Luigi Mangione, the Rise of Bluesky, and High-Stakes Chokes

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

I'm Maria Konakova.

And I'm Nate Silbert.

Today we'll talk about a man who allegedly made a very poor decision to murder a healthcare CEO, that is, of course, Luigi Mangione.

And after that, we're going to talk about blue sky, social media, echo chambers, and how that all ties into the types of phenomenon that we're witnessing, like Luigi Maggione.

And after that, we are going to talk about chess and choking under pressure and the importance of mental game.

Let's get into it.

Maria, I want you to have the first word on Luigi,

because I want to kind of try to get in his, I know we're not supposed to do this, right?

But like, you're the psychologist.

I want to kind of get your basic take on kind of what, what kind of headspace that he was in.

Yeah.

So a lot of people have been.

supportive of him.

And I've said, you know, it's it's incredibly understandable.

The guy's in pain.

And And

so he does something about it.

And I have a few things to say to that.

First of all, we don't actually

know what the causes are, right?

We do know he had back surgery.

We know it was covered by insurance, by the way.

So he did not have insurance problems in that sense.

And back pain is awful.

Back pain is horrible.

But how many people?

in the world suffer from back pain and some debilitating back pain and some people can't even have the surgery because it's not covered for them.

And some people live in countries where the surgery isn't even available or in countries where surgery is awful and the surgery would be botched and they'd be in even greater pain after that.

And out of those people, how many then decide, you know what?

I am going to go and kill the CEO of a healthcare company.

That is not.

a normal reaction.

I think that, I think that psychologically speaking, like there's something deeply fucked up about that being your response.

And there's also something deeply fucked up about a society that looks at it and says, yeah, I get it.

That's really cool.

And, you know, those types of violent tendencies have happened in the past.

And there's been a lot of scholarship on how, you know, we're getting better.

Right.

Steven Pinker wrote a big book about it, Better Angels of Our Nature, about how violence has gone down over the years, over the centuries in society, and how, you know, we have society and rules and governments for a reason, right?

We have the legal system.

And yes, sometimes you feel like everything's against you, but the correct, quote-unquote, correct response, the moral response, the psychologically normal response isn't to say, let me get a ghost gun with a silencer and go and kill someone in cold blood, allegedly.

And I think that that, you know, that that is

in the psychological literature, we call that profoundly fucked up.

That is not a normal response.

And so I think obviously he has major issues.

And

that's a problem.

And there are lots of people who have major psychological issues.

But the other psychological problem is in society lionizing this and glorifying it.

And by the way, let me just like caveat this by saying I believe in universal health care.

I think that there are horrible problems with the healthcare system in the United States.

I think no one should be denied coverage.

I think this should be a fundamental human right.

So let's just put that aside.

But the answer to that isn't, you know, let's go out and shoot people.

And the first thing I thought about, and I'm not the only one, is like the French Revolution, right?

And when people were like, yeah, justifiable, let's go behead some people.

You know what happened to those executioners who did the beheadings?

They got beheaded.

They also died after in the counter-revolution, the Thermidorian reaction.

So, you know, there's a lot of historical precedent that says that this ain't, you know, yeah, sure, society might change eventually, but this ain't the way to go about it.

And there are, I think we've advanced past that.

And I hope we keep advancing past that rather than regressing.

And I see a lot of signs of regression right now.

Yeah, if you look at the number of deaths in armed conflict around the world, it kind of bottomed out in the early 2000s and it has since risen.

There's actually a lot of people dying in Ukraine, for example.

There are interstate and intrastate conflicts in Africa.

Yeah, I don't know.

I think people are not necessarily

internally all that much more civilized than they ever were.

And, you know, the fact that you can have this bountiful life in different ways and the fact that you have like a legal system and the fact that you have kind of diplomatic ways of resolving conflicts like the courts or whatever else or a negotiation of some kind,

like that goes a long way.

You know, I mean, this is clearly a guy who is quite smart.

He was valedictorian valedictorian of his high school class.

He went to the University of Penn.

He

read pretty widely.

Clearly, a guy who is capable of profound rationalization for extremely violent behavior.

I mean, the timeline he gave only makes a certain amount of sense, right?

Where

he actually was like texting friends that, hey, actually, the surgery worked out pretty well and I'm back to being able to do some of the things I used to be able to do.

I mean, people have inferred that, you know, he's at the age, what's he, 26, 27?

He's at the age where if you have signs of schizophrenia,

then that tends to be an inflection point for schizophrenia.

He had also experimented with

psychedelic drugs, which

I have no problem with people doing,

but tends to be a bad idea for people with schizophrenia.

Yes, we know that they're a trigger, by the way.

There's a lot of research on this.

So if you have a tendency towards schizophrenia,

and if you have that genetic predisposition, psychedelics and there are other drugs, but psychedelics are especially a trigger for it.

So that's something that can actually precipitate the psychotic rank.

Please continue, Nate.

I mean, I also don't think the critique of the healthcare system is particularly good, right?

I mean, the problem is that, so the U.S.

spends a lot more on healthcare relative to the quality of outcomes we have than other westernized, industrialized countries.

You know, the reasons for this are much debated.

Part of it has to do with a lot of kind of profit built in for

pharmaceutical companies that develop actually very effective drugs like we saw in COVID or whatnot.

But you know, for whatever reason that tends to be subsidized by American taxpayers a little bit more.

Some it's because of incentives, right?

If you're not kind of paying out of pocket for things and you might consume more care than you want and some very small number of people consume a very high percentage of resources in the healthcare system, some of whom are in really bad shape and deserve it, but some of whom just kind of are consuming healthcare goods as a luxury good and things like that.

And so

it is the job of insurers to

track down fraudulent payments or track down procedures that they deem medically unnecessary.

But

if your critique is the cost of healthcare, then you shouldn't be complaining necessarily about the insurance companies that have a relatively modest profit margin.

Here, I'm a neoliberal capitalist, I suppose.

I do think the healthcare system is fucked up.

I'm not sure that I think,

you know, socialized medicine is a good idea.

I think it wouldn't be politically viable, among other things.

But this is not like a very mature, I would say, critique of what the causes of

the pain points in the healthcare system are, I would say.

Despite being a smart guy overall, and that probably fits a pattern.

And by the way, also a guy who like is a little bit in kind of what we call the gray tribe, people who he's reading some of these kind of like centrist rationalist newsletters, probably subscribes to a lot of sub stacks.

For example, maybe listens to this show.

If you're listening in jail, hello, Luigi.

Um,

would we invite him on the program?

Probably not.

I think, probably a bad idea.

Yeah, I don't think so.

Um, I'm, you know, I draw the line at giving a platform to alleged CEOs.

A legend,

just a legend.

You never know.

You never know.

Um,

but but yeah, no, I mean, I think, I think we both agree, healthcare system profoundly fucked up.

It's not just the insurance companies, it's the hospitals.

I mean, there are a lot of things that are wrong.

But I will also say that when people have really serious problems, I've had, you know, I've had friends and my parents have had friends, you know, older health issues, cancer, you know, brain tumors, all sorts of things go wrong in Canada and in Europe.

Do you know where they come?

to the United States to get the set to get the surgery because that's where you can get that standard of care and you can't get Sure, there are experts everywhere.

But in general,

you know, the quality,

the expertise is here and that's also here for a reason.

I, like I said, I firmly believe in universal health care.

Socialized medicine, probably not quite the way to go.

I have no idea how to solve this, right?

This is why I am not the CEO of a healthcare company or in charge of healthcare.

This is not my area of expertise, but

what is my area of expertise is the psychological element of this.

And it's really, you know, I think the human brain has this tendency, and I think we see this in Luigi, to just simplify, right?

Black and white, heroes, villains, bad, good.

This person must go.

There's just this tendency to simplification and avoidance of nuance, like shades of gray

ain't people's strong point a lot of times.

And I think that's getting much worse.

And especially in the social media world, you know, where kind of all of these things are being amplified, where people get into their little silos, into their little bubbles, and they see these things reflected.

That simplification, that like black and white thinking, that hero-villain thinking is getting overblown.

I'd like to see people start studying this right now.

I'm no longer in academia, but I'd really like to see some work done on kind of the

rise of this type of simplistic thinking and simplistic outlooks on the world

as it relates to social media.

I don't think it's very widespread.

There was some poll that came out that found that only 18% of people approve of Luigi Mangioni and like 70% disapprove.

I'm surprised that 82% of people have an opinion about him or know who he is, right?

He could sound like some Italian movie star from the 40s or something like that, right?

So just to clarify what I was thinking,

what I was talking about was actually Luigi himself and the reason he thought this was a good idea, like that his view of the world is this kind of black and white view.

And I think that, but as yes, it also applies to the people who support him.

I think that, yeah, it is a widespread kind of, a widespread fallacy.

And our brains do work that way, and we have to constantly fight against it.

And the things that actually help buttress against that are things that are disappearing from the world, like critical thinking skills and reading literature.

And, you know, things that, things that actually kind of force you to slow down and to think and to reflect.

And instead, we're, I think, living in a world where we're reacting and thinking very quickly and not reading deeply and consuming, you know, very simplistic media a lot of the times.

And that is, I think that's not a good, that's not a good background.

Yeah, what's weird is like,

it was, it's not like one of these like zodiac killer types where he plots us out for years, I don't think, right?

Like he wrote a manifesto that was like

not very, not the best manifesto.

I'd give it a C minus.

I rate your manifesto a C.

But he's like, yeah, I haven't really finished thinking about this, but, you know, whatever.

There's not time.

It's like, okay, come on, man.

Okay.

But I'm more interested in talking about blue sky in a moment.

I'm more interested in the phenomenon of like

the certain segment, I guess you call it, of the left.

I'm not sure why it's even necessarily the left exactly.

I think it's just kind of like

crazy attention demanding people.

For sure.

Well, you also, I think, I don't know if I've said this on the show before, but I've definitely talked to you about it, which is my view that as you get to, that the political spectrum isn't a line, it's a circle, right?

And as you get to the extremes of the right and the left, they meet, right?

And those

total extremists

are actually basically

the same thing.

It just comes full circle.

That's yeah, I mean, I mean, there are the demands.

There's like how much trust do you have in the system, right?

Yeah, it's weird.

You've seen like Democratic politicians ranging from

AOC to Elizabeth Warren

to Chris Murphy, who's this very like white-bred senator from Connecticut, who's now trying to be like the cool dad.

He's lame.

He's like trying to run for the president in 2028, right?

And he's like from the ultimate neoliberal insurance broker state.

You don't like the dad vibe.

We had walls.

Went to Williams College, you know, which, which it's not the populist hotbed exactly.

Whereas Bernie Sanders, who is a much better politician than all of the three people I mentioned together, multiplied by 50.

I mean, Bernie Sanders has accomplished.

I mean, AOC is a pretty good politician.

I take that back.

I think Elizabeth Warren's a borderline, terrible politician, and Chris Murphy is worse.

AOC is a pretty smart politician, so that was surprising to see.

But Bernie Sanders, who like has built this coalition and, you know, gotten a lot of things, gotten minimum wage increases in a lot of places, came not within a hair's breadth, but did very respectably against Hillary Clinton in 2016.

I mean, like, you know, he was like, yeah, this is not the way into

people's hearts on this issue, right?

And like, also, like, if you want to talk more about healthcare, by the way, just to give you some context, right, this is a real issue.

The United States, according to the Peter J.

Peterson Foundation, spends $12,742 per year on healthcare compared to $6,850 of the other wealthy countries.

This is per person, right?

Per capita, yeah, so twice as much-ish.

About $1,000 of that is in administrative costs,

which is not all of it or most of it,

but compares to an average of $213 in these other wealthy countries, Australia, Canada,

Belgium, and so forth.

So there is a real issue here, but you don't have to like...

You just start talking more about healthcare.

You don't have to say, we're talking more about healthcare because this fucking lunatic who allegedly killed somebody, right?

Just talk more about healthcare and like, don't like rationalize it in your little bubble.

And it just, it just, I don't know.

It's just very weird to me.

Yeah,

I think that's exactly right.

And I think on that note, shall we take a break and then talk about social media and Kirk Sky?

Yeah.

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So over the last few months, since October, Blue Sky has gained almost 2.5 million users, and Twitter, or X as it's now known, has lost basically the same amount, 2.7 million.

So we're seeing kind of Twitter X is still 10 times bigger than Blue Sky, but we are seeing something that looks like it might be a trend.

Before we get into it, Nate, do you have a Blue Sky account?

I do, but

I never use it.

And I don't know what kind of fucking psychedelics, drugs you'd have to give me to want to spend a moment on Blue Sky.

So I knew you had a Blue Sky account.

I thought it was you because I found you with zero posts.

But I have a Blue Sky account.

I still have my Twitter account.

But I made a Blue Sky account back when it was very early invite-only.

So sick brag.

Yeah, I know, I know.

But I've had one for a while and I've had periods of activity and dormancy, right?

So I was active at the beginning, then I was like, screw this.

You know, it's too many social media platforms.

You've got Twitter.

You've got Mastodon.

Do you remember Mastodon?

I've been pretty loyal to Twitter.

You've got Blue Sky.

There are all these things.

And I'm like, you know, fuck this.

Like, I can't maintain all of these different accounts.

But I actually re kind of recommitted to Blue Sky

probably about, oh, I don't know how many months ago.

three, four, five months ago, because Twitter was getting, for me, so your experience is probably different because as someone with over a million followers, you were,

you, you got the, you know, check, blue check mark and your, your Twitter experience is a premium when mine is not.

I refuse to pay for a blue check mark.

And so my Twitter just became so unusable in terms of spam, in terms of just like horrific content that I get, bots,

all sorts of things, ads that I really don't want to see.

And Blue Sky...

became kind of a much cleaner way of sharing.

That said, I didn't leave Twitter because I actually think that that would have been a mistake.

And I think that it's a very bad idea to kind of leave the party when you disagree with things that are going on, because then you miss the discourse, right?

You miss the conversation.

You have no idea what's going on.

And the worst thing you can do at that point is like go off into your bubble in protest because that's not going to make anything better.

I'd much rather hang out at the Twitter party than the Blue Sky Party.

And by the way, I have been like, You haven't tried the Blue Sky Party.

I have been

harass

as much as almost any person on twitter i'm just not like the little whiny baby about it you know what i mean but like in terms of like having people say awful things to me it happens to me all the time on twitter maybe a little bit less than it did in previous epics maybe a little bit less than it did in election year um

but like you know and i dish it out too to be fair um but yeah i've been a trending topic more times than i count for i can count for like totally innocuous things right um

but i would still rather have Twitter in all its decrepit form and there's lots of conspiracy theories and,

you know, the 4U algorithm will do kind of anything to get your engagement.

You know, you get lots, it doesn't apparently know that I'm gay.

I get like lots of like smutty female stuff, right?

And things like that.

And like, it hasn't quite figured me out exactly.

And I'm probably kind of gradually using Twitter like less and less.

Now and then I'll have days where I forget to check Twitter first thing in the morning, even though it's kind of part of my morning routine, to be honest.

But like, well, let me back up a little bit, right?

Twitter, I mean, I first had a Twitter account in 2008.

And this is kind of like before

everybody is quite so online as they are now.

And so

you kind of have like the founders are kind of tech nerds in a different way or like news nerds, people who are working in the journalism industry in some ways and trying to find new platforms.

And when you have that, then, you know, one nice thing about that is that nerds tend to be, I don't know, there's a camaraderie with other nerds, right?

If you're a tech geek, then you can like, you know, tolerate certain things.

They tend to be pretty center-left, although not necessarily that political, quote unquote.

Around 2015, you begin to see

a lot more media organizations, actually before that really, right?

And then you kind of had, and, you know,

I don't know where you could like pinpoint the reasons for this, but you had a certain type of very

pedantic, progressive, scoldy left-wing commentator become very prominent on Twitter.

And it's like, I call them nits, but they're worse.

Cause anyway, it's like my least favorite type of people in the world.

And they're all at blue sky and they all are in a circle jerk with one another.

And like, I just can't imagine like you would have to pay me millions of dollars per year to be like an active blue sky community member.

Now, look, if

we got to a point.

Tell us how you really feel, Nate.

Tell us how you really feel.

And by the way, Blue Sky's numbers are not really rising anymore.

The number of daily likes, this is according to bsky.jazzco.dev backslash stats,

actually peaked on November 18th, it looks like, and has now, the number of daily likes has fallen by about 30%

since the peak.

The number of daily posters fallen by about the same amount.

The number of daily followers fallen even more than that, right?

And so

I think you actually have a self-limiting bubble here, right?

Clearly, it's a compelling product to a certain type.

It's actually to more than one group, right?

There are these kind of like

fringy,

more left-wing people, I would say.

That's one group.

There's also kind of like the resistance liberals.

But you kind of combine the crazy left people with the like goody two-shoes, like resistance folks, who I also

have no real problem with, but you know, they're too, I don't know, they're too square for me and too cringe and like, and like too straight-laced, right?

It's like, it's like, I don't know, it's again, it's the worst party in the world.

And I think, I think that it actually has a pretty limited audience.

I think that audience will love it, but I think founder effects are profound.

Founder effects mean that when a certain like species enters an ecosystem or a certain population enters a you know physical ecosystem that they have like there's a lot of path dependency and kind of who then joins or is

um or feels like estranged from the system.

And I think people like Matt Iglesias, who is kind of a friend of the newsletter, I don't know if a friend of the podcast, but like he was someone who tried to go on Blue Sky and act in good faith.

And like, and Matt's probably somewhat like me and being somewhat center left and also can give and take a little bit and was like kind of hounded off it and like treated really, really poorly.

And like if you can't like tolerate like Matt Iglesias, who's to the left of 75% of the country, right, then your platform has a limited reach, I think.

Yeah.

So I will, you know, push back on part of that in the sense that like my blue sky experience is totally different, right?

Like I

curated it the way that I curate my Twitter feed, which is like a lot of people who make me laugh and are funny, a lot of writers I admire, right?

And it's actually.

you know, I've tried to steer clear.

There's some political stuff on there, but mostly, you know, and some news and stuff like that.

And it's just a much cleaner feed for me now than what Twitter has become.

I don't get death threats.

I don't get rape threats.

You know, people are.

People do.

I mean, if you're, but you're not like,

I'm just saying, I'm just saying my experience.

So I'm just saying that there are lots of different ways to curate Blue Sky.

Where I will, well, I will agree with you is that I think that this kind of just black and white knee-jerk reaction, like this person is here, like let's hound them off, like that is bad, right?

That is just.

It's also violent.

People who are seen as being too conservative on trans rights there, like are literally receiving, literally receiving death threats, right?

Very out in the open, and there's not much effort tolerated on Blue Sky, whereas like Matt Aglesias is handed off, I mean, that's really fucked up, right?

I don't want to support that platform.

I literally think Twitter is better.

I literally think Twitter is at least a little bit more bipartisan.

And like, you know,

you don't have this hypocritical endorsement of violence on Blue Sky that I don't think people should spend their time there.

No, I think that the endorsement of violence is absolutely wrong.

And like I said, you know, that's the thing I'm agreeing with you on.

I I think that you should, you know, people need to be more open-minded, more tolerant, and more able to see nuance.

This is a thread throughout this episode, I guess, of risky business, that, you know, the world ain't black and white people.

Like there are good things and bad things and you can disagree respectfully, right?

You can have conversations.

You can engage with people.

You can actually have debates about a lot of topics.

And it's not, if you say this or if you think that, then you're a horrible human being and I'm done with you.

And here's this person's address.

Let's go and get them, right?

Like that, that is just, that is not okay behavior.

And that kind of extremism, that's what we were talking about, you know, in our last segment about Luigi, that is rising.

And I think that what Twitter has of that, Twitter has that as well.

Like that is not unique to Blue Sky.

What Twitter has of that, what Blue Sky is showing and amplifying there, like that is a very, very bad way of looking at the world.

And I think we're seeing it more and more.

And we need to have, you know, I don't know how we draw back as a society and say, okay, you know, enough, right?

Like,

let's just

civilize disco.

Maybe Twitter-like social media platforms are like the great filter, right?

There's all this theory about the Fermi paradox and like, why don't we see extraterrestrial life?

And there are like literally dozens of possible answers to it.

But like, you know, maybe the Twitter type social media platforms,

especially when they get algorithmatized to

spark engagement by any means necessary.

Like maybe those are just really bad.

Right.

And maybe Twitter was actually the exception to be like

relatively good for a period.

I mean, it still is more bipartisan.

If you look at the data on like Democrats versus Republicans on

Twitter, it is relatively balanced.

Now, I personally think that Elon with the for you algorithm, I think, puts a pretty heavy finger on the scale for conservative viewpoints.

And my subjective view was a very long time user is that like there's a little thumb on the scale for certain stuff, including Elon fucking posting so much himself, right?

Maybe the most important thumb on the scale.

I'm one of those people who constantly says like, don't show, like ignore this is not for me.

And it doesn't work when it comes to Elon and

when it comes to those things.

It just

completely does not work.

Yeah, Parator ignores my prep.

Twitter.

If tweet is from Elon, weight by like 1000x, right?

Yeah.

But I think you made a really important point that maybe like social media platforms like Twitter, like Blue Sky, like all of these sorts of platforms are not good at the end of the day, right?

Like maybe that is not good for critical thinking.

That's not good for deep thinking.

It's not good for fostering the kind of society where we want to live.

And by the way, you know, in other news, like we've seen Australia, right, just ban social media for people under 16.

Is that right?

Yeah.

But, you know, there are countries that are just trying to go like complete, okay, whoa, this is not, this is not good.

I think that might might be a little too extreme.

But I do think we're seeing a lot of signs that, like, maybe this just isn't good, whether it's Twitter or Blue Sky

or any of these platforms, that they're just not bringing out the best in people.

They're not bringing out the best in conversation.

They're not bringing out the best in the ways that our brains can work, right?

They're not challenging us the way that they should be challenging us.

And instead, they're kind of catering to the lowest common denominator, which is not good.

That is not kind of

catering to the lowest common denominator is never, never a good phenomenon.

phenomenon.

In summary, Twitter sucks and Blue Sky sucks a little bit more, in Nate's opinion.

I would say they both suck, Twitter sucks a little bit more.

So we will, we will disagree on that.

And we both agree that the types of platforms and the types of thinking fostered by that approach to social media is not good and sucks.

And we need something better.

Let's take a break and then let's talk about some chess.

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Are you a chess fan, Nate?

Framed that way, no.

I kind of like adjacent to a lot of chess fans, right?

So I absorb some of it through kind of like

Daryl Maury, who we spoke with in a previous episode, is a big chess fan.

So you get some of it through him and people I read on the internet.

But I, you know, I'm a casual follower, I'd say.

Yeah.

So

were you aware, though, even as a casual follower, of the world championship defense that happened last week?

A little bit, and then from reading your sub stack, yeah.

Okay, so for people, for people who didn't see it,

the world chess champion, former world chess champion, Deng Li Zhen

was defending his championship title last week.

And he made a blunder.

So they were tied and they were playing in a...

a match that seemed like it would also be a tie.

And then he blundered.

And he made a blunder that was so bad that every chess expert, you know, you can read about this in every person I spoke to.

I spoke with Jennifer Jennifer Shahade,

who is a former

women's chess champion of the United States twice, and the only woman, I believe, to have ever won the junior chess championship open in the United States, woman grandmaster.

And she said, like, people, it was just like horrific, right?

Like, you do not make that kind of a mistake at that level, even at much lower levels.

It was so bad that she went over it with her son, who is, who is little and who is

learning how to play chess.

And so he blundered and an 18-year-old Gukesh Domaraju was able to claim the World Championship title, becoming the youngest ever world chess champion.

Yeah, Gary Kasparov used to hold that title.

He was 22.

And so this was a huge, huge moment.

And I am interested in it.

And this is what I wrote about it, not because, you know, this is a show about chess strategy,

but because of like the the psychology behind it right like

we've we've been there and i'm sure i know i've been there in poker right like you sometimes like you just have

a brain fart and sometimes a brain fart isn't just a brain fart right like it can be a brain fart that's like a blunder of epic proportions now you and i have never played on that kind of a global stage where we're, you know, defending our world championship title, but you see this all the time in high performance athletes, whether it's mental games or whether it's actually physical games, where someone who's really, really good just chokes, right?

And just has this kind of moment where like,

what just happened, right?

Like a holy shit moment.

And I, you know, every, when I, when I see that, like, I'm fascinated in, you know, the psychology behind that, the psychology of why kind of high, high-performance people can actually, you know, experience moments like that.

And I'm sure you've seen that much, you've seen that often in sports, like actual sports.

I don't follow actual sports as closely as you do, but in mind sports, you know, I wrote about a brain fart that I had that was that was a little bit

less less extreme, but that changed the outcome of the NAPT, the PokerStars event that I just went deep in.

So these things matter.

And

when you're in high pressure situations, mental game and your ability to perform is incredibly important.

But even the best people who have strong mental game sometimes screw up.

Yeah, there's a lot about this in my book, On the Edge, The Art of Receiving Everything from Penguin Press.

But about performance under pressure and actually the physiological changes that you experience under pressure, because it's not just mental, right?

No, no, there's a lot of people.

Evolutionarily, our bodies...

understand when we're in high-stakes situations, whether they're physical or mental or somewhere in between.

You cannot fake, and you don't necessarily want to fake, because actually your body is more alert and getting more information, right?

If you're playing

the final table of a $10,000 poker tournament, as Marie and I hope to do, right?

You are going to react differently than when you're playing your $1, $2 home game on Tuesday.

Absolutely.

And you tell yourself, oh, it's just monopoly.

You can't not true.

And you can't trick your brain, but you're on a different operating system where your heart rate would be a lot higher, right?

You know, some people become more intuitive, which can be a good thing or a bad thing, but like it becomes, you know, you can be in the zone where you're like, just kind of feel like I'm seeing things.

It's happened to me a handful of times, right?

Or you can choke.

So

when you run deep in a poker tournament, like really deep.

So I played in 2023.

I both made like.

day five of the Millionaire Maker and day six of the main event, right?

And so you see what happens in these big soft tournaments.

The main event, by the way, is like one of the softest poker tournaments in the world.

Lots of kind of rich YOLO guys come and show up, right?

Lots of people who qualify in some way.

And like, so this is a population of predominantly amateurs, right?

And they just lose their shit when the pressure is on, right?

Some of them probably have like,

it's a self-sabotage.

complex or like survivorship guilt.

Some of them are just tired.

They've been playing poker for, you know, a six-year-old guy who's not used to playing poker all day.

Now he plays high-stress poker for four days in a row for 12 hours with all these younger kids.

And like, and then maybe they lose a big pot and they freak out and they, and they tilt.

And you see people shaking to the point where, you know, it almost looks like they have some type of medical condition because

your body is having a profound like physiological response to stress.

And then it goes away the minute that the hand's over.

Okay, so

if you...

do not eventually adapt to that in poker, then you probably don't get very far.

So you filter in professional settings for people who like, who are either tolerant of that type of stress or even enjoy it.

The sickos, the Michael Jordans of the world who enjoy the stress, right?

Jason Kuhn, another very good poker player, for talk to the book,

grew up in this very rough upbringing in West Virginia and had like an abusive father and things like that.

And he's like, yeah, for me, it's like, that's natural, right?

Like high stress.

I feel kind of more comfortable in a fucked up way under high stress.

So yeah, impressional sports, it's rare to see someone who will survive through the gauntlet of high school and college and whatever else.

You know, Ben Simmons, the former Philadelphia 76er, is kind of an exception.

He's known as a choke artist.

And Parker, he's so naturally talented that he could kind of overcome that, right?

But like, usually you kind of filter that out, but it's like not a natural thing to be like,

to have the eyes of the world kind of literally upon you.

This is all live streamed, right?

And like, you know, the most high-pressure moment of his life.

And so I'm very, I'm very empathetic, but chess is kind of,

you know, it's not quite like poker in that, like an amateur, I could go play in a much tougher tournament than I'm qualified for in poker and I still have a chance of winning, right?

If I entered a chess world championship, I guarantee you,

I guarantee you, I get checkmated within 10 moves every single time, right?

There's not a lot of

luck in chess.

So

the cream rises to the top, but still, still, you know, and then it can be things like if you're a little tired, I used to try to like do things like be a hero when I played a poker tournament and like, oh, I'll just skip lunch.

I, you know, had a few minutes too many calories yesterday.

So I'll skip lunch and wait till the dinner break.

And like, and, you know, you play enough and you kind of see that when you're physically tired, when you have other stresses in your life, when you're hungry, then you play worse, right?

And it kind of comes out in ways that aren't necessarily conscious, but like rather like,

you know, you just kind of punt a hand.

You're like, you know, actually, there's probably my body telling me that like this spot's probably pretty indifferent and I really need to get some fucking dinner.

Right.

And you, you've done that enough where you kind of learn how your body and your mind are not so easy to separate.

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

And I think that it's impossible.

Like you cannot underestimate the effects of fatigue.

And this is what, I mean, Ding Lejen was incredibly tired, right?

This is not, he didn't blunder in the first game.

He had a beautiful first game.

Like, this is, we're, we're 14 games in here.

Um, and, you know, that that really, and it was, I think, four hours into the match, right?

So like you, you've been thinking at that high level for a very long time.

And something that I think that a lot of poker players can probably relate to is sometimes like when you've been working so hard for so long, like you just want to simplify, right?

Like, you just want it to be over.

Like, in poker, there's like the tendency to go all in, right?

You're like, I don't want to play post-flop.

Like, I don't want to like have that complex decision making.

Like, he four-bet me, like, fuck it.

I'm all in.

Or like, he three bet me.

Like, fuck it, I'm all in for 60 big blinds, right?

Like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

But I've done that.

Like, sometimes, sometimes you're just like, I don't want to think through the complexities.

Please simplify this for me.

And this is something that,

like I said, I'm not a chess expert.

When I talked to Jen and she said that she's going to be writing about this on her sub stack, she actually thinks that this is a good kind of.

Strategically, this is part of what happened in this particular case where he was trying to simplify the end game.

He was trying to kind of get it to

a stalemate more quickly.

And he made a mistake while he was doing that.

So as opposed to kind of just playing it out,

he just wanted it to be over.

And I think that's a very, very human.

That's a very human tendency.

And that's something that, you know, we should be aware of.

But I will end by saying like he has remarkable self-awareness, right?

Like he is someone who

I think will take this opportunity and

learn from it.

Or at least I hope so, because he, you know, he dared to come back

after depression, after

losing dozens of games in a row.

And

he did not perform well after becoming the world champion.

Clearly, that stress got to him and he's back.

So I think that that's kind of the other part of mental game.

Everyone's going to choke at some point.

Like we're all going to have that moment where like we fuck up.

And how you react to that, I think, is kind of the

true test, right?

Do you say, okay, you know, know i fucked up and then how do i avoid it next time or do you just lose your shit completely on that note nate um let's go and play day two of the win championship main event yeah we both we both made it i have a decent stack maria i texted you how you doing this is what is sunday she's like oh it's going good i'm like yo how many chips do you have right i knew that you had a lot of chips

i knew you had a lot of chips when you were too embarrassed to to say how many chips you had

all right um and on that note let's both hope for a smooth sailing day two we are not yet in the money by the time you all hear this on thursday we will know how we did but right now you know it's an it's an open question and so here's to some run good and good luck for the day

Let us know what you think of the show.

Reach out to us at riskybusiness at pushkin.fm.

Risky Business is hosted by me, Maria Kondakova.

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.

Our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein.

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

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Thanks for tuning in.

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