risks at this point, not speaking out is how we go down a very dark path. And I think that people will be rewarded for taking risks right now, but
they don't think of it that way. Right It's a cover my ass immediately type of reaction, which, yeah, which I think is the wrong way of looking at it.
You know, I forgot to pack the world's tiny oft file in in my luggage. But like I, out of all things Trump is doing, going after the Ivy League universes is one of the things I'm most sympathetic too, and where we probably have an audience that over your next is. But I think for years these universes and there are exceptions. I would think that my elemmentar Eativers
of Chicago is one of them. But like these universes have lit a culture of free speech in road, they have let their at it's become politicized, I think, in one direction towards a certain type of lectning behavior, and they after this though they were immune from public backlash, and believe me, Harvard is more immune from it than
state schools, for example. But I think there's a reason why Trump is going after these schools and not the University of Texas, the University of Maryland or things like that. So I look, I mean, I think they should tap any endowment and tell Trump to to fuck off, Like what's it? What's it for?
Uh?
But I don't know, I don't want to say that, like I am questioning the utility of like do Ivy League schools make America better? I'm not sure about that.
Actually, well, I think that I think that they do in the sense of, you know, the research that they the research conduct is but but where else, like that's you know, where the cutting edge research is happening, not just Ivy leagues obviously, but in the universities. It's happening in those laboratories. It's happening in those graduate departments. That's
where all of the scientific innovation is happening. Those ideas are not coming from the private sector like that's economics one oh one, right, that they will not fund them until the research is at a certain stage then they will fund them. But that research, those idea explorations that.
Happens within that happens.
Oh I'm talking about I'm talking about other like basic science, not tech, that all happens in academia. So so I think that the value here is absolutely enormous. And I actually hate so obviously I'm Jewish, very sensitive to anti Semitism stuff, but I hate that he's using that as kind of to make people be like, oh, well, you know, we're combating anti semitism. It's not that bad. No, like this has nothing to do with anti semitism, because he has plenty of very anti Semitic policies.
He's using that.
As a cover to basically assert his will and say that, you know that I can dictate what universities can and can't do. Academia is not perfect, far from perfect. We've talked about this before. It needs to be reformed. But Paul Weiss, like, what the fuck?
You know?
You have this happening, This muzzling people, just backing down and not saying anything, happening everywhere you know, law firms, and it's just to me, that's that's a very scary precedent to set. I just read that the former head of Doctors Without Borders had her presentation. I think it was at NYU canceled for being anti government because she was going to be talking about USAID cuts. Like that's fucked up, right, Like that that kind of thing is
is totally fucked up, and people are scared. And the moment that you're the most scared is when you actually should start taking these risks and protesting because it's only going to get worse. And you know, let's just look at the big picture as opposed to like the nitty
gritty and say that this is not good. The fact that Columbia kept capitulated is not good, setting a horrible precedent, and I think it makes it even more important for places like Harvard to say fuck you, and the fact that they haven't is not good.
I'm not as sure that it's only going to get worse. Trump is probably going to keep getting more unpopular, particularly if the economy suffers due to I mean, we're like, oh, we won the election on inflation, so let's make cars more extensive like that seems like a pretty stupid idea, Maria from a risk management standpoint, and.
Okay, paying higher prices night Americans will be.
Okay, investors are longer buy it. Like GM stock was off quite a bit more than some of the four manufacturers. Tesla's stock was off quite a bit. But you know, I think Trump has been smart in the tactical sense of trying to pack a lot in at the start. When they adamare political capital, they're probably going to lose political capital over time, and when they're resistance, I mean that both kind of figurably and literally is kind of like confused and it's combobulated. Look, there are lovers in
the system. The courts can fight back, people can protest. We have a decentralized system of government in which states and localities have a lot of power. Potentially their midterm elections coming up. There are special elections increening one or to today in Florida, re seats that the jup will probably hold, but much closer than you would typically expect it. If there's a huge surprise, then you know, and then
within the realm of remote possibility, I suppose. And by the way, Democrats having well, I mean, look the racing it's kind of more competitive, probably was in upstate New York, but I mean stathetic. Harvard, right, by the way, is no longer being nominated to the UN because Trump is afraid of nominating a someone who in a district he won by twenty one points because it might cut their
majority too much. Right, so you know, so there is resistance elon Musk, you see, even more in popular than Trump. The point is not lost though that like when you create a precedent that you can cave and you saw, by the way, this happened with with like Canada and Mexico to some degree on tariffs. At first, the conservatives in Canada were like, Okay, well, I just give you this little tribune, right and then and their voters got furious at them, right.
You know.
Also, some of the Harvard donors would be like, fuck you, Harvard. I'm not if you could pitch like Trump, then I'm not doing any of you anymore. So You're gonna cost you money either way. And they have fifty two million dollars to burn, billion dollars to burn, and so you know, again, I'm not that I'm not that sympathetic, but I think probably probably the worst hight paying job in the country would be president of a major research IVY League university right now.
Yes, and we know that the Columbia president has resigned again, and yeah, this this is definitely an unprecedented kind of assault on a lot in a lot of in a lot of ways.
Let's see how it goes. Nate.
I hope that your optimism is warranted. I'm much more pessimistic. I think it is going to get worse before it gets better. If it gets better.
I'm not actually optimistic. I don't think about the picture of the country. I mean, you know, look, Trump does things and then the courts react. But I do think you have to recognize though, that to some extent they are signing from a position of weakness, right, They're not. I mean, although even here let me qualify that a bit.
It is also true that like these I of the universes, like I said, are unsympathetic targets, right, And the reason why they kind of frame it around anti Semitism is because that's an issue that like does capture some of the center. But George, people were pissed off about the congressional hearings in twenty twenty three, for example, the three university presence and so like, so they're kind of like tactically smart about like, oh, acting their targets a little bit.
But I don't know, yeah, I don't know.
Yeah, it's tactically I mean, it's obviously one hundred percent disingenuous, but very tactically smart way for Trump forgetting what he wants, which is this kind of culture where everyone is scared to say anything, and that's why he's doing it and framing it the way he is. It's actually like it's a very savvy way of doing it. Which is why it's very scary.
The last thing I'll say is that like history will remember this, I don't need to dramatize this as the same as like the most important pivot point in American history.
I'm just saying, like a lot of people have done a lot of really cringey things in the first what is it now, two and a half months of Trump, Right, all the CEOs who met the need at the inauguration, and all the people who are you know, but the networks, even the liberals are now back to watching the news who fired all their liberal correspondents, right, But like that stuff will not age well if Trump goes down as an unsuccessful president or worse dot right And again, I
think you can see the trajectory already toward him becoming more unpopular. If you didn't fuck up the economy, it might be a whole different ballgame. If you want to be like a fucking dictator, then ruining the economy is about the stupidest thing you can do in terms of maintaining public support.
Yeah, I think that's right.
So I hope, I hope it all falls down around him, and I hope you're right that the Sarah will be remembered as that as opposed to the start of the end offination democracy. If we're being dramatic, I hope we don't get that far.
There's a there's.
A gray zone, now there are any democracy already has been weekend a little bit right, get a little bit weaker.
Yeah, Let's let's hope the gray zone resolves.
In a good way and not in the dictatorial way. Let's take a little break and talk about something that is also newsy but very different. Let's talk about twenty three and me. Have you ever given your genetic data to a website?
No, and I don't think.
I don't think I would neither have I. I am one of those people who forever I told everyone in my family was like, do not ever upload your genetic information to twenty three and meters, to ancestry dot com, to any of those, do not give your genetic data to any private corporation because of a lot of things. First of all, you know obviously data security. Second of all, you are not protected. You know, this is not health services that hit backed does not protect you whatsoever. And
it's just it's just dumb. And also you can't see the future. We were just talking about being in a gray zone politically right now, like, who is your data going to be sold to? Potentially? How will it be used? How will you potentially be discriminated against in the future once we know that ooh, this combination of genes equals this in terms of your risk for this disease. And so now insurance companies you know, are are going to have access to that. You don't know any of this anyway.
I have never given my genetic information, and I think that the risks for individuals at weigh any potential benefits of being able to say, oh, look, Nate, you and I are twentieth cousins once removed.
How cool is that?
Well, people can do that for that reason, for the for the what's it called genealogy? Is that? What the what do the Mormons do?
A lot of Oh I don't yeah, genealogy, Yeah, genealogy, Okay, yeah. Ancestry dot com is all about so twenty three and meter is all about health data. Ancestry dot com is all about genealogy. Either way, you have to give your genetic information too to do this, and I think people did it as kind of a novelty thing curiosity, Right, you want to find out stuff. But I think that those motivations are not sufficient because of the risks that a company it.
Yeah, I think you could also do genetics reading for certain disease.
I mean they used to be so twenty three and meters over promised and under delivered on that front because genetics can we just like pause this and go back out for a second and say, genetics is really complicated, right, and there are very very few genetic conditions where it's
like this gene maps to this risk. Yes, there are a few of them, but it's tiny, tiny, tiny, And at first twenty three and me was trying to cover everything and be like, oh, well there was one paper about this and that, and so you can have false positive, false negatives, like just stuff that there wasn't enough data for.
And then the type of testing they were doing is not at the level that you would get if you actually, you know, are in a doctor's office health you know situation where you're getting screened for all of these things correctly. And so there was a lot of uncertainty involved. There's a lot of actually ethical gray zones, even if you're doing it in a doctor's office, with screening for things that are actually pretty black and white, like the BRCA
gene and breast cancer. Right, there's a lot of kind of controversy around well, you know, how do you how do you communicate it? You know, do you tell people what can they do? What if they didn't want to screen for it but you found out and there are people you train doctors, and okay, how do you communicate this risk?
What do you say?
You know, how do you give this life changing information to someone twenty three and me? Like, there's none of that, right, You just like get your results back and you're like, oh wow, Like, oh my god, what am I supposed to do with that? So there it was ethically fraud even on that front. And I would not have used it to find out my you know, genetic risk of something. I would have gone to a doctor to get those tests.
Yeah, what I've seen friends who've done it. It's quite vague, right, It's like, oh, you have an elevator risk of this area or that area. Right, if you have elevated risk of some condition in effects one and a hundred thousand people, then you're probably harming yourself more with the extra stress of that then, and you're learning altered about your chances. I just don't trust anybody with giving away information. I kind of assume it'll be leaked at some point.
If absolutely, if it gets there, should happens, and your information is not secure. And I actually I hate, you know, all biometrics, Like I hate that at this point, like in the airports, you have to smile into the camera and it always yeah I do. It's very easy, but it's it is much faster, right, But we're giving up so much privacy for convenience.
Yeah, travel is right. Yeah, travel is a right, not a privilege. My partner of this character, it's like kind of Mary Joe Quimby from the Simpsons, like or a Channy, but like only campaigns and like frequent flyer complaints. We will have a bit of sky lounge.
I think, I think, I think you've got to You've got to hit on yours. No, it is, so that's the thing. I do it because it's much faster, and there's always a thing. So I was gonna say, there's always a thing that says, oh you can opt out, right, you don't have to do the biometric thing.
We delete the data right.
Away, and I was like, oh, but it's going to take If I say I want to opt out, it's going to take me like twenty minutes to get through security because then they're going to pull me aside and do all this stuff.
So I don't opt out. I just do that.
But I still don't love it, because you know, you're giving all of your facial data, biometric data. I don't want it, you know, as far as I can tell, Like, I'd rather just not give as much data as I can to the government, to private corporations. But genetic data is something that like that is something that you can really control. It doesn't make travel easier. So I think that the like the risk reward trade offs there are just soberblown and now people are finally coming to their
senses and they're like, oh shit, it's going bankrupt. Like here's how you delete your data? Really, is my data only stored in one place? Is it really all going to be? Like there are a lot of questions here, Like I wouldn't be so sure.
Yeah, the California age called for customers to delete their twenty three aeters data, So probably good idea, you know that. I think I think maybe I'm not as much of a privacy and consent I think the improved efficiency and airport security screening. And by the way, also if you traveled internationally, it's much faster now most entries to get out of there when you're when you're going through customs
and so forth. I know, I think that might be a category where I think it's it's worth the trade off. I like, I really about guiling your time in a minute.
Right yeah, And like I said, Nate, I actually like I I have made that trade off when traveling as well. All of these things are trade offs, and you do need to realize that they're all. You know, there is always going to be a privacy concern and there's always going to be a concern with how your data is stored, how it's used, with all of these things, and you just need to think about it.
I did have a trainer one time who found out that he had some degree of Middle Eastern in ancestry, which he didn't know about. So that was interesting. That changed the self conception I think a little bit. So I was in wit guy.
From Well and I mean a lot of times people you know who do give their genetic information do find out things right like there is I understand why people are curious, especially like there are people who can't find you who don't know who their parents are. Well, sometimes people think they know who their parents are and find out should that they really didn't want to find out, right,
Like a lot of family secrets coming out. I get the impulse, but you always, to me, like, you just always need to think through what the next steps are. And right now we're seeing that, right, and we're seeing that just play out in real time. Do you think so, I've like imagine trying to delete your data from Facebook, right, Like I know people who tried over and over and it's just impossible, right, Like those those photos like that
that shouldn't get deleted. So now like deleting your data from twenty three on me, Like, I don't think that data is getting deleted in the way that you think.
I do think that more and more, as we're moving to our technological future, certain things like you know, facial recognition, they're so ubiquitous that it's really like it's almost basically impossible to opt out, right, Like I think that we're probably nearing that point with some of these things, but not with all of them, And so the little bits of privacy that we still can protect I think we should well.
And AI AFFECTSMOS too, in part because like basically they just kind of the AI models have a corpus of data and they just silk up all the data trained on it for a while and then have model ways
to produce outputs. Right, It's kind of hard once you train the model, it's very hard to go back and say, oh, we weren't supposed to use Maria's DNA sequence right for this new genomic AI that we have right untrained, Well, we're gonna We're gonna untrained, and then we'll come back in a year and waste billions of dollars in I mean,
it doesn't really work. And I think we're probably in a world where there's going to need to be more surveillance, which I'm not happy about, but I think that's direction that we're headed in.
Yeah, I do think that, uh, this is where we're going. There's a really good book about this, by the way, so Cash Hell's book Your Face Belongs to Us, which is a really interesting and it's a book about facial recognition and privacy concerns. She's a reporter with The New
York Times. She's also a poker player night, So I'm very glad Nate that you have Also, you also do not need to pull your data, your unpullable data from twenty three and me, and I hope you know, for everyone's sake that this resolves in a nicer way than it could, because I'm not at all optimistic that this data isn't going to be sold to companies that are going to use it, not in the way that you intended when you initially sent those little samples of saliva
to twenty three and me. On that note, Nate, let's take a break, and I hope that you and all of our listeners use that break productively, because time is valuable.
A little, a little force pery of it.
You know, Well, Okay, I did my best. This is a question that doesn't come up nearly enough, but I think it's really really important, which is, how do you actually place a value right on your time? I made a I made a bad joke, Nate, you you called it forced. I feel very heard about using our break productively because time is money, and we I mean, time is money is such a cliche, but it's a cliche for a reason. That's actually the case. Right every single
time that we do something, we're making trade offs. We're not doing something else. And this is the whole point of getting paid. It's your time. You're literally trading off time that you would rather be doing something else usually, or time that you're getting paid to do something. And so this is a calculus that I think we're always making, but we're not always explicitly aware that we're making it.
But I think we could make much better decisions if we were explicitly aware and actually could kind of game theorize it a little bit and try to figure out, Okay, well, you know how much.
Do I value my time? Is this worth it? Is that worth it?
Obviously you don't want to go through your entire life thinking that way, but I think that for big decisions, for those types of trade offs, it is an interesting way of looking at it, is that how do you actually go about this night? Do you consciously think you know what is the value of my time?
Good question, And let.
Me acknowledge upfront that this is like a little bit I'm not big on, like the privilege trip. Tell me I acknowledge though, this is like a little bit of maybe a kind of a privilegy conversation where if you're somebody who has the opportunity to like to make money, or have more than one opportunity you can pursue, right, and you have kind of more capacity to take on additional work or valuable things to trade off with. Right.
In my case, for example, I'm considering whether to accept consulting work, right, because there you're actually like kind of like setting a rate that you're paid on an hourly basis, right, Or sometimes I mean, no huge secret if you're if you're an author who sells books like Marie, or I'll get opportunities to do speaking gigs where you travel. I'm out here in California for one, for example, right now, and they pay you to talk, and maybe the talk isn't that much time, but then you have two old
days you burn on travel, for example. So I think you have to like think about these things fairly explicitly. That's especially through like when you're I mean I'm essentially a freelancer, right, or maybe a small business owner where I write posts for Silver Bulletin newsletter. The more posts you write, the more opportunities there are people to subscribe. And so I probably have some calculation of like what
is the opportunity cost. Right, If I'm traveling on a plane and the Wi Fi goes out, that's one less post that I write. How much money would have for sicken from that post. I mean, you know, I think sometimes it's good to be honest with yourself about that kind of thing. I also think that, like there's things
you want to treat as constraints. Right, So I'm going to play I don't know, let's say, four or five weeks of the World Series of Poker this summer, maybe two thirds half to two thirds of the schedules about what I settled into, right, That is clearly a bad trade off from like an opportunity cost standpoint. Right, I'm probably plus ev in most of the events that I play, but if that leads to several fewer newsletter posts or
consulting opportunities, the trade af's pretty high. It was like much easier where I worked for a giant, baseless corporation, and like I was kind of like paying a fixed salary and kind of working on the company dine basically, So you know, I mean, it really kind of came to light last year when like I was playing in some roughly low buying event at the wind and then Trump is charged with all these convicted I should say, of all these felonies, and I have to write a
post about that, and I kind of like deliberately kind of punted because I'm like, okay, literally, the value of my stack here is like worthless than being really quick on this news. But you know, or likewise, like I was this past weekend at the New Orleans Book Festival, which is a great event attracting lots of brand name and obscure like authorial talent. Right this, by the way,
is free. It's on the campus at Too Lane, and so it's kind of in the in the spirit of like Edinburgh Fringefest or something where they want to like take this kind of medium sized community and have this festival once. A ye, I didn't get paid for that, but like it's kind of like sometimes the caution either be zero or a lot and yeah, right.
Yeah, no, I actually agree with that. And by the way, to your first point, I think that's a really really important point where time is money is very relevant in the sense that this is something that we're privileged to
be able to think about it this way. And I've actually written about this about time scarcity being like the one of the huge constraints on poverty, right, And Cindilmula Nathan at the University of Chicago has done a ton of research into this about how time poverty is a thing, right, and that if you're actually if you're poor, like this is one of the biggest, one of the biggest barriers to kind of getting out of poverty because all of these things we take for granted, like, oh, I have
time to think through this decision. You know, the cognitive overload of not not having that flexibility is actually huge, right, because you're just living paycheck to paycheck. You don't have childcare, right, you're not sleeping enough. All of these different things are adding to the cognitive load, and you can't make choices the way that you know you can afford to make
choices if you're living at a higher subsistence level. So if people are interested in that research, highly recommend some deals work, and that's something that we should we should definitely not take for granted. But I agree with you that, you know, when I think about big things like speaking engagements, like what I'm going to take on, I usually think about like what is the total time, right, It's never just like an hour talk, Right, it's how long does
it take me to travel there? What else is it disrupting? Like how long do I prepare? Like all all of these different things add up, and you do need to try to make that trade off. And sometimes I'll do things for free if it's for a cause an organization, like something that's important like book festivals. Right, I think that that's an important value to the community, and so
you will just do that. And sometimes I will actually take a lot less for something just because it's fun to do, Like I will sometimes take writing assignments because I want to write about this and like I actually think that this is interesting, and like I will take less than I would normally take because I enjoy it, right, and there's going to be there's going to be something else there for me. So it's not just money, right, it's how much am.
I enjoying it?
Like what else? What else is there? What are their trade offs are there? So that the calculus, just like with all expected value calculations. I think one of the reasons that you're still playing the World series, even though technically speaking, is probably negative ev on some levels, because you enjoy it, right, you get some intrinsic enjoyment out of playing this, out of the competition, you know, out
of potentially winning. And the way that I also think about it is well, it's actually huge for my brand if I end up doing really well, right, like winning a bracelet, that ev of that is insane and so that you know, will help me book future speaking engagements and Celtic work at all of this because it helps
my profile. And so they are all of these different nuanced levels of calculations that go on, and so something is not It might not be as straightforward as oh, an hour speth doing this is not an hour spent doing that.
Yeah, look, I would push back on that slightly, only in the sense that if you kind of calculate, like what are your odds of winning? You already have bracelet? By the way, what are you but not wondering? I guess the summer worlds here, like, what are the odds of winning one? If you play two thirds of the schedule? I mean in probably fairly low, right, And so you can kind of what I kind of say is like, people you have to the point of life, are not the only point of life? Right?
Well, what's the meaning of life? Night I'm right that we're all listening.
To be a good person, to contribute intellectually into it, but to also enjoy yourself, right, And if like the doing poker is one of the things you most enjoy, and the World series pokenturmins can be a grind, right, but when you make those final tables and day threes, it's one of the most fun things ever. It kind of also, I think is good for experience and character building to play under high pressure, to kind of simulating.
So it's real hig pressure because the money GE's pretty big if you actually are deep in a World series event. So it's like, kind of, what's the point if, like I'm not making time for the things that I enjoy, Right, what's the whole point of like working so hard like last year during election? If I if I, if I can't sometimes relax a little bit, you know, I mean the value of that is I you know, I'm now yet more aware of kind of the privilegedness of this conversation.
But like, at the same time, I think people allow themselves at all places in the income ladder to be bogged down in jobs that aren't getting them anywhere in particular, And it's not just an immediate time cost, but the optionality cost. I think, you know, in general, people ought to think more abouttionality. We're can I put myself in a place where I'll have more options? That's related to the idea of opportunity cost. But yeah, but it's it's
like splitting tens in black check. If you already make twenty, you're like, oh, I can get even more of this fi Splitting No. Twenty is already a hard totally get. So it's like it's a fish move to split tens in blackjack. But yeah, I don't, I don't know. I I actually kind of carve out a lot of time for for non productive work, and kind of what happens sometimes I wind up backing into doing productive work. Anyway. You come home from aren't you going to shirt the
web a bit? And then all you're like writing a post or collecting some data for a spreadsheet.
Et cetera.
Yeah, Well, actually that that dovetails very nicely with what I was just about to say, which is that for people like us Nate who write you know, who are journalists who actually you know, are constantly thinking about about
about writing about what we're working on. I find that a lot of times that I'm being quote unquote unproductive is when I end up coming up with ideas, coming up with connections, reading something because you know, I'm just like I'm tired, and so I end up you know, watching a show or or reading reading something that I wouldn't otherwise read because it's not strictly speaking for work, and that ends up inspiring something and it ends up
being productive work. And so I actually, you know, I think that sometimes you just don't know where things are going to lead, and you do need to just give yourself that freedom, and sometimes that ends up being very productive time because otherwise, I think burnout takes a huge toll. And I've burned out before, like I've given myself a nervous breakdown before like that. It's not fun and it actually it really cuts down on your productivity and your
ability to do things. So I think if you have the privilege to kind of step back, I think that that's a really good thing to do.
No, absolutely right, And sometimes I think, you know, the last thing i'd say or maybe I'll moveless is now. Then you do get in situations where you have a much more explicit ev calculation, you know, I need to pay for this flight that's more expensive because otherwise it'll fuck up my calendar for the next two days. Right.
You know, sometimes people that want to take either the early morning flight or the or the or the PM flight back in California, for example, it's like, well, you know what, if I wake up for the six am flight, it's going to fuck up my sleep schedule. Right if I take the PM flight, it's going to fuck up the next day. So I want to pay this extra three hundred and five hundred bucks because like that's definitely
worth expditional hours of productivity. So like, don't be don't be a cheap skate when you are and where of these kind of narrowly solvable problems, you know, when when there's a direct trade off from from losing productive time.
I think about it the exact same way. And I have absolutely taken the most expensive flight because it is the one that's going to actually put me in the best frame of mind to do what I need to do.
So there's at least it's the most expensive too. I mean, they know what they know what they're doing, is the Yeah.
The reason it's the most expensive is because it's the most gonvenient flight. But yeah, I think I think that those types of things are very important because at the end of the day, don't be a cheap skate about your time.
Is actually a.
Very good way to end this, right, don't be nitty about that, because as we know, Nate, you do not like knits.
No, and it often comes from a feeling of guilt. I think right that, like, yeah, if you are successful, but you're not really you know, you're not really helping anybody by just you know, laterally less productive than you could be.
Exactly exactly, So don't do that. And I think all these calculations are different for everyone, but do think about it, because I think this is something that's important to think about and important to realize that, you know what, some cliches are there for a reason. Time actually is money. Figure out how you value your time. I'm not going to oh, am I gonna do it? Nate, Am I gonna end with how are you going to live your one wild and beautiful?
No?
No, we're not gonna We're not gonna do the cliche poetry ending to this.
We'll just say see.
You next week, and we hope that you use your time productively and start off by listening to our Pushkin Plus.
That is the actually the best pop please of your time?
Yes, definitely.
That's all for this week. Premium subscribers can seeker bund for our answer to one of your burning listener questions after the credits. This week, it's from Easton Lewis on how to manage funny incentives in prediction markets. If you're not subtrapping yet, consider signing up for just six twenty nine a month. You get access to premium content from us every week and add free listening across Pushkin's entire network of shows. Risky Business is hosted by me Nate.
Silver and me Maria Kanakova. The show is a co production of Pushkin Industries and iHeart Media. 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 Bruguer.
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