The Ivy League Bows to Trump, Plus Protecting Your Genetic Data and Your Time

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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 free speech, what's going on right now on college campuses, and then go into 23andMe and whether it's a good idea to send your genetic data to a private company.

Tough one.

Tough one, Nate.

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 in my life.

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 my 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 dead?

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 Duke because I thought it was going to be ahead and I out psyched myself.

So, yeah, anyway, yeah.

I'm already pretty anti-Duke, just in general, in life, and also in some of my

real sports hunting.

By the way,

you want a little tidbit into like the sports betting,

uh, the sports betting life, right?

Yeah, let's start.

Always.

So far, I bet, let me see here.

I bet 120

units on the NCAA tournament.

Both the men and the women were equal opportunity here.

And I'm ahead by 0.6.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, this is how it often goes.

But you're ahead.

Which is better than 98% of people, I would imagine.

We would really like it if Houston wins.

We would like it if...

Florida wins, both for our bracket and for my old bets.

And we'd like it if the South Carolina women win.

None of that happens, we end up underwater, probably.

Well, I would like Duke to win.

I'm now 100% on Duke.

I, you know, it's so funny.

This is, I, 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 he said it's an emotional roller coaster, which it really is, but we are still alive.

And it does, though, make it a lot more fun to be sweating and 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 anti-most dislike.

You can't say that.

You cannot answer that on a public podcast that is being listened to by tens of thousands of people.

Give me a gender gender and a nationality.

That doesn't really narrow, unless it's like Slovenian or something.

Well, one of the people, I can't give you a nationality, but

male.

Male.

Okay, thanks.

Thanks.

Male Speaker 1.

Oh, I think one of the people I most dislike is male and,

oh, fuck, no.

That's going to narrow it.

I don't want to be mean.

I don't want to be mean.

But I think some of these people, oh, male and American.

Here we go.

I know one of the people I'm talking about.

You're not allowed to give an answer.

There you go.

But it's true.

You're not allowed to give.

Okay.

Okay.

But it's always very fun to anti-sweat as well.

That's mean of me, isn't it?

No, that's how we get our pleasure in law.

I mean, that's why people, that's just why humans are human beings, right?

We fight for honor.

We fight to the death.

You know, and the people in charge of this country also seem to be fueled by grievance.

I don't know if we want to talk about politics or not.

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

free speech in this country and with how colleges, universities are reacting to pressure from Trump.

Not just universities, by the way, this is happening everywhere, law firms.

There's just this big muzzling 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 caved 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 a $9 billion 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 is 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 nits to the 20th, 20 millionth degree, that they are just saying, you know, 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 short-sighted, 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.

$2 billion?

$53 billion.

Sorry.

Mr.

Billion here or 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 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 tiniest violin in my uh 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 i'm most sympathetic to and i'm aware we probably have an audience that over indexes but i think for years these universities and there are exceptions i would think that my alma mater university of chicago is one of them but like these universities have let a culture of free speech erode they have let their academics become politicized, I think, in one direction toward a certain type of left-wing behavior.

And they acted as 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 or the University of Maryland or things like that.

So I look, I mean, I think they should tap into the endowment and tell Trump to fuck off.

Like,

what's it for?

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 they do in the sense of the research that they

conduct is, but where else like that's 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 101, 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.

Oh,

I'm talking about other like basic science, not tech.

That all happens in academia.

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.

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.

With Paul Weiss, like, what the fuck?

You know, you have this happening, like 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 kind of thing 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 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 expensive.

Like, that seems like a pretty stupid idea, Maria, from a risk management standpoint.

And by the way, Americans will be okay paying higher prices, Nate.

Americans will be okay.

Investors no 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 have more political capital.

They're probably going to lose political capital over time.

And when their resistance, I mean that both kind of figuratively and literally, is kind of like confused and discombobulated.

Look, there are levers 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.

There are midterm elections coming up.

There are special elections, including one or two today in Florida,

seats that the GP will probably hold, but much closer than you would typically expect.

And if there's a huge surprise, then, you know,

within the realm of remote possibility, I suppose.

And by the way, Democrats,

well, I mean, look, the race in

it's got to be more competitive, probably, it was in upstate New York, but I mean, Stephanie, Harvard Red, by the way,

is no longer being nominated to the UN because Trump is afraid of nominating someone who, in a district, he won by 21 points because it might cut their majority too much, right?

So, you know, so there is resistance.

Elon Musk, you see, even more unpopular 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 like Canada and Mexico to some degree on tariffs.

At first, the conservatives in Canada were like, okay, well, I'll just give you this little tribute, right?

And then, and their voters got furious at them, right?

You know, also some of the Harvard donors should be like, fuck you, you, Harvard.

I'm not, if you could pitch like Trump, then I'm not donating you anymore.

So you're going to cost you money either way.

And they have $52 million

to burn.

And so, you know, again,

I'm not that sympathetic, but I think probably

the worst high-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 is definitely an unprecedented kind of assault on

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 future 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 fighting 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 ILL universities, 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

does capture some of the center majority of people were pissed off about the congressional congressional hearings in 2023, for example, for the three university presents.

And so like, so they're kind of like tactically smart about like 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 100% disingenuous, but very tactically smart way of for Trump forget 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 mean to dramatize this as saying this is like the most important pivot point in American history.

I'm just saying like a lot of people have done a lot of really cringy things in the first, what is it now, two and a half months of Trump, right?

All the CEOs who bent the knee at the inauguration and all the people who are, you know,

the networks, even the liberals are now back here watching the news, who fired all their liberal correspondence, right?

Like, but like that stuff will not age well if Trump goes down as an unsuccessful president or worse, dot, dot, dot, right?

And again,

I think you can see the trajectory already toward him becoming more unpopular.

If he 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 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 of American democracy, if we're being dramatic.

I hope we don't get that far.

There's a gray zone.

There are gray zones.

No, there are.

I mean, democracy already has been weakened a little bit, right?

It should get a little bit weaker.

Yeah, 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 23 and me.

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Nate, have you ever given your genetic data to a website?

No,

I don't think I would.

Neither have I.

I am one of those people who forever, I told everyone in my family, I was like, do not ever upload your genetic information to 23andMe, to ancestry.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.

The HIPAA Act does not protect you whatsoever.

And

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.

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 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 outweigh any potential benefits of being able to say, ooh, look, Nate, you and I are 20th cousins once removed.

How cool is that?

Well, people could 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.

And ancestry.com is all about, so 23andMe is all about health data.

Ancestry.com is all about genealogy.

Either way, you have to give your genetic information 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 accompany it.

Yeah, people could also do genetic screening for certain

disease types, right?

I mean,

they used to be, so 23andMe over-promised and under-delivered on that front.

Because genetics is, can we just like pause 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, 23andMe was trying to cover everything and be like, oh, well, there was one paper about this and that.

And so you can have false positives, 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 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 in, okay, how do you communicate this risk?

What do you say?

You know, how do you give this life-changing information to someone?

23 on 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 it was ethically fraught 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 have 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 elevator risk of some condition condition that affects one in 100,000 people, then you're probably harming yourself more with the extra stress of that than you're learning ultimately 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

it gets there.

Shit 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 should.

Do you like that?

Yeah, I do.

It's very easy.

It's much

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 i partner this character it's like kind of marriage joe quimby from the simpsons like or a candy but like only campaigns on like frequent flyer complaints we will have a bit of sky lounge

i think i think i think you've got a you've got a hit on your hands

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 going to 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 20 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 to, 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, genetic data is something that, like, that is something that you can really control.

It doesn't make travel easier.

And so, so I think that the like the risk-reward trade-offs there are just so overblown.

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, I wouldn't be so sure.

yeah the california ag called for customers to delete their 23 me data so um probably good idea i i know i think i think maybe i'm not as much of a privacy advocate i think the improved efficiency and airport security screening and by the way also if you travel internationally it's much faster now in most countries to get out of there when you're when you're going through customs and so forth I don't know.

I think that might be a category where I think it's worth the trade-off.

No, like I said.

We're going to talk about

dialoguing your time in a minute, right?

Yeah.

And like I said, Nate, I actually like, 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 ancestry, which he didn't know about.

So that was interesting.

That changed the self-conception, I think, a little bit.

So he was some white 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, who don't know who their parents are.

Well, sometimes people think they know who their parents are and find out shit 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, 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 shit ain't getting deleted.

So now like deleting your data from 23andMe, 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 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 affects some of those too, in part because like basically they just kind of, the AI models have a corpus of data and they just soak up all this data, train on it for a while and then have model ways that 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?

Let's untrain it.

We're going to

untrain it and then we'll come back in a year and waste billions of dollars and give it, 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 the direction that we're headed in.

Yeah, I do think that

this is where we're going.

There's a really good book about this, by the way.

So, Cash Hill's book, Your Face Belongs to Us,

which is a really interesting and sounds like a song.

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, Nate.

So

I'm very glad, Nate, that you have also, you also do not need to pull your data, your unpullable data from 23andMe.

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 23andme.

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 forced, Maria, but you know, we'll.

Hey, hey, I did my best.

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This is a question that

doesn't come up nearly enough, but I think is really, really important, which is, how do you actually place a value on your time?

I made a bad joke, Nate, you called it forced.

I feel very hurt

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

kind of those types of trade-offs, it is an interesting way of looking at it.

How do you actually go about this, Nate?

Do you consciously think, you know, what is the value of my time?

Good question.

And let me acknowledge up front that this is like

a little bit, I'm not big on like the privilege ramp.

Let me acknowledge though, this is like a little bit of maybe of a kind of a privilegey

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 a if you're a author who sells books like Maria or I'll get opportunities to do speaking gigs when 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 whole days you burn on travel, for example.

So I think you have to like think about these things fairly explicitly.

That's especially true like when you're,

I mean, I'm essentially a freelancer, right?

Or maybe a small business owner where I write posts for the Silver Bulletin newsletter.

The more posts you write, the more opportunities there are for 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 I have forsaken 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 schedule is 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 that leads to several fewer newsletter posts or consulting opportunities.

I mean, the trade-off is pretty high.

It was like much easier.

where I worked for a giant faceless corporation and like I was kind of like paying a fixed salary and kind of working on the company dime, basically.

So, you know, I mean, it really kind of came to light last year when like I was playing in some relatively low buy-in event at the win and then Trump is charged with all these or 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 worth less 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 Tulane.

And so it's kind of in the spirit of like Edinburgh Fringe Fest or something where they want to like take this kind of medium-sized community and

have this festival once a year, right?

I didn't get paid for that, but like it's kind of like sometimes the cost should 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 like 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 Sundeel Malanathan 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 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 the 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 um 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 other trade-offs are there?

So 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, it's probably negative EV on some level is 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, the EV of that is insane.

And so that, you know, will help me.

book future speaking engagements and consulting work and all of this because it helps my profile.

And so there 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 spent 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 a bracelet, by the way.

What are you,

but not one during, I guess, the summer world series.

Like, what are the odds of

winning one if you play two-thirds of the schedule?

I mean, unless you're playing probably fairly low, right?

And so you can kind of,

what I'm trying to say is, like,

people, you have to, the point of life, or not the only point of life, right?

Oh, what's the meaning of life, Nate?

We're all listening.

To be a good person and to contribute intellectually into it, but to also enjoy yourself, right?

And if, like, there you go.

Doing poker is one of the things you most enjoy.

And the World Series poker tournaments 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 simulate.

And he said, it's real high pressure because the money gets 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 the election

if I can't sometimes relax a little bit?

You know, I mean, the value of that is I, you know, and 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 and it's not just the immediate time cost but the optionality cost i i think you know in general people ought to think more about optionality.

How 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 like splitting tens in blackjack.

If you already make 20, you're like, oh, I can get even more of this by splitting.

No, 20 is already a hard total to 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 actually kind of carve out a lot of time for

non-productive work.

And kind of what happens sometimes, I wind up backing into doing productive work anyway.

You come home from the dinner, you're like, oh, I'm just going to surf the web a bit.

And then blah, blah, blah, you're like writing a post or collecting some data for a a spreadsheet, et cetera.

Yeah, well, actually,

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

are constantly thinking 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 I'm just like, I'm tired.

And so I end up, you know, watching a show or, or

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 the thing, you know, the last thing I'd say, or maybe almost less, is

now and 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

PM flight back from California, for example, it's like, well, you know what?

If I wake up for a 6 a.m.

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'm going to pay this extra 300, 500 bucks because, like, that's definitely worth X additional hours of productivity.

So

don't be a cheapskate when you are in one of these kind of narrowly solvable problems,

you know, when there's a direct trade-off from losing productive time.

100%, Nate.

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 the reason it's the most expensive, too.

I mean, they know what they're doing in terms of the...

The reason it's most expensive is because it's the most convenient flight.

But yeah, I think that those types of things are very important because at the end of the day, don't be a cheapskate 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 nits.

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

being unilaterally 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, oh, am I going to do it, Nate?

Am I going to end with, how are you going to live your one wild and beautiful life?

Let's, no, no, we're not going to, we're not going to 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 question.

That is actually the best possible use of your time.

Yes, definitely.

That's all for this week.

Premium subscribers can stick around for our answer to one of your burning listener questions after the credits.

This week it's from Eastman Lewis on how to manage funny incentives in prediction markets.

If you're not subscribing yet, consider signing up for just $6.99 a month.

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Risky Business is hosted by me, Nate Silver, and me, Maria Konakova.

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

This episode was produced by Isabel Carter.

Our associate producer is Gabriel Hunter Chang.

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

Mixing by Sarah Bruguer.

If you like the show, please rate and review us so other people can find us too.

This is Justin Richmond, host of Broken Record.

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