The Riskies: The Best, Worst, and Most Interesting Decisions of 2024

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

I'm Maria Konakova.

And I'm Nate Silver, and I forgot to bring my audio equipment to Las Vegas, so that's why I look ridiculous if you're watching this on YouTube, holding my phone to my lips.

Today we have a special kind of year-end show for you.

We're going to be awarding the riskies.

This is our term for awards like Degen of of the Year, Knit of the Year, Tilt of the Year.

Basically, a bunch of awards to people who made extraordinarily good or bad decisions.

We're very excited about these.

Yep, and after the riskies, we're going to be talking a little bit about poker and our own riskies because Nate and I are both in Las Vegas right now for the WBT series at the Wind.

So we'll talk a little bit about how that's going.

And finally, we're actually going to respond to a listener question about bilingualism and does it make sense to learn a second language?

Nate, I'm really excited for our first of what I hope will be annual risky awards, the riskies,

to talk about good and bad decisions of the year in all walks of life.

So obviously, you know, we talk a lot about politics on the show.

So we'll have some from politics, but also from business and from sports and Hollywood,

just talking in general about risky decisions, which ones worked out, which ones didn't, which ones were good, which ones were bad.

So let's get started and talk about awarding the first risky for the hero call of the year.

So a decision that looked like it might have been a little crazy at the time, but turned out to be brilliant, right?

Just like a hero call in poker, when you're thinking, you're thinking you have Jack High

and it's for your tournament life and you end up calling and you're right because the other guy was bluffing with eight high or whatever it it was.

Nate, do you have a Hero Call of the Year?

I think Theo, the French whale, has to get the Hero Call of the Year award.

So what did he make?

He

$85 billion.

So he,

the French whale was on polymarket, which I'm an advisor to,

and bet copious amounts, millions of dollars, that Trump would win and kind of even like distort it as a loaded term, but like the whole market was affected by this one trader.

Polymarket has good volume, but not,

But you know, it's not it's not the equities market or something like that

Apparently did some polling where he asked people who are your neighbors owning for this technique is

not that proven, but look it worked a hero call by definition is like if you get the answer right for lots of money then you have to get some amount of some amount of credit, right?

A lot of people didn't have this degree of confidence election.

Our forecast literally had it literally had it more random than a coin flip.

And so I'm going to give the French whale Theo this award.

I think that that's a beautiful, uh, that's a beautiful answer.

Um, Theo absolutely deserves Hero Call of the Year because we even talked on the podcast, we're like, This is insane!

Like, right, who is this whale?

Like, what is going on?

Um, and yeah, he ended up making a ton of money.

Um, so congratulations, Theo, you've made our Hero Call of the Year.

Congrats, yes, and come on the show, yes, we'd love to, we'd love to talk about how you think about.

nate promises he will not do his french accent for you when you are on the show

all right so you know a flip side of the hero call is uh when you make the wrong decision right what was the worst fold of the year so a decision that you know ended up

making people think, you know, what were you thinking?

How could you fold there?

I have one for this, but yeah, you go ahead.

It seems like you're excited about this one.

I'm sorry.

So on brand i have to go with like the she should have picked shapiro thing i know it's i know it's very politics heavy but like you have this very charismatic politician who's like literally the popular governor of the most important swing state which by the way turned out to be the tipping point state pennsylvania and she picked Tim Walls, who was kind of weird in practice.

And like, it just seemed like a no-brainer.

And I can try and dissect why the campaign did this, but like that, that's a decision that's kind of the opposite of the of the hero call, right?

It's like

obvious play, if you don't make the obvious play, right?

If you have this amazing semi-bluffing opportunity, you have a straight draw and a flush draw and you have fold equity and you choose to play the hand differently in some weird way, then it better work out well.

Or if not, we have the right to criticize you.

So there's another award that comes a little bit later, but I'm going to reference it now because I think it's very germane.

And it's an award that we're borrowing from the podcast, The Town.

So thank you very much, The Town.

And it's the Sucket Haters, I Was Right award.

And that, Nate, I'm going to give to one of the decisions that you've been talking about all year,

which is she should have chosen Shapiro.

Should have chosen Shapiro.

So I actually, I went outside of politics, sort of, and I said the worst fold was anyone who ended up selling Bitcoin at the beginning of the year during the bear market in January.

Yeah.

I think that that was the worst fold.

Like the people who were, you know, like all in on Bitcoin and then were like, you know what, I changed my mind.

Like, this is bad.

Like, it's down to 40K.

Like, shit.

I bet those people are not very happy right now.

So I think that, and I don't think that it was, I think that it was pretty obvious that they should not be folding, right?

Because you know how cyclical this market is.

You know how the bare bull cycles work.

Like, if you know what you're doing, you do not sell like

at a bottom right there.

But yeah, so that was, that's who I gave the

worst fold of the year year award to.

So I think we can we can both give out one

Next up, we have

Cooler of the Year, who had a great hand but still lost.

So here I went outside of our usual purview, right?

We were normally kind of very politics, business, some sports heavy.

Here I decided to go to Hollywood

and I am giving this award to Greta Gerwig, who was the writer and director of Barbie, who just got completely shut out at the Oscars, losing everything, losing even some nominations.

She wasn't even nominated for directing.

And she lost for writing.

And I think that she was just like completely, she had a great hand.

I think Barbie was a great movie that did incredibly well.

And for some reason, she was just like...

completely shut out of the Oscars this year.

That happens every year.

You know, there's always someone.

But this one, I feel like,

yeah,

I felt a little bit personal about it because I think, you know,

she's female, she's talented, she's great.

And I actually did not like Oppenheimer at all.

I thought it was a horrible movie.

I thought it was really boring.

I did not think that it should have gotten all the awards it got.

So, like, I actually disagreed completely.

This is from a personal thing, but these are our awards, so they get to be personal.

That was my worst.

That was my cooler of the year.

How about you, Nate?

Maybe the New York Yankees, so I don't know if you're a baseball fan, Juan Soto, this amazing young outfielder who is kind of like the Ted Williams of his era, signed with the crosstown rival New York Mets for

almost $800 million.

The Yankees offered him $760 million after making their first World Series run since 2009, I guess.

Because apparently the Yankees were just cheap.

Like George Costanza, working for the Yankees in Seinfeld, were like, they wouldn't give Juan Soto a sweet.

They apparently like harassed his family and his driver and so he was like fuck you i'm actually going to steve cohen and the new york met it's pretty rare to see a cross-town free agency move like that all right up next tilt of the year so what was the most emotional decision of the year do you think i mean i'm going back to politics here yeah mine's political mine's politics too yep joe biden deciding deciding a to run for re-election and that he was indefatible and then the then the pardon of yeah fail son hunter

I've got the pardon as mine.

So let's unanimously give the tilt of the year to Biden for making some very emotional decisions, the deciding to run and the pardon of Hunter.

I think that that is absolutely, you know, that was tilt.

The definition of tilt is letting emotions into your decision process, right?

That you are no longer evaluating things based on their, you know, expected value, based on their actual kind of decision matrix.

You are letting emotions that are incidental and not integral to the decision, into the decision.

And that's exactly what Joe Biden did.

GTO call of the year, game theory optimalist call for the most balanced, mathematically sound decision of the year.

Okay.

So this one I went outside of politics.

I went into the

business side because this is so incredibly rare.

I wanted to kind of compliment Apple on abandoning their foray into electric vehicles because most companies, after spending billions on something, don't have the foresight, the knowledge, kind of the perspicacity to say, you know what?

We're not going to be competitive here.

It's not working.

We're just going to write it off and move on.

And the markets rewarded Apple, actually, even though some people were like, this is insane.

Like, right, how can you step away from a multi-billion dollar investment?

So I think that that was actually, that is what GTO is, right?

Is actually being able to make those types of really, really tough decisions because you realize, you know what, it doesn't matter.

We already spent that money and we can't get it back.

And if we realize we're not competitive, like I'm going to fold my hand, right?

And I'm going to, and I'm going to walk away and that's going to be okay.

And most companies are not capable of doing that.

Most CEOs are not capable of doing that.

So I want to reward Apple for a really good decision.

Yeah, maybe I give a little shout out here to

Dan Campbell, the head coach of the Detroit Lions.

The Lions nearly made their first Super Bowl ever.

Blew it.

That probably saved me.

I don't want to even say how much it was going to save me on a

Las Vegas Super Bowl trip.

But Campbell's very aggressive about going for it on fourth down and making other aggressive play calls, which the GTO says is correct and didn't work out, but they trust the system.

And now the Lions are the best team in the NFL so far this year.

So maybe I'll be spending my hard-earned dollars on a trip to New Orleans instead in the Super Bowl.

Great.

I'm on board with that.

All right.

How about the Danny Kahneman Memorial Cognitive Bias of the Year Award?

What cognitive bias best explains 2024?

So I'm going to say that the bias that best encapsulates 2024, and we're going back to politics here, is the sunk cost fallacy, which is the inability to walk away from sunk costs.

And I think that the Biden campaign, which is something that is going to, you know, be, we'll be feeling the repercussions of that for years to come, suffered from the sunk cost fallacy, right?

The fact that, oh, you know, I

am already,

I said I'm running, like I'm not, I'm not going to turn back on it.

I'm going to keep putting good time and good money after bad, after it was becoming more and more clear that he shouldn't run again, that he should step away.

And the sunk cost fallacy, I think, literally cost them the election because they, you know, he did not step away.

We've talked about this so many times, but, you know, the fact that they didn't pivot, the fact that they kind of didn't

take the risk and take on the new strategy and realize, you know what, we're only hurting ourselves by continuing to put good time, good money, good energy after bad.

I think that that was the death, the death knell

of

this campaign.

So to me, the sunk cost fallacy is the decision error that best encapsulates this year.

Yeah, maybe I'll go with good old-fashioned groupthink.

I suppose it's like also contained to the Democratic Party where an inability, like I think it's fundamentally, I'm kind of writing an article about this now.

I think it's kind of amazing, but Democrats adopt this philosophy where they kind of claim to be working on behalf of like all these oppressed minorities.

And then all the oppressed minorities shift a long way toward Trump.

And I think what that is, is that you're actually

looking at views among other elites and Democrats have kind of lost touch with

how people outside their group think think and what messages are appealing and which aren't.

And so we, you know, I don't want to deter this too much, but I'll kind of broadly give it to the Democratic Party and how capture among all the

cognitive elites actually can be a problem in some ways.

Makes sense.

Here's a fun one.

Degen of the year.

This is one of the most prestigious awards.

It is.

Well, I'm giving it to Ipe Mizuhara.

Okay, that was my pick.

$16 million.

I don't think it doesn't get more DGen each year.

Can we call it the Ipe Mizohara Memorial DGen Award of the Year in the future?

I think it's a good idea.

Yeah, in future years, I think that's what we need to call it.

And for people, obviously, who can't immediately put that name to a face, that was Otani's interpreter who pleaded guilty to making at least $17 million worth of sports bets gone wrong and using Otani's accounts to cover those.

And the knit of the year, do you have a good one for this?

Kamala Harris.

Okay, Kamala Harris.

Yeah, these are two, the Kamala Harris Memorial.

Yes, I got that.

She refused to distance herself from Biden, even though

they didn't campaign on Biden's agenda either.

They just said, oh, well, let's hope people ignore this.

And yeah, the risk aversion in this campaign, and by the way, how much this is her versus her campaign managers, I'm not sure.

But like, that's the, it's

not that they have a lot of politics.

Right.

At the end end of the day, it's her campaign, and if she disagrees with her campaign manager, she needs to be like, No, fuck this, I'm not going to be a knit.

So at the end of the day, it's on her.

It's just like it's not.

Or vice versa.

If the campaign disagrees with her, they're like, yo,

yo, you got to get your shit and gear, Kamala.

Exactly.

Exactly.

So it seems like you agree with my D-Gen and knit of the year picks.

Absolutely.

These are pretty easy ones, I think.

The risky business bracelet, who had the better, which of the two hosts?

This is an easy one because there are only two answers.

Had the better poker, had the better poker year?

I don't know, Nate.

Are you up or down?

I'm definitely down in tournaments, and then I have a quite good year in cash, and so I don't actually know.

All right, well, the bracelet, I think we should do tournaments, right?

Since bracelets are

verifiable, right?

Yeah, it's verifiable.

Yeah, so I'm up in tournaments, so I guess I get the bracelet for this year.

Yeah, I'm down a fair bit.

I'll need to have a good series here with the win, but the cash has gone well.

I'm starting to think of myself as more of a

cash player in some ways.

That's wonderful.

And I look forward to seeing you on some big cash streams and we can change this from the bracelet awards to something else so that we can just say poker prowess, whether cash or tournaments.

I don't know.

So now we've got two awards that are being taken from another podcast, The Town, which gives awards the Mia Coolpa I Was Wrong Award and the Sucket Haters I Was Right Award.

So these are for, I think, personal decisions, you know, personal things that we've done.

This is where I said that you should be the sucket haters I was right.

I didn't have one for me, but I had it for you, which was the she should have gone for Shapiro.

I think that that's, I think that you, you get that award.

And

the Mia Coolpa I was wrong award.

I actually, so I think that I was wrong when we had talked on the podcast about kind of how important crypto was to the election.

And I'm like, it's a tiny percentage.

It doesn't really matter.

I actually think that it ended up mattering a lot more than I thought it would.

And, you know, and especially kind of given, given the amount of money that was donated, given kind of some people who I think came out and became single-issue voters for Trump because of his take on crypto.

I actually think I was a little bit wrong on that.

I think I underestimated the crypto vote.

I'll give myself an award for

nearly betting on with Keith Verboy,

who was a venture capitalist, on the outcome in Florida, where Keith claimed, he lives in Miami now, very proudly so, that Kamala Harris would lose Florida by eight points or more.

And at the time, she was down only three points in the polling average, got a spat on Twitter and offered to bet 100K

and actually kind of tried to facilitate this and sent an email to a mutual friend

saying, hey, Keith, if you want to negotiate terms, here's person Y who can confirm this.

And he didn't respond for four days, right?

And then some morning, a New York Times poll comes out and has Harris down like 13 or 15 points in Florida.

And I'm like, fuck this, you know, you don't have a free option to make this bet whenever.

So the offer is rescinded, which he agreed.

It was too late to accept the bet.

Certainly not recognizing the complete collapse of the Democratic Party in Florida and being lucky to be able to pull out of that bet.

Yeah,

I think that's a good one.

And the second haters, I was right.

Do you like my choice for that?

I have a lot.

I mean, all the Biden-related stuff.

I actually like

everything, haters.

I know.

The Biden debate stuff, where I'm like, actually, the debate might go so bad

that he'll have to pull out.

That was kind of crazy, right?

I would not have given more than like a 15% probability of that, but I kind of put myself out there with at least raising his chance.

And so all the Biden stuff,

I felt like was my you definitely put yourself out there.

And I think, and I think you ended up being right about a lot of it so so yes

I'm there for it.

All right, now we're gonna have two individual awards for for us to give out so mine is the Maria Kanakova Award for the biggest bluff of the year.

And I am gonna get a lot of people mad for this one, but I'm giving it to Sam Altman and OpenAI for bluffing about the mission and the non-profit nature of Open AI and getting, you know, saying how it was all about, you know, just being for the good of the world and then raising money and saying, actually, we're going to be for-profit and

all of this stuff that, like, obviously it was going to be a business.

And obviously, like, this is where it was heading.

But I think a lot of people believed his initial bluff.

And this is something that's going to be really important.

And Open AI and, you know, how Sam goes about it, I think this is an important thing to track closely.

So I think it's good to realize that this is someone who is incredibly good at bluffing, incredibly credible at bluffing, and bluffs a lot.

I agree.

I think, no,

I think that's a great pick, Maria.

Thank you.

I mean, he is.

I don't know if he's convincing everyone necessarily,

but he knows how to see their bluff through.

I'll say that much.

Yes, he does.

The Nate Silver Award for Rivarian of the Year, the Rivarian, of course, a term from my book for this group of, I don't know,

degenerate gambling types.

I think you have to give it to

our boy Elon.

I just think you have to.

He made this very big bet where he was kind of in more of a blue leaning cultural space and has obviously gotten like red-pilled in various ways.

But look,

he bet 250,000 or people are still counting, maybe 300 million, excuse me, he bet like several hundred million dollars of his own money on Trump, went very all in on this movement.

And now it's been rewarded with heading a government or a quasi-governmental agency named Doge and getting this guy he wanted elected.

I, you know, it's a little bit like this thing we said before, where if you kind of

make that hero call, and not like the odds were that bad.

I mean, Biden was evidently in trouble very early on, but I think you have to like, and again, I, Elon is not my favorite representative of the river, right?

Even if you were strictly conservatives, you know, someone like Jay Bhattacharya, who was an early Stanford professor who was skeptical of some of the COVID lockdown stuff, now named director of the NIH, like he is someone who I would personally rather get a beer with or something.

But Elon's the obvious choice.

I'm not going to deny him his good year.

Well,

this was a lot of fun.

I like the riskies,

and I like our renaming of some of the awards to the awards recipients.

Ife for DJ

forevermore.

We'll be back in just a minute to talk a little bit about how the poker is going so far and answer a listener question.

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Nate, you are beautifully backlit by the lovely Wynn

Hotel.

So we are both in Las Vegas for the WPT.

I've been playing a few more events than you.

You came in and went straight into the 3K,

$3,000 one-day event yesterday.

How did that go?

Good.

I finished 13th place for $10,000 or $9,900 something, I think, technically.

I know it's for tax reasons or what they do it that way.

Yeah, always great to start out with

a decent size cache in your first event.

It was a very turbo event.

If our listeners don't know what that means, it means that the blinds increase very fast.

They start the event at one.

They're trying to get it wrapped up by

2 a.m.

And with like 200 players or whatever, 250, I forget what it was.

Then that means you all of a sudden...

are playing for very high stakes relative to the amount of ships that you have.

And so

requires hitting some big hands early and then being aggressive and winning some coin flips, being aware of how the dynamics change in terms of

we've talked about ICM on this show before with the independent

chip model.

Independent chip model.

The goal is to win money if you have it not

just maximize your first place chances, right?

And so I had to be, I had a medium-sized stack and I had to be a little bit cautious for parts.

of the tournament, which is kind of, which is kind of no fun.

But that's, that's, you know, I'm playing poker to to win money not to not to make friends and influence people well maybe that too um so we were a little bit nitty at times and wound up getting quite a few pay jumps to 13th place yeah well that's important especially because you were not in for one bullet you were in for multiple bullets right so you needed maria you didn't have to you know there's no record of that on handed mob yeah

all right two bullets i came in i came in

aggressively as one tends to do on their first day in Las Vegas.

You were not a net.

You want people to know that you were not a net.

Your first bullet was bluffed off.

So, so you were, you, you, you put in a good show of not being a net first.

And then you made it a lot.

I do think for like these one day, I mean, like, I think it is worthwhile to like

look a little bit at like your life philosophy, right?

And like what your alternatives are.

I don't want to like.

If I bust out of the tournament before the dinner break, then my partner's in town, you're in town, can go get like a nice dinner somewhere and have a relaxing night in Vegas.

And so like, I think there is something where like increasing your variance a little bit in the early stages where you get a big stack or not is a good life strategy.

And also in this tournament, you kind of need a big stack or else you're just, or else you're just, I mean, the blinds increase so fast that you're kind of have to play very defensively or get very lucky.

And so I think it's actually worth in like these one day events.

It's not a slow structure.

It's worth kind of saying, I'm going to either have a big stack or go get some, go to a show or something fun.

Yeah.

Go big or go home.

I totally get it.

But in all transparency, so the series has not started off well for me.

I have played so far three events.

So I played the opening $800 event, which was actually a $4,000 event for me.

So people can do the math in terms of re-entries.

I did not cash.

Then I played the Mystery Bounty, which is a $1,600 event.

Again, full transparency.

It was only a $3,200 event for me.

So that one I managed to sneak by with only two bullets and I bubbled.

Bubbling, once again, for people who don't know, is I busted very, very late in the night,

basically when we were about to reach day two and the money.

So that was not fun.

And that was, you know, that was just a cooler hand.

And I started the Prime, which is the $1,100 event yesterday.

And I ended up busting.

You can only rebuy once a day.

So I busted both of my bullets yesterday.

And I'm going to play again today.

As soon as we finish recording our podcast, I'll make my way to the wind to see you, Nate, where we can both try to find a bunch of people.

I'm going to come in after lunch and maybe get a little looser.

Yeah.

Yeah, get a little lunch.

But there's lots of stuff.

There's like

10, the main 10K event starts next week, I guess.

This weekend, this coming weekend.

This weekend.

There is a free roll for Devon.

I did not get a seat into the free roll, Nate.

Did you?

Perhaps.

Nate.

Perhaps.

I did not win a seat into the free-roll.

And I'm not running well this series.

So they have, if you enter, they have this promotion where you join, you know, club WPT Gold or whatever, kind of the same thing that the free roll is advertising.

And then you get to draw from all of these possible prizes, including a McLaren, you know, $250,000 car,

and all of these other amazing prizes, including entry to the free roll.

I drew a fucking hat, Nate.

A hat.

Yeah.

And I had to be like, I'm sorry, you can keep the hat.

I can't take a WVT hat.

I bought the hats are kind of expensive.

They're cost like 40 bucks or something, Maria.

Oh, Nate, I should have given you the hat.

I should have taken the hat.

I didn't know.

I didn't know.

I turned my nose up at the hat.

I was like, I got the lowest value prize.

Oh, there were also cash prizes.

You could go into this cash boost.

There were so many good prizes.

And I drew the hat i am not running well this tournament series so far um you know down almost ten thousand dollars and a hat

let's turn it around look let's turn around i i you know it happens i my second leg of the world series this year um

it's all kind of a blur there was so much politics news but just brick everything right so over

Ophra, I forget what it was, O for 12 or 13 or something probably.

And that's very normal.

The chances of that if you do the math, they're like quite a bit higher than you might expect or want intuitively.

Absolutely.

And I've had a very good year.

So I'm not complaining.

I just want people to realize that there is a lot of variance in this game.

You know, just like in life,

you go through these periods where things just don't come together.

And it's hard to forget that.

It's hard to remember that when things are coming together, right?

Like when you're running well,

when you're cashing, you're like, oh, this is easy.

Poker's easy.

Life is great.

And I think that's true of life in general, right?

When things are going well, you're like, yeah, this is good.

This is how life should be.

But you do go through periods when shit hits the fan, when things do not go as well as planned.

But let's, I hope I turn it around and that some of your 3K, you know, success rubs off on me so that I do not have to then go and

play the prime yet again

because

this is a 1k event that's very worth playing the maximum amount of time since it's probably the largest 1k event of the year.

So it's exciting.

It's an exciting series.

I'm looking forward to the rest and I'm looking forward to running a little bit better and I hope both of us do.

Let's take a break and then let's take a listener question and talk about bilingualism.

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We had a listener named Ed who had a question about language learning.

So

should you learn a second language or not?

And he maintains that as a primary English speaker, the EV for learning a second language is hugely negative, that it's a time suck.

English is common.

There's no obvious second language to learn that is better than any others.

You know, he talks about Spanish and Mandarin, that they're both commonly spoken, but how often will he go to a place where he'll only have that and no one to broker communications?

Doubly so with internet translation.

So yeah, he just wants to know,

are there situations that make it marginally positive for a non for a native English speaker, assuming you're not living with bilingual parents and getting your second language as a free.

What are your second language statuses, Maria?

Russian, French, Spanish, Italian, and Persian.

Geez.

Okay.

So you clearly

don't agree with a listener then.

No, I don't at all.

And I think that there's a ton of research on why you want to learn a second language that has nothing to do with

traveling over the world and having it be

you know, basically how to communicate with people.

That I think, by the way, is incredibly important.

I actually think it's great to be able to speak the language, at least a little bit of the place that you're visiting.

It helps you appreciate it more.

It helps you get a different experience.

And you will, you know, I like going off the beaten path, right?

Like I like going to places that are kind of in the back alleys and like the local hidden places where oftentimes people don't speak English.

And I think that I think that you just, you gain a lot from life for being able to speak the language.

So I disagree with that, but that's a matter of, you know, opinion, right?

And I don't want to be like an obnoxious tourist because if you think about it, basically everyone else in the world is bilingual and they've learned English to help the idiot Americans who refuse to learn a second language.

Like if you meet someone from the Netherlands, they're going to speak English.

If you meet someone from France, they're going to speak English.

And, you know, they, I think, are a lot richer for it because they have acquired that second language.

And I think that it's just, it's great to be able to do it as well.

But if we talk about the research, there are actually a ton of benefits for your brain for learning more languages.

Nate, I actually, I was wondering just before we get into that, do you have kind of, do you have other languages?

And kind of what's your just

high-level take on this?

No, I look, I took Spanish in high school and learned just enough to pass out of my college spanish requirements so i you know i can listen at like 40 comprehension and read at 60 comprehension

you know restaurant menu stuff i mean in general it's a foodie i can read i actually prefer to read like i'd rather see an italian menu in italian than english because i trust my ability to like

a know the original terms or translate more but yeah apart from apart from that very limited basis no i look um

i am sympathetic to the research you're citing for a couple of reasons, right?

One is I do think that like, if you look at like large language models, they suggest that like any given language, whether it's English or Spanish or French or Russian, or whether it's a computer language or mathematical language, is like

an incomplete representation of like the kind of implicit

to sound pretentious, implicit vector space of human thought.

And so having a wider like literal vocabulary that's not just English-based and interesting.

I mean, the analogy I sometimes make is like, there are poker concepts that

are hard to translate if you haven't specifically played poker, right?

The notion that like, if you're indifferent between two decisions, that like

small factors make a difference.

I mean, that's kind of legible in English, but like, but yeah, I, you know, and sometimes if I'm thinking a lot about poker or like programming or things like that, it feels like it's improving some other types of cognitive recognition where if I'm really deep in like doing some static coding or something.

It's hard to know.

I mean, the question is kind of what are the realistic trade-offs?

I mean, maybe if you did learn a programming language, maybe you did learn a craft deeply.

I, you know, I think there is a lot of

metaphors in art and literature that I think are probably somewhat parallel to language.

Of course, you can read some of those texts earlier, easier if you have.

If you have, but yeah, I don't know.

I also don't know like where, are you making a big bet or a small bet, right?

Like, should I, in my spare time,

take Duolingo?

So if we're at the EPT Paris next year, I can kind of make half sentences or not, right?

Or should I go all in?

I mean, where do you line up there?

Yeah, I think that that's a very personal decision.

But I think, so one of the things you mentioned, I think there is a lot of work on, which is that our views of the world really are expanded by having the proper vocabulary for it, right?

Like being able to express your thoughts, emotions, kind of of having words for things actually helps you, you know, figure out what they are, helps you think more rationally, more logically, make better decisions.

And there, you know, sometimes I have a Russian word for something that doesn't exist in English.

And it's a nuance.

It's a distinction that I wouldn't otherwise have.

And we know that this is true of like just physical perception of the world, right?

You, people who have, who are artists, who have a larger palette of colors and know all the different hues, they actually are able to distinguish more colors when you give them kind of a color wheel, where someone might be like, oh, I see red and green.

They actually see more colors, right?

Like their visual experience is different because they know what the words are.

And different languages have different words for things.

And I think that's really important.

I think that that's actually really cool.

Like I love, I love these learning, learning kind of even languages I don't know, learning words to express certain concepts, certain states, you know, certain parts of the world.

But there are also other benefits beyond that.

So first, cognitive control, which is executive control, which is really important, is better in bilinguals.

So all of those cognitive functions tend to be enhanced by having kind of the control to switch between languages, right?

Having all these different things coexist in your mind, especially if you learn it young, but right now, let's not talk about that because that's not what the question is, right?

He actually tries to exclude people who had it as a freebie.

So like Russian for me is a freebie, but English is not.

I actually grew up monolingual just speaking Russian.

I learned English in school when I was already, you know, when I was five years old.

So So it wasn't quite a freebie, but I was still a little kid.

So let's just call it a freebie.

And then the other language.

When you hear Russian guys discussing poker at the table, do they assume you don't know what they're saying?

Oh, sometimes when they don't, it's amazing because they'll say horrible things about me, assumptions about me, or things about their hand.

And I've actually learned a lot of information.

More and more people realize I speak Russian these days,

but a lot of people still don't know.

Yeah, so that is a lot of fun.

But the other thing that I think our listener would be very interested in knowing is that it seems like people who speak more languages actually age a lot better and their brains are protected a lot longer and more strongly from dementia and cognitive decline.

So on average,

people who are bilingual or more, but

let's just say bilingual,

if they experience signs of cognitive decline over four years later than people who aren't.

That's huge, right?

Like think about that.

So

how do we know this is not just selecting for higher socioeconomic status and or educational?

So these studies are pretty well done with those types of controls, right?

So that's super easy to control for.

You just put in a control for socioeconomic status and you see does this still have an effect?

And in general, it seems like it does.

Now this work is preliminary.

Like we, all of these types of things are incredibly difficult, right?

These are really, really hard things to study.

So we have a good sense that this, that this might matter.

And we know that, you know, with like with dementia, where you, where you actually see Alzheimer's, where you can see kind of the plaques, et cetera, and then you can just see like when did people, you know, after they die, like when did they start exhibiting signs, you end up seeing that people who are bilingual exhibit signs much later.

So they're able to kind of compensate, right?

Because you have different parts of your brain, you're able to compensate for the loss in a much better way.

And I think that that's really interesting.

Oftentimes there's a lot of clinical evidence and it's quite quite interesting, but when you have a stroke,

you know, when something goes really wrong in your brain, oftentimes people who are bilingual switch language, like you forget one language, but you retain the other somehow.

It's really cool.

Yeah, there's some really, really cool stuff where your brain is much more flexible and you have much more cognitive capacity to deal with bad shit happening.

And I think that that's something that everyone should want, right?

Like you want to think and be sharper and have kind of those reserves for as long as possible.

So to me, it's just an absolute no-brainer for no pun intended

for a lot of reasons.

But I think that all of these different areas of research are really interesting.

Maria, since we both have some poker poker to play and in my case, also lunch to eat, do you want to wrap up there?

Yeah, that sounds good to me.

I hope, dear Ed, that we've convinced you to learn a second language, that it is actually plus EV for you for a number of reasons, even though most people you encounter will be able to speak English.

If you have a listener question, dear listener, email us at riskybusinessall1word at pushkin.fm and maybe you will have a chance to be on the air and to have, let us have some fun with your question instead.

Risky Business is hosted by me, Maria Konakova.

And by me, Nate Silver.

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

This episode was produced by Isabel Carter.

Our associate producer is 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.

And if you want to listen to an ad-free version, sign up for Pushkin Plus.

For $6.99 a month, you get access to ad-free listening.

Thanks for tuning in.

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