How to Win Bets and Influence Elections

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

I'm Maria Kanakova.

I'm Nate Silver.

Do you ever see the 60 Minutes thing where they're like, they're like, I'm Marley Saper.

I'm Anderson Cooper.

And they go for like 15 fucking people.

It's like too much.

It is too much.

I'm glad there's only two of us.

So Nate, what are we going to talk about today?

Today on the show, we'll check in on Carolyn Ellison, the former CEO of Alameda Research and girlfriend of Sam Mikman-Freed, who was sentenced to two years for her role in the FTX fraud.

And after that, we'll have a little politics update where we talk about the latest polling and also what actually makes a difference to the numbers.

Is there anything that we can do in the next few weeks to

push the polls one way or the other, make our candidate more or less likely to win?

And then we'll say RIP to a couple of legendary degenerate gamblers.

So.

Caroline Ellison, former CEO, first co-CEO, right?

And then just sole CEO of Alameda, which was the hedge fund that was associated with FTX.

We've talked about Sam Bankman-Fried.

We've talked about FTX, but this was a big one because Caroline was one of the biggest names to testify against SBF and to kind of bring the whole thing down.

And this week she has been sentenced herself to two years.

Nate, did you get a chance to meet Caroline when you were doing your research?

I didn't.

We put in a request, but she smartly ignored it because unlike Sam Bateman-Freed, she wasn't talking to journalists while she was, you know, on trial for various fraud charges.

I did obtain transcripts of the three days that Carolyn Ellison spent in court testifying about SBF.

And this was a very compelling testimony that basically had SBF dead to rights.

In fact, the lawyer that I talked to about the case

said that he thought Sam, after Carolyn's testimony, was stupid to testify himself, that he was going to come across unsympathetically to a jury, was going to perjure himself and get a larger sentence, which is what happened.

The SBF got 20 years.

The judge is a no-nonsense judge, Judge Kaplan,

presided over many trials and was not impressed by

dear old Sam Bakeman Freed.

So

things that were apparent in her testimony.

One was that that this was that Sam had a good deal of awareness of what was happening, um, that he was aware that she was taking on risks that could result in the bankruptcy of the company.

That he, she had, he, that she had presented spreadsheets to him to say, Hey, if we make these loans, if there's even a mild downturn in crypto prices, which there is all the time, then we're fucked.

And he said, I don't care, it's positive expected value.

Um, because he thought, you know, so usually when people calculate expected value,

poker players and the like,

they are assigning some weight to the risk of ruin, right?

The Kelly criteria is a gambling formula that says, let's say I want to bet on the Packers Chiefs game this weekend.

How much should I bet given my edge as a share of my bankroll?

And basically tells you how to maximize your return without having any chance of going truly broke.

Now.

And by the way, let's just caveat that a little bit because we know, and you've written about about the fact that the Kelly criterion might actually not be the best way to do this if you actually want to avoid it.

Yeah, one problem is that it assumes you know your edge.

And if you know your edge, then, well, that's wonderful, but that's not how real sports betting works most of the time.

You're estimating your edge, and most gamblers, even smart gamblers, tend to overestimate.

Overestimate, yes.

So therefore,

most gamblers have learned through time that you want to have half Kelly or a quarter Kelly even.

A full Kelly bet, intuitively to most gamblers, looks very aggressive.

You could have yourself betting 15% of your entire bankroll on one game where you have only a small edge, for example.

And to a gambler like SBF, though, the Kelly criterion might be a good idea.

I thought the Kelly criterion was

for risk.

Because what it doesn't do is tell you how to maximize your expected value if you don't care about going broke.

In the book, I ran some simulations where you bet 5x Kelly instead of 0.5 Kelly.

And what happens is that 99% of the time over the course of simulating an NFL season, you go broke.

But 1% of the time, you wind up with more money than Elon Musk.

Yep.

And that's why you have positive expected value.

Right.

So having a one in 1,000 chance of earning $225 billion from a $10,000 starting bankroll or whatever simulations we made, right?

is very plus EV if you don't care about the fact that you are in debtors prison the other 99.9% of the time.

Exactly.

So PSA, for our listeners, do not try this at home.

The one person who did did is currently in prison for 20 years.

So, yeah.

So SPF was aware of the risks they were taking and kind of like was LLL kind of like shrugging them off, right?

You know, was aware of the mechanism by which these trades are occurring, which is that you open up a flood wall or a floodgate between the customer funds secured as Alameda and,

you know, money that they were then trading with and making bets on shit coins and other things.

You know, this is the part where Sam, when I talked to him, would get more legalistic about saying, well, technically, customer funds were wired to X and Y.

And,

you know,

anyway, the jury didn't buy his bullshit.

And so I don't, I don't really either.

But they were knowingly taking customer funds and making what Sam knew to be really risky bets.

And Ellison

was

aware of this and trying to present these risks to Sam.

Now,

we should say

she is a government witness.

You sign a plea deal, right?

And that means that you're going to be presented in a favorable light.

You know, she kind of presents herself as some

sheep in the wool.

Is that the right metaphor?

I don't know.

I think that's not quite the right metaphor, but I think she does present herself as a victim, as someone who, you know, jumped into the abyss.

And even the judge referred to the fact that Sam Banksman-Fried was her kryptonite.

Right.

So in that analogy, she would be Superman if he's, if he's kryptonite, right?

And he's

screwed that up a lot.

People really screw that analogy up.

I just want to point that out.

But yes, she presented herself as a victim, as someone who knew it was wrong, but did it anyway and then couldn't see straight because she, you know, her professional life and her

private life were too deeply intertwined.

You know, she

and she basically was a pawn.

So I don't know.

I don't know what the sheep metaphor here would be.

It's not a wolf in sheep's clothing.

That would be SBF, I think.

But she, yeah, she is someone who was maybe a lamb to slaughter.

Her lamb's haircut was a little was a little sheep-like, I suppose, right?

It was.

It was.

Lamb to the slaughter.

I don't know.

I'm trying to take all my metaphors out here.

I mean, look, one other thing about FTX is that, like, it's a very much a cult-like

company.

When you go there, I went to the Bahamas after everyone except for two FTX employees and Sam's mom and dad and Sam himself had fled.

And it's not the typical, but from the talking to these ex-employees, it's like not the typical crypto bro, finance bro

atmosphere.

Instead, it's like this touchy-feely, effective altruist.

They think they're stealing from the rich to, I don't know what, for Sam's charitable endeavors.

They are isolated, right?

The Bahamas is not actually

this part of the Bahamas, right, that they're in,

on the southwest corner of New Providence Island, is not party central.

You're away from the Bahamar and the Atlantis and

Nassau and the cruise ship docks.

But yeah, but like, but so there it's kind of a cult.

And like, and like,

and Sam makes this claim that, oh, I'm doing this because I want to eventually, you know, accumulate more money because the marginal utility is very high because I'll donate it to charity.

Although actually he might do things like donate to presidential candidates and try to curry influence and favors.

But so you have true believers

and,

you know, and she is close to this inner circle.

You know, one thing clearly, Sam is smart enough to not share his fraudulent intent widely, right?

Right.

You know, it's the inner circle and not much else.

Doesn't go much further than that.

So I don't know.

I mean, so how many years did she accept as part of the plea deal?

Two years.

She just got sentenced to two years.

She had, as part of the plea deal, she didn't accept anything immediately in the sense that she was still going to await sentencing.

And her lawyers and actually the prosecutors also argued for no prison time because of how much she cooperated.

But the judge said that, you know, she couldn't get it.

I think this was literally the quote, a get out of jail free card.

I was like, ha ha, I cannot believe you just said that.

But yes,

that is what happened.

So she was sentenced to two years.

But

I think

talking about kind of this type of environment

is actually

quite interesting because you use the word true believer, which we've used on the show in the past when we're talking about con artists.

And the mark of a true believer is you don't, like, you don't know, right, that you're committing fraud.

Like you actually believe in this and you believe it's the right thing to do.

And what you were just talking about, Caroline knew what she was doing, right?

She knew that it was wrong.

She knew what the risk of ruin was.

She knew that this was defrauding, but she felt, you know, her loyalty was such that she did it anyway.

So I think that we can't call her a true believer, right?

We can't call her like a true brainwashed cult victim because she knew this was wrong and she did it anyway.

I think we can still give her some sort of, she's one of these people who's kind of in between because I think she has some characteristics of victim, right?

And I think that the cult environment is really interesting because it makes dissent much less likely.

It means that even if you're not a true believer, but everyone around you kind of is because they don't know the full extent of it, then that kind of influences you as well.

And you start thinking, maybe I'm wrong, right?

Maybe this isn't fraud, etc., etc, etc.

You start trying to convince yourself.

But on the other hand, because she knew it, I think she was also a perpetrator.

Instead of whistleblowing, instead of leaving, instead of going to the authorities, she did it anyway.

And so I think that

I'm totally on board with giving her a lighter sentence because given the testimony, like given

what she did, I think that that's absolutely correct.

And I do see that there are elements of victimhood there.

Like I'm not blaming her.

I'm not giving her a complete,

you know, saying, oh, no, she's a horrible person.

And she does seem very, unlike SBF, she seems to be, to feel really, really bad.

Or at least she's a very good actor and saying that she feels really, really bad.

And that's completely absent in what he's doing.

In fact, he's appealing his sentence, right?

He said that the judge was biased and that he deserves to not be in jail at all.

And she seems to be kind of,

I don't know if that peace is the right word, but she seems to have accepted that like she did bad and she deserves to be punished.

I'm trying to remember the reporting.

I think it was from the

Michael Lewis book, but she apparently felt like a great sense of relief when she realized that they were fucked.

Because they were fucked sooner or later.

I mean, even when it talked to me, Sam was kind of like, well, we could have played out the string for a few more months, and then you never know what happens, right?

But she knew

when she realized they were fucked, she's like, okay, finally, this has an ending.

I mean, I don't know about the by the way, just to remind you, if you just, I mean, she was sleeping with her boss too, where he was sleeping with her.

Yeah, she was.

Yes, yes, yes.

They were, they were part of a relationship.

I think it was even like a polycule, right?

It wasn't just,

if I remember correctly, like part of the story.

I didn't care to investigate that much.

I don't really want to picture certain things.

But I don't blame you, Nate.

I don't blame you.

I mean, isn't the game theory such that, like,

isn't it, aren't we giving people too many incentives to be cooperating witnesses or not?

What's the expected value, you know what I mean, of committing fraud?

If, like, if you're not the principal, oh, now two years, hey, not so bad, not so bad, two years.

Well, it's so funny that you say that because I actually read an analysis and I thought, I was like, no, this isn't, this analysis is fucked.

This isn't true at all.

They're like, she got two years.

This is going to mean that no one's ever going to cooperate because like she should have just gotten off free.

Like, if you cooperate you shouldn't get any jail time and i was like no i don't think that's right like if you are conspiring to defraud people out of eight billion dollars like that's you know with a b that's a lot of money um unless you end up in the one percent of the simulation where you have more money than elon musk but in the other 99.9 percent you know the uh eight billion is a lot of money and so how about just one second of prison time for every dollar you steal it's not too bad one second i can't do that math how long is that going to be?

Nate?

Long.

Look, I don't know.

Look, I'm not good at math.

People think I'm good at math.

I have to like

calculate.

Same with me.

Same with me.

But anyway, yeah, I think she's getting off a little bit light.

Other people think that she's not getting off light enough.

And I do think that it's a really interesting, I think your question is a really, really interesting one.

What's the game theory here, right?

What's the game theory on fraud, on

trying to do these sorts of things?

If you look at SBF and you're like, okay, you're going to jail for at least 20 years, like that doesn't seem very good.

I mean, this is literally the prisoner's dilemma.

Yeah, it is.

It actually literally is the prisoner's dilemma.

Yes.

Yeah.

Are we going to, except they were allowed to communicate because they weren't isolated from each other right away, right?

Okay.

Yeah.

But otherwise, otherwise it was the

253 years for...

That's a lot of...

That's a lot of seconds.

We get to live a lot of seconds.

That means we get to live like three

billion seconds.

That's a fucking lot.

I'm wasting more seconds from now on.

I know I made a burn.

Yeah.

No, and the game theory, the prisoner's dilemma says that you ultimately do snitch on your partner.

It's too hard to maintain confidence.

Yeah.

And she did.

And she did.

And that's, but this was one of those cases.

It's actually really interesting.

The game theory changes depending on how much evidence there is, right?

Like it's one of these, if you have two prisoners and they don't actually have anything on

you and they need the confession, then it's very different from we have reams of data and we actually know, you know, we'll be able to trace the finances and we'll be able to catch you anyway.

And if you cooperate, maybe it'll be less time.

And I believe, and Nate, correct me if I'm wrong, because you know a lot more about this case than I do.

I believe that they did have enough evidence where even without Caroline, they would have been able to have a pretty strong case.

Yeah.

I mean,

I think she she was the key witness, but like they, I mean, they had more evidence than they really needed, frankly.

And they had two other witnesses, by the way.

There were three top executives who ended up turning and testifying against SBF.

By the way, the story does have a happy ending.

It looks as though most of the defrauded people will get their money back with interest, in part because

some things that FTX did have gone well.

So they invested in Anthropic, the AI company.

And also, you've seen a big rise in crypto prices since the bankruptcy.

Oh, that's good.

I didn't realize that.

Good for the poker economy.

Let's pump that crypto back into some high rollers, okay, guys?

Absolutely.

Let's do it.

But yeah, I think the bottom line here is that Caroline is, you know, SBF is, to me, like not very, not particularly complex to kind of talk about in the sense of like, was he a con artist?

We have talked about that.

You know, we think, I think he was, and like, you know, he clearly knew exactly what he was doing.

Caroline knew what she was doing, but I do think that she is probably, she's a more complex character here because you do also have the power dynamic, you have the sexual dynamic, you have all sorts of things going on.

You want to talk some politics, Maria?

I do want to talk some politics, Nate, and let's do that after the break.

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We are now one week closer to the election.

And I know, I know that sounds dramatic, but I mean,

you know, it's getting close, right?

We're almost, are we in October yet?

What day is it?

Is it October 1st today?

It's Tuesday, right?

It's October, which means that I'm late on the monthly paid subscriber newsletter post.

Oh, no.

Nate,

as a paid subscriber, I'm livid.

I'm so mad that you're late on this post.

They took away the 31st.

Oh, no.

September.

Doesn't September seem like it should be 31?

It actually, it actually does seem that way, but I, and you know what?

I never remember.

I actually have to do the little rhyme.

Did you ever learn that little rhyme in school?

You can do the finger thing.

I do do the finger.

Yeah, I do the finger thing, but I also have my little rhyme.

30 Days has September, April, June, and November.

All the rest have 31.

What month shouldn't have a 31st day?

Should we give to September?

I say

I would say, I would say either, I'd say November

or.

Yeah, yeah, let's get rid of that November.

November's a pretty shitty month.

Yeah.

November is 31.

Yeah.

November should be 30.

Wait, no, does November have 30?

November has 30.

I just gave my rhyme.

30 days has September, April, June, and November.

November already has 30.

I hate November so much that I wanted to subtract yet another one.

All right, let's

do it.

November has 29 days left.

Let's do it.

All right, November has 29 days.

September has 31.

Done.

Guys, we've made your life so much better.

This is what you come to us for.

This is the hard-hitting news stuff.

Tuesday, September 31st edition of

Risky Business.

But okay,

let's get to it.

We're in October.

We're getting close.

What's going on?

Has anything changed?

And then let's talk about

what people can be doing in this lead up where we're now like weeks away from the actual election.

So not very much has changed.

Kamala Harris has a three-point lead roughly in national polls.

She's ahead by about a point in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

She's behind by about a point in Georgia, Arizona.

She's tied, actually, she's ahead by a point or so in Nevada, North Carolina.

About a tie, big hurricane there, more important things.

Nevada, Nevada.

Is there like the silver state?

I can just say the silver state.

Silver state.

There you go.

Yeah.

So please continue.

All that works out to basically a toss-up.

If you want to play the percentages, we have Harris at blue loop, a 55.1% chance of winning Electoral College as of this morning.

Trump, 44.7%.

Dead heat, a tie, 0.3%.

Like hitting, I don't know what bet is 300 to 1.

I was going to say like hitting the double zero space in your left, but that's much more likely than 0.3%.

Yeah.

so um

look i think if the election were held today then you'd slightly rather be harris she is uh

ahead in nominally enough states to win 276

electoral votes including wisconsin michigan pennsylvania and the silver state nevada

Wait is it Nevada or Nevada?

Nevada.

Nevada.

Okay.

So it's not Sierra Nevada.

It's not the fancy.

Nevada.

Oh, boy.

Nevada is a pretty word.

It is.

I actually prefer Nevada, but I will.

There's this really good Substack post where they rate the state names.

And like, most state names are pretty fucking good.

You know what a great name is?

What?

California.

What a great fucking name.

It is.

It is.

It really does give you promises of, you know, beauty and sunshine.

California.

Rolls off.

What's the worst state name, according to subsequent posts i don't know iowa

okay

think about it there aren't that many bad state names yeah if you if i mean oh you know a low-key bad state name is washington

like i mean yeah name it i mean come on you beautiful state yeah yeah you're way far up you create confusion with washington dc

you weren't even part of the republic when washington was president I mean, come on, right?

Like, let's pick something.

It's also, you're right.

And the level of creativity there has really just like gone down.

Why did we have to go for Washington?

I'd like to know the history of this because I love Washington.

I think it's such a gorgeous state.

So other than state names,

I do think something that you said kind of gets into one of the topics that we wanted to cover today, which is what actually matters.

So we've had some pretty severe storms over the last week with a lot of destruction.

The death toll keeps rising.

I mean, it's really horrific.

Do things like that

in the lead up?

I'm not talking like a year ago, right?

Does the fact that this is happening right now, do events like that actually matter when it comes to the election outcomes?

Does the response matter?

Like what's actually important or not?

Well, clearly the candidates think it matters because there's a lot of posturing over,

you know, Trump as he is inclined to do is saying some things that seem exaggerated, according to the fact checkers.

But like he's, he's saying that why isn't Biden going there?

And why is he holding up relief?

But the Harris-Biden administration, Biden-Harris administration has approved relief funds and they're trying to get there and the roads are out and I don't know, right?

So it becomes this kind of like another cable news cycle where you just want to tune out.

But clearly, like, I mean, there are precedents.

After Hurricane Sandy hit New Jersey and the East Coast in late 2012,

Obama and New York.

I remember.

I mean, it was fucking a lot of people.

I didn't have a seat.

I didn't have power.

And I didn't have cell service.

I had to go back and forth to the New York Times building in this darkened tax anyway.

But like Obama did better in some of these areas where the storms had hit.

So there's like a bipartisan praise for a leader that can be good.

If it's Hurricane Katrina and there's bipartisan disputes for how it was handled, right, then that could be bad.

I mean, I researched some papers for this.

You know, some findings say it tends to help incumbents, which would be good for Biden.

Some just say it gives more polarization, that it just increases, you know, team red thinks that Republicans did this well and team blue thinks Democrats did well, et cetera.

So then it's a wash kind of in the end.

I would say, look, in general,

this is a moment, natural disasters are a moment when you appreciate having the government in your life, right?

Or at least they don't totally fuck up the recovery.

So if you're like a little bit, a little bit of a closet libertarian like me, then like when there's a fucking hurricane or a snowstorm, you're like, I'm really fucking glad that there are trucks plowing the roads and we're not in some libertarian utopia where we have to pay for private tow trucks or something.

You know what I mean?

So

that might be good for Democrats.

It also raises the salience of climate change.

I don't want to get into a discussion over which hurricanes are caused by climate change or the different effects of hurricanes.

But, you know, you have had more storms with this very bad inland flooding.

And again, I'll leave it to the experts to determine how much that is because of building patterns versus climate change versus luck, basically.

Yeah, yeah.

But maybe worth noting that in this particular case, also North Carolina is a swing state, right?

So

Georgia was affected as well.

And Georgia is, sorry, I forgot your latest update.

Georgia is still leaning red, right?

By a point.

Trumps ahead by a point-ish there, point and a half, maybe.

Okay.

Yeah, so this will be interesting.

I think I hope people are gathering data on this, and I hope that there is some polling going on right now because I'd be very curious.

Because I do think that these sorts of events do happen

and will continue happening and will increase in severity.

So it is interesting for me to see whether they will matter.

But now there's obviously nothing that we as individuals can do about that, right?

Like that's

the environment, it happens.

And here, the politicians' response may or may not matter.

But what about people on either side of the divide?

You know, Trump supporters, Harris supporters,

who want to make sure that they're doing everything they can in the run-up

to try to get kind of the voters that may be on the fence or undecided or don't know if they're going to vote or whatnot to actually vote.

What matters?

Do donations matter?

Going door to door, does that matter?

Do any of these things actually make a meaningful difference or do they just make us feel a little bit better like recycling which doesn't actually matter

what helps is

being a dick on social media really helps your candidate win so do more do more of that um by the way if you want to donate to charity to help the people in the carolinas etc then uh I would recommend charitynavigator.org gives you a whole list of local charities, which are usually more effective than that's a little

effective altruism.

Yeah,

that's a great recommendation.

So, look, I think that the presidential campaigns have

more money than they need.

And this is not me in a crotchety way.

It's saying, like, you know, they are running all the ads they want to the point where the ads have diminishing returns.

They have all the field staff they want.

Maybe if you started out with all the money four years ahead of time, you could do more ambitious things and so forth.

But like, don't donate to a presidential campaign.

Donate to a

down ballot campaign, maybe a Senate campaign.

Senate campaigns have a lot of money too.

But, you know, U.S.

House races,

state Supreme Court races, state legislature races, right?

These are cases where

a little bit of money can make more difference.

By the way, I think in general, I don't think that political donations count particularly.

I don't mean in like a moral way.

I think they're probably, you know, donate to charity instead of a campaign is also a valid strategy.

Makes sense.

Most campaigns believe that door-to-door canvassing can help a bit.

One thing that happened in 2020 is that Democrats were COVID shy

and did not do traditional canvassing.

And lo and behold, Biden underforms his polls by a few points on election day.

And I'm not saying it's a major cause, but like that may have been a mistake in retrospect.

So that seems to suggest, because I was about to say, are there data that suggests

that door-to-door polling and canvassing and all of that actually is effective?

Or is it just that politicians believe this and it's never been challenged?

Do we actually have data?

I think that's more studyable because you can kind of

randomize contrial.

I think the academic consensus is that it does help a little bit.

Okay.

So on the margin it helps, which is important, right?

Because right now we're looking for on the margin.

So for either candidate, on the margin, it should help.

What about endorsements?

So, you know, we talked a few weeks ago.

Taylor Swift obviously was a major endorsement.

Do those things matter?

Does it matter?

Obviously, like there are levels of endorsement, right?

Like at some point, I saw the Kamala Harris campaign retweeting that like Meryl Streep has endorsed her and this is huge.

I'm like, I don't think Meryl Streep's endorsement matters.

I'm sorry.

I love you, Meryl Streep, but like, I don't think that's going to move the needle.

But

it's like when they say somebody that dies, and you're like, I thought they're already dead.

Right.

Right.

It's like, I thought Meryl Streep already endorsed.

And that's part of

for Taytay, too, is,

I think people assume that she was on the Harris bandwagon already.

I mean, look, she apparently drove some voter registration efforts and things like that.

And so, yeah, look, you definitely take that if you're...

if you're Harris, right?

But if like, but it's not like you see like a big, I mean, it's complicated because it happened about the same time as a debate.

um

but it's she you know the biggest pop star in the world endorses you and you can barely see any difference if any in the polls um so that puts kind of a cap on sure

I was actually wondering if maybe the endorsement you said something which I think is really important, which is that most people kind of already assumed, right, that

she was going to be Team Harris because she had endorsed Biden.

She had already kind of broken her silence.

But what about things like, and here I think there's some really interesting psych research, what about things like Willie Nelson endorsing the Democrats, right?

Like you have a white country singer, like when you have people who

look and sound and kind of have the background of someone who would more traditionally be a Trump supporter, do we think that that actually might matter a little bit more than a Taylor Swift in these particular circumstances?

Maybe.

I mean, look, look, people know that the Hollywood types, you know, I guess he's a singer, not a Hollywood type.

I take that.

Maybe.

I don't know.

I mean, you know what probably did matter was,

by the way, William Nelson has quite a beautiful catalog of music going back a long way.

Anyway,

part of it...

Love it.

I love the editorializing on this thing.

The most here.

The part of the endorsement in the race so far has probably been RFK Jr.

endorsing

endorsing.

That coincided with a...

rough period for Harris and the Polls and like, you know, and those are, those voters are lost.

And I think, so that might have mattered a fair bit.

Yeah.

So by a fair bit, I mean by half a point or something, but like half a point.

Which is important, which is, which is really important as we keep talking about.

And there's also some psych research that's really interesting into kind of the psychology of social influence and

having an effect on social norms and behavior.

And a lot of this research comes from Princeton University,

Betsy Pollock.

She won the MacArthur Genius Grant a number of years ago for this work.

And some of the stuff stuff that she shows is that

you need to have the correct person say things, and they have to actually be kind of from the background and kind of from the

from a place that people who you're trying to influence actually respect.

So if you're trying to influence potential Trump voters to vote for Kamala Harris, then you want to be probably a white male from certain states with a certain background.

If you want to try to get

Trump voters,

if you want to get Kamala Harris voters to vote for Trump, you probably want someone who

is

a minority or

female,

someone who has kind of more of a Kamala-Harris vibe, and then have them endorse Trump.

That would matter more.

There was a really cool study that was done on social media to see

basically what can you do to mitigate trolls right like how can you get people to change behavior and the one thing that actually worked the best was if you create an account that's like a generic white man and he says hey like you know this is a real person like just you might want to tone it down a little bit that actually worked as opposed to anything else so it's I think that

when we talk about endorsements, they're not all created equal, not just because of the reach, like, oh, you're a superstar, you're a pop star, but also like, who is your demographic?

Who do you represent?

What is your specific voter appeal?

And

will you be able to look like a person of authority to the voters that you're trying to reach?

Two other important stories that I think we can't not mention.

Let me start with one that's like a bit less obvious.

Port workers have gone on strike in both both the East Coast and the Gulf Coast.

Something, some enormous amount of commerce passes through one of these ports, and this could potentially have a devastating effect on the economy and shipping, which is already

a little bit constrained because you have problems with the Houthis in the Red Sea.

Is that right?

So you already have like some shipping channels that are operating at less than full capacity.

That more kind of affects Europe than the U.S.

But supply chains have struggled to get back to normal and this could cause big problems.

You also have a hurricane and things like that that's affected.

So,

you know,

this is a real dilemma for a Democratic White House.

Biden has said he does not want to invoke the Taft-Hartley Act that could require these striking workers to go back to work.

But they have a lot of leverage, right?

They're like, well, fuck your election up unless you give us a nice new contract.

And that's, that's, we understand leverage, right?

And they have a lot of leverage.

So far, the Biden-White House has been able to

placate problems like this in the past.

Like, that to me is like a potential October surprise that has to play negatively for

Harris and Biden.

Absolutely.

And if we, just like a little caveat, I think a tie-in to endorsements, given that this is kind of a workers' strike, is that the Teamsters Union did not endorse either candidate for the first time in a long time.

So just something to keep in mind

as we think about this October surprise potentially.

Yeah, probably most Teamster members are

Trump,

right?

Yeah, it was actually Teamsters are leaning more Trump, even though the Teamsters have endorsed the Democrats in the past.

In the latest survey data that I've seen, the Teamsters are heavily leaning Trump.

The other, of course, is the re-escalating conflict in the Middle East.

That's a little harder to predict, right?

It's opportunities to show leadership potentially, but

look, I mean, you can make an argument that like

foreign policy has not gone that well under Biden.

The Middle East is kind of blowing up and, you know, Ukraine was invaded.

American relations with China are probably worse now than they were.

You know, if Trump were more coherent and normal, then he could form a pretty good critique of Biden's foreign policy, I think.

And this is a reminder of that.

Now, voters usually don't care about foreign policy that much.

To the extent they do, it's kind of about

I was going to say that, you know, it's the politics of, it's not the foreign policy, right?

It's the politics of the state of israel and how they exist or failed to coexist with palestinians and like and that's territory where we you know there i have written about that so just because it like affects american politics so much um you know that seemed to have died down to some degree although although you know two percent of the population is arab american in michigan um around the dearborn area there clearly have been signs and polls that shifted from being a democratic vote to people who are throwing their hands up and saying i don't know what i'm going to do.

So that has an effect on the margin.

But anyway, I just want to mention those two important stories.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I think that it is interesting to see how much any one thing will end up affecting any person's decision to vote, just because we are in such a close race, right?

So much closer than

we have been in

the past.

And so I think that those things on the margin may matter, especially when we're talking like back to the ports.

I think that oftentimes voters are not thinking that long term.

So that's why foreign policy often doesn't end up making that big of a difference.

But if we see, and I don't think, I don't know if there's enough time to actually see any change in prices, availability, et cetera, in the next few weeks.

But if we do see that, then I think that that will become a much bigger issue.

You know, this is also a test of Biden and his capabilities.

If you have multiple crises happening at once you know i mean the media seems

reluctant i mean once once the uh

once dryden dropped out was forced out um

by the way the dana carvey impression of biden was pretty fucking good it was very good yes if you have not seen it um i i highly endorse that

but like since then the media is not that very interested in covering his um

performance issues and and this will be a test i suppose yeah absolutely

after the break uh let's talk about something uh well i was gonna say lighter but it involves death but not politics related uh lighter but it involves death after the break

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We had two people who are quite important in the gambling world die since, you know, in the last few days.

One of those died today is, what, Tuesday?

So yesterday, Pete Rose, and we, he was one of the first people we talked about on this podcast.

And the other, less well-known to the mainstream public, Archie Callis.

Nate, do you have any thoughts on the death of Pete Rose and his legacy for the world of baseball and the world of gambling?

Yeah, I mean, Pete was a,

I never met him.

I think he was kind of the classic D-Gen, right?

You can say that.

He lived in Las Vegas till late in his life, right?

He did, yeah, yeah.

After he was no longer allowed to be associated with baseball, he made the move to Las Vegas.

Yeah, look, this was kind of,

I don't know, the end of a certain era of innocence for baseball, I suppose.

I mean, Pete Rose, if you're not a baseball fan, right, he played the game

differently than anyone else, right?

Lots of base hits, lots of his nickname was Charlie Hussle, right?

Would barrel into catchers and second baseman.

I mean, he played baseball like it was football, basically.

Now,

people like me, before Pete Rose

was known for gambling, people like me would have said, ah, Pete Rose, he's a little bit overrated, right?

He was the only subject of, you know, he does have the most hits in Major League Baseball history.

He doesn't get on base that much and doesn't have that much power.

A very, very good player, but we'd say, yeah, he's one of the 20 best of all time, but not, you know, know, having the hits record doesn't necessarily, he also played forever, right?

He played Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Montreal, briefly, Cincinnati again, played until he was like 40-some years old.

So beloved, right?

And, but he clearly, I think, bet on baseball.

There's not much ambiguity about that.

And baseball kind of always was very unforgiving about ever commuting.

his sentence or really letting Pete Rose participate in any ways.

And

I kind of understand that, but like I'm trying to remember some of the history.

Originally, he said that he bet on other sports, but never bet on baseball.

He was still found to be guilty of betting on baseball.

And he,

in his memoir,

admitted that, yeah, he did bet on baseball, but never for his team to lose, because he only wanted his team to win.

As if that made it any better.

Part of it is, so you had this commissioner of baseball named Bart Giamatti, who was a

president of Yale University and like this English literature professor who was kind of this intellectual who was going to,

you know, take baseball to some new cultural significance.

And he got tied up with Pete Rose and then died of a heart attack after only

four or five months.

No, I think it was closer.

I think it was like weeks after he passed out the verdict.

As

we circuit for commissioner April through September.

Okay.

And then, but yeah, the verdict.

It was just.

Yeah, it was right after he

said that Pete Rose was not allowed to play.

I think that he died like a week after that.

Of a broken heart.

My theory is that

this is part of why

baseball was kind of so unforgiving to Pete.

And the fact that Pete Rose, I'm sure, was an asshole, right?

But, you know, the fact that

I think people, I don't, I I don't know this for, I'm just going by the psychology.

I think they think, you know, Pete Rose somehow killed Bart

Giamatti through grief, died of a broken heart kind of thing, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, okay, so let's let's end that with one question for you, Nate.

I just want a yes or no.

Does Pete Rose deserve to be in the Hall of Fame?

No.

Okay.

All right.

You've been on baseball a year.

There you go.

All right.

And another legendary gambler died, who did not play baseball, died this week, Archie Karas.

And have you, do you know his story name?

No.

So he

is someone who

had the nickname the Greek, just like another another famous gambler in gambling history.

And he went on one of the most legendary runs in gambling history.

And it's so legendary that it's just known as the run with a capital R.

He went from, so he was just a total D-Gen.

But in this particular case, he went from $50

to over 40 million.

as he went on this insane gambling run.

And then he lost it all back.

And he

did this through a combination of just going on an insane run in craps,

which happens, right?

Like he was in that percent of the distribution.

Then he actually played some poker

and people used to love playing poker against him because he wasn't very good, but he thought he was very good.

But then he went on quite the run where he ended up beating.

some of the top players in the game, including Chip Reese, for millions of dollars.

And yeah, and then he and then he did some sports betting and he just did incredibly well, 40 million.

I think this was 1992 to 1994.

And then he went broke.

And eventually he was accused of cheating multiple times, cheating in blackjack.

And then he became, I believe, the 33rd person, but I might be wrong, 32nd, 34th,

something along those lines to enter the infamous Black book of Las Vegas casinos.

Yeah.

So he is, became banned for life from every single casino property in the state of Nevada.

And if he were to enter one, he would be immediately arrested.

So so that is how he ended his days but how crazy is that i just want to just say this is next level degen fifty dollars forty million broke

could be you audience member no don't don't don't

no he was he was clearly a sick individual get 40 million playing craps stop stop walk away walk away invest some of it if you have if you want to keep playing craps fine like put

a hundred thousand.

That's even too much of it back into craps.

And the rest just walk away, please.

But no one ever does.

And I think that there's also the hubris there, right?

To think that I must be so good.

And that happened with his poker playing as well.

He knew people knew he wasn't good.

That's why they were playing against him.

And then he just beat all of these players.

And that can happen when you're playing heads up, right?

In any one scenario, in any one iteration, the worst player in the world can beat the best player in the world if you just run it once.

Because that's, you know, poker is a game of skill, but in the immediate term, in one specific hand, in one game, there's a huge element of chance.

So do not let that chance get to you.

And do not forget that sometimes you just run ridiculously rucky.

Do not be Archie and then take that 40 million and go broke.

Rest in peace, Archie.

Rest in peace, Pete.

The world has lost two gamblers of very different stripes today.

Think about the polka games we'll have in hell, right?

I don't know what.

That's a good.

I like your hell voice.

You know, I know what the poke game.

I've been in the

2.5 game at the commerce, and so I know what poker in hell feels like.

On that note,

we'll see you all next week.

All right.

Thanks for joining us.

And tune in again every time we have a show.

Oh, one more thing.

We would love to leave you with an email address for the show.

If there's ever anything you really want us to talk about, if you have any feedback, we'd love to hear from you.

Super easy.

Risky Business, all one word, lowercase at pushkin.fm.

Risky Business is hosted by me, Nate Silver.

And me, Maria Konakova.

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

This episode was produced by Isabel Carter.

Our associate producer is Gabriel Hunter Chen.

Our engineer is Sarah Bruguer.

Our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein.

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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