Group Chat Protocols, Bracket Updates, and thoughts on the WNBA

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

I'm Maria Kanakova.

And live on tape from the beautiful Pushkin Studios in the Fine Art District of New York City, New York, I'm Nate Silver.

Yes, this is correct.

This is the first time that Nate and I are both in the studio in the same place since the pilot of the show, Nate.

But if you detect an extra special chemistry, it's very close quarters here actually.

It is.

Yeah.

And today we've got some some stories for you.

First up, the failing Atlantic Monthly.

Failing Atlantic Monthly.

Has quite the scoop.

So we're going to be talking about Jeffrey Goldberg's signal information security and what not to do on your group chat.

Then we'll catch up on our NCA brackets, recap, for example, how Team Nate is so far in the lead against Team Maria and Monty.

And we'll talk about women's basketball and why on earth are women not allowed to join the WMBA until 22 years old.

Let's get into it, Nate.

But before we do, you moved.

You are now in a new apartment.

I'm now, I moved from a neighborhood which might generously be called Chelsea, but really is South Penn Station to the New York Times.

Thank you, Nate.

You finally, now that you moved, you finally admitted

on the New York Times map, it was considered 70% Chelsea.

All right, all right.

Chelsea, Midtown, West hybrid currently.

But now that you're out of there, you can acknowledge that it really was not Chelsea.

No, and like there is something about being like in an actual neighborhood.

Yeah.

Like, you know,

South Penn,

Northeast Chelsea, as I call it,

serves kind of this transient community, right?

It's people commuting in and out of the city.

It's, there are some working spaces there, right?

People going to Knicks and Rangers games.

I like Knicks and Rangers, right?

But like, you know, Madison Square Garden dominates in some ways the profile of the neighborhood.

And so, yes, this is a real neighborhood.

And like, there, you know, I'm reading the Esperant Klein, but there's an abundance, right?

Not only do you have your independent coffee shops in the morning, right?

You have your

French Vietnamese independent coffee shop on your Scandinavian independent coffee shop, right?

You have your

vaguely Russian, Eastern European, mostly vegetarian wine bar.

It's like, and they're all pretty fucking good, right?

I'm glad you're now in your new neighborhood.

I'm glad you're finally moved because as we all know, moving sucks, the process, that is.

So I'm glad that's behind you.

Let's talk about something a little bit less fun.

I mean, on some level, it's kind of hilarious,

which is that this week there was an absolute bombshell.

You know, bombshells usually overused, but I feel like this was a bombshell piece in The Atlantic, unprecedented, as far as I can tell, in the annals of national security, where Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, was inadvertently included on a signal chat with members, top members of U.S.

national security that were discussing a then-imminent attack on the Houthis.

Let's start off by just talking about Infosec or information security and how the fuck something like this happens.

Well, no, I am a

top information security is my top issue, right?

The reason I voted for Donald Trump in 2016 is because of Hillary Clinton's email server.

I thought that was the most important story in the country.

I thought there was too little press coverage of it, if anything.

Sorry.

Vote for Trump.

Yes, for anybody who thought that Nate was serious, Nate did not vote for Trump in 2016.

This was, he was being sarcastic.

Are you a group chat girl person?

I am only in a few group chats, and those group chats are like three people.

You know, like I'm in a group chat with you and your partner.

Yeah.

And I'm in a similar group chat with, you know, my college roommates and a few others, but I hate group chats.

Yeah, I'm not a big.

I'm not awful.

I'm not a big.

I think it's probably because, now this is where I sound like a fucking snob, right?

But like, Maria, you and I like have, we're kind of like, we're able to communicate.

We kind of communicate professionally for a living, right?

And so like, I could see the value of like a group chat if like, if you want this cool group of people that you're like, who care about your opinions, right?

But like, if you're writing all the time, I'm like with emails too.

Like, I don't want to fucking write a long email.

No.

I'll make it a fucking newsletter.

Monetize that shit.

Talk about the podcast.

Monetize that shit.

I'm not giving free stuff away in group chats.

Sorry.

No, that's absolutely true.

So I've had to set up group chats a few times for various reasons.

And whenever I do, I'm actually super paranoid about putting the wrong person in the group chat.

So Nate, for instance, let me use you as an example because I've had to add you to group chats for scheduling purposes.

And I have several Nates in my phone.

And you are never the first Nate to come up, probably because you don't have an iPhone.

So my iPhone doesn't like that and always is like, no, don't, don't use this Nate.

And so,

you know, Barstool Nate, he is also in my phone.

Oh, wow.

And he is the one who is always coming up before you.

And I am always paranoid.

Sorry, Barstool Nate.

But I'm always paranoid that I'm going to add the wrong Nate to one of these things.

And I triple check to make sure that, you know, I don't inadvertently say, you know, add and I'm adding the wrong person.

Now, I'm only highlighting this to say, okay, when you're starting a group chat, and this is just about scheduling, you probably care about who's in it.

Now imagine

you're doing a group chat about bombing a country, right, or bombing a group.

Shouldn't you double check, triple check, quadruple check?

I mean, okay, wait, what am I even talking about?

Why are we starting a group chat about national security?

Rule number one, and you probably have learned this as a journalist, you never put anything in an email or in a chat that you don't want on the front page of the New York Times, potentially because

that's the other reason why I don't like I'm pretty circumstanti about what I say over email or even you know even a

private event I'm just careful about what I say whereas I'm kind of in call you know I say lots of shit like on the podcast and on Twitter and whatever else the newsletter but like but yeah I don't assume that things

stay private without like a explicit

understanding.

You can't assume they stay private and you can't assume that things don't get passed along, that basically the only people who see them are going to be the people who you are sending them to.

So nothing should be done over chat that is sensitive.

That's not how you communicate national security.

It's not how you communicate war plans.

But in this case, that is what happened.

Now, one of the things I learned when I was back when I was working on the confidence game,

I actually talked to a lot of people who do information security, who do cybersecurity, because hacking and, you know, that kind of social engineering is huge for con artists.

And they all told me, I don't care what kind of a security system you have.

I don't care how up-to-date you are, who's your, you know, who does your Infosec, all of this stuff.

You're only as strong as your weakest human link.

And it's always going to be human.

It's never going to be technological, right?

There's always going to be that dumb person.

And if I can get to that dumb person, then I can take you down, right?

I don't, I don't, I can get behind any firewall.

I can get past anything.

And this, that's just like 101 ABC and this is like the textbook case of wait I didn't even need to do anything right you just fucked up so badly that you know you just here here is the weakest link and the weakest link happens to be at the top of our national intelligence so one thing I'd say is um

You are bringing a lot of people that don't have a lot of experience in government, right?

I listened to the Esper Klein podcast with, I think it was Ben Buchanan, who was like basically one of Biden's heads of AI policy.

And he was like, yeah, you go into the government and like there are rooms where you're not allowed to use the internet and there are all these protocols that are quite cumbersome.

And if you come from the private sector, I'm sure it's like extremely annoying, right?

And so the fact that like, you know, J.D.

Vance, only two years in government, right?

Pete Hagsmith, no years in government, unless I'm forgetting about something, right?

You bring in people that are like our current.

Does Fox and France count?

I think, you know, it's kind of, it could be state-owned media.

I don't know.

But yeah, you bring in people who like are just like, hey, we're kind of treating this like a group chat, like we're negotiating some VC deal or whatever.

And like, on the one hand, it's kind of like,

how do I put this?

The casualness of the language.

I'm not, you know, I don't think any of them come off especially

badly in the texts that are referenced.

I mean, if anything, they're kind of like, if anything, they seem like,

I mean, there are internal politics, like Stephen Miller comes in, he's the kind of Trump advisor, and he's like, don't go too far in interpreting Trump's shit, right and then they kind of shut up right but like but you know look I'm sure J.D.

Vance is a smart guy right I think he might be in over his debt but I think he's like a smart guy and it's kind of fun to watch them chit-chatting but yeah why is this journalist

why is this journalist copied on this chain yeah and and no one and no one

catches that he's on the chain at any point.

And apparently, so we don't know, but apparently there are very sensitive details shared.

And at this point, so just in terms of of journalistic ethics, you know, people are joking and saying, you know, you're a journalist, why didn't you stay in the chat?

Well, it's because Jeffrey Goldberg actually understands the repercussions of this.

And at the moment that this was actually said, that this is, that this is correct, right, that this isn't.

Because at first he didn't know if this was a spoof or like what this was, right?

But once it was confirmed that this is legit, he left.

And I think that that is the ethical thing to do.

Although there's obviously a part of me that is like, ooh, but what what else could you have learned?

But I think that that is the ethical and the legally safer thing to do because

people will try, I think, to come after him.

And it was smart to leave.

I think you can debate.

I mean, look, fundamentally, okay, well, let's ask you.

Let's say that you're added to this group chat.

What do you do?

Well, I think at first, especially given, you know, my background and the books that I've written, the book I'm working on,

I would assume that it's fake.

I mean, that would be my initial assumption.

How could you not assume that it's fake when you see the name

until he kind of performed this out-of-sample test where he like, I guess he said he drove to, they make a movie about it, right?

Yeah, wrote a he drives to some suburban grocery store and waits in a parking lot and is like, well, if they announce in the next 15 minutes that we're bombing Yemen, right?

Then this is real.

This is real.

And yeah.

And

the Trump people kind of caught off guard, kind of

did acknowledge that this was a real chat, right?

Whether heads will roll because of this, I don't know.

It probably depends on who Trump's mad at.

Yeah, I doubt heads will roll.

And I think that probably the

two heads that might roll are the head of the person who acknowledged that it was real immediately and Goldberg, right?

Like they're going to try to find a way to pin this on him instead.

Because

that is their, you know, initially, you know, the when Pete Hegset was asked about this, he said, oh, it's fake.

This isn't real, right?

But the government had already acknowledged that it was very much real.

Have you ever gotten a scoop just by kind of being in the right place at the right time?

Yeah.

I have, I have.

Especially because I'm female and so people tend to forget that I exist as an actual person with a brain.

No, it's true.

It's true.

It's true.

I can like, I blend into the background and people forget to take me into account.

I'm assuming with you, it's probably less likely that people are.

I mean, there's a sense, you know, it's always interesting, what people, and it probably is different if you're male and in white, whatever,

mistakenly taken for heterosexual in my case.

But like what people feel comfortable sharing with you.

I mean, this is true even at

the poker table in both public games and private games.

In poker, there is kind of, I think, a pretty strong unspoken understanding that like

you know, if something relates, if someone relates something to me at the poker table, then if I don't have a relationship with them, right,

I would kind of anonymize.

Yeah.

Right.

But people do have a lot of trust, right?

I mean, I've heard people discussing wildly illegal things at the poker table.

Oh, for sure.

For sure.

They do have a lot of trust, and they do often forget that you're a journalist

and you do have to remind them.

But yeah, I think it's very interesting that not only Hegseth, but like the Trump reaction to this was, you know, what's the Atlantic failing magazine, right?

Nobody cares about this.

I'm sure it's got a million plus page.

Yeah.

And so, and so if you

if you think about, you know, what is ideal risk mitigation strategy, right?

Like, okay, you fuck up.

What do you do now, right?

Like from a risk management mitigation standpoint, what is the best thing to do next?

And I would argue that the best thing, the way that people usually come off the best, and this comes from both organizations and on an individual level, is to immediately acknowledge it and be like, yeah, fucked up, sorry.

And then like, we'll get back to you.

And then, you know, issue whatever apology, et cetera.

But you always, always, always look a million times worse.

And it spirals out of control.

And it gets like.

a much bigger story, right?

It becomes much worse if you deny.

It becomes much worse if you try to put a rug over it.

Me, spill?

No, no, look, the floor is beautiful.

And so I think that this is just being handled completely backwards.

And you would think that people who have media training, that's something he does have, would know better, right?

Would know that that always, always, always backfires.

I don't think there's a single case that I can think of when it doesn't backfire, when the person looks better because they initially denied and then they were forced to acknowledge.

So ignoring is often a good

strategy, right?

There is a Streisand effect thing where like the news cycle moves on quickly.

Oh, sure.

That's a different thing.

So a lot of you'll pay expensive money for a PR person or you'll have,

you know, if you work for a big corporation, their PR team will come in.

A lot of times I say, don't say anything.

We'll do a little bit of work in the background with reporters who are working on this story, but don't say anything.

Go take, you know, go to the woods for a couple of days and we'll probably go away, right?

Yeah.

This is different.

I mean, you know, if you're at the White House, it's a little bit different.

This has national security implications.

I mean, look, part of the issue is in general,

you know, you're a

powerful person.

You're the vice president or you're the secretary of defense.

So you're somebody who thinks you're kind of like

doing some of the most important work in the world and you're busy and you don't care that much about like security, right?

That's someone else's problem.

And so it's kind of like the annoying thing that like, I mean, I'm worried about this like in a lot of ways.

I'm worried about

like hacking of AI labs.

And

I'm sure they take it somewhat seriously.

But like knowing that personality type, you know, I don't think they probably take it seriously enough.

It's seen as like this bureaucratic shit.

You have to like jump.

By the way, I tell you something.

If you want to use the

men's bathroom at the at the Pushkin Studios in Flatiron, there's a four-digit code.

I'm telling you, it's not the most difficult code to guess.

Speaking about information security, that's the easiest.

Well, you'd be, you know, can we just

go way back in history?

One of my favorite stories, I love the writing of Richard Feynman.

I think, you know, he was a brilliant mind, brilliant writer, but he has a hilarious story about information security where he had a

complete

fascination with safe cracking.

Like he would go down these rabbit holes with different things.

And at some point, he became fascinated with cryptography and safe cracking.

And he became very adept at cracking into safes.

And mostly how he did it wasn't he didn't, you know, train with criminals and, you know, figure out like in the movies, how do you listen and all of that.

No, he figured out that it was always easy to get the code, right?

Because there was always a secretary who like had written it down somewhere or something like that.

And then there was actually an incredibly important safe.

And there was a series of them that had national security secret.

stuff because he worked in really important on you know important projects

important energy projects things that were highly classified And he was like, ooh, I wonder if I can crack into these safes.

And he couldn't find anyone writing down the combination.

He was striking out.

And finally, he was like, you know what?

I'm going to try the factory code.

And he did.

And the safe opened.

Oh, no.

And he was like, huh.

So he went to the second one.

There was three of them.

He tried the factory code and the safe opened and the third one as well.

So he wrote notes in all three.

And it was like, yeah.

And left them.

And then the guy opened them in the wrong order and didn't realize that it was Feynman, you know, making a point and thought that they had been severely compromised and freaked the fuck out, as he should have.

Just this goes to show, right, that people are dumb.

I mean, there are trade-offs, right?

If you like need to go withdraw money from your bank and they're like, you know, you face this as a poker player, right?

They're like, what's it for?

It's like, it's my fucking money.

You have custody of it, right?

Give it to me.

Yeah.

And yeah, no,

these types of things happen all the time.

But I think we do need to be worried.

Like the bigger implication, I think there are a few big implications here.

First, it happened and they're saying, oh, well, it only happened once in two months.

Okay, first of all, it's never, that's...

That, it's never happened before.

Like, this is huge.

And they're denying it.

They're taking it like no big deal.

It is a big deal.

Like, they were lucky that it was Jeffrey Goldberg and not someone else who was by mistake on this chat.

By the way, maybe other people and other chats had other actors on there that were there by mistake.

Like, this is a big deal.

Information security is incredibly important.

Denying is not the correct strategy if you want to mitigate risk.

And we should be really, really worried about this.

This is not something that is like halloween.

Yeah, you're not even supposed to have signal on government phones.

No, you're using private phones, which is kind of what people were mad about with Hillary and like.

Exactly.

I mean, everything about this from start to finish is incredibly worrisome.

So.

I mean, Trump literally, do you know that if Anthony fucking Weiner hadn't been sexing, right?

Like probably Hillary Clinton becomes president.

Maybe Trump becomes president in 2020, to be honest, right?

And then what happens in 2020?

I don't know, right?

But

so much stupidity here and so much male ego, I have to say, that results in things like this.

But yes, from a risky business standpoint, this is one bad risky decision after another.

Nate, let's take a break and let's talk about some March Madness brackets.

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Can we start with a spoiler alert?

Nate is currently winning our brackets competition.

And worse, Maria and Monty have to root for Duke as their only pathway back to victory for anyone.

And Tennessee.

First of all, it's probably going to put me further ahead, right?

But like,

if Tennessee wins, it doesn't put you further ahead.

You know, they're pretty big underdogs, Maria.

Maria.

I know, I know, but they might win.

Yeah.

And we have Purdue.

We have one victory over Nate so far.

We had Purdue as a pick, and Nate did not.

Okay.

What I have at Colorado State or I get, yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

So how is the tournament going?

I would say it's a good tournament if you're betting on all the favorites to win, right?

You know, you have all the 16 teams left in the men's tournament are from major conferences, right?

You have, I think, one double-digit seed.

You have all the one seeds intact, all but one of the two seeds intact.

So, and I read this article beforehand saying, hey, we have more and more upsets in the N-State tournament.

It's gradual, but it's happening.

This year, we did not.

We had lots of chalk as we define the term last week, which means that

the one seeds go forward, the favorites win.

Except there were some upsets in the earlier rounds, right?

Which is that

some of them weren't like Colorado Sticky and they were like the lower seed who'd they'd be, but like they were actually a favorite in our in our model, right?

Like they were no,

you know, St.

John's lost to Arkansas, which was, I believe, a 10-seed.

10-seed, you know,

St.

John's kind of was in foul trouble.

They benched their best player and kind of otherwise played like crap, right?

But, you know, but, you know, Arkansas had won and beaten a pretty Kansas team, right?

It wasn't like a, yeah, very, and that's the biggest upset of the event so far, but there have been like at most 80-20 upsets, none of the 95-5 variety that are quite fun, right?

And so like, you know, how do you evaluate that from like a record standpoint?

On the one hand, if people are going to like the Silver Bulletin model and picking the favorites, they're probably pretty happy, right?

If you're doing something where you're trying to calibrate relative to

the odds of an upset, like, you know, full disclosure, I do make bets on these games, right?

And yeah, in general,

I was betting more

underdogs than favorites.

Why is that name?

So I think our...

Our model, I think, thought that like there's more parity in college basketball to a degree that like maybe other systems aren't accounting for.

So this trend toward parity has reversed itself, whether that's a small sample size thing or I mean, there are things that are changing.

So in college now,

there are NIL deals, which I believe stands for Name, Image, and Lenin.

Likeness.

And so now maybe there's more incentive to go to like a big program like a Duke or a Kentucky where, I mean, all those big programs already have that advantage, right?

But maybe that could be changing things.

Maybe some, I mean, Duke is clearly a very strong team.

Maybe the one seeds are particularly, particularly good this year.

You know, some of the more plucky teams, like Gonzaga is a minor, excuse me, a mid-major team that our model thought was like

super underrated, but they were in eight seed, which means you faced the one seed, I believe it was Houston, in the...

a round of 32.

And like, so, you know, the teams that we thought had good potential to overperform were in disadvantageous positions where they faced other very good teams, right?

So that's part of it, too.

The women's side, I mean, this is kind of how it goes, right?

I mean, there are

in any given year, you know, between like one to

five or six women's programs that are just like so much better than the rest, right?

The programs where women's college basketball is treated as like, you know, co-equal to

the men's program, right?

That's not everywhere.

It might be a

dozen to two dozen schools in a given year.

A few of those are really good, but like it's, it's, it's, you know, a lot of colleges are, are

not aspiring to treat women's basketball as like a revenue sport, as it's called, whereas ones that are can do quite well, right?

But there's, you know, gigantic gaps.

And if you look at women's college basketball tenants, gigantic gaps from some teams selling 16,000 seats a game to some literally sell 100 seats a game, right?

And so, and so you see that, you see that lack of parody play itself out.

Yeah, no,

that all makes sense.

Um, and in full disclosure, um, I have not watched any of the women's games.

Um, and you watched the guys?

I've watched some of the guys, yes, because we had a bracket.

How many hours over under run?

Um,

probably around two hours total.

Hey, it's two hours more than I would normally have watched.

I'm baby steps, Nate.

Baby steps.

Baby steps.

Baby steps.

You know, I'm getting I was really rooting for Illinois.

I really wanted them to win because they were

one of my idiosyncratic picks

of sports.

No, I still haven't.

I haven't bet any money on this.

Yeah.

But that was, you know, I wanted to have a free and clear consultation with Monty.

I did not want to use any of his

insights to actually make money.

Although, I think we would have lost money.

Well, I don't know.

It depends on how the bets went.

But no, I've never been on sports.

You know, I actually feel like

I don't like for me, it's not, it's not fun.

You know, just like I don't, I don't play tape.

But you just said you watched two hours more of because

it's fun, but yeah, but it's it's a fun bracket, but I don't have money on it.

You know, it's just a sweat.

I, you know, it's like a pure, it's kind of a pure, I want my

team to win.

I'll give you a little free bet sometimes, Maria.

Hey, first one's on me.

Gateway drug, gateway drug.

But no, I mean, in all honesty, you know, I have zero edge in sports betting.

I wouldn't want to do, I wouldn't want to engage in an activity that I felt I had no edge.

And you have models, like you actually have an edge, right?

Like you're one of the sports betting issues.

It's hard.

I did a lot of people.

And

you're one of the few people who actually

tournament

last year.

And then this year I'm down a little bit.

Two years before that, I was up a little bit.

Like it's, but you know, look, if you go, so down this year, I've lost more on the women than I've made on the men's right but if you go through and say

okay so so far are the bets I've made I'm down 4% right um ROI what is the house's cut four percent right so if you have a year where you're winning some and losing some going 50 50 then that 4% gets drained from your bankroll over and over again and I do think that probably you know I'm gonna but also you know also you run into shit like where you're I'm restricted to kind of like two and a half sites as I complained about last week.

Some of them don't take very much money on women's games.

I guess it's to my benefit this year since women's picks haven't been going great.

But yeah,

they're much more cautious about that.

Yeah,

so it's increasingly more difficult to make money, even if you do have an edge.

You have to, like, I mean, it's kind of like the one thing about the tournament is like, if you were just really dedicated to like college basketball, it's kind of like a short season.

But like, yeah, basically, like,

first of all, the more serious experiment I did was like trying to seriously bet the NBA for the book 2022-23 season.

And this is probably like

two hours a day of work for seven months.

I mean, that was real effort, right?

And that I was basically

break-even, right?

Which is better than 99% of people.

But like, and that's break-even.

So it's like, okay, if I want to, and by the way, at the start of that, I have nine books I can bet on New York.

I'm the end of two and a half, right?

And so like, so, you know, first of all, to make money, I'd have to like, A, devote more than

two hours a day which is you know my time is valuable that's real time absolutely and then spend even more time figuring out like okay which friends can i

find a way to get money down with or you know it's not like these like betting sites take appeals necessarily right um

you know maybe you can convince them hey i'm a fish so give me back but like so it's like it's like quite hard to make a living you have to like

be kind of

i don't know i mean it's different you can kind of capitalize it right like you're a smart guy who can get down money and you find people to build a model for you and you can do things like that a little bit but like it's not an easy way to it's like poker in that way it's not an easy way to make a living no absolutely not well i hope that uh this week i hope you do well financially and i hope i do well in our bracket bets so even though i i hate saying go duke go duke you've put me you've put me in this position they know you have forced me

i know you have forced me in the go duke and go tennessee position okay you don't mind the tennessee

You know, they got a nice.

I like that orange.

I like that orange color.

What does that sound like?

On that note,

tell me for our

landing pages for the tournament stuff.

We have like this thing where we have to manually enter the team hex.

So I'm very sensitive to which shade of orange Tennessee is versus the burnt orange kind of Texas, by the way.

I like the orange shade.

Nice.

So you have used all your Crayola colors from childhood.

You now know what all Burnt Sienna and all the others, you know exactly what they look like.

Yeah.

Do you remember those Crayola colors?

I have some of those colors just etched into my mind because they were such cool colors.

Cerulean was my favorite.

Is it like a blue?

It's a blue, but it just sounds so cool.

Cerulean.

How cool is that word?

I like it.

And I'd never heard it before, right?

So it just, it really appealed to my writer's sensibility.

What was your favorite?

I mean, I like the the red-orange

feels like a nate color, right?

I think that was Burnt Sienna, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, Burnt Sienna, you know, that was more browny.

And I like you buy the advanced set and there's like a separate red-orange and orange-red.

That's true.

That's true.

Yeah, this is this is fun.

A lot of kids were shaped by

Crayola colors.

Guys, this will be a future episode for now.

Let's talk about it.

Didn't they have the white crayon, but the white crayon doesn't really.

It doesn't do much.

Yeah, there was a white one.

Discontinue.

Hey, Crayola.

some advice.

Discontinue the white crayon.

It's at best a placebo.

Well, I guess on black paper, you can do it on black paper.

Okay.

Okay.

Fair enough.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right, Crayola, please, please take our advice

into account.

Yeah, we are.

Maybe, maybe it's better now.

Who knows?

Used to have nine planets, another eight.

A lot of things have changed since we went to school.

Let's take a break, and when we come back, we'll talk more about the women's side of things and that pesky eligibility rule.

Last week, Nate, I learned something totally crazy from you.

You just casually mentioned that women were not eligible for the WNBA until they were 22 years old.

That's just like totally batshit.

Let's talk about this a little bit more.

This is something that is not true of men.

And why in the world does this exist?

Why is it a thing?

So let me

theorize, right?

When

Caitlin Clark, and it's probably going to offend people who are sensitive about their women's basketball topics, I will say, right?

People who are longtime women's basketball fans.

And by the way, we've been running women's models dating back to the 538 days for 10 years years now.

It's something we've always taken seriously, right?

You know, okay, I'm going to make some broad stroke generalizations, right?

Until fairly recently, the WNBA was

not a very popular product and not making a lot of money.

It did have

a loyal fan base and like the quality of the product is good.

Certainly, these players are spectacular players, right?

But, you know,

the reason why

all these people were like, you know, Brittany Greiner, who was detained in Russia, right?

It's because there was more money there than they were making from

the American sport, where they might get paid.

I mean, it's kind of crazy, right?

You talk about some of the

best athletes in the world, and they're like getting paid, like, you know,

nothing.

Some intern salary, basically, right?

By the way, most sports leagues have like a rookie scale cap, right?

Where like you kind of are

restricted in your free agent negotiating power for some number of years.

I don't know offhand what it is in the end, but in baseball, it's six years of professional servitude, right?

Or service time is how it's used.

So there is a lot of like protection.

So they're a combination of things.

One, there's like there's protection of like the existing classes, right?

Labor unions and sports.

tend to bargain in ways that fuck over young players and protect the veterans, which in some ways is like, and I'm, you know, generally,

whatever.

I think I'm a free country.

People should form unions if they want.

I think they've done benefited people in some cases and maybe not in others, right?

I'm just saying, empirically in sports, what happens is they tend to protect the veterans, the aging stars, whereas they deny younger players the right to have their full bargaining power, right?

Younger players are subject to a draft, and then they

in most sports do not make their market salaries or particularly close to it until they're several years in, right?

They might say that, oh, well,

we're actually doing a player a service by developing him.

It is true that like a bad, a young player in the NW, in the NBA is like, is pretty bad, right?

So on the one hand, you have like a restriction of supply

problem, which is formulated by, you know,

you know, unions that maybe don't care as much about these younger players.

And also like

from the league standpoint, they're probably kind of indifferent toward this because one thing i've learned having built basketball protection systems and i haven't done it well i haven't done the team ratings for women i haven't done player ratings for women right

in general um

if you're a 19 year old 20 year old playing in the nba you're pretty bad right i imagine the same is true for the w NBA that generally speaking um from age 18 to 22 is when you do a lot of your physical maturation when you become an adult in other ways too.

Maybe it's a little bit different for do women

hit puberty earlier than men?

They do.

Maybe it's a little bit different, right?

It is.

So everything you're saying, though, should apply to men and women, right?

In terms of the unions, protecting older players, all of that.

Aaron Powell, so one thing, there are probably a fewer players who, you know, if you're making whatever, like $60,000 a year in the WMEA, and maybe you run an ad in a local subway chain or something, right?

So on the one hand, like, then maybe the college experience is better if you're playing at like a South Carolina or a Yukon or

an Iowa or a USC.

You know, maybe the college experience is actually better.

So it's probably also like less demand for

your services, right?

But yeah, I'm surprised there hasn't been more.

Yeah, because

that seems like a very paternalistic argument, right?

Like

let them have the choice.

Like

if the college experience is better, then let them stay in college, but let them also have the same choice as their male counterparts, which is to leave early.

Now, one of the things that I heard when I started researching this a little bit is that

speaking about paternalism,

that there was an argument made that

women need the degree more than men do.

So force them basically to finish college because they will thank you for it later because

they'll be lucky that they have an alternate career to fall back on because

this is probably not going to work out.

And look, I understand that that that like technically might be might be the case but i once again you know i think that there should be um

you should be able to make that choice so one of my closest friends um

was a professional dancer right a professional athlete uh didn't go to college right didn't finish college and uh danced full-time you know um you know her as well um ended up after you know finishing her dance career going to columbia and finishing a degree writing a novel becoming incred you know

an incredibly successful entrepreneur, jewelry designer, all these wonderful things.

But she did that afterwards because she never went to college because she was a professional athlete.

So it's not like if you leave at the age of 19 or 20 to go play basketball, oh my God, you can never finish college, right?

I think a lot, most colleges would be thrilled to have a professional athlete come back to finish their degree because that's, you know, it's not like you're closing off that option.

You're not precluding it.

And I think that, you know, so that argument

doesn't suffice.

And so it does seem like there are these vested interests, as there often are when there's something so crazy, right?

When there's something that doesn't make sense, usually it's because there are some old vested interests that don't want it to change.

And so what you were saying about unions, about protecting older players, about kind of enshrining that, that to me kind of makes more sense than, oh, we're doing this for the good of the players, because that seems like a disingenuous argument at best.

Aaron Trevor Brandon, no, look, I mean, you have,

you know, the other risk is that you get some, if you, you know, talk to college basketball players, men,

they'll, not I'm talking to them personally, but if you read interviews with them, right, they're like, look, I can't take the chance that I get like

injured, right?

And therefore have no career at all.

You know, USC's best player just tore her ACL in their round of 32 win last night, right?

And, you know, this is a long recovery.

And like, if you have that happen after you sign your kind of like rookie contract, then, like, that gives you more protection, right?

Yeah.

So, in some ways, it's better.

If you can, like, good enough to play professionally

and

the professional league and the NCAA are kind of like, I mean, I guess it's not really the NCA's fault, right?

But the league that's supposed to represent women's basketball is kind of denying you a professional existence.

I mean, that's kind of fucked up, right?

Somebody should sue.

Somebody sue the NBA.

Yeah, somebody should sue.

WNBA, excuse me.

Yeah, no, it is.

It's un-American.

Well, no, it actually, it is kind of fucked up that you are just unilaterally denied the opportunity to do this.

And, you know,

you should have the choice.

You should be able to make a living however you want.

And these days, we have so many people arguing that, oh, well, college degrees aren't even what they used to be.

You don't even need one.

You know, Peter Thiel paying people money not to go to college.

And yet, here we are, right?

That finish your college degree before you can play basketball professionally.

I mean, it just, it makes absolutely zero sense.

Yeah, if you're good enough to be,

you know, the WNBA, right?

One of the 100, 200 best players in the world, then like, yeah, I mean, that's more valuable than a college degree.

Absolutely it is.

It's more unique and like you'll build life skills and

absolutely it is.

And you can always, and you can always go back and get a college degree later if you want.

And then you'll be a former WNBA with a college degree, right?

I think that's the kind of experience that you can't duplicate, whereas a college degree is actually quite easy to duplicate in a lot of different ways.

So yes, I think that you and I agree on this.

WNBA, get your shit together.

This is not a good rule.

All right, well, let's see what happens next week.

I don't think the WNBA rules will change, but maybe, maybe I will be redeemed in our bracket competition.

And if not, Nate, I'm going to have a survey of best burgers in both New York and Vegas, depending on where we are.

And then we can pick a fun dinner, whoever wants.

Risky Business is hosted by me, Nate Silver.

And me, Maria Kanakova.

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

This episode was produced by Isabel Carter.

Our associate producer is Gabriel Hunter Cheng.

Sally Helm is our editor.

Our engineer is Sarah Bruguer.

Our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein.

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