Air Travel, Alcohol, and How to Bet On a Coin Toss

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

I'm Maria Konakova.

And I'm Nate Silver.

So today on the show, Nate we're we're gonna start off by talking about some of the current events that we have been experiencing in the last week or so.

Some personal ones like poker, some less personal ones, but very important ones like plane crashes.

Continuing on this theme of everyday types of risk, we're talking about booze just in time for it not to be dry January, but there is a new Surgeon General discourse out, warnings, and Maria has, and I have some thoughts on these.

And finally, we're going to be talking about my area of expertise, the Super Bowl.

There's a lot going on.

I'm like,

I'm apartment hunting

officially, Maria.

I played some poker this week and I got fourth place in a tournament.

It was a $400.

$400 tournament, but you know, look, it's a final table.

It was

big O.

It's a five-card high-low game when I started playing.

I did not know it was a split-pot game.

I thought it was a high-only game, but nevertheless, luck boxed my way to a small but fun final table.

That's fun.

Well, before we get into serious stuff, and there's a lot of serious stuff that we need to cover this week, I love that you were able to kind of pick up the game midway through.

So, should I be registering an 08 tournament?

It's kind of like, so

in different ways, I'm both the best and the worst player at the table right in terms of like overall tournament experience and like poker knowledge I mean this I'm sure there are some pros there right but a pretty recreational heavy field um

so in terms of like kind of raw poker ability but then like I won't know

the equities in a hand right so you're very vulnerable to like am I supposed to call a check brace with this hand am I supposed to value bet this am I supposed to bluff this you're kind of guessing and uh

so that battle resulted in in a pretty good result but also you know also feeling, I mean, when you have relative mastery over Texas Holon, which is a game that both you and I play far more than anything else, right?

It's

it's kind of frustrating.

Like, I just don't know the answer to this, right?

Like, I haven't studied this game and like, I'm just guessing and like trying to improvise.

And so it's a challenge.

One reason I like the mixed games is because like it's a challenge for your poker brain, right?

You're trying to take these concepts and apply them to a different canvas.

Well, I think that that's a really interesting overarching point that we are going to be actually talking about in some of the more newsy segments on today's show, which is kind of the

way that our perceptions of risk can translate to different environments.

For someone who is a poker player, we've talked about this a lot, who actually does have that innate sense of probabilities, I'm guessing that you are better able to kind of get those risk assessments right than somebody who isn't, right?

Who is just trying to

go off of of random experience or something like that.

So I think that that's a really interesting point because when we talk about things that, you know, like plane crashes, you know, risks in our daily life, alcohol, et cetera, it is interesting to try to see, you know, how can we calibrate risk perception based on past experience?

And I think that

this little poker foray into a game that you had never played before

is a really fun.

lens into that.

Congratulations on your first final table of 2025, right?

Thank you.

Yeah.

No, pretty good pretty good start i hope it's the first of many nate

um so shall we shall we move on to slightly less fun topics there has been a lot going on um in the news this week um since we you know since we last spoke um both politically and also in the sports news and we'll be covering uh we'll be covering those um as well but yeah you you had a very funny emergency post on sports yeah when i was playing this tournament um there's this like ESP, and my phone's dead, it's like one in the morning at this point, right?

And like, there's an ESP on Alert that Luka Doncic, the great Dallas, former Dallas Maverick, uh,

point guard, unicorn, you could describe them as different positions, was traded in this deal.

It's like totally inexplicable because usually you get a really high return, but was traded to the LA Lakers for Anthony Davis and a bunch of crap and a first-round draft pick, basically.

Um, and yeah, that's probably the most shocking NBA trade in history.

If you want to read more about my view on that, go to Silver Bulletin, my newsletter on Substack.

Tariffs is another story I'm running about this week.

This is a very in flux

policy.

Full disclosure, we're taping this on Monday afternoon East Coast time.

Tariffs went into effect on China and Mexico over the weekend.

However, an hour or something ago, Trump suspended for a month tariffs on Mexico after Mexico made some concessions, saying they would deploy a bunch of troops to the U.S.

border.

10,000 troops, Nate.

We have a lot of leverage.

There's a lot of game theory involved, both in terms of the domestic political reaction to the terrorists and in terms of these other countries.

I mean, we have, I'm just looking at this, right?

Do you know that U.S.

exports are 26.4%

of Mexico's GDP?

I had no idea.

That is a high percentage.

Our exports to Mexico are 1.2%, right?

So they can retaliate and we're like, fuck you, Mexico.

But, you know, the fact that we're

levering these allies is just kind of gross in some ways.

But anyway, there's a lot to talk about, and I'm sure that'll be a theme that we'll hit on going forward in the next couple of weeks.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think it's going to be a really important topic.

There are also, there are a number of other interesting and concerning policies that have come out in the last week.

I don't know if we want to get into all of them.

Giving Elon Musk's access to treasury payment systems is something that I think is,

you know, is notable, but has kind of gone under the radar.

What's going to happen to U.S.

foreign aid?

All of these things are, I think, topics that we might talk about in the future.

But as of now, I think it actually doesn't make sense to talk about them because it's too much speculation.

We don't know what's actually going to happen.

We don't know how it's going to be enacted.

And we don't know how much is Bark versus Byte.

I think that that's kind of the bottom line on a lot of this.

And look, there's also, so one thing that like

I think poker teaches you, but also life stress.

We both have lots of interesting life experience at this point, right?

It's like, can you deal with multiple things going on at once and prioritize?

And it seems like

Democrats are not good at that.

I think both kind of constitutionally,

that's a whole theory about like different personality traits, but also just like people aren't used to having like all these different stories at once and prioritizing is essential.

And like, but people don't do it right.

They They tend to like focus on like, so there's all this focus on the first week, maybe the biggest story

until the tariff stuff and the plane crash was Elon Musk's salute.

We talked about that, didn't we, a little bit last week?

And like, this is not the most important.

We're trying to leverage our friends north and south of the border.

And Elon controls a Treasury.

Department payout system and like on AI stuff.

I mean, all this stuff is like quite a lot more important.

I wrote about multitasking briefly on my sub stack this past week because I think that it's so important to remember how our brain works, right?

And how attention works, because it's really playing in.

We talked about this a little bit to Trump's strategy, right?

Overwhelm, overwhelm, overwhelm, because our brain is like, ooh, yay, like I get to do all of these different things.

It's really hard to focus.

And it's really hard to kind of figure out what's best.

And our brain is not good at that, right?

Like our brain wants to be all over the place.

And so this just plays into kind of the worst vulnerabilities in our thinking.

That's why what I said last week, I think is still the message, which is focus, right?

Like figure, reclaim your attention, focus on what's important, prioritize.

You need to, you need to kind of see, okay, what are our priorities?

What's the coherent message here?

And knowing that that, by the way, is not like a Democrat or Republican.

That's just like a human failing, right?

Our brains are really, really bad at that.

And Trump is really, really good at taking advantage of it.

It's like, you know, like social media, right?

Social media is designed to take advantage of that brain's inability to focus and the desire to have all of these different things happening at once.

And Trump is like the human walking social media.

He's so good at just throwing all this shit out there, seeing what sticks.

Trump and social media and the regular media too, right?

But algorithmically and editorially, people are very aware of like what things make headlines.

And kind of plane crashes are in a classic

category where, I mean, it used to be,

I used to think when a plane crashed in the U.S., this was like almost a hurricane-type story for days.

And, you know, one reason why it's not as much anymore is because there are far fewer plane crashes.

Flying on airplanes, on commercial airlines in the U.S.

is incredibly safe.

But, you know, but when there are crashes, then

they freak people out and that changes the incentives toward more and more safety.

Yeah, so

let's talk about that, obviously.

Last week was the first major aviation disaster since 2009.

So it's been a, it's been a minute, right?

Which goes to your point that in general, plane travel is incredibly safe,

even though our risk perception gets overblown because we do have an outsized focus on events like this, as we should, by the way.

You know, I think that it's actually important to hold kind of these

sorts of institutions to account in the sense that

one of the things that has come out of this is that, oh, hey, there were a lot of safety concerns that have been ignored, a lot of safety recommendations that have been ignored for years, specifically with the DC airspace.

There were recommendations that the DC airspace was already overstressed, and yet more and more flights kept getting added, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And people ignored them because nothing had happened since 2009.

So there are some really interesting statistics that near misses have gone up, actually, a huge amount, and near misses is accidents that almost happen, but not quite.

So since

from a decade ago, we have a 25% increase in runway incursions.

So that's near misses just on the runway,

which is a lot, right?

Not that high in terms of absolute numbers,

but in relative terms.

something that's a little bit worrisome.

And we have near misses mid-air, not just on the runway, you know, takeoffs, landing, all sorts of things like that.

But because everything tends to work out okay,

people are just like, ah, it's totally fine.

So this is a big logical fallacy that people commit all the time.

And it's called the near-miss fallacy.

So it almost leads to something that we talk about often on the show, overconfidence, right?

That like, oh, it'll all work out.

This means the system's working, like it's all good.

No, it means that the system is barely holding on and you've gotten, you know, how many times did it work versus you got lucky?

And that's such a difficult thing to track.

And both you and I know that, you know, being outcome oriented is not the way to do it.

You need to make sure that your process is intact.

No, and in fact, if you're doing some type of like statistical modeling,

then near misses give you data and tend to actually increase the incidence of the thing that you fear going forward, right?

If

If we intercept a, you know, attempt, a terrorist attack on the Brooklyn Bridge or something, right?

That's not good news.

Assuming the attack got like reasonably far along in the planning stage, that means that like the incidence of terrorism is maybe higher than we would have thought, right?

Because usually, you know, when you look back at something like 9-11, you're like, how many different things had to go wrong or right?

And how many signals did we have to miss, right?

And it is true that to pull off like a complicated attack or any type of disaster where there are multiple redundant systems in place, like, you know, two, three, four things have to go wrong.

But still, if you say, if you say, oh, three things went wrong, but we got lucky in the fourth thing and it saved us, right?

To take a more recent example, the fact that President Trump, then his candidate Trump,

was nearly assassinated.

Really bad news, right?

Really bad news in terms of like the rise of political violence in the U.S.

Yeah.

No, the takeaway from that isn't great, but he wasn't assassinated, sources.

It worked correctly.

The takeaway is, oh, shit, you know, what happened to make that even possible?

And so, but the, you know, but oftentimes we do the exact opposite, right?

And people are like, oh, we don't need to implement these recommendations.

We don't need to, you know, spend more money on this.

We don't need to relieve this airspace or whatever it is because it's all been working out.

No crashes since 2009.

So this is, you know, what happened was absolutely horrible and it seems like absolutely preventable.

And that overconfidence and kind of a lack of accountability on on some in some respects is one of the reasons that we're having this conversation now.

So if there is a silver lining, I hope that it is that, you know, people actually start looking at the process and realizing that the number of near misses that we have, both mid-air, on the ground, takeoffs, landings, are actually important.

And as you say, like if you were building a statistical model, all of these things change your probability and not not for the better, right?

Your a priori probabilities have to be adjusted, not in a good direction.

And so I hope that this is a wake-up call.

Do you think it will be?

I don't know.

Okay, now I'm going to say the controversial thing, right?

I am not sure

that it's rational to put more resources into aviation safety, right?

Defined as follows, right?

If you, so the statistical value of a life is a concept we've talked about before on this show.

Yeah.

And that is how much are people willing to pay?

It's not based on some bureaucrats in a back office.

It's how much people are willing to pay

to ensure their risk of surviving or extend their life.

Right.

And it comes out to about $10 million.

that if people could gamble and say, I'll give you $10 million and you have a one in X chance of dying, right?

I mean, you know, there's some nonlinearities, but it comes from like things like

people being willing to do dangerous tasks or being willing to have medical inventions or

buy safety features.

And across all different ways this is measured, it's pretty consistently about 10 million.

For aviation safety, it's much higher than that.

People fear

hijackings and they fear plane crashes.

It would be an obviously terrible way to die.

But like, you know, not every time that, I mean, the failure rate should not be zero, right?

To take a much less serious example, you hear the phrase like, if you've never missed a flight, you're not doing it right.

Meaning that like if you're flying from New York to Chicago, there are, you know, 15 flights an hour,

an hour, but a lot, right?

Not that much consequence of missing your flight.

Obviously, any crash involving, what are we up to, like 70 deaths roughly,

is more serious.

But at the same time, like...

you know, bad shit's supposed to happen some of the time because the alternative is that you are paying gigantic amounts for

safety features.

I mean, you see this, right?

You see, like in construction of the New York subway, for example, there are so many commitments to different groups and to safety equipments and to special interests that it just is incredibly expensive to do anything.

So,

you know, this is kind of more

high-level grevarian thinking to use, but like being willing to think about in terms of trade-offs, what is the price of

reducing air traffic fatalities, right?

Compared to what we might spend on other things like road safety or

medical safety or other things, right?

And the fact is that humans are pretty inconsistent

about kind of what they're willing to, what risks they're willing to take action to prevent.

I think that that is a very valid point that we are inconsistent.

However, I will kind of push back a little bit,

not in terms of like overall spending, right?

But what I'm talking about is how we respond to different risks and what the takeaway is from near misses, right?

You could reallocate spending.

You could not make stupid decisions like adding over 60 flights to an airspace that you've already been warned is overcrowded.

This doesn't have to do with pouring more money into it.

This is just risk management, making different decisions, making different process decisions, holding yourself to different accountability, maybe reallocating some of the funds you already have to kind of to different things,

looking at training, like looking at, looking at models from the bottom up

and reassessing a lot of kind of the decision making along the way, as opposed to complacently saying, oh, everything's fine.

Or I think it's actually the lazy thing is just to throw money at it, right?

Because why throw money if you don't even know, you know, first you need to figure out what are we fixing?

What's going wrong?

What's going wrong in the human decision making, in the non-human decision making, right?

Like, what are the system, where are the systems most vulnerable?

And if we don't do that, I don't care if we allocate billions of dollars to the problem.

It's not going to help, right?

That's what happens with

bad financial decision making, where you just think, oh, you know, pouring money at the problem is going to help.

So I think that that's kind of the way of thinking about it, not just like, oh, you know, like, let's either allocate more money or not.

I think that a lot of people made bad decisions along the way.

And this was also differences in priorities, right?

Because people say, oh, well, you know, Senator X and Senator Y and Senator Z all need direct flights home.

And so we're going to add those routes to, you know, for that specific reason.

That's really bad, right?

Now, what are you saying about the value of human life?

Right.

You're saying that this person's...

preference on when he gets home is much more important than the safety of

all of the people who are flying through this airspace, right?

So, there have been some questionable decision-making

results along the way.

And I think those are the types of things we should be looking at.

But I think your other point is very well taken and something that we do talk about on the show, but I think it's just something that's really worth stressing over and over because even though I know it, I still fall for it, right?

When we do inconsistently take these risk assessments where we do, you know, we are too scared of a plane crash, too scared of a hijacking, not scared enough of, you know, crossing the street,

where our chance of dying is actually much higher, right?

Being hit by a car, having something horrible happen.

You know, we do have very inconsistent risk preferences.

And that's something that, you know, we should just constantly remind ourselves of, constantly remind our listeners of, and constantly remind our brains of, so that we try to behave more rationally, even though at the end of the day, emotion always gets into it, right?

It's really difficult not to have emotion in your decisions when it comes to you and immediate decision making um as opposed to having kind of the the time and space and um

leisure to to think through it in a more rational way yeah i remember uh i was in costa rica a couple years ago with some friends we were like staying at this airbnb on a hill and the costa rica is very very

wet, right?

With like torrential thunderstorms, like a lot, right?

Maybe every day um but yeah we're like driving down this like

uh dirt road in a thunderstorm in a country we've never been in before like probably not the best idea even though like they have incredible drainage systems right they're used to this problem um

but sometimes you gotta be like fuck it you know what i mean i mean if you never take there's like a portfolio of like you should get like one fuck it card

a year, I feel like maybe.

Yeah, but we could, we could talk about this stuff every week.

Let's go on and talk about booze, right?

Yeah,

let's talk about some alcohol warnings after this break.

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We have had some news coming out on the alcohol front.

I don't know if it was timed to coincide with dry January when lots of people decide to, you know, abstain from drinking, but that's that's when it came out.

So the Surgeon General earlier had issued a report on the potential cancer risks associated with drinking any alcohol whatsoever.

And so,

you know, there are now talks of putting warning labels like you have on cigarettes, right?

On all alcohol saying, you know, skulling cross bones, you're going to die basically if you drink this.

And a lot of people, a lot of wellness gurus, health influencers have been saying, yes, this is exactly right.

Zero drinking.

You know, no amount of alcohol is healthy.

This is the way to go.

And man, oh man, like I have, I have so many thoughts on this.

like this is like the most

i kind of i saw this news uh-huh i'm like oh that sucks you know it's nice to have some beer and wine now and then right maybe

but i i didn't really want to process it because i didn't either like want to give myself like an excuse if i thought it was bullshit or like didn't want to face but i'm going to let you drive this segment because i know you've been researching this a lot Yeah, so, so first of all, let's just start off with the fact that all studies of alcohol and health are correlational, right?

And the fact that they're all correlational, not causational, but they're observational studies in the environment makes all nutritional studies, like not just alcohol, incredibly difficult to do and conclusions very suspect depending on how you parse data.

There are so many other variables because it's not like you take people from birth, right?

And you say, okay, when this person turns 21, we are going to give them, we're going to control everything they eat their entire life.

We're going to have all these people live in in our little lab environment.

And when this person turns 21, they're going to start getting a glass of wine, right?

a day.

And this one's not going to drink at all.

No, that is,

you know, maybe there's a science fiction novel about that, but that's not the way that this all works in the real world, right?

So in the real world, what we do in all of these cases is ask people, right, and have observational data.

And there are some studies that have followed people for decades and decades.

And you look at what their habits are.

You try to control for stuff as well as you possibly can, and then you see what happens to them, right?

Who's getting sick?

How are they getting sick?

How long are they living, et cetera, et cetera.

And

lo and behold, in past studies, when they did that, it turned out that moderate drinkers actually did better than people who abstained.

from alcohol altogether.

There was one big study that showed that light drinkers, so people who consumed one to three drinks per week, had lower rates of cancer and death than people who abstained altogether.

There was a study of nearly a million people that were followed for over a decade that showed that abstainers had higher rates of death, chronic disease, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's disease, chronic lung disease, than light or moderate drinkers.

There have been a study of millions of people that show that non-drinkers had

higher rates of death than moderate drinkers.

But this is all to say that that was the prevailing wisdom.

Now, all of a sudden, you know, we see other data that say, oh, no, actually cancer rates go up.

What the fuck, right?

Like this is true of so much nutritional advice where we just get really, really bad advice for a long time.

And then it's upended and then it's upended again.

cholesterol, good cholesterol, bad cholesterol, eggs, right?

All sorts of stuff that's good for you, that's bad for you.

Butter is horrible.

You should have margarine.

No, margarine is going to kill you because of the chemicals in it.

You should have butter, right?

All of these things just go round and round and round.

And I hate when people make it into a moral crusade, which is, by the way, exactly what is happening, right?

That, like, oh, this is good, and this is the way to a long life, and this is bad, and this is, you know, this makes you a bad person, and you are going to die.

Because the other flip side of it is, even if, you know, if I have a drink, if I have a glass of wine with dinner and my risk of breast cancer goes up by one percent right from an already you know or whatever it is that I just totally made up that number by the way um

okay you know

I'm willing to have that because it you know do I want to live a life where I just don't do anything, don't drink, don't eat this, don't do that, don't do this, and just spend all day trying to live longer?

No, right?

like that's that ain't the kind of existence i want who's that brian johnson guy who's like drinking his son's plasma or anyway yeah exactly and measuring his son's nightly erections yes i don't want to be that guy but this is like oh my god this is like a little bit of like a silicon valley thing now where like

you know i'm not sure it's exactly straight edge living because people say oh yeah i'm sober but then they'll take different types of drugs from psychedelics to whatever else can be included in sobriety, right?

I mean, you know, it gets very difficult.

And, and I do think there is this like,

I don't know if you'd call it Puritanism.

I would call it Puritanism.

Exactly.

But there's kind of like a self-improvement culture that, you know,

it's a little aesthetic, ACSC.

I don't know how you're supposed to say that word, but like there's something about it that like, you know, even like,

even like the effective altruism movement in Silicon Valley is, I don't know, it's also, it's also kind of like a California thing where like,

Because if you're drinking socially in California, then you have this constant problem of like,

how to get places without drunk driving, right?

Yeah, well, I think that there are two things going on, and they do go back to Silicon Valley in California

in another way.

One, I think it is puritanical, and I think that there is kind of this like moral judgment that comes with it that's like a part of American culture and has been for a long time.

But the other thing is simplifying, oversimplifying, right?

This desire for like one solution that'll make you live longer, where you take tons of data that is really complex, really difficult, where you can't actually draw conclusions.

And you say, cold plunge, right?

Yes, cold plunge a day and all of a sudden you're going to improve your health and your life.

Infrared saunas, right?

And that you don't actually look to say, oh, that study was done on 10 people and they were all finished and right.

And all the confounders and all of a sudden we have all of these things.

So you see these things that are like these solutions that if you just do this one thing, if you do this and this, then all of a sudden you're going to hack your, you know hack your health and this biohacking will make you like live live longer be smarter and all of these things and so i think that alcohol is kind of one of these let's simplify and let's just say you know absolutely no and it's wrong this is

the wrong way to think about it you also find that you have people who are concerned about harm reduction or if you want to put it more in nate and maria terms kind of EV maximalization, right?

You get some benefits out of drinking.

Maybe it's enjoyable.

Maybe it's good for your social life.

Not advocating it either way, but like, you know, people are doing it and there's some cost in terms of health outcomes and other risks, right?

And like, you know, how can you reduce the more harmful ways to use this product?

I mean, this comes up a lot, right?

With nicotine, I'm not to date with this literature, but like there are all these alternatives to cigarettes, Zin and vapes and everything else, gum.

And, you know, sometimes they're advocating as, oh, these are safe products, right?

Because they don't involve the tar of cigarettes.

Sometimes they're wrapped up and say that's just another gateway drug.

I don't know what the literature on that is, but like, but you actually have people who want to do harm reduction and people who are, who are prudes, right?

And then you have that when it comes to like COVID stuff.

You would hear things, well, masks just provide a false sense of security.

And the alternative often implied was just stay at home and don't do anything for a year and a half until vaccines are widely available.

So that's always, that's always tricky is kind of what are people's actual motives.

For sure, for sure.

And then I will also just close this out by saying that, you know, the proposed, let's put these warning labels and like basically say that, you know, alcohol is terrible and it's going to cause cancer.

First of all, life causes cancer, right?

If you look at the cancer risks, almost anything causes cancer.

So like, let's just, let's just put a warning label on life.

Life also causes death.

You know,

it's a really bad thing.

But the fact that we're embracing marijuana the way that we are and vilifying alcohol is just absolutely like mind-boggling to me because the data.

I didn't know this.

I didn't know that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The data on like the harm that can come from

marijuana consumption, especially now where it's much stronger than it used to be, is a ton of long-term damage that can happen to your memory,

to kind of reaction time, to all sorts of things.

We don't talk about that.

And we're like, yay, pot, good, because, you know, for some reason, pot is now good and alcohol, bad.

I think people have to be like honest with themselves about what things they

enjoy more or less, right?

Like you probably have some matrix of like, what is the risk of something relative to the personal amount of

enjoyment that it brings you, right?

And, you know, sometimes I wish I knew more about the risks to little, you know, I have some heuristics that soda seems really bad, deep-fried foods seem

really bad and then, but sometimes I don't care.

Sometimes, you know, it's kind of you're

every now and then you're indulging, but like, but like, but having, you know, filling out that matrix would be helpful because you get confused you hear like sure mixed vestures a lot and they're different objectives right if you're trying to lose weight yeah versus trying to reduce cholesterol those are very different diets that you might consume right i don't think we are going to do like a ton of like

personal health stuff on this show but what we'll promise is that when we do it we'll not be like

judgy because a we'd be like hypocrites and b we trust people to make their own decisions but like you know yeah i would often like more straightforward information about is this thing that is billed as being really bad is it actually bad?

Absolutely.

You know, or not, right?

Absolutely.

I think, I think that that's something that we can all aspire to.

And

the unfortunate truth, though, is when it comes to nutrition, it is tough.

But we can do a little bit more about that in the future.

But do you want to take a break and then end on some Super Bowl predictions or prop bets or just thoughts?

Yeah, let's do a few Super Bowl bets.

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Okay, Nate, so I'm so proud of myself because I,

in order to prepare for this segment, I figured out who was going to be playing in the Super Bowl.

This is my level of interest.

I was like, I was like, I got to, I have to know who's playing.

So I was, I was very proud of myself.

That is the extent of my Super Bowl knowledge.

So let's

have you take it away.

We've already talked about, you know, the odds of who you should be betting on, the Eagles or the Chiefs, given where the odds are.

But let's talk about some Super Bowl prop bets because this is something that, you know, I think a lot of people are interested in.

And more and more sports books are offering just a whole array of them.

How do you think about it, by the way?

Do you think that they're like, would you ever put money on prop bets?

Or, you know, real money, I mean, maybe you'd put on 10 bucks because you think it's funny or fun, but would you ever actually like bet real money on prop bets?

Or do you think that that's not kind of a smart way of looking at these things?

Oh, no.

So actually in my book On the Edge,

there is discussion about Super Bowl prop bets, but we meet a guy named Rufus Peabody, maybe familiar to fans of this show.

He has his own

gambling-related podcast with Jeff Ma, also featured in the book.

And yeah, so he is somebody who like builds computer models and specializes in Super Bowl prop bets and is very high

EV in them to the point where of course he gets limited and you know he'll like literally go is it the Westgate the super book at the Westgate I think casino where um they're famous for their prop bet to like set up camp and bring thousands of dollars where you're allowed to make like two bets at a time you have to like go to the back of the line right but like no these are these are beatable if you do research and I haven't done the research but they're counting on people being lazy right um that they're recreational bets, they're a lot of fun, right?

And so, if you're sharp, and by the way, it's probably true, by the way, for the Super Bowl in general,

is that there's so much public money out there, everybody's making a bet

that there isn't enough sharp money, there's not enough Rufus Peabody in the world to gobble up all that, all that expected value, right?

And so, like,

you know, as of

today, Monday the 3rd,

77% of the money money on the point spread is on the Philadelphia Eagles.

That's probably a good sign that you should bet on the Kansas City Chiefs, who, of course, are 16 and 1, right?

Who have won two bowls in a row,

have often had very hairy escapes from games this year, right?

But anyway, you want to do some prop betting?

Yeah, yeah.

Well, there's one that I know that people do bet on, but it's just to me, it's like so mind-boggling, which is the result of the coin toss, right?

Like, why would you bet on that?

Of all the things that could be, you know, predictable, modelable, et cetera, it's a coin toss.

This is what we base a lot of our statistics on, right?

The fact that a coin toss is 50-50 and yet, and yet,

it's like the face tattoo of

gambling, right?

It's just you're so, I mean, first of all, heads does win like 50.5% of the time or something, right?

Well, in our limited data set of Super Bowls.

Well, no, but the reference class is like, wasn't there a study?

Have we talked about this?

Where like, where like a coin flip is not actually random, whatever aerodynamic shit, it lines on the.

Yeah, well, it depends on the coin, yes.

And I guess it's a special Super Bowl commemorative coin with, I don't know what the fuck on the I don't know about that one, but no, the study you're talking about, there was, there was a study

where it turned out that the two faces were not actually weighted equally.

If I were the Kansas City Chiefs of the Philadelphia Eagles, I would have a fucking intern spend the week researching what coin will be flipped and which side is like heavier, right?

I would optimize that strategy.

If possible, right?

What if you find out that neither side is heavier?

Come on, they're not going to.

I think this side, it's like one side with like a little LIX, it's Super Bowl licks, LIX.

That looks heavy, right?

There's like a lot of embossing and shit like that.

So I bet on the on the licks side, I think.

Does the heavier side

tend to come up on top?

No, the heavier side is going to be on the bottom.

Okay, so bet against licks,

I think.

Bet against the side with the big Super Bowl logo on it.

And I don't know if that's heads or tails.

So, and probably not enough to whatever.

Are they giving you like minus 110 on this bet?

So you're risking $11 to win 10, right?

But like,

I don't know.

I think there's some edge there.

Maybe it was minus 101 or something.

Well, we'll see, we'll see.

And also, do we know?

So, so maybe this is, um, we're getting into the nitty-gritty of coin tosses, guys.

Do we know whether

they always position the coin with the same side up before the flip?

Or is that also random?

Do they flip a coin to know whether heads or tails is going to be up when the flip starts?

I'm just telling you, this fucking Super Bowl logo side looks pretty fucking heavy.

You know, I can't tell if it's embossed or not, but yeah, Google Super Bowl commemorative coin.

All right.

Well, there's your coupon code, risky business.

No, I'm just kidding.

That would be hilarious.

But yes, okay, okay, fine.

We could do some research, but it's still like that's about as degeny of a bet as

you can get, I think, the coin toss.

But there are also a lot of other lines that are available.

Such as, will a player or a coach cry during the national anthem?

That seems like a gimme, right?

Someone's going to cry.

Yeah, minus 300, I think.

Minus a million.

Okay, look, I'll take,

I'll take no crying at plus 500.

All right, all right.

Let's, we could talk about that.

Okay, I'm betting 20 bucks at plus 500 on no crying.

If no one cries, you owe me 100 bucks, okay?

Let me, let me think about it.

How do we define crying?

It's tearing up.

It's tearing up.

It's tearing up a.

Because I think

I mean like,

I don't mean someone's going to like full out bawling, but like tearing up, I think for me counts.

That's when I said like minus a million.

You have to see a tier.

Okay.

Not merely watery.

You have to see a tier.

But what happens?

But we can't see everyone either.

So who actually decides this bet?

On the official, whichever networks television in the game, which is probably no, official broadcast.

It's on Fox.

On the Fox News U.S., not Fox Deportes or whatever, right?

The Fox News U.S.

feed during the national anthem.

Is there a player or a coach who has a tear in their eye during the national anthem picture on Fox?

All right.

We can do it.

How about $10, not $20?

Okay.

Okay.

Fine.

Okay.

We're de-risking.

And then, and then you're on.

Let's do it.

Any other bets?

First song performed by Kendrick Lamar.

I look these odds up.

Does Polymarket, by the way, have odds for all of these Super Bowl bets as well?

And I'm an advisor to Polymarket.

I'm sure.

I'm sure you can, you know, degenerate

your heart's content.

Okay, not like us, plus 195, Humble plus 210.

Euphoria plus 300, by the way, there is also a plus 750 chance of a Taylor Swift

girlfriend of the Kansas City Chiefs taught in.

I'll have you know.

Taylor Swift guest's appearance is plus 750.

I guess I kind of like that.

I mean, she's in the stadium, right?

Yeah.

I don't know.

I mean, it would be, actually, I don't.

I mean,

I mean, overexposure is a problem, right?

This is true.

Drake, plus 30 of 100.

But yeah, you can like, look, you can bet on everything, basically.

Anything, any other bets you want to make with me, though, Maria?

No.

We got one.

We got one.

We'll report back on the risky business prof bet.

I say sadly, nate i'm too i'm too uh you're you're too good i can't i can't bet against you and i know nothing the funny thing is though these types of prop bets you need to know absolutely nothing about football um or um about the actual kind of results of the game to but those but there is stuff like what's the chance that like a foamball return in the second quarter results and you know i like that kind of stuff Yeah, there are prop bets that are actually

very much related to football knowledge and to the actual gameplay, but the ones we've been talking about are completely random.

So I guess, Nate, you don't have any special insider knowledge.

And I'm hoping that my knowledge of human psychology will render me on top on our crying bed.

Someone will tear up.

I believe.

You'll actually find that on Thursday there's going to be a silver bulletin post about historic crying during the Super Bowl and empirical rates of crying over time and how this changed.

What was that?

What was that voice?

I like that.

I don't know.

It's a blogger voice.

I don't know which one.

Blogger, your blogger voice.

Got got it and on that note risky business listeners we will see you next week where we will know whether crying did in fact take place

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.

We'll be answering a listener question question each week.

That's coming up right after the credits.

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Risky Business is hosted by me, Maria Konikova.

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 Gabriel Hunter Chang.

Sally Helm is our editor.

And our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein, mixing by Sarah Brueguer.

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

Thanks so much for tuning in.

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