Motivated Reasoning in the Biden Campaign, Silicon Valley, and Beyond

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

I'm Maria Kanakova.

And I'm Nate Silver.

What's the theme of the show, Maria?

I think today is people who just won't go away.

So

there have been new books out on President Biden's condition during his twilight in office.

Biden was also diagnosed with cancer this weekend.

Our condolences to him and his family.

We'll talk about, we'll talk about, we'll flog the Biden horse one more time, Marita.

We'll be talking about Biden's

decision or lack thereof to step down in a timely fashion, what that meant, and some psychology behind it.

Yes.

And then in other people who we just can't stop talking about, we'll be talking about Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos, and Elizabeth Holmes' partner, Billy Evans, and his new startup, which, surprise, surprise, promises an innovative way of testing blood.

Dallas Navigational Manager Nico Harrison is not in the same league as Joe Biden or Elizabeth Holmes.

He just made an extremely stupid trade earlier this year, but he was rewarded for it with the number one overall pick in the NBA draft, likely to be Cooper Flag.

We'll talk about, is the NBA draft lottery rigged?

Of course it isn't.

Ha ha.

Let's get into it, Nate.

Nate, way back when, you were one of the first prominent voices to say that Biden should not be running for re-election and that he should be stepping down.

And you got a lot of hate for that.

When you were saying it, almost no one else was.

And, you know, it was a big deal.

And now we've got several books coming out that basically say, oops, more people should have been saying it.

They should have been saying it earlier.

And what a cluster fuck.

Let's talk a little bit about that.

Yeah.

So there are a few things that make this relevant, right?

One, we have talked on this program before about the book Fight by Jonathan Allen and Amy Parnes.

There's another book out called Original Sin,

which takes a slightly longer exposure.

Fights mostly about the period where Biden has this terrible debate and then is kind of forced to wrap out.

This takes a longer lens.

I've not read it yet.

I've read the extensive excerpts and previews of it.

So that's one thing, right?

Number two, Joe Biden over the weekend was diagnosed with,

I believe, stage four

prostate cancer, correct?

Yes, correct.

That has met

his bones.

It's a pretty advanced stage.

So our condolences to Biden's family, but

this is not entirely non-germane to the topic at hand, right?

Third, the audio transcripts of one of the earlier warning signs for Biden was he um was under investigation by a special counsel named robert her

last year for a document uh actually two years ago i guess right for document retention practices a thing that no president seems to be very careful about these days uh her

issued a report saying i'm not going to charge him because he's quote an elderly man with a poor memory and what's the point right he's going to go on the witness stand and forget half this shit anyway right um so of course all the biden people and all the apparently non-partisan media flipped out about this when it happened.

However, the Biden White House refused to release the audio or the video of these interviews, right?

Making up some bullshit excuse that only stupid people, but there are a lot of stupid people in election years, right?

And so now the audio's out and like, and Biden's stuttering and stammering.

It's not any different than you would.

expecting that they were afraid of it being released.

But still, that shines more of a lens on on the story.

But Maria, can I give you the kind of hard question so I don't have to answer it first?

How did you feel when you heard about the cancer news?

I felt obviously absolutely horrible for Biden.

I mean, I don't wish that on anyone.

I also, you know,

I think that, you know, we're in a really shitty situation right now.

And the country is really, really hurting.

And we've talked on this pod a lot.

It doesn't really matter kind of what someone's political leanings are to be able to point to some things like, you know, what's happened to USAID, to scientific funding, to research, to innovation, you know, tariffs, as we've talked about many, many times, to all of these facets of American life, First Amendment protections, all of these things.

And, you know, that's...

I don't want to say squarely on Biden's shoulders, but a lot of that is on Biden's shoulders for

refusing to do what he said he would do, right?

If you remember, Nate, you probably actually remember this quote more accurately than I do, but what was his, what was

his way of phrasing it when he was elected the first time, right?

I think he said that he was going to be a bridge, right?

Something like that, that he was someone who was going to be a bridge to kind of protect against Trump and bring America forward.

And then, you know, a bridge ends, right?

A bridge goes from bank to bank, and then you get off and you're on the other side.

And at some point, he decided that, no, was, he wasn't really going to be a bridge.

He was also, he was also going to be the road on the other side.

And he was the correct person to continue, to continue on forward.

And,

you know, here's where we are.

So I feel, you know, the two things are

not related, somewhat related.

I don't even know.

I feel awful, right?

Like no one deserves an aggressive form of cancer.

I wish, I wish him quick, speedy recovery.

I hope that they can treat it.

You know, I hope that he has a comfortable old age.

but I'm not in a very pro-Biden frame of mind in general.

Yeah, I have trouble mustering up that much sympathy under the circumstances, right?

And

the reason why is because I think probabilistically, right?

And like, that's part of what colors the whole analysis to begin with.

We're like, someone hits this age and that's a problem.

But also, if you are now being diagnosed with this very aggressive cancer, right?

Wouldn't there have been signs of it before?

I mean, you know, I asked ChatGPT, the O3 model, people have different opinions on how appropriate it is for medical diagnosis, but it's trying to summarize a bunch of research on the internet and in journals and things like that.

And it said, yeah, there's a high probability that if the cancer is this advanced that it would have been detectable a year or so earlier.

It's like an 80 or 90 percent chance, right?

So there's reporting, and I have not read Original Sin, there's reporting in

Fight

about how, you know, Biden's kind of avoiding the doctor quite a bit.

Once his health becomes an issue, he just kind of just want to give people rope for this thing.

And it's like, okay, so that's not great, right?

You would think that after the debate, you would say, okay, I got everything checked out and a couple of problems, but here's a complete report.

And instead, he's kind of like...

polling a Trump where he has these personal doctors that frankly aren't very fucking credible, right?

Or that the diagnosis had been made before and they didn't want to disclose it i i don't well either of those things is pretty damning because the first is you know we've i think we've all been there or or you know that moment where like you think something's wrong and you're kind of in denial and you don't want to go to the doctor because because you don't want to confirm it.

So you're like, I'm just going to put off this appointment, right?

Like it's not that important because

you don't want to know.

It's a very, very human response.

But if you're kind of a president then you have a responsibility to make sure that okay i'm functioning you know well i'm firing on all cylinders there's nothing actually wrong um because i have you know the weight of the country on my shoulders so if he's avoiding the doctor that's damning however if he goes and he knows that he has this cancer diagnosis and he hides it that's also damning right because if you have stage four cancer get the fuck out of the race right like that is something that is you know it's awful.

And like you should, you should in no way be running for the presidency.

I mean, you should be at home focusing on your health, recovering.

If he had received that diagnosis during his presidency, frankly, he should have resigned right then and there.

passed over the presidency to Kamala Harris and said, you know, I'm dealing with stage four cancer.

I'm, you know, I'm really sorry.

I'm doing what's best for the country.

So either way, whether he was avoiding the doctors or whether he knew, and I have no idea, right, Obviously.

Neither one is a very good look for him as

the president.

And if we also just zoom out, like, Nate, imagine that he had gotten re-elected, right?

And right now

we're in term two of the Biden presidency.

And this news comes out this weekend, you know, four months in.

And then everyone who says, you know, Biden was too old, everyone's like, what are we even doing?

Like, how did we get here?

Right.

So the counterfactual is also kind of scary to think about no i mean and you imagine if this news had come out then i think he would resign the presidency i i don't know

we would hope so but at this point we don't know right given how he behaved during during uh i mean it's so impossible to imagine him

winning like if somehow i don't know i mean if somehow he had won i mean it would be i think a disastrous presidency you know what i mean and i in different ways out of

in different but like i again i said on this program

that, you know, I was not going to vote for Joe Biden.

My vote doesn't really matter.

Right.

And I feel extremely validated in that, right?

I, with perfect hindsight, I mean, I wouldn't vote for Trump, but like, I'm even further away from ever thinking it was appropriate to cast a vote for somebody who, I mean, again, in the reporting in these books suggests that people around him were worried about his ability to perform in a crisis, right?

You know, if you have a red phone moment and then his people are like, well,

there aren't really any, nothing disastrous happened.

Well, I don't know, right?

We got lucky.

We got lucky.

That is also, I mean, the world is less peaceful than when Biden took over, right?

I mean, Israel and the Middle East are at war and Ukraine, I mean, it's the most serious incursion into, you know, European territory in many years, right?

Our relationship with China is deteriorating.

India and Pakistan are

not real happy with each other right now, you know?

So I don't know.

I mean, you know, when he was like taking these special council meetings, it was like right at the same time that October 7th happens, was like off the phone with Bibi and into these meetings.

And it's like, okay, well, if you're kind of like not able to like coherently remember names and dates, I'm like, what if there is a acute point of strategy that the United States wants to articulate or point of leverage, right?

It's just a really huge

scandal.

It's a huge scandal.

And,

you know, in some ways, I guess Democrats are

lucky they're not suffering for it from it more.

You know, I mean, I don't know if the long-term effect, I mean, I think Biden at some point will just kind of go away right but like but like it's

it's news worth talking about even in may of the year after the election because you know it's one of the biggest gaffes i mean that's not the right way to put it one of the biggest knowable errors stubborn errors of judgment repeated errors of judgment by biden and the people around him and by the media frankly who kind of had the i mean they're doing a good job now right but they all the democrats who were mad at me or Ezra Klein or people who were like pointing out that, yeah, probably not a good idea to have a guy who's going to be president until he's 86.

And oh, by the way, he's clearly not firing Ronald Sylvester's right now after the debate, right?

I mean, I've done hundreds of public appearances, right?

I've had shit where I was super tired or sick or hungover.

I've never had a performance remotely as bad as Biden's debate, right?

And if I did, then I hope somebody would be like, you got to get medical attention.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

No, I mean, I think that it's important to be talking about this now, both to understand what happened,

but also to figure out, you know, how on a broader scale, like, how do we prevent something like this from happening again?

How do we actually learn from this?

Right.

So that going forward,

we don't find ourselves in a similar situation.

And by we, I mean the country, right?

I don't mean, you know, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, because this could happen to either party.

And I think that people do need to be empowered to say something and not shut up, because I think that psychologically speaking, there are multiple forces here.

I mean, first from like the Biden camp internally,

you do have kind of this cycle of motivated reasoning,

which basically, you know, is

confirmation bias on steroids.

So, you know, if you already have a point of view, right, you tend to look at evidence with that point of view in mind.

And so everything that confirms your point of view, you're like, yeah, see, this is exactly what I'm talking about.

Everything that disconfirms it, you're like, oh, no, well, this is bullshit, you know, for these reasons.

And you don't weight them correctly, right?

You don't actually, you think that you're doing an objective analysis, but it's a motivated analysis motivated by your own biases and your own agenda.

And so I think that, you know, I've talked before about followers of Trump kind of being under the sway of a con a con artist-like mentality, right?

Where you kind kind of, once you buy into this, you're just kind of part of that and you can't see things to the contrary.

I actually think that that's true to some extent of what was happening to the Biden camp as well, that you kind of buy into kind of the reality that no, Biden, you know, this is this is fine, right?

That this is fine, dog, that I have behind me during our tapings, that this is fine, and that everything to the contrary we dismiss.

And everything and every moment of clarity where Biden has like a good interview, right?

Or a half an hour where he's sharp, you're like, see, he's totally fine.

Everything is fine.

And so you have that on the one hand.

And on the other hand, you have the pressure, right?

The pressure from

different

external forces and internal forces to show cohesion, to kind of be loyal to the party.

And people often don't understand.

And I think that this is important to understand both in the past and currently what's happening in the Republican Party, that sometimes being loyal to the party means speaking out, right?

And saying, Hey, this is not okay.

This is actually undermining our party, right?

In the long term, what is happening with the party is hurting the party.

That that can be the act of loyalty, but instead, people just like kowtow and shut up and meekly say, Yes, we will follow the party line.

And that can actually be devastating.

Yeah, look,

I think they're

both bad, but not quite the same phenomenon.

I mean, I think in some ways, Democrats plays maybe less narrowly stupid and more cynical in some ways, right?

Like, so I think, you know, number one, I think the people close to Biden did or must have had some idea.

A lot of these books are reported on background, right?

Which means it's hard to attribute kind of what was generally known versus who knew what, right?

But like, my model is like

people knew.

I mean, Biden was obviously being like shielded a lot.

I went through his entire schedule for four years, and there were eight instances in 2013 and another eight in 2024.

So 16 total in the final two years where he does not have any public appearances for four days or more in a row.

And some of those, okay, I guess the president's entitled to a vacation, but like, you know, I mean, his schedule becomes very sporadic and erratic.

But also, I mean, Democrats are

selecting for people who go along with the program, right?

I mean, this is like, you know, this is part of the personality type of what I call the village in my book, right?

Which is, it's risk-averse, do-gooder types.

And so so brown-nosing is a big part of the game.

And

Jennifer O'Malley Dylan, who ran Harris's campaign and ran Biden's campaign, still reporting in these books, is like, yes, she is somebody where if you have bad news or a dissenting point of view, then don't tell it to Jen, right?

And how she mind-warped Kamala Harris into making herself Kamala Harris's campaign chief too.

I mean, that was just, you know, I'm much more sympathetic to Kamala Harris than I am to Joe Biden.

But that decision was

ill-advised, I would say.

And that's also the implicit thing, too.

It's like, so the Biden people

thought that, okay, well,

Harris can't win.

Well, you're the ones who fucking picked her as your vice president, right?

I mean, the low esteem in which the Biden people held Kamala Harris, right?

You know, first of all, you know, you have a vice president and whatever you think of her as a candidate, I mean, she definitely is a knowledgeable person who attorney general, senator, definitely traditional qualifications, right, in the largest state in the country.

And so she probably should have been president.

I would have felt safer in a crisis with Kamala Harris.

You know, I'll be honest, I would feel safer with Donald Trump picking up the red phone than Joe Biden.

Like, it's not even close.

Like, I don't think he hasn't gotten, I'm not saying I prefer Trump overall.

I certainly wouldn't, right?

But like,

but I, you know, I mean, at least he has his wits about him,

such as they are, right?

But anyway, but yeah, the lowest theme, and then if you read Fight, a lot of it is like, well, the Biden people don't want Harris exactly.

And the dissenters of the Democratic parties, like Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi, also don't want Harris.

They want kind of this open primary, but she kind of emerges as this compromise option in part because the Biden people are like, you don't want me?

Well, fuck you.

You're getting her, right?

I'm not exaggerating by much, right?

Like there's that attitude.

So yeah, it's just this morass of stuff that like, and you know, and then I, you know, I also got some pushback from some people about like, I wrote an article last week saying, okay, enough with the media victory lap here, right?

I mean, maybe we should have like, there's all this reporting.

I understand when you're reporting a book that sometimes people tell you things on the condition of it's going to come out in a year, right?

I mean, for On the Edge, I had some of that.

People say, well, I'll talk to you on the record because it won't be published for two years and I trust you to do a fair job.

Whereas I couldn't just go turn around and write like a newsletter post about that or something, right?

But still, I mean, mean, you know,

the U.S.

was lucky, I think, to avoid an acute crisis.

Yeah, it absolutely was.

And just for, you know, for the record, I have not read either book.

I've read some excerpts from both of them.

But some of the some of the information there is pretty damning in the sense of not recognizing George Clooney, which, by the way, is huge, right?

Like let's just

let's just say that

George Clooney's face nate.

So I don't know if you know this but he so there are psych studies um on um brain damage kind of different types of neural damage and kind of cognitive function loss and George Clooney is one of the faces that's used to kind of look at that.

He is so recognizable and such an iconic celebrity that his face is actually one of the like classic study materials where you assess cognitive function.

Because sometimes people like, I might not recognize you even though I've known you, but I'll recognize George Clooney, right?

And sometimes I won't quite recognize, but I'll be like, oh, you know.

So he is one of those faces that's used.

So to me, like it was an added, like, oh my God, right.

Not recognizing him when you actually know him and he's actually a friend.

Like that is not something that you dismiss, right?

That is something that if you're, if you're a doctor, I was going to say if you're a psychiatrist, but you don't need to be a psychiatrist.

If you're anyone, you have to be like, okay, you know, something is actually wrong and you need to assess this and we need to figure out what the hell happened.

It's not, it's much worse than thinking you just spoke to Mitterrand, even though he's not been the president of France for quite some time, right?

So

in some ways, like that's, that's a...

oh shit moment like what are we even doing here and there are so many of those that i just saw in the excerpts and obviously excerpts are chosen to for the juicy bits but it does seem like there was um kind of a consensus to protect the president and that's the wrong incentive structure, right?

The incentive should be to protect the country and to make sure that the country is on a good path, not to protect a man.

Yeah, I mean, there's a whole history of older presidents.

I mean, you know, Woodrow Wilson had a stroke and

his second term was a disaster.

And he wanted to run for like a third term.

And Harry Truman kind of had to be shown.

So what happened is until 1972, basically parties picked their candidates in the proverbial smoke-filled rooms, right?

So if the Democratic Party were getting together in private, they'd say, you know what, we've all heard these stories about Joe Biden.

And so now it's going to be Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, or maybe Harris would have a good chance, et cetera, right?

And like, and it's somebody kind of went up with this in-between where like there wasn't really a primary.

I don't know.

It's,

yeah.

You know, I just think, you know, any inner circle Biden person

just has direct moral responsibility for the election outcome.

You know what I mean?

Exactly, exactly.

And in protecting Biden, here we are, right?

We, you handed the country to Donald Trump and everything that comes with that.

But, Nate, the very human response to just once you're lying, to lie, lie, lie, and lie, I think that's a great entry point to

something else we wanted to talk about.

On Elizabeth Holmes, Maria.

Let's take a break and talk about the new startup from Billy Evans.

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Nate, this is a blast from the past show.

Elizabeth Holmes is back in the news.

Our listeners and people who have followed any news media kind of for the last few years, know her as the head of Theranos, founder of a game changer in blood diagnostic technology, basically had all the big Silicon Valley bigwigs behind her, Henry Kissinger on her board.

So got some politics in there as well.

And it all turned out to be a huge grift and more than a grift, a very bloody grift, pun intended, because the results were bogus.

The blood work was absolutely fraudulent and people were misdiagnosed.

It was just an absolute disaster.

Holmes is currently in prison serving a sentence for her role in

Theranos.

But she still posed for a photo for the New York Times with her partner Billie Evans, who has a new startup called Hemanthus, which is a flower known as the blood lily.

Ha ha ha.

Because do you know what this startup is going to do?

It is going to revolutionize

how we test blood for diseases.

Does that concern you at all, Pate?

Yeah, look, I remember

reading the book, Bad Blood by the Wall Street journalist John Carriew, I believe.

Yeah.

Great book.

Yeah, and it reminds me a little bit of the Biden thing.

It was so obvious from the start that this was like seriously fraudulent.

It wasn't like, it wasn't so with like, with like FTX, which is the other most famous fraud of this quarter century, I guess, right?

I guess Enron is a little too, has aged out.

You know, FTX itself was a legitimate and quite well-regarded platform for exchanging crypto assets, right?

Like that part of the business was legitimate, whatever you think of crypto, right?

And then SBF was siphoning money to make a whole bunch of like trades on the side that were customer deposits, right?

Whereas Theranos, it's like it was all a ruse.

You know, they actually recruited a lot of people who like weren't traditional Silicon Valley VCs, but were very well networked.

They're like, oh, this is the future of medicine.

And

here's,

you know,

let me put this carefully, right?

I think there was a lot of excitement over a

woman founder, right?

She knew dignitaries and she had a great Rolodex, right?

And like generated a lot of buzz and got a slightly different investment profile than a typical early stage startup might, where maybe there was less scrutiny.

But I don't know.

Yeah, no, I mean, I think that she was, and this is, I think, the reason why

her partner startup is also noteworthy.

I think that she brilliantly hit on all of the flaws in venture capital funding, right?

And how Silicon Valley operates in general, what the incentive structures are, what they look at, what they don't look at, which is also absolutely crucial.

So, you know, the model obviously is, you know, we invest in tons of stuff and most of it's going to fail, but a few are going to be kind of our stars with

completely outsized returns, right?

And that's how kind of VC, the VC world works.

And they love stories and they love compelling narratives, compelling people, you know, something.

They love con artists, basically, because the best storytellers in the world are con artists who paint you a beautiful picture of blue skies and what's possible and why this is going to be the idea that changes everything.

They want to believe in that because their incentive structure is such that they...

you know, if one of those is actually true and not a con artist, beautiful, right?

Like there's my, there's my outsized return that's going to pay for everything and make me look like an absolute genius.

And the problem is oftentimes, you know,

it's hard to tell

where the line is between a compelling story with a real idea, compelling story with a not real idea.

In this case, as you point out, Nate, it's very clear very early on

that there were major, major holes in

Elizabeth Holmes's story.

But because of kind of a lot of the glamour associated with it, motivated reasoning, right?

This is what we were talking about when we were talking about Biden.

It's easy to overlook it if your incentives are to believe.

And we've talked about a lot of those holes.

You know, the fact that she dropped out, her former advisor said, this is, you know, this ain't good.

A lot of prominent scientists were like, this is bullshit.

You know, a lot of the data just.

never released.

A lot of these things were huge red flags.

People started resigning very early on over the lack of scientific data etc etc etc and yet like what if right like that what if is huge like what if we're the ones who miss out fomo is big and we don't want to be the people who passed on the beatles like you don't want to be that cautionary tale and so you just want to kind of go go along with it and that creates this culture where grifters thrive.

And I'm, I mean, I would bet a lot of money that there are other cons that have been funded by VCs in Silicon Valley right now that we don't know about yet and that we might never know about because they might just kind of peter out.

They might not ever, ever be kind of as headliney as Elizabeth Holmes.

But the fact now that her partner is doing,

you know, he's saying, you know what?

The appetite for this is strong enough that I am going to do this again.

Look, you know, I have been pulling up the list of investors that Therados had.

And it's like it

conspicuously omits a lot of the traditional Andreas and Horowitz Sequoia type firms.

I think people did have concerns.

And although people in those firms make a lot of mistakes, I think sometimes you have to wonder, well, if they passed on it, right?

Because they are terrified of like passing on the next big thing, then

that's probably has some

signaling value, right?

But the general point is absolutely correct.

I mean, when I,

you know, I just reported it in the the book, right?

So

I was invited to like an Indrecent Horrowitz conference and it became off the record very quickly, right?

But before they told us to go off the record, the guy they had on stage was Adam Newman, who is the founder of WeWork.

Very charismatic guy, if you've ever interacted with him, right?

But also there were all types of problems with WeWork where it's valuation cratered and he was accused of like smoking weed on international jets and things like that, right?

And they were proud to say we're investing in his new startup, right?

Because they're like, we want high variance.

If you're good enough to build kind of the like, WeWork wasn't like

fake in the way that Theranos was, right?

If you're if you're right, if you're able to build a company, like whatever it was, $60 billion valuation and right into the ground, well, it's still closer than most people come, right?

So you're high variance and high upside,

and

so we want that skill set.

And I guess that's kind of the same idea here.

I mean, you know, I don't know.

I mean, if

SBF or Elizabeth Holmes wanted to invest a new startup, they'd probably get some funding, I think.

I think they would as well.

This is,

you know, this is one of those things where I think it's true in a lot of the finance community.

You have people

like who,

you know, not even startups in the hedge fund industry who've blown up multiple hedge funds.

Basically, their investors lost all their money and there were spectacular failures and they still get money, right?

They still are able to raise fund number two.

They're able to raise fund number three because at some point they had a good track record.

And these are, you know, oftentimes, Nate, as we know, there's variance.

And so that initial track record might have been an absolute fluke.

You know that in poker, right?

You have some poker players who just have stellar starts.

And it's not because they're brilliant players.

It's because they got ridiculously lucky.

But in poker, it's actually much easier to see that, to see through the noise.

And eventually, you know, those players go bust.

But in the world of stock markets, sometimes, you know, it's easier to take.

It's noisier, right?

So it's harder to be like, oh, this was just someone who was a luck box, not someone who's a good investor.

And so if you're initially a luck box, then you get money over and over and over, even if you just keep blowing it up.

And think about how many poker players, by the way, even in a world that's less noisy, go bust multiple times and yet still find people to lend them money.

And so I think that we do see this sort of thinking in that world over and over and over.

And so I think absolutely, once, you know, Elizabeth Holmes' 11 years are up, if she wants to do company number two, some people will invest in her,

even though there are probably a lot of people you should invest in before you invest in her.

And in the meantime, you know, I have a hard time.

I know nothing about Billy Evans

other than

what he's doing right now and that he's Elizabeth Holmes' partner.

And to me, that's, you know, I hate judging someone who I've never met, but that's pretty damning.

Like, do we think, like, is there,

is there a universe where he's a true believer?

I don't think so.

Yeah.

And by the way, it's not even that like,

it's not even like crazy to think that like Adam Newman could build a successful.

another successful startup at some point, right?

It's just that like, why pick him when you have

more options than you can possibly have to in time to even look at, right?

Absolutely.

And you know that his behavior hasn't really improved, right?

So even if he does build something successful, like there's, he's also a wild card.

Like he might blow it up just by virtue of who he is and the types of things that he's prone to do.

You know, why are you, why are you investing in someone like that?

I totally agree with you, Nate.

And yeah, and while, you know, we with someone like Billy Evans, who doesn't have a track record, like might be a good guy.

Like we might, we might look at him and be like, oh, you know, everything, everything is great.

But it just, why, if you're, if you're an entrepreneur and like

your partner is Elizabeth Holmes and you know, like, you know, how that shit went down and you know, the science was not there, by the way, for being able to test, you know, one single drop of blood.

Like that was, there was no science behind it.

It was just not possible to do what she wanted to do.

And to say that, oh, no, well, now, you know, know, now we have the science behind trying to do the exact same machine, basically, like, man, oh, man.

Is he going to be able to raise the $50 million that he wants initially?

And he says he'll need 70, you know, to really kind of bring it to scientific fruition.

I really, I honestly hope not because it's going to, like, my estimation is already pretty low of that world.

It's going to fall even further if there are people who are willing to give him $50 to $70 million.

Should people be responsible for what their partners do?

No, but if you are launching an identical startup to the fraud that was perpetrated by your partner for which she is now serving jail time, I don't know.

To me, that's a little bit different.

I mean, during the wokeness peak, there was like this

MLS soccer player who's like,

wife had like put on social media a bunch of really racist stuff, and then he had to like leave the team, right?

Which doesn't seem very no, that's that's totally not fair.

It just, just, you know, I think it's, there's a lot of nuance there and it depends on, depends on the circumstances.

So, no, I don't think you're responsible for what your partner does.

But then when you go on and

try to do the exact same thing your partner's in prison for, I think that's a little bit different.

What's the startup's name again?

Himanthas.

Oh, yeah, you told me that.

It's like the blood flower.

Yeah, blood lily.

But hey, it is what it is.

And we will see what happens.

And all I can say is please, venture capitalists who listen to our show, Silicon Valley more broadly, like please try to invest in people who actually have the background for what they're doing and who are credible and not just because they know how to tell a compelling story.

Storytelling ain't all there is, even though I know that that's what you like to reward.

So please try to heed that.

Storyteller.

Journalism is like...

Storytelling and journalism.

Like, I fucking hate storytelling.

I mean, I like storytelling, but like

the minute you call it storytelling, it's like, that's just an excuse to like prioritize the narrative over the facts and to prioritize and to

put a little spin on the bowl, I think, right?

Let's take a quick break and then, Nate, I'd love to hear, you know, because I love conspiracy theories, but I don't know much about the Mavs.

So I am very curious to hear about what all of this conspiracy thinking is about.

So

let's get into it after the break.

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So the Dallas Mavericks won the NBA draft lottery.

Was it last week, I guess?

They had a 1.8% chance of being picked.

The top teams have around a 14 or 15% chance.

And their combination of ping-pong balls came up.

So they will presumably be drafting Cooper Flag, who was the

one of the few college players ever to win National Player of the Year as a freshman, great player, kid from Maine, which does not produce a lot of basketball prospects, but thought of as the next potential superstar.

People quickly became suspicious, partly because, yeah, people underestimate that 1.8% is not that low, right?

It's like a one-outer in poker.

But

they had made an inexplicable trade earlier this year where Luka Doncic, maybe the top, in my opinion, maybe about the fifth best best player in the NBA.

Some people might have a little higher, put him five or six or something like that, right?

Was traded for Anthony Davis, who promptly got hurt, and one first round pick and a mediocre player named Max Christie, right?

And so like, if you had done an auction around the league, they would have gotten like

literally

twice as much of a return, maybe more than that, right?

They sold for like 40 cents on the dollar.

However, conveniently, you now have Luca,

one of the league's glamour players, playing with LeBron James in Los Angeles for the Lakers, one of the league's glamour franchises, right?

Probably the Lakers are the premier, you know, if you want a team to be really good, probably Lakers nicks in that order if you're the NBA.

So why would they do this?

Well, if it turns out they're also getting the first overall pick and Cooper Flag, that's a pretty fair trade.

AD and Cooper Flag for Luca, who's about to have a big contract extension, looks pretty good.

And so that's triggered some conspiracy theories.

It's not the first time right um you know lebron james grew up in akron ohio hmm conveniently conveniently the cleveland cavaliers win the draft lottery that year for example um which other ones are alleged you know other things were like when teams you know when the new orleans pelicans which were then like owned by the nba like trade away uh

also anthony davis um

they got the first pick in zion williamson so whenever whenever there's there's a big prospect, you know, it seems to end up in a convenient place.

But

I'd say a few things about that, right?

Like,

number one, a lot of people would have to be in on this conspiracy, right?

They draw the ping pong balls in front of the sealed room full of people in the media.

Zach Lowe, formerly of Grantland.

and ESPN, now of the Ringer, I believe,

was among them.

You can go listen to his account on his show, right?

And like, so, you know, it's pretty transparent.

They have as complicated codes.

It's like not just one ping pong ball, but you draw four and each code lines up with a set of teams that are picked, right?

So they'd have to, you know, enlist Ernst ⁇ Young, I believe, is the accounting firm they work with to like rig the actual mechanics of the ping-pong balls, right?

And that would be a lot.

And a lot of people would have knowledge of this and would feel safed about it, potentially.

I mean, who knows?

People, you know, people kept tightlifted about the Biden thing for a long period of time.

But like, I'm also not sure that like

if you're the league, you necessarily would want Cooper flag and

Dallas as opposed to.

I mean, maybe, I don't know.

It is a pretty big market, right?

Maybe I know.

Well, Nate,

in general, I always like to push back on conspiracy theories, right?

Because the human mind loves to see, to see them where they don't exist.

And we do know as poker players, one-outers happen, right?

Like, man, they happen way more often than you feel like they should happen.

That said,

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

And

one of the things that I was recently researching, I don't know if you remember this, you know, I wasn't born yet, but it was a huge scandal.

In 1980,

Pennsylvania lottery scandal, the triple six fix, they actually were able to rig the lottery and they had specially weighted balls so that a special limited number of combinations were more likely to be drawn.

And so, yeah, obviously you need someone on the inside in the in the ball machines, but this was done, you know, this was done also on television.

Like it was very, very controlled environment.

And yet like it's still possible to introduce

weighted balls into machines that make certain number of combinations more likely to happen.

And that's not the only time that that's happened.

That was just like a very prominent example of that happening.

And so I hate, I don't want to honor conspiracy theorists, but I do just want to point out that it is possible to reg lottery ball machines.

Shaquille O'Neal just alleged

that in 1992, then NBA Commissioner David Stern asked him if he wanted to go to a cold weather or a warm weather city.

Guess who won?

It happened to be the Orlando Magic, one of the warmest destinations in the NBA, not the Minnesota Timboff or something like that.

And so like, I think people are mostly joking, and I think I'm mostly joking.

I would say that like there is,

there are big incentives for like the league to

align talent to places where they think the franchise not deserves it, right?

But like, I mean, it's, you know, I don't know.

There would be, you know, there would be incentives to do it.

Yeah.

They should just read it.

Maybe they should say, yeah, we've determined these are the optimal picks for the league, right?

Yeah, no, for sure, for sure.

And

I also am

mostly joking, and I think that it is important to kind of

make it clear that it's unlikely that anything is rigged.

All I can say, Nate, is: you know, next time you do a lottery ball,

a lottery that has little balls and machines, just keep one eyebrow up and make sure that everything is weighted correctly before choosing your numbers.

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.

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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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