Iran: Don’t Rush To Judge A Dangerous Moment

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Pushkin.

Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making better decisions.

I'm Maria Kanakova.

And I'm Nate Silver.

So today, in typical high-low fashion on risky business, we're going to start out with one of the most serious topics in the world right now, Iran.

We're going to navigate carefully around this.

In fact, talking about how as an American citizen, let alone podcast co-host, we're trying to navigate things where we don't know a lot of the parameters and think about a little bit about the domestic conflicts, but also

the strategy that Trump faces and the potential for good and bad decision making.

And after that,

we're going to do a 180 and talk about poker and what's been going on at the World Series, how Nate and I have been doing, and some angle shooting and other controversies that have arisen in the past week because what would a World Series be without a controversy a week?

Let's get into it, Nate.

We tape this show on Tuesdays.

It's Tuesday, June 24th.

You won't hear this until Thursday.

And we always have this caveat, but with the situation in Iran right now, I think that caveat is extra important because shit's changing every second, right?

So this happens all the time in military conflicts, in wars.

But in this particular situation, when there is so much unknown, so much uncertainty, so much ambiguity, where it's so difficult to make judgments, the fact that we just don't know what's going on and that the situation keeps changing hour by hour, really, makes it difficult.

But as of now, we have Trump having announced on Truth Social that there's a ceasefire, having successfully bullied both sides into saying, okay, okay, we'll have a ceasefire, at least as of now, Tuesday morning.

We'll see how this ages

on Thursday.

But that's where we currently are.

So just a little bit of a recap in case you haven't been following the news at all.

The U.S.

bombed three strategic nuclear sites in Iran.

It was a successful mission, but maybe not as successful as Trump initially made it out to be.

Iran retaliated by hitting a base, the largest U.S.

military base in the Middle East.

And Qatar gave the U.S.

ample warning.

And Israel and Iran have been exchanging strikes up until Tuesday morning, where Trump is like, Israel, stop.

And Iran, stop.

There's a ceasefire, and you're going to agree to it.

So that's where we are right now.

Yeah, I mean, for better or worse, markets are up.

This is again Tuesday morning, Vegas time, Tuesday afternoon, East Coast time, and we're taping this.

Markets are up.

They seem to put some credence in the news.

Oil prices are back down again, I believe.

It is a little funny because like the heuristic had been taco, Trump Always Chickens Out, which I think was kind of poorly formed, right?

I think Trump is,

okay, we're already getting into controversial territory.

I think Trump is more

quote unquote rational.

We can debate what rational means about some of this stuff than he's sometimes given credit for, right?

He backs off when he has a losing hand.

Here, I don't know.

I mean, there was apparently, we're going to talk about like the way Americans feel about this and the splits in the Republican Republican Party, right?

You know, here there was apparently some dissent in the cabinet.

Tulsi Gabbard was afraid of doing anything mean to Iran, apparently.

This is not something that Putin likes either, right?

You know, the Republican Party also has a very complicated relationship with the state of Israel, as does America in general, and liberals and Democrats as well in their own way.

But this does appear to have been a Trump decision.

This is not a case like our previous president, President Biden, who was maybe outsourcing a lot of high-level decision-making to members of his cabinet.

Yeah.

So on risky business, you know, we are all about good decision analysis, right?

How do you analyze risk?

How do you kind of weigh all the factors to decide correctly?

And in situations like this, like the simple truth is that we don't have the information, right?

No one has the information.

When you're reading analyses, you know, whether it's in the New York Times or foreign policy, BBC, wherever it is,

nobody has the facts and we won't have them until much later on, right?

These are the sorts of decisions that are analyzed well in retrospect by historians when there are things that have become declassified when we know more about what happened, when people who were in the room actually start talking.

And right now we simply don't know.

So all of these analyses, we've talked before on the show about

biases, about motivated reasoning, about availability heuristics and all of these things.

And that's, I really don't want to add to that because I think that people right now are being biased by their political leanings, their presuppositions when it comes to Iran, the United States, should we get involved, et cetera.

And that is obviously, I think, tinting their analysis in one direction or in another and showing how they selectively process information.

And so I think that on this show, we don't want to do that.

We're not in the business of speculating on people

in that sort of sense.

That's bad decision analysis.

And so for now, I think what we can focus on is on the things that we do know.

And as responsible citizens, I think this is what Nate was alluding to earlier, you often are in situations, right?

This is like the extreme of the unknowns because it's a foreign policy decision.

It was a military strike, right?

Everything is classified.

Like we really have no idea what the hell's going on.

We don't know what the intelligence is.

We don't know anything.

But we have to make decisions all the time.

We're in a democracy, so we vote.

So we need to kind of try to figure out what do we do as citizens in situations of uncertainty.

How do we try to parse this sort of information?

Right, Nate, that's kind of what you were getting at, right?

How do we respond?

How do we try to get through the fog of all of these different opinions that may or may not agree with each other?

And how do we do that in a way that's actually as unbiased as possible?

Because it's so easy for me to say, like, in advance, oh, I agree that we should have bombed Iran, or I don't agree that we should have bombed Iran.

And so I'm going to look at those analyses only and I'll make up my mind.

Yeah, like let's let's enumerate for a minute here like some of the things that we don't know and in fact are deliberately likely to be concealed.

Yep.

Right.

Or ambiguous.

Right.

You know, number one thing we don't know is in what state was Iran's nuclear program, how close were they to developing actual weapons, right?

Number two, we don't know is how

much this set them back.

I mean, you can look at satellite photos.

There's a big hole in the ground, right?

Did that hole that was supposed to be dug very deep in the ground get penetrated to the point where they've been set back by years, right?

Are there other facilities that we don't know about?

That's number two, right?

Number three is

to what extent, so Israel lacked, I believe they're called bunker-busting bombs to penetrate far enough.

They could do some things.

They could take out, you know, Iranian nuclear scientists and things like that, right?

You know, as a citizen,

I'm somewhat curious about how much Trump felt like his hand was forced by Netanyahu.

That creates a complicated equilibrium, right?

You know, like, I will say I'm not a big BB guy.

I won't go further than that, right?

But, you know, were we forced into a situation that like it may have been the most rational action given that choice?

We don't know that either.

And obviously, we don't know like any of the long-term consequences of this.

So far, it seems like Iran is maybe more concerned about preserving domestic politics, but to what extent does this like

provoke further hatred of the United States and Israel?

Does it provoke future terrorist attacks?

Does it make countries more determined to develop nuclear programs or biological weapons and things like that?

How does the rest of the Middle East and the Arab world feel about this?

I mean, one of the good things...

I think there were a few good things in Trump's first term, right?

One of which is you kind of had, and you can debate the reasons for this, but we did see improving relations with parts of the Arab world during Trump's first term.

Are they happy about this or not, right?

We don't know any of that, right?

And we also don't know to what extent Iran would have used nuclear weapons if they, if they had them.

I mean, I think they're.

pretty widely regarded as a bad actor, but like also, that's a question of like stylized facts that we know.

It's not a case like, what's a case?

It's like much more trivial, right?

It's like congestion pricing in New York, right?

If you don't like research the empirical data on that and don't look at the mechanism for how it works, right?

That's something where if you took a day and really studied it, you might have a valid opinion.

Here, there are just things that are unknowable beyond a certain level.

Yeah, I mean, even to the point where, as you said, we have no idea how much the nuclear program was damaged.

You know, there's speculation that a lot of nuclear material was actually moved before the strikes, right?

And we don't know what the counterfactual would have been, right?

Like, would diplomacy have been successful?

We have, you know, historic data that it hasn't been in the past, past, but who knows, right?

Like, there are so many things that we just have no way of telling.

And we don't know how Iran is going to react right now, kind of over the long term.

Right now, it seems like the ceasefire is going to hold because it is a great, you know, rationally, like, it seems to me it's a great face-saving thing, right?

Like, if you know that you don't really want the U.S.

to keep attacking you, you can say, look, hey, we launched a strike at the biggest U.S.

base in the region, but obviously they warned the U.S.

ahead of time that this was going to happen.

So there were no casualties.

But you can say, here, there's a win for all of us.

We retaliated.

Now we're all going to step back.

But, you know, what's the, as Nate, as you kind of alluded to, what's the long-term plan here?

If we kind of saved all our nuclear materials, do we just lie low for a few years, right?

And pretend that everything's fine, but really, like this really pissed us off?

What's going to happen?

And the truth is, we can speculate, but speculation isn't going to be particularly helpful in the absence of this sort of information.

And this is one of those times when I would really, really caution everyone to really try to understand what your biases are, because those are really going to affect how you're interpreting information, what information you're seeing as legitimate or not legitimate.

And that's true, by the way, of policymakers as well, right?

This is one of those situations where, like, because of all of the uncertainty, actually are

reaching for heuristics and our brain's kind of reliance on biases becomes greater so it's one of those things where like there's an inverse relationship where well actually no it's a direct relationship right the greater the uncertainty the greater our use of heuristics and biases because we don't actually have a lot of information to go on and so we

go on what we want to be true and gut feeling.

And it's much easier then to support that point of view.

That's a relationship that's very,

very tricky and something that we really need to avoid, including you and me, Nate, right?

Like we do it too.

We're human.

It's really difficult to

think clearly when you have all of this uncertainty.

I do want to go back to a point you made because I do think it's really interesting.

And I was like, what the hell, especially initially, like when you see that the stock market, you know, and crypto and all these things were not, like, they weren't really reacting, right?

Even before the ceasefire, when there was news of the bombing, it was like, oh, this is probably not going to be that bad, right?

We saw a much bigger fall in both the last time that there was.

potential for uncertainty in Iran, a little over a year ago.

And this time, everything was very muted.

And I wonder if that's just over correction saying, oh, well, last time nothing bad happened.

So we're just going to assume that it's going to be just like last time.

Or if it's wishful thinking, you know, oh, well, we don't want anything bad to happen.

So we're just going to kind of pretend nothing bad's going to happen.

What is it?

it?

Well, yeah, this famous thing where, like, the stock market doesn't really discount for the price of nuclear war because if we're all dead, then nobody cares what your 401k is worth.

Look, I do think that's worth saying that, like, Iran's

a big country in various senses of that term, right?

It has 90 million people.

I think Ted Cruz got that wrong in some interviews.

It's 90 million people.

It's a lot of people.

Its GDP per capita is not very high.

It's 4.5 thousand per head.

That's down.

I don't know to what extent that's oil price fluctuations versus regime change versus everything else.

As of 20, as recently as 2012, it had a higher per capita GDP than China.

So the world changes a lot.

It occupies a very important strategic location in terms of the way that oil is moving and other goods are moving around the Middle East and around the world.

So this is a high leverage decision point.

And by the way, it's like not really

invadable.

Even foolish Americans, I think, would not be inclined to invade this country.

It's much more populous and much more mountainous than, say, Iraq, right?

Maybe in some ways it's better.

I don't think there's any risk of like

turning this into a ground war.

Like, I do want to say a couple of things here, right?

You know, one is that more countries having nuclear weapons is probably

bad, right?

You know, I think people

on balance understate the risk of

a nuclear conflict.

It hasn't been that long, just a couple of generations since the world has had weapons these powerful, right?

So,

you know, other things being equal and things are not equal, international law and precedents and norms and things like that.

And,

you know, why does Israel get to have unofficially, it's a strategic, ambiguous position.

Everyone believes that Israel has nuclear weapons, right?

You know, who deserves them and who doesn't?

I don't know about that paternalism or whatever else, right?

But some people think we want regime change in Iran.

Look, look, the one thing I'll say about Trump, because obviously we've talked about, okay, you don't know all the facts, really don't know any of the important facts, right?

So you default to priors and what's a prior versus a bias, right?

You know, I would feel better if Trump had people in positions of power that he had in his first term, right?

If Pete Hegseth or Chelsea Gabbard don't like this, I should feel better about it, right?

I believe it or not.

I trust Trump's judgment more than them, frankly.

That's the point we've come to, Nate.

That's the point we've come to.

But he has not been particularly hawkish, right?

He's been trying, I think not terribly, effectively to be negotiating a ceasefire with

Ukraine, right?

He's been all over the place on

China, right?

But, you know, we didn't have any new wars in Trump's first term.

And so I so, okay, you can clip this and criticize me.

You know, the fact that like

he's not, doesn't have this Bushian default toward intervention,

I think is a meaningful affects the priors a little bit.

It actually does.

It makes you, and like I said, we want to try to avoid speculation, but

with these priors, it does seem like a potential

thing that he was thinking was not like, I want the U.S.

to be involved in Iran, but rather, oh, like, I think that I can just bomb them and

they'll do what I say and we'll be one and done.

And then I'll be this beautiful peacebroker, right?

Because that's kind of what he, like, that's always, that's what he wanted to do in Ukraine, not bombing Ukraine, but he wants like, he wants to be seen as the peacemaker, right?

And he wants it to be done quickly.

When he took office, this we know, so this isn't speculation, you know, he said, oh, I'll end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours.

Obviously, that didn't happen, but in his his head, you know,

he can end everything in 24 hours.

Just, you know, Trump shows up and he makes peace.

And so I think that this might have been a bid to, okay, well, we'll just bomb him and then everything will be fine.

And I can make peace and we'll end this situation in 24 hours or 48 hours or whatever it is.

And that might seem like insane thinking from the outside, but.

it is the type of thinking that he's engaged in over and over and over.

So that seems like that might have been what was going on in his head rather than, oh, we want another protracted conflict.

It was more of a one and done, right?

If I do this, then I can be Trump the Great.

I can get a Nobel Peace Prize for brokering peace between Iran and Israel.

Yeah, look, Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016 in part because he explicitly campaigned against Bushism in various forms, right?

And against foreign entanglements, especially in the Middle East.

I mean, in terms of the domestic politics, this policy or this this decision to bomb Iran, depends on how the question is phrased, right?

Appears to be actually slightly unpopular on net.

Trump's net approval rating in the silver bullets of polling average is at negative 6.8.

It's been fluctuating.

It's actually fallen over the past couple of days, whether that's an Iran effect or just ciscal noise.

I think we'll need more data to show.

Maybe by Thursday, if you're looking at that, you'll have more.

But yeah, the American public's very skeptical of foreign intervention in general, and the Middle East in particular, has grown more skeptical of Israel to the extent that we are,

you know, I don't think it's a helpful factor necessarily.

So, you know, Trump, it's not a, it's not a move.

It may be a cynical move to, you know, Polymark has a 10% chance that he wins a Nobel Peace Prize or something, right?

But it's like, I don't think it's a cynical Bush era move of, oh, my approval rating is falling.

Let's bomb somewhere, right?

I don't think that quote-unquote trick works very well anymore.

People are very wary of foreign wars.

Often, what happens historically is that you get an approval rating bump, and then things turn into a quagmire, and then the president becomes deeply unpopular.

Here, Trump, I don't know whether it's a decline or it's steady, does not appear to be a bump coming, at least from this, right?

So, the historical reward not being there, I think might affect your priors too.

That I don't know.

I mean, there are lots of cynical reasons to do this, I guess, but like, but

having lived through Iraq and Afghanistan, you know, and Trump, I think, again,

has good instincts for why the previous Republicans became unpopular.

I don't think he's doing this as a way to like boost his popularity.

And he has enough other ways to

have little cheap tricks to like to do that.

And like, you know, I'm not sure Pickley cares about foreign policy, right?

He said recently, oh, there are no permanent enemies in the context of China or Russia or whatever else, right?

But like, he's transactional.

He's a deal maker.

And maybe in some ways I

prefer that to the grandiosity of

Bush era foreign policy.

I'm not sure.

Yeah,

it's a tough one.

I don't think I can go as far as to say I prefer this because we just have, you know,

I mean, it's

true.

It's not a particularly high bar, but it's just in the sense that I think that there's kind of Trump's vision and then there's kind of the reality, right?

He sees himself as, oh, I can be this peacemaker, but the reality of it is that he might do things that have unforeseen, or they could have been foreseen by good advisors, but unforeseen by him, long-term consequences that really fuck the world over.

So

it's kind of one of these situations where, yes, he doesn't want to entangle us, however.

And I will also say, in terms of his approval ratings, we've just seen historically over and over and over that the Trump coalition, kind of the MAGA coalition, is able to stomach complete changes of policy when they come from Trump, right?

Like he is just so good at persuading his base that what he's doing is the right thing.

So I would not be at all surprised that if we do end up kind of becoming more entangled in the Middle East, that all of a sudden the same people who were saying no foreign entanglements will be like, yeah, America first, like we're gonna we're gonna show them what's happening.

And we were for this all along.

So I can definitely, I don't see that this is going to actually do lasting damage to him because he has shown himself to be just phenomenally good at

being able to turn any sentiment in his favor.

That's his superpower, right?

Like, he is so good at convincing his base that whatever he decided to do was the right thing, even if it was the total opposite of what he had campaigned on.

And we'll be right back after this break.

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Tripp's other advantage, I think, here relative to Biden is that like he is seen, I think, as being a little bit unpredictable, and that probably helps.

I don't know if you want to go too far in the game theory, but like, but like...

No, we've talked about that before.

I mean, the kind of the irrational rationality, right?

The irrational actor, the kind of the Thomas Schelling model of, you know, your famous chicken problem where you have...

two cars going towards each other, right, head-on collision course,

and

one of the drivers pulls out the steering wheel and throws it out the the window, signaling, I can't swerve, right?

So I'm going to win this.

And that's kind of the rational irrationality.

Of course, the problem comes in: what happens if both of them pull out their steering wheel at the same time?

Then you're kind of screwed.

What happens if one person doesn't actually see you throwing the steering wheel out the window, which is possible, even though you try to be blatant about it?

You know, maybe they were looking away at that moment.

Maybe they were so focused on your car that they didn't see that.

So there are issues with that scenario.

But yes, there is kind of the madman theory that if I'm unpredictable, if I'm the one who is capable of ripping out my steering wheel and people know that, then they're going to tread much more carefully around me.

Yeah, or at least one would hope so, right?

To the point earlier about like Iran's a populous country, at times it has flirted with becoming a developing, wealthier country before the revolution, and I guess 79.

And then and then more recently its GDP had been increasing right so it's it's not a I don't think it'd be classified as like a failed state that kind of has nothing

to lose right

and it's always hard to gauge public sentiment in authoritarian countries I don't know you know I think the conventional wisdom is that like the regime is not especially popular in Iran.

It's a sophisticated country with a lot of history and people may have ambiguous feelings about its current status, right?

A lot of different ethnic groups also within Iran, again, a big complex country, right?

And so like,

look, all of this seems better to me than like trying to facilitate regime change in Iraq, right?

But it's also higher stakes in some ways involving, you know, one unofficial nuclear power.

Well, two, the United States and Israel, right?

One perhaps aspiring nuclear power, right?

A state that where a lot of oil and commerce turns on.

And so, yeah, I'm sorry to use the cliché metaphor.

It is risky business, right?

You know, one of the things you learn in poker is that like the biggest confrontations often arise from cases where it becomes one decision escalates after another.

And in any isolated circumstance, it may be correct to take the escalatory move.

However, the cumulative effect of that can be quite profoundly high stakes and profoundly negative in some cases.

Yeah, effects are not just what you see in the moment, right?

They can be exponential.

And so you have kind of the immediate stakes, and it doesn't seem particularly like, oh, you know, this is just a tiny, tiny blip, but then it can really spiral out of control.

I mean, I know people, it's to stay in the poker realm, who end up going bust in level one.

I know multiple people in level one of the main event of the World Series, which Nate and I will both be playing in just over a week.

But in level one of the main event, you have two hour long levels.

And I don't remember how many big lines you start with, but an insane amount, right?

Just totally crazy.

And then people just lose their minds and they end up in these situations where they really do not need to bust.

but they do anyway.

And they're like, oh, I couldn't avoid it.

And I was like, no, you could have avoided it, right?

Like, let's look at all of the mistakes, all of the decision errors that led you to this point where you felt like you couldn't avoid it, right?

There are so many mistakes that keep compounding and compounding, and all of a sudden you're out of this tournament where like you didn't need to be in that situation at all.

Yeah, sometimes there can kind of be, so what happens a lot in these big World Series events where there are a lot of amateur recreational players, right?

It's like

sometimes you'll have implicit agreement between the better players at the table that we don't want to go to war with one another.

We both have an incentive to, as the superpowers at this table, to like preserve our chip stacks and make easy profit from the fish as they're called however

when there's a lack of trust and there's no intrinsic reason to trust opponents in poker that regime can break down right where you feel like I'm being taken advantage of now right but the point is that like you know when you have better global norms

there is more potential for de-escalation and if you kind of look at it as like an exponential right so if you look at like how does nuclear war start

when there's not at at the moment, well, you can argue there's a NATO versus Russia proxy conflict, obviously, in Ukraine, right?

At the moment, there's not a hot war between nuclear superpowers, right?

So, you know, how's nuclear war start?

It happens through a series of accidents, probably, right?

You know, we do, I think, have enough precedent in the 80, whatever, one years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki to say that, like, probably you don't have nuclear wars start easily or nuclear accidents start easily, but in the fog of war in these escalatory scenarios right i mean it is a little frightening in the sense of like okay well we actually have to take this rather dramatic action that has unpredictable consequences because it's so bad preemptively if iran you know um i mean what if iran already has

nuclear weapons right and or you know or some failed dirty bomb or you know there's a lot we don't know and like and like when you have less cooperation around the world then every step is more likely to escalate right like let's say you need you know three things things that have a 10% probability of happening to happen in sequence to have a nuclear detonation somewhere, right?

That's a one in 1,000 chance.

What if the chances go up just because there's less cooperation in the world to 15%

times three, right?

That's actually six times higher if you do the math or four times higher or if you do the math.

I'm, I'm trying to get my spreadsheet out, right?

Because the exponential increase of all these steps you have to pass when things are a little bit less cooperative is more, is quite a bit more dangerous when they combine together.

Yeah, I think that's a really, really important point that we are actually in a global moment where I do think that kind of global norms have been eroding for a while.

And kind of we are in a less cooperative moment than we were in some way, even during the Cold War, right?

Like that seems crazy to say, but I think that norms have shifted in the last decade, in the last two decades, to a point where these sorts of percentages probably have gone up.

And, you know, and shit happens.

Like

we've talked, I think we've talked on the show before, Nate, correct me if we haven't, about Stanislav Petrov, who was a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Force.

And he basically prevented World War III back in 1983, unilaterally, back when there was a false alarm, basically, right?

The Soviet nuclear system malfunctioned, and it looked like the United States had launched a nuclear missile.

And

just he made the decision that this was a false alarm and that they were not going to counter strike.

And that decision was absolutely pivotal.

Now, imagine if it wasn't him.

Imagine if we've outsourced to AI, right?

Imagine so many different things that could have happened where instead of this being something that we only that we now know happened, back then no one knew, right?

That we almost had a nuclear confrontation.

Like imagine if those percentages shift a little bit, if you know different person, like

those types of situations, if the risk of them goes up even a tiny, tiny bit, then it's a really scary proposition.

Even back in 1983, it was terrifying.

And I don't even want to know what would have happened had someone else kind of been at the helm and decided, not decided, that this was the right thing to do.

So that's why these decisions are good to analyze in retrospect, because then we know the kinds of things that were avoided that were unknown at the time.

But yeah, it's um someone disobeyed orders right somebody went against the military protocol and decided not to launch a counterattack and that prevented the soviets from actually launching a nuclear missile when the us did not so these these sorts of things are really important and we've talked you know you've you've mentioned it i've mentioned it exponential effects are really important and human brains don't usually think about kind of exponential growth.

That's very difficult to think about.

But, you know, tiny shifts can actually actually have outsized effects because exponential growth is a thing.

Yeah,

it's both exponential and

existential potentially, right?

You can debate the semantics over whether climate change is, quote, an existential threat, right?

It's a bit more linear, generally speaking, where it's not like, well, I mean, there are like feedback loops and this gets a little bit, but like, it's not like, you know, there is some chance that next week

a situation grows out of control and there's a massive nuclear attack somewhere, right?

There's no chance that like

we all burn despite the heat wave on the East Coast.

There's no chance that like the world ends because of climate change tomorrow.

It's longer term and nuclear war is not is not like that, right?

Look, a lot of Americans lived in fear

for

many years of nuclear war, right?

I can remember just faintly from growing up in 47, like the presence of like fallout shelters.

By the time I was in school, there are no longer like fallout drills, but some number of years earlier, there might have been, right?

Trump is obviously old enough to remember the Cold War.

But sooner or later, we're going to have a younger generation of leaders that are not and that didn't live with nuclear risk as this like persistent existential threat in the way that people feel about climate change or increasingly even like AI today.

Yeah, and I think that that's another very important point.

So we have the compounding effects of changing social norms, changing international norms, less cooperation, and the loss of historical memory, right?

Of people who actually have that visceral knowledge of what these things felt like, which we talk about a lot on the show.

This is like direct risky business, right?

The way that we understand risk the best is by actually experiencing.

And that's why people understand risk so poorly.

But the kind of the historical memory, the people who lived through this, who understand just how important this is, just how scary it is, that's going away.

And the people who've lived through the world war is like, that's going away.

All sorts of these major moments in memory are going away.

And that has scary implications for the next generation.

For us as well, I'm just saying for the next generation of leaders.

That has scary implications for the world.

So

yeah, we're out here playing folk or well.

I don't think the world's on the verge of a World War III.

That's kind of like an internet meme.

But clearly, this is,

you know, one of the most consequential things happening in the world right now.

Yeah, Nate, I think that's a good way of putting it.

So, with that, let's take a quick break and let's lighten it up a little bit and talk a little poker.

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Last week on the show, we promised you that if we were not going to give you a poker update, that meant that things were not going well.

So no news, bad news.

And for me, for me, that's actually mostly the case.

I had one or two caches in online bracelet events.

I don't remember if it was one or two because I don't quite remember the timing, but my live events have not gone well.

Nate, for you, they've gone slightly better.

A little better.

I mean, I have four caches in online events, one of which was at the Win, Not the World Series, one online cache.

I've succumbed and played one online.

I don't really love the online stuff as much.

But look, I just talked about last week, the way to actually end the trip with more than you lose is making a very deep run, top 2%, or to cash in your higher buy-in events.

And I've done neither plenty of caches in these smaller events that are medium deep, but not deep enough to really make good money.

And so we're still searching for that, you know, that big win.

I think it feels better to,

I don't know if it's better or worse.

I played a lot of poker, right?

I've been making it to the end of nights and stuff like that.

I don't know if that's better or worse than to maybe you have one big cache and then a bunch of busts early, then you have more dinners with friends and things like that.

But it's been a grindy kind of

World Series.

We've played a lot, get our name on the tote board sometimes, but nothing, no lasting memories yet.

And then about halfway through.

That's how it goes often, though.

It is how it goes often.

And Nate, you know, we still have a number of weeks left, so we're just saving up our run good for the main event and other events.

And Nate, you and I are going to tag team together.

So

there's a fun event called the Tag Team where you get to play with a partner and you tag in and out.

And so it would be really fun.

You know, we are taping this again on Tuesday, which is when Tag Team starts.

So by Thursday, you'll know if we're still in or not.

We don't know right now, but let's be optimistic, Nate, and say that we're still in Thursday, which means we made the final table.

That would be pretty cool.

That'd be amazing.

That would be great for the fucking show.

So there are some fun things.

There have been, you know, every World Series, and we've talked about some of the controversies so far, there have been more controversies.

I'm not going to talk through all of them, but there have been more accusations of both angle shooting, which as we've talked about, is when you basically bend the rules, but don't break them, right?

Where you go to the limit of what's technically allowed, but don't...

cross the line.

And so there have been accusations against multiple players of angle shooting.

And there was accusations of collusion at the final table of the 50K PLO,

which is a huge event.

Some chip dumping might have happened.

And Nate, you know, this is something that I actually was thinking about as you were talking about, you know, sort of soft collusion with other players at the table where you think, oh, you know, we're the better players.

We're going to stay out of each other's way.

But there's also kind of...

There's also this phenomenon, which is not angle shooting.

It actually is illegal, but it's incredibly difficult to police where, say, you and I, Nate, like, I'm not saying we would ever do this, but like, let's imagine that we're in an event together at the same table.

I have lots of chips, you don't have very many chips, and we both decided that we really need you to cash.

And so I raise, you go all in, and it doesn't matter what hand I have, you know, I just fold, right?

So that you can take my chips.

That's chip dumping.

That's incredibly bad.

Don't ever do something like that.

There's a reason that there's a rule in poker where if everyone is all in, you have to show your hand.

It's It's to prevent collusion, it's to prevent stuff like this.

But in situations like the one that happened at the final table of the 50K PLO, it was impossible to tell what happened because the first person who raised didn't scan their cards.

And it was not an all-in situation where there was a call, there was a raise, there was an all-in, and there was a fold.

And so it's incredibly difficult to understand what happened in situations like this.

I don't know in that particular situation.

Other players have been accused of angle shooting by, we've talked about this before, by saying the wrong raise size, right?

With really strong hands, where they say, oh, you know, I didn't mean to raise or I didn't mean to, I meant to raise not to call, and they just pretend that they're confused.

And maybe they really are confused, maybe they aren't.

And it's very difficult to know what happened in situations like that.

That's happened a few times already at the World Series.

And, you know, I'm of mixed.

So, you know, I'm working on a book about cheating.

You know, I really care about angle shooting.

You know, I really care about keeping the game, you know, at a high level.

I do think that we need to be careful of just starting to call everything angle shooting.

Right?

People have become a little trigger happy, I think, this World Series with their accusations, just whenever anyone does something that they don't like and takes their chips, they're like, oh, you're angle shooting.

Like, no, it's not always angle shooting, right?

Like, you need to be very careful and reserve that terminology for moments that really are suspect.

And I think a lot of the moments people have called out are not.

They're just people really do get confused.

Yeah, look, a lot of people, one of the things that comes with like

having more experience in poker is you see more situations like this, number one, and you're able to play poker without all of your bandwidth being devoted to, oh, what's the right play in this hand, right?

You're able to be more aware of the setting and the situation and so, and look for potential ankle shoots or weird shit, right?

um

you know sometimes if someone makes a weird bet size right then i'll ask them for clarification on that right to get information for my own self or sometimes it's kind of like not an angle but like speech play right where i'm trying to like confuse or intimidate somebody but like being having more awareness in a a

poker game like the World Series, where you have a very wide range of players from the best in the world to the worst players in the world, kind of almost literally, right?

And you have a lot of dealers who are making, let's be honest, are making mistakes, right?

Then like just being aware of the situation over the course, if you play seven weeks of a World Series, it's going to probably save you big mistakes two or three times in seven weeks.

That could be for a lot of chips, right?

Like that's a lot, right?

So don't be on your headphones, don't be on your phone in higher stakes moments, or you're going to risk things like

stupid decisions, tilting yourself, or also just being a good poker citizen and like when other players are fucking up, protecting those other players too, that you have, I think, as an obligation to do as a good poker citizen?

I think that's a really good note to end on.

Just really, really pay attention.

There was a situation that happened this past week with one of Poker's characters that people really like.

I think he's great, Texas Mike.

And he talked about a situation where a player had raised, he went all in and the dealer pushed the blinds and ante's to him.

Texas Mike was also playing on the phone at the same time and mucked his cards, like assuming that it was the whole pot.

The other player had never folded and still had his cards.

And the dealer fucked up.

And Texas Mike ended up losing the pot.

He had to put in the amount of the raise, and it was just

a nightmare.

He had had pocket queens.

But yeah, it was a really bad situation just because the dealer messed up and he was on his phone.

This was not even an angle shoot.

So, bottom line, pay attention.

There's nothing that's more important to your bottom line, to your end results of anything in life, but especially, you know, at poker in the World Series, just pay attention.

And if you believe you won the pot or there's anything ambiguous, you might be misreading the board that can happen in Omaha games and you might have won the pot, do not fold, do not muck your hand

until the chips are pushed your way.

Be a nick.

Or even when the chips are being pushed your way, because the dealer was pushing the chips towards Mike.

Right.

She just didn't understand that there was someone else in the hand still.

So just be hyper, hyper-aware always.

On that note, Nate, good luck today in the 5K 6 Max and to both of us in the tag team.

I hope that by the time our listeners hear this, we will be at the final table.

Let us know what you think of the show.

Reach out to us at riskybusiness at pushkin.fm.

And by the way, if you're a Pushkin Plus subscriber, we have some bonus content for you.

That's coming up right after the credits.

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Risky Business is hosted by me, Maria Konakova.

And by me, Nate Silver.

The show is a co-production of Pushkin Industries and iHeartMedia.

This episode was produced by Isabel Carter.

Our associate producer is Sonia Gerwit.

Sally Helm is our editor, and our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein.

Mixing by Sarah Bruguer.

Thanks so much for tuning in.

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