What the Nobels Tell Us About the World Right Now

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Pushkin.

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

I'm Maria Kanakova.

And I'm Nate Silver.

Today on the show, Nate, we'll be talking about a topic that I think is really exciting.

Every single year, I'm always eagerly awaiting the announcements of the Nobel Prizes, not because I'm in any danger of winning one, but because I think you can learn a lot from people who win the awards.

So all of the Nobel Prizes for 2025 have been given now, and I'm excited, probably more excited than you are, Nate, to dive into the recipients and some of the broader implications and broader history of the Nobel Prize.

Yeah, you know, look,

I think you owe me,

not to be too genderstear, I think you owe me a sports-focused episode soon,

Maria.

But yes, I do have some thoughts, particularly on the economics Nobel Prize, where I'm an admirer of one of the recipients.

So Nobel Prizes are something that I actually always follow avidly.

That makes one of us.

I think that they're fascinating.

And I think so for several reasons.

First, like when we get the Nobel Prizes in, you know, medicine, chemistry, physics, all of that stuff,

I get to learn something about the world because it's usually for shit that I had no idea existed.

And I'm like, oh my God, this is so cool, right?

You've been doing all this amazing research, and that's really interesting.

And it's a way, you know, of educating myself about things that I don't know about.

Nobel Prize in Literature, I'm always really excited about because if it's someone who I know and love, I'm like, yes, you know, finally they get recognition.

And if it's someone whose work I've never read, I'm like, wow, okay, you know, this is cool, something else for me.

Economics, I also think, is always always just interesting to figure out, you know, what is in vogue, so to speak, right?

Like what ideas are getting rewarded at what time for what reasons, because I do think that there is kind of a backdrop for the choices of Nobel Prizes on any given year, because they could be awarded at, you know, this year or next year or never.

And when you make that choice, you are saying something about, I think that this idea is very important right now.

And the peace prize is the one that often gets the most attention, you know, since Donald Trump has been campaigning for it.

It's certainly been getting a lot of attention.

And I actually think that that is the, for me, that's the most politicized prize and the one that I think sometimes goes to people who are completely undeserving of it.

And I'm like, what the fuck?

Like, you guys are just trying to make a political statement.

So the Nobel Peace Prize, I think, is one that I most often disagree with.

But the other reason I love the Nobel Prizes is I really love the Nobel lectures.

So I actually, especially in literature, I love reading the lectures that people write and deliver because there are so many.

I mean, I think it's some of the most interesting thinking and writing out there.

And I often quote from people's Nobel Prize speeches, lectures,

because I think that we have the chance to hear from some of the greatest minds, some of the greatest writers, some of the greatest thinkers in the world.

So yes, I love the Nobel Prizes.

Clearly, Nate, you are not a fan, though.

You are not someone who

follows along.

You know,

I'm more concerned with the American League MVP award

among many other things.

I guess I know somebody who's won, somebody call a friend who's won a Nobel Prize.

You get the call from like, you know, some strange plus something country code European number in the middle

of the morning, middle of the night, right?

Very exciting.

I would still be up working on some fucking model.

I'd be like, hey, Nate, you and Maria have finally won.

I'd be like, I'm tired.

Just call Maria.

I'm tired.

And I'm busy.

I'm busy that weekend.

You get money for the Nobel Prize, right?

You get money for the Nobel Prize, different amounts for different prizes.

My favorite, by the way, speaking of Middle of the Night, and I don't know if you saw this, Nate.

I shared it because it, to me, it actually says something pretty fundamental about the type of thinking that is often required to win a Nobel Prize.

So, one of the people who won, Fred Ramsdell, he was unreachable when he won the Nobel Prize in medicine, and they could not get a hold of him.

Like, this is the first time actually in the history of the Nobel Prize that they literally could not.

contact a winner, not even, not immediately, but like for 24 hours.

And he was hiking with his wife and off the grid, living his best life, as his company said, after they've reached the company and the company actually ended up putting out a statement on his behalf.

So he was just completely

off the grid hiking with his wife.

This is something that they do.

This is something that they love doing.

They don't have reception.

Their phones are off.

His is actually the entire trip in airplane mode.

And he ended up finding out because his wife had hers not in airplane mode.

And so at some point they came to a place where they had reception.

Five brilliant exactly, exactly.

And she started screaming and he thought she saw a grizzly bear.

So he didn't have a heart attack.

He was fine.

But he thought that actually she was in danger.

And she's like, you won the Nobel Prize.

It would be ironic if you did have a heart attack.

It would be very ironic.

Yeah, I always wondered about the mechanics of like,

I guess I was last year was nominated for a prize, which is second only to the Nobel Prize.

I was nominated for a global poker award.

Oh, my God.

You know, some people would say it's actually more prestigious than the Nobel Prize.

So, you know, no, I mean, it really is far up there.

I have won a Global Poker Award.

So and I didn't go, they have a ceremony.

I hadn't made enough trips to Vegas for the year.

Didn't go to the ceremony.

I kind of figured that like, if I was going to win, I didn't win,

they would tip me off.

Yeah.

Like, oh, they don't?

They do not tip you off.

So these are awards that are given for various accomplishments in the poker world.

Some of them are for things like best tournament performance, best breakout player, something that I was nominated for once and did not win, Nate.

I was breakout player of the year and lost to, this is very funny, Ali Imserevich, who no longer plays poker because it turned out that he was cheating.

So his breakout performance was not quite as breakouting in the right ways.

So I think that that actually is quite funny, but he won that year.

But some of them are for poker journalism and those types of awards.

You were nominated for On the Edge.

I was nominated and won for the biggest block.

They are crisping everything by penguin press

so my yeah my my global poker award is for the biggest bluff um and it's yeah it's it's a fun ceremony but no you have no idea no one is tipped off and so it's very funny because there are people who have won and like when i won i did i wasn't at the ceremony and um didn't get my physical award for several years because i kept forgetting to pick it up and to ask for it um so yeah, they don't tip you off.

And the Nobel Prizes.

So this is something quite interesting.

I love, you know, that this guy was off the grid.

And I think that it's really interesting to think about the importance of, you know, disconnecting and actually letting your brain think and being out in nature.

There's so many things about this that are actually, there's a ton of research on why this is good for creativity, good thought, et cetera, et cetera.

So yay, Fred Ramsdell, and yay being so, like, basically so secure in your profession that it's Nobel week and you're like, fuck it, I'm going off the grid.

I don't care.

So it does say a lot about that.

But Nate, there's a really interesting component here about the being tipped off.

There were some controversies surrounding the Nobel Prizes in terms of polymarket and prediction market betting, where it seemed like there were tip-offs before the announcements of certain prize winners, most notably the Nobel Peace Prize, which went to

Maria Corina Machado.

And there was before the announcement.

Wait, were you just replaced with a native Spanish speaker there?

You know, I, you know,

you know,

I studied Spanish for many years and lived in Spain, Nate.

I studied abroad in Spain.

So, yeah, there was a big surge for her on Polymarket and probably other prediction markets, like right before she won, right?

The theory I've heard is that there was a lot of maybe some metadata release that you're preparing a bio you're preparing like a big like you know look i used to know how to find poll releases before they were released by oh really typing in certain urls and things like that right so like if you have an incentive to make hundreds of thousands of dollars by getting this identity right and looking for any clues that you can it doesn't necessarily have to be inside information there's a whole longer conversation about like inside information and prediction markets and non-prediction markets too that we should maybe have for some

other period of time right um Um,

I mean, the one thing where I think Polymarket did a bad job was for the Pope, right?

That was a case where shit didn't leak.

Um, that's because they were offline, Nate.

There were no pockets of data or anything, it was totally

exception that proves

they have the internet in the Vatican, they probably have the internet, right?

They need it for grinder,

sorry, Nate, Nate, come on.

When they're in Conclave, they absolutely do not have access to the internet.

Nobody does.

But they do have somebody who can access everything externally in case of medical emergency, et cetera, et cetera.

As we talked about in our fascinating deep dive into the Conclave.

Have you judged awards before?

I have.

Park poker.

Yeah.

I have indeed.

And this is just to say that the Nobel does try to keep it very close to the best.

Have you judged awards before?

Yeah, I did a rotating two-year, so the higher journalists were people, you know, to judge the Pulitzers for like a two-year stint.

And then I guess you have to wait another decade before they invite you back.

But that was fascinating, right?

You spend, is it like two or three days up at the Columbia campus?

And like

for the Pulitzers,

you were given like a gigantic stack of applications in your category, right?

I love the spirit of it.

It's a fun day.

You get to meet, I guess I call myself a journalist among other things.

I get to meet like real journalists and interesting people, right?

And with different perspectives, but you're like, you're going through this shit very fast.

I'm not sure if it like applies the same way to

the Nobel Prize, right?

You know, one thing I would know in general, if you're applying for an award that's like judged by some panel or committee, it's almost like student applications to some elite institution, right?

Like half of it to two-thirds to three-quarters can be dismissed out of hand,

pretty much, right?

You know, if I'm a journalist and I'm judging different stories, there are some stories that are prize-bait, right?

Where like it's framed in this way, it's feature style and blah, blah, but it's important.

Here's some person who overcame hardships, or here's a person who took on City Hall, right?

And like, sometimes it's good, but

it's sometimes not necessarily all that impactful, right?

Yep.

It's kind of a little bit paint by numbers.

And like, when I'm on the committee, I don't particularly care for that type of story, right?

I kind of care more about like what made a big splash in the world this year, right?

I guess when I was doing it, was it during the first Trump term race before COVID, right?

There's a bunch of Me Too stuff.

There was a bunch of Trump Russia stuff, right?

By the way, you know, you have your group that makes a recommendation that can be overridden by like the board of the Pulitzer Prizes, which, you know,

might sound like it's having a heavy hand on the scale, but like, but they're inherently political kind of things.

I think the Pulitzers do better than some jobs, but like it, you know,

it probably helps to

know people, I suppose.

Yeah, no, absolutely.

And

that's why I said that, you know, some of the, I think some of the prizes are much more political than others.

And even it's interesting because

in the Nobel Peace Prizes, that's very, you know, that's just egregiously the case.

And by the way, that's not a knock on this year's winner, who I think is incredibly deserving.

I'm not trying to subtly suggest that this year's winner

should not have won.

I do want to very strongly suggest that there are past winners who should not have won, but she is not among them.

But even, you know, even Peace Prize aside,

I do think that the Nobels have become more than just, oh, we think that this is the person most deserving of a prize for their literary output, for instance.

And I say become, but this has...

always been the case to some extent where there are political conf considerations of all sorts.

So I think with the Nobel Prizes in literature, just, you know, in recent years, the committee was accused of having, you know, too many white men, too many Europeans, Americans, et cetera.

And they're like, okay, so how much of that is because we just have a committee whose reading habits are inherently biased because of who they are, right?

Like they're not trying to be biased, but they just are not aware of a lot of other literature.

That's,

you know, that's...

painting them in a non-erudite light saying, you know, you haven't made those sorts of comparisons.

And so, but sometimes then it's kind of like, you know,

it's a really, it gets into really murky ground where we're like, well, are we trying to have like a quota system to write for Nobel Prizes in literature where we don't have, you know, enough women, we don't have enough people from, you know, non-Europe, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And I think that part of it is just a lack of knowledge, a lack of exposure, a lack of translation, right?

That's, that's another important thing.

Like, you need who sits on the committee.

We don't know, by the way, these are things that are very closely guarded secrets.

So like, I do not, you can't Google like who is the committee for the Nobel Prize in X.

Like, have you sold a French edition of The Biggest Fluff?

I have not, actually.

I have not sold.

You have to sell French.

Don't buy my book either.

I have not.

So the French, I have not sold a single one of my books in France ever.

And my books, this isn't a brag, but like my books have been translated into over 20 languages, right?

Like we've sold rights all over the world.

France has never bought one of my books.

The first one, I was like, well, it's about Sherlock Holmes.

It's very English, right?

So maybe there's like an inherently anti-English bias.

But yeah, no, the French do not like buying American books in.

I like France.

I'm.

By the way, isn't the world poker or the whatever European poker back in Paris next year?

Poker Stars is coming back to Paris in February with the EPC.

I will not leave Paris.

Until both of us have sold our books.

Until both of us have had our books translated into French.

I love that.

I like wine.

I like coffee.

I like lounging around.

I like steak fruits.

Yeah, I know.

There's so many amazing things about France, but yes, they do not love our books, Nate.

But, you know, this is an issue, right?

Translation is a problem.

Like the winner this year, not all of his books have been translated

into English, and some have just been translated.

By the way, that's Lasno Krasnohorka.

He is Hungarian.

And I loved that his last book, which I have not read, is 400 pages and contains one period in the entire book.

So that should be an interesting, interesting read.

As a purveyor of run-on sentences myself, I'm officially a fan.

Yeah, there you go.

There you go.

So, you know, but, you know,

you get these winners who

already won the prize, right?

Someone like this year's winner.

And not all of his books have been translated into English.

And so I assume, you know, other languages also suffer from that.

Now imagine you're someone who hasn't, like, and he's someone who already rose to that level of prominence.

So there are issues that end up, you know, making the prize a little bit more politicized than one would think.

And I said that, you know, In recent memory, people have been pressuring the committee saying, you know, you're, you're representing too many similar voices.

And yet, this has been an issue for a very long time.

So there have been two times that I know of in history because deliberations are eventually made public.

I don't remember how many years after.

It's decades.

But

you eventually, you eventually do know who was nominated and like you do understand, you know, why some people were shot down.

So I can,

there are two instances in history where I'm like, are you guys, are you kidding me?

And it shows different sorts of biases.

One, which I think is the single most egregious one, is W.H.

Auden did not get the Nobel Prize in literature.

He was gay.

He was very openly gay.

He was, you know, very vocal about it.

And

this was not, it's not like it's.

there's a line that says, we are not giving him the prize because he's gay.

But you can read between the lines.

And he did not get it because of his sexual orientation.

He's one of the greatest poets, writers of the 20th century.

And the fact that he wasn't given the Nobel Prize because of his sexual orientation is horrible.

Now, second one shows a very different sort of bias.

white straight male this time.

Tolkien, J.R.

Tolkien, did not win the Nobel Prize because people were biased against the types of books that he wrote and said, you know, oh, you know, fantasy is not real literature.

It's not going to stand the test of time.

But the year that Tolkien was up, the person who won that year, like, I have no idea who the fuck that is.

And like, no one remembers that name.

And everyone knows Tolkien's name.

And like, it's one of those things where I'm like, wow, you guys are just.

There have been closed-minded biases around this prize for a very, very long time, basically since its inception.

So instead of saying this is the prize for the, single most deserving author, just like with everything, I think we need to caveat it, right?

That has risen to a certain level, whose works have been translated, and we don't take issue with the type of writing you do, the type of person you are, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So I think that that's something that's really important to keep in mind.

And you would think that the other prizes, like, you know, medicine,

physics, economics, that they're a little bit

potentially especially with something like physics more straightforward and i actually just to be perfectly honest i don't know um literature i've done a lot of deep dives into the history because it's something you know it's my field it's something that i feel very passionately about um and i wouldn't be surprised if i went down the line of you know physics and realized how much controversy there was there i do know that there is controversy in who exactly gets prizes for discoveries right because sometimes if you know that a certain discovery is going to win the prize in physics, medicine, et cetera, how do you divide it?

right?

How do you actually decide who's going to get it?

Who's going to get credit for this?

Does one person get it?

Do two people get it?

Do three people get it?

Because sometimes it is split.

This year's prize in economics was split three ways.

One person got half the prize and then two people had to split the other half.

So you have to make determinations like that all the time.

You have to be alive too.

And you have to be alive.

That's actually

huge.

That's actually really important.

So like when Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for his work with Tversky, Tversky couldn't win it, right?

Even

though

he did half the research, right?

He was half the team, but Kahneman was alive.

Tversky was not.

My grandparents who were passed away, you know, they would ask us, how did you guys stay married for

50 years?

Or it became 60 years eventually, right?

My grandfather was always like, well, there are three key components, right?

Get married young, number one.

Stay together and don't die.

The don't die part is really

quite important for winning a Nobel and for other things.

And we'll be back right after this.

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You want to talk a little bit about the economics prize?

The one thing that I kind of, you know, I don't know the other two.

I do know Joel, I always thought it was Mokure, M-O-K-Y-R.

I don't actually, yeah, I don't know how it's Mokure.

Oh, okay.

He's Dutch, Israeli, American, you know, a lot of different ingredients here, but he does work on economic history.

In particular, I'm going to do very basic stuff, right?

If,

you know, if you study economic history, then

very stylized interpretation of the facts, right?

You learn that progress is unusual, right?

That like humanity has spent most of its existence barely eking out a living where innovations are slow to come by.

There's wars.

You might have empires.

The empires die out after some period of time.

And then in the Industrial Revolution, we had this spark and things began to catalyze.

And since the Industrial Revolution,

we've had growth, right?

At first, the growth might be 0.5% per year on top of population growth, although population growth is also important.

Then it gets up to 1%, 2%, 3%,

begins to compound.

And so, you know, I think economic history is like a vitally undercovered topic.

I think one, you know, the average

liberal or conservative, this is where I think both sides are full of shit, right?

I don't think they understand that like that progress is not the default by any means for human history, right?

In some ways, it's a very pessimistic interpretation of human history, right?

You know, I mean, you know, now people who think that we're on the verge of an AI singularity are saying, okay, we're going to have like, and in my book, on the edge, the art of risking everything from publishers everywhere.

No, I, um,

in my book, you know, I'm evaluating, I'm using the Industrial Revolution as a paradigm for like what might happen if you had very rapid AI growth, right?

In the Industrial Revolution, of course, you had a lot of change of institutions.

You had the Enlightenment, you had the American Revolution, you had the French Revolution.

There is always some debate about what came first, right?

Did you have this technological shock?

and then

institutions catered to that?

That period of time, maybe things that were more liberal, right?

Like land didn't matter as much now, labor power did, and that changes the way that all society relates to one another.

You also have wealth now.

People are not just at subsistence.

People are not just peasants anymore, although it takes a long time to expand that franchise and so forth, right?

And so, like, I was very glad to see economic history get its due.

I think, you know,

the critique of economic historians, they're neither economists nor historians.

Joel McGeer, again, I don't know the other two, is excellent, I think, at both.

And,

you know, considering the stakes of like, why does humanity, why do civilizations grow or stagnate or die out?

It seems like a very high stakes question that most people don't know very much about.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I'm especially grateful in the present day and age where people seem to be devaluing the importance of history and historians in general.

I think it's very important to

illustrate just how important economic, I mean, history in general is, but economic history specifically.

And the other two winners, by the way,

are Peter Howitt, I think I got that pronunciation correct, and Philippe Aguillon.

And sorry if I butchered that one

because, you know, I have not heard these names pronounced.

I've only ever read them.

And they were awarded for their work on creative destruction.

So the concept of creative destruction.

So the process by which something new, something innovative will replace older technologies and businesses.

And that was originally, to put a little more history here, it was originally coined in a 1942 book, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy by Joseph Schumpeter.

Schumpeter?

How do you pronounce it?

I don't know how to pronounce any of these last names, Nate.

This is going to be a riddled with riddled with a mispronunciation episode.

Yeah, I mean, it's kind of become a little bit of a buzzword in Silicon Valley where it can be, you know, hey, man, let's go to Burning Man, do some creative destruction kind of thing.

But yeah, look,

one of the core basic foundations of both capitalism and democracy, which is why they have some correlation, often are paired together.

I mean, they both ideally should believe in competition, right?

I mean, this is why I think people, you know, and I put these both under liberalism, like people are flawed.

It is hard to predict the future.

It is hard to know what's going to work, hard to know what ideas will find a market, right?

And so, and so you want them to compete instead of to have central planning, right?

And this is more of a risky business kind of topic, right?

But like, you know, a lot of it is the value of optionality, right?

You know, if I were living in some small town and I could like commission the perfect restaurant in my town, right?

Maybe I'm some patron, right?

I'd rather have like five in a food hall or something, right?

And then the best ones can, can survive because there's uncertainty, because like, you know, because it creates proper incentives.

And

it also means that like, um,

that older institutions sometimes have to be replaced and

destroyed, right?

Um,

I think ironically, or not ironically, I guess ironically only because we're talking about Europe, you know, but like small things like that, like making it hard to fire unsuccessful employees or making it hard to dislodge businesses that have an end with the government.

But like that's, it's very, it's very important.

And, you know, the other thing about economic history too is like,

again, for our audience, it's kind of like a 101 concept, but the notion of like compounding growth when you're looking, taking the truly long-term perspective.

I probably said verses of this before, but like,

you know, I am worried in the Trump era about America like squandering its leadership in various ways, including its economic leadership, and that having compounding effects, right?

I mean, the U.S.

has like a big lead

over the rest of the world and a lot of advantages, a lot of advantages.

World's leading currency, world's largest or, you know, most effective military, right?

World's most number of founders, I guess, effectively, right?

You know, we're in a very, even very, America's a beautiful country.

You got lots of good land.

Whoops, almost knocked over a lamp.

And like,

we're starting from a very high point.

And, you know, fortunately, every other country is fucking up too, right?

But like, but yeah, when you go from like 3% to 2% to 1% to negative 1% GDP growth per capita over time, then you really notice that after a generation.

you know, you kind of need more of an economic history perspective, comparative perspective, at least to understand the implications of that.

Yeah, absolutely.

And Mokir is someone who's definitely thought a lot about the implications of creative destruction and kind of how

you need to think about it in order to enable long-term growth, right?

And not just like have this short, like, let's move fast and break shit type of mentality.

Because one of the elements of his work,

of

all three of their work,

is that in order for

the innovations to have lasting positive impact, you need to actually support the individuals who were affected by the changes and be able to protect the workers and move them to kind of more productive other jobs.

So he's not saying that you need to protect specific jobs, you know, jobs are going to get replaced, right?

Because that's the nature of the way the world works.

But you do need to know how to actually protect productivity and protect workers.

And if you don't do that, right, if you don't actually do everything together and have a full vision for how this will work with long-term societal impact, you might be negatively surprised.

So this is, I think, something that a lot of people don't realize, right, when they're like, oh, well, we just need to innovate.

But they don't realize that there are actually ways of innovating successfully that have long-term positive economic implications and ways of doing it in a much less successful way.

And people don't normally couple those things together necessarily.

They're like, ah, the market, we'll just figure it out.

Yeah.

And kind of when you look.

back at history with a very long lens, right?

You're like, oh, there was political turmoil during this time, right?

And you don't live through that turmoil necessarily, right?

Yeah, it's particularly interesting in the case of AI, where

explicitly, some of the leaders in Silicon Valley are saying, they're not saying we're going to create millions of new high-paying jobs, right?

Some of them are saying we're going to create a life of leisure for people where you can create weird Sora videos of furries having sex and I don't know what you're going to do, right?

And neglecting like the dignity of

work or the fact that, like, you know, you're going to have like

a political upheaval is a euphemism, right?

You know, if you kind of like take everyone's jobs, you might have a revolution revolution or something, right?

Um, and ignoring kind of that history lesson, even though some people, you know, uh, Patrick Collison is the CEO of Stripe and he and Tyler Kaiwan, the economist, have kind of like founded a field called progress studies, which is in this kind of like same vein, potentially.

But like the politics and the economics are intertwined.

I think probably there's too much of saying, oh, we have to preserve these kind of coal miners' jobs and you have like parochial interests and things like that.

But if you have very widespread destructions of existing institutions and

you don't have a good plan to create new institutions, then that could get very messy potentially.

I'm not sure there's a good precedent.

You know, again, I worry about the combination of rapid technological change with declining institutions, right?

And like,

and the fact that the technologies involve in some ways people checking out from civic life.

I mean, again, after World War II, we kind of had a new world order, somewhat literally.

We also had the development of the atomic bomb.

It probably is another episode, right?

But you also had the development of the United Nations, which whatever you think of it, I get annoyed because it makes it a fucking nightmare to commute to the east side for a couple of months every year when they have a conference.

Oh, my God.

And by the way,

the building is not super.

And I feel like the U.S.

should have a fucking better building when they do that.

I'm just going to do a total caveat on our Nobel episode to just complain.

So that was the United Nations was meeting when we were trying to...

rent a car and drive to Vermont and rented the car in Midtown because I'm an idiot and forgot and had to wait for an hour basically to leave the garage because the block that the car was on had dignitaries staying on it and then everything was blocked off.

Anyway, it was just such a nightmare.

And I was like, okay, I'm just never going to go to Midtown Manhattan when the UN is meeting ever again.

Anyway, that's a big caveat.

But yes, you can be annoyed by that.

But your broader point, Nate, is an incredibly important one.

And I want to make sure that we stay with it, which is that the institutions that came out of it were actually incredibly important and that you need multiple prongs for stability and that you might have issues with a lot of the kind of UN directions.

You might have issues with the UN traffic.

You might have issues with more important things that the UN does.

But the fact that you do have this societal structure is something that helped prevent

innovation with negative kind of with the negative social disruptions that might have otherwise accompanied it, it, with the social displacements, with the revolutionary forces

that people tend to gloss over.

And we'll be right back after this break.

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Maria, what would you give yourself a Nobel Prize for?

Nothing.

I don't think I deserve a Nobel Prize nate.

If I were to give you a Nobel Prize nate, I would give you the prize in economics and you would get it for some of your statistical stuff.

And I'm sure that by the time you get your Nobel Prize, you will have come up with some, you know, great statistical innovations that help us forecast and project more accurately.

And hopefully, because we're friends, I'll be able to profit off of that by placing very nice bets on prediction markets.

Have you written fiction, Rio?

Because I will give you the prize in literature because I know you have to.

I have written fiction and I hope you're- You're a very good writer.

Well, I appreciate that, Knight.

And yes, and I hope to write more fiction

in the future.

So that is something that I'm definitely.

I feel like we probably, being in Pokemon, we probably both deserve the Nobel Peace Prize for listening to bad beat stories over the years.

Yeah, we could, we could collectively, I think we could collectively take a Nobel Peace Prize for listening to bad beat stories and not actually physically harming anyone who tells us a bad beat story, even though sometimes I really, really want tonight.

There are some people who you just.

When they're like, Maria, hey, do you want to grab dinner?

I'm like, oh, no, no, no, no, no.

You know some of these people and you just want to run away.

And when you actually are cornered and end up in a conversation with them or at a dinner with them and you smile and nod through the whole thing, you do feel like a mediator who's made world peace possible.

Can you believe that?

The flesh came in on the river again.

Can you believe the idiot who stayed in the hand until the river?

The odds were so bad.

How does this fish ever make any money?

By the way, Nate, this is totally off, well, it's not off topic with the poker bad beats, but have you noticed that there's a certain type of person who, whenever they tell you hand histories, this usually goes hand in hand with bad beats stories.

It's always like the whale in the one seat did this, and then the fish did this, and then the idiot did this.

It seems like every single person at their table is an a whale, a fish, an idiot, a donk, a something bad, and no one is actually, and from their descriptions, I'm like, wow, I want to play in that tournament, you know, seems like, seems like a great field.

No, you can learn a lot from the causes of death, I once called it, in a poker tournament, right?

I once created a tech someone and they're like,

13 ways to

die, right?

And how do you die?

I go out swinging sometimes, I go out with a bluff sometimes.

If you're only losing poker tournaments when you take a bad beat, that's often a sign of people who are too nitty and risk averse.

Absolutely.

That you chip down, you chip down, chip down, chip down, right?

Because you're not taking any chances.

And then, yeah, you lose it 70 to 30, or you lose it aces versus kings maybe if the kings against the aces can't avoid that kind of thing right but like you know someone who is

never

busting out of a tournament by saying look i made a big bluff here it didn't work i made a big fold here i got shown the hand it was wrong and then i was down low on chips right i made a big call and that was wrong um

I tried to slow play because I thought it was the right play and he caught the perfect card and I lost all my chips.

Like, if you're never like admitting to to like making a bowl of poker play, then

I kind of think you're probably an inferior player.

Yeah, what matters is all the decisions that led up to that point, not the actual bad beat at the end.

I think that that's an important thing to remember.

When you're awarding the Nobel Prize in Poker Bad Beat Stories, Nobel Committee, these are all things that

we all need to keep in mind.

Nate, you will have created a statistical model that tells us how to avoid the people who will tell us the bad beat stories.

You'll get us maps of the Paris and horseshoe ballrooms so that we know the best routes to take to avoid bad beat storytellers.

And I will incorporate them into my novel and

we will bring this to the Nobel's attention.

But that was, I really enjoyed that.

And next year, I hope, Nate, that you will be a little bit more engaged in the Nobel Prize given now that you understand why some of them can be so interesting to follow.

And now that you know some of the controversy behind the scenes, can we bet on it?

Can we bet on it?

You can bet on it.

Yeah, yeah, we can bet on it.

All right, next year we can do Nobel brackets.

Nobel brackets.

Yeah.

Okay, Maria, we'll have to be one another's Nobel Prize for now.

So thank you, listeners.

Yes, and we'll see you soon.

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 Konakova.

And by me, Nate Silver.

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

This episode was produced by Isaac Carter.

Our associate producer is Sonia Gerwit.

Lydia, Jean Kott, and Daphne Chen are our editors.

And our executive producer is Jacob Goldstein.

Mixing by Sarah Bruguer.

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