NO LIMIT, Some AI… Poker’s Documentary-Gate

Transcript

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Speaker 1 Pushkin.

Speaker 1 Welcome back to Risky Business, a show about making better decisions. I'm Maria Kanakova.

Speaker 17 And I'm Nathaniel Silver.

Speaker 1 You just can't leave it alone. You can't just be Nate Silver.
I'm going to call you Nathaniel this entire show. Just watch.
Just watch it.

Speaker 17 Just going to spend a little time in Florida and there.

Speaker 17 Nate, N-A-T-E, is very often Nate

Speaker 17 if you have, like, for an example, an Uber or Lip driver. So, you know, Nathaniel might be, might be needed in the mix a little bit here.

Speaker 1 All right, Nate.

Speaker 1 let's get going.

Speaker 1 Today on the show, we have some poker drama. Nate, we haven't, oh sorry, Nathaniel,

Speaker 1 we haven't done poker drama for a while, but this is poker drama that's squarely in the intersection of the poker world and the non-poker world.

Speaker 1 And that as a writer, as a creator, really grabbed me and I'm guessing grabbed you as well. And it has to do with the No Limit documentary series that was released a few weeks ago.

Speaker 1 But no, dear listeners, you will not be able to find it anywhere because it has since been scrubbed from the internet.

Speaker 1 So, Nate, do you want me to give a little bit of a rundown for her?

Speaker 17 I'm going to play the backgrounder here. Yeah.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 1 So, first of all, this was a documentary that was created by a collaboration between GG Poker, which owns the World Series of Poker, and Artisans on Fire, specifically Dustin Ionnati, who followed last year

Speaker 1 players during the inaugural $25,000 Super Main event in the Bahamas, which was the largest ever guarantee in poker history. Lots of compelling storylines.
I mean, it was a huge, huge event.

Speaker 1 I definitely remember seeing it from afar. I was in Vegas at the time.
I did not play in it, but being like, wow, like, holy shit, this is huge. So, Dustin Ionati followed players around.

Speaker 1 According to their original release, they had over 650 hours of behind-the-scenes footage from the event. 650 hours, Nate.

Speaker 1 That is a lot of hours. And it was edited down to eight 30-minute episodes.
Six of them had been released by last week when it came out.

Speaker 1 And I say it came out because there was no, you know, there were no

Speaker 1 intimations or signs that this was the case, but one of the main characters, Alan Keating, had watched one of the episodes where he appeared and was like, hey, I didn't say this stuff.

Speaker 1 Like, what is actually going on? And he called out the documentary on Twitter and was like, hey guys, what's going on? Dustin.

Speaker 1 admitted that he had used AI to advance the narrative and put words in

Speaker 1 Keating's mouth that Keating never actually said.

Speaker 1 By the way, both Keating's original Callout and Ionati's Mia Culpa have since been taken off. Anyway, long story short, he said, oh, but this is the only time I used it.

Speaker 1 Not really a big deal. Then there was another Keating who's not at all related, Alex Keating, who's like, actually, wait, no, I'm going to raise my hand too,

Speaker 1 because also, you know, I see it in my stuff. Anyway, documentary has been taken off.
WSOP apologizes and says that they are going to re-edit everything.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 that's kind of, that's where we stand right now. I have some very strong feelings on this that go far beyond the poker world.

Speaker 1 And I'm sure you do too. I'll let you start since I've kind of been hogging the mic with the background of the drama.

Speaker 17 Yeah, it was a one-off thing. It's like when people are like accused of

Speaker 17 handsiness or sexual harassment, right? Usually not a usually not a one-off thing. It's usually a chronic chronic behavior where you don't recognize a boundary of permission.
Yeah.

Speaker 17 By the way, if you ever interview me for some shit like this, I hate watching myself on TV, so you could probably just make me say whatever.

Speaker 17 You're too lazy to ever check it.

Speaker 1 Nate, it's so funny that you said that. I was actually talking with my husband about this, and I was like, I would lose my shit if this happened to me.
Because

Speaker 1 I think both of us have appeared in dozens of documentaries.

Speaker 1 Like, I don't even know how many, but I never watch myself back and i don't actually think that keating watched himself back until somebody quoted him back to him and he was like wait um i never said that and then he watched no look in all seriousness i am reluctant

Speaker 17 to give any interviews for something that can be edited

Speaker 17 even fairly or relatively fairly right if you're you know if you're

Speaker 17 taping an hour with me and you're going to clip five minutes out of it or maybe 15 seconds out out of it, right? Like, that makes me very nervous, right?

Speaker 17 Yeah, you know, and I kind of feel like, and this is kind of advice to

Speaker 17 people in general. I'm sure we have a lot of influential listeners, is like, yeah, you should understand kind of like what the journalist's motivation is.

Speaker 17 If the story's about you and you're a kind of primary character, that's one thing. If you're kind of invited in to provide light color commentary, then yeah, I would be a little bit wary.

Speaker 17 But look, I think there are a couple of things going on here, right? Like, one is like

Speaker 17 a lack of recognition of what like

Speaker 17 good journalism

Speaker 17 or even journalism good or not really is. So what's the guy's name?

Speaker 1 Like Ionetti Simmiti Dustin Ionati. Ionati.

Speaker 17 Yep.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he I apologize if I'm mispronouncing it.

Speaker 17 Ionati, whatever. It's an Americanized.
You're going with Dustin. We get to pronounce the, you know, if you're like Dante or something, then maybe you can Italianify it, whatever.

Speaker 17 Dustin, we get to pick how to pronounce your last name. I feel like Dustin.
You're giving up your. Anyway.
um

Speaker 17 but mr dustin

Speaker 17 posted a lot of not pretentious but a lot of very long tweets on x where he's like you know poker is losing mindshare to chess and f1

Speaker 17 and all these other things that should be comparable to poker and we do

Speaker 17 much worse and there are a lot of reasons for this but one of the reasons is that we're not we're not good enough at like storytelling and and narrative, right?

Speaker 17 Which, okay,

Speaker 17 I think some people might say, well, okay, is it okay to use ChatGPT to do like a little copy edit on

Speaker 17 your script? Sure, I would think that's totally fine, right? Is it useful to use AI tools to clean up literal visual defects? I mean, I think, sure, it's probably fine.

Speaker 17 When you are attributing, though, a quote to some person,

Speaker 17 then you're not allowed to do that. It's like a basic journalism thing.

Speaker 1 It's also weird.

Speaker 17 It's also just weird because, like, you tape all this footage, and, like,

Speaker 17 can you really not make the story?

Speaker 1 650 hours. I just keep saying that because it is mind-boggling to me that you would have that much footage and say that for the sake of narrative, you needed to create something that you didn't have.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 17 it's kind of lazy, you know what I mean? Like,

Speaker 17 that in all that footage, you can't find

Speaker 17 the quote. I mean, look, yeah, sometimes when

Speaker 17 you're writing,

Speaker 17 you're like, boy, I wish the subject had said that, right?

Speaker 17 What you can do, though, if you're a writer, you can actually say it in your own voice. You're like, that's a good idea, right? Or you can, or, or there are like legitimate ways to paraphrase.

Speaker 17 Like, you know, sometimes if someone like

Speaker 17 is jumping around the meaning of something, then, I mean, this is a little bit of a fine art.

Speaker 17 The BBC got in trouble recently for for like splicing together two snippets of a trump speech on january 6th that were like

Speaker 17 30 minutes apart or something and made it seem like he's like

Speaker 17 go

Speaker 17 attack the capitol right now right or he's kind of like we need to go to the capitol blah blah blah half an hour blah blah blah he was long-winded and go march there right now and like okay like that clearly was taken out of context, right?

Speaker 17 Like,

Speaker 17 I know when you use like the ellipses. Anyway, I'm getting to like weird journalism stuff.
The point is that like...

Speaker 1 No, but you know what? This weird journalism stuff is actually important because it's been around for a very long time and there are standards for a reason.

Speaker 1 For instance, The New Yorker and I think most magazines actually that I've ever written for do not actually allow you to allow sources to look through their quotes before you publish, right?

Speaker 1 Like that's because you're, you know, you don't want someone to be like, well, you know, I don't actually want, you know, to be quoted saying this.

Speaker 1 Like you're on the record, you give the interview, like, that's it. But you record, right? You have recordings,

Speaker 1 you have notes, you have all this stuff. You give all of that to fact checkers who actually go through and make sure that this all happened and this all exists.

Speaker 1 The reason that we do this is that in the past, there have been egregious malpractice issues with journalists who made shit up, right?

Speaker 1 And who actually did craft the perfect characters or the perfect stories because it suited their story, whatever, whatever they were trying to tell. And some of them got away with it.

Speaker 1 So at The New Yorker, someone who absolutely broke my heart was Joseph Mitchell, who died before I, I don't know if he died before I was born, but you know, this is a different era of New Yorker journalism.

Speaker 1 And Joseph Mitchell was someone I had really, really looked up to as like a cub writer because his stories were just filled with these amazing characters, these amazing quotes, these amazing scenes.

Speaker 1 And I was like, wow, I wish I could do that, right? He writes nonfiction. That's like fiction.
He finds all of these amazing things and he brings you there.

Speaker 1 And it turns out his nonfiction was fiction. So as it turns out, he actually did exactly what you were suggesting, Nate.
He's like, I wish this quote existed.

Speaker 1 I'm just going to make it up and I'm going to create a composite character based on the reporting I did who says all of these things that are very convenient for me to say.

Speaker 1 Now, like I said, different era, era, different time, the vaunted fact-checking department did not work the way that it does today. It slipped through.

Speaker 1 And like I said, it broke my heart because it sets you to an absolutely unattainable standard, right? I was looking at this like, oh, this is what journalism is. No, this is what fiction is.

Speaker 1 And the reason it was so clean with, you know, all the bows beautifully tied is because it was fiction. Now, he's a beautiful writer, but he's a novelist, right?

Speaker 1 He's a fabulous. He is not actually someone who is a journalist.
And the reason I felt betrayed was because he wasn't saying this is inspired by.

Speaker 1 He was portraying it as this is literally what happened and these are literally the people I talk to. When you are a documentary filmmaker, you are saying, I am a documentarian.

Speaker 1 And we're not talking about someone like Ken Burns, right, who's doing a historic documentary about people who are no longer alive and you have historic recreations, et cetera, et cetera, where you're trying to be, you know, true to the characters, but John Adams ain't alive, sorry, so we can't go and interview him.

Speaker 1 But when you're doing a documentary in the modern era, in real time, where you're following people around and you are saying, I am creating a real experience and I am showing you the unvarnished truth, and then you use AI, however you use it, without telling anyone that you're using it, without asking people, is it okay to use it?

Speaker 1 There are just so many issues here that I think are going to become more and more important to deal with as AI becomes more prevalent, right?

Speaker 1 But this is something that's existed in journalism long, long, long before AI.

Speaker 17 Yeah, there's like Jonah Lehrer. I mean, look, I would see as a kissing cousin to this at least is also the data fraud scandals in academia.
Absolutely.

Speaker 17 Which often kind of follow this like Jonah Lehrer, who was at Stephen Glass.

Speaker 17 Jason Blair was another, or maybe, but like, but where like, yeah, it makes the narrative a little bit too neat and perfect, right?

Speaker 17 And maybe I have like a more general critique of like journalism where like, you know, whenever I hear the word storytelling as it pertains to journalism, I get a little bit nervous, right?

Speaker 17 Because I think that often involves at least oversimplification. It often involves, you know, turning characters into like good and evil, sometimes caricatures a little bit.

Speaker 17 And look, I think, I mean, and Marie, the books that we write take a long time and involve a lot of research.

Speaker 17 You know, to me, it's also laziness kind of thing, right? We're like, you should be able, if, you know, I talked to 200 people for my book.

Speaker 17 I should be able to find, and I can also consult source material. I can read other books, right? Like, if I can't find interesting stories out of those 200 interviews,

Speaker 1 then okay,

Speaker 17 that's a me problem. I mean, what's weird about this World Series Poker video is like.

Speaker 17 The quotes from Keating are like similar to things that he would say and they're not really advancing the narrative.

Speaker 1 It's like it's just no, it was just it was just it was very yeah I don't understand. But by the way, for listeners, just a bit of context.
You threw a lot of names out.

Speaker 1 Joan Alaire was a journalist with The New Yorker as well. And he was fired for

Speaker 1 just major issues of fabrication. The reason he was caught was inventing a quote by Bob Dylan, right?

Speaker 1 The one person who you would never invent a quote from, because the fans, Bob Dylan fans, man, first of all, Bob Dylan's still alive.

Speaker 1 Secondly, Bob Dylan fans, they have gone through every single word that man has ever said with a fine-tooth comb. And believe me, immediately when this quote came out,

Speaker 1 people were like, oh my God, when did he say this? It's such a beautiful quote about the nature of creativity.

Speaker 1 Never said it, right? But it was, it was very convenient. So that was, yeah, that was Jonah Lair.

Speaker 1 And I think your similarity, the similarity with data fabrication is if you're a scientist who has kind of a hypothesis in mind and the data almost fit, you know, it can be very tempting to be like, let's massage this a little bit, right?

Speaker 1 Let's take out these data points. Let's control for this variable, p-hacking, right?

Speaker 1 Like that p-hacking is the nice version of it where you don't actually fabricate anything, but you start controlling for random things so that your p-value becomes significant, so that you hit that significant 0.05 threshold.

Speaker 1 and you're like, ha ha, I told you.

Speaker 1 But then when asked, like, hey, why did you control for this? Like, why did you control for that? Like, is there any a priori reason or hypothesis?

Speaker 1 Oftentimes the answer is like, well, because it became significant only then.

Speaker 1 So that's kind of the benign version. And the less benign version is when you literally create data points or take away data points or fabricate data out of

Speaker 1 out of thin air, which happened with, allegedly happened with Dan Arielli and Francesca Gino in some of those studies that are being investigated as we speak.

Speaker 17 And we'll be right back after this break.

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Speaker 3 This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something.

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Speaker 17 Yeah, you get different rationales for this, right? Sometimes it's kind of this like

Speaker 17 postmodern, oh, everybody's doing it. It's all a game for power and influence, right?

Speaker 17 Sometimes it can have like more of an ideological basis, like, you know, we're on the right side of things and the other side

Speaker 17 embellishes and cheats. And so, like,

Speaker 17 and by the way, you can find plenty of examples of Democrats doing this, but like one that comes to mind is J.D. Vance, the vice presidential nominee in the campaign last year, was like, yeah,

Speaker 17 these media narratives, I'm paraphrasing, this is not a direct quote,

Speaker 17 these media narratives about Haitian immigrants and dogs and cats might be a little bit exaggerated.

Speaker 17 However, Democrats lie about shit like this all the time, and we need something to grab the media's attention.

Speaker 17 It was kind of like a mask off moment where he's like a little bit bit more honest about that. And,

Speaker 17 you know, you see that kind of thing happen

Speaker 17 all the time, right? I mean,

Speaker 17 I don't know. I mean, you know, and there's a difference again between like lies and exaggerations.

Speaker 17 I mean, some of the during the racial reckoning, I think, you know, the behavior of certain people was exaggerated very much. I mean, there's lots of misinformation out there.

Speaker 17 Still, there's a lot of information about, like, there's a big controversy on Twitter about like AI data centers and how much water they use. I mean, there's a lot of, but like, um,

Speaker 17 but it's also sometimes like a lack of

Speaker 17 like formal training, right?

Speaker 17 If people kind of get into like, I guess more and more people that kind of get into like content creation don't kind of I don't know if this is actually empirically true, right?

Speaker 17 I imagine fewer of them kind of go to to school for journalism or whatnot, right? They can kind of go like viral in their own ways potentially. And,

Speaker 17 you know, yeah, when I was kind of the editor-in-chief at 538, which is partly a ceremonial title, but you did kind of notice differences. We mostly did hire people that were like

Speaker 17 had a background in kind of capital J journalism. And I think that that helped with this kind of thing at least.

Speaker 1 Sure. Yeah.
Well, you know, I think you're making a really important point in that, you know, we are living at a time where

Speaker 1 it can be really difficult to discern you know what's the truth and what isn't right where like the lines are so fungible like there's so much misinformation on every side and it's true in politics and in in in everything that it feels like when you then intentionally do it right like you're you're just muddying already muddy waters and to me it's all you know as as our listeners know i'm working on a book about cheating and it's all kind of these you know forms of kind of cheating with what your profession is supposed to do.

Speaker 1 Unless, like I said, I don't actually necessarily have a problem with using AI if you say like how you're doing it, if you ask people for permission, if you kind of explain what you're going to be doing, if you disclose it, right?

Speaker 1 If you say like, hey, like this, some of this has been generated with the help of AI for narrative clarity, right? Like whatever it is.

Speaker 1 I personally wouldn't do that, but like at least do that and at least kind of have the decency to ask permission from the people who you are interviewing, right?

Speaker 1 To say like, is it okay if we edit you in this way? Is it okay if we use AI to kind of to

Speaker 1 move forward the narrative? I don't even remember what the wording is, but you have to ask for permission.

Speaker 1 I'm sure that before you do documentaries, like

Speaker 1 I do,

Speaker 1 you go through an appearance release release form right where you actually have to look at all these things and sign it I read that shit and I actually read it really carefully and I make changes and I make changes that say that no like actually you can't edit this way no I don't consent to the use this way No, you must ask my permission if you're doing this or that.

Speaker 1 All of these things. And I've had times when I've walked away when I haven't appeared in projects because they weren't okay with my edits.

Speaker 1 And I had one particular time last year that was really frustrating because it was for this huge Canadian show. And we spent multiple hours filming and it was all this stuff.

Speaker 1 And then they gave me like almost as an afterthought, this absolutely batshit crazy release that I then edited the crap out of and we couldn't come to an agreement.

Speaker 1 So it was, they had spent tons of money, right? They had flown out a whole crew, rented out a hotel room, like done all this stuff with me.

Speaker 1 I had spent all this time, you know, it was was like a day gone out of my life. And I was like, you know what?

Speaker 1 But I'm sorry you're not going to be using this because I'm not comfortable with the liberties that you may or may not take, right?

Speaker 1 Maybe it would have been unedited, but the things that I was agreeing to, I was like, I am not okay with that. I want to know exactly how the things, and it was political too, right?

Speaker 1 It was about Trump. So, Nate, you know, like that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 You just have to be so careful that people are not going to be using it out of context, juxtaposing it with images or with things that make it seem different from your intention, that they remain true to kind of what you said and how you intended it to be perceived.

Speaker 17 Yeah, anything, this is very inside baseball. Anything involving traditional produced television or

Speaker 17 video or film, right, is like...

Speaker 17 quite labor-intensive relative to the amount of time that the eventual end product uses up, including like they will shoot a lot, a lot, a lot of footage with you and you got to go to some studio.

Speaker 17 And it just usually, it always takes, there's multiple takes, it just always takes longer to produce good

Speaker 17 taped television than you might think, right? Which is kind of why I'm like, let's go on a podcast, you know what I mean? I don't have to like retake things.

Speaker 17 We very occasionally retake things because we stumble on our words and stuff, Maria. But like, look, a lot of times

Speaker 17 when there's bad behavior, people say, well, what about this other thing that's also bad? And it's like, okay, we can debate about how much of an ethical sin is it to quote somebody out of context?

Speaker 17 Or how much of a sin is it to, let's say, you give a long interview to a documentary and they take 15 seconds out of that.

Speaker 17 It's meant to portray you in a bad light out of a three-hour interview for whatever grudge that they have, right? We can debate, is that unethical? Is it tantamount to like a journalistic sin, right?

Speaker 17 And I might say more than most people that it is, actually, right?

Speaker 17 However, the things that are clearly journalistic sins, we should not absolve because of the edge case. This is not an edge case, right?

Speaker 1 This is not an edge. No, this is not an edge case.
And I hate the excuse that, oh, well, it's not that much in the grand context of things, right? It's only a little, it's only a few lines here.

Speaker 1 It's only, it's not all the players. It's only, no, that doesn't make it more okay, right? Like, I only fabricated this one quote in my article, Nate.
The rest of it is from

Speaker 1 I only fabricated that one data point to make it all mixed.

Speaker 17 Which is almost certainly.

Speaker 17 Like, why would you like?

Speaker 17 Yeah, I mean, if you're like, oh, I have this one annoying thing that it's going to take extra time, but in order to do that, I don't have to cheat.

Speaker 1 It's also kind of arrogant to think that

Speaker 17 this guy, by the way, isn't he like the video producer for Alan Keating, too?

Speaker 1 He is. Yeah, that's the weird thing.
So this guy who actually blew the whistle is someone who employed this company to run his YouTube channel. And so had been working with them for about a year.

Speaker 1 So that's, honestly, like to me, that's even, that makes it even worse. Like, Nate, imagine like one of our producers on Risky Business, right?

Speaker 1 We've been working with them and all of a sudden we find out that they just AI generated an episode for us. without asking us.

Speaker 1 Like that would, that would make it worse if they actually then said like, hey,

Speaker 1 but we've been working together for multiple years now, so we have a great working relationship. So it's okay.
Like, we, and we remain true. We know Nate and Maria.

Speaker 1 We've worked with them for so long that we know what their thoughts are and where their minds are. And so we promised that this episode was true to their spirit.

Speaker 1 Unless we both die in a fatal accident, which I hope doesn't happen. I hope there's never a risk.
Can you imagine?

Speaker 17 You would exhaust. I mean, now there's these things, these fucking AI companions, like your dead fucking husband husband or

Speaker 17 child or stuffed animal or whatever.

Speaker 1 By the way,

Speaker 1 producers, producers,

Speaker 1 just like, just to just to make sure that you understand, it's still not okay. If we die tragically, just do an episode yourself.

Speaker 1 You can introduce yourself as hosts and

Speaker 1 talk about, you know, what pain... pains in the asses we were to work with while we were still alive and do a nice episode without our own voices.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's it's just, you know, that in some ways makes it even worse because they're betraying

Speaker 1 an existing relationship, right? There's a level of trust there where, like, if it's someone I've worked with a lot, I would trust that they wouldn't do that to me, right?

Speaker 1 That they would actually respect what I said, how I said it, etc., etc.

Speaker 1 To have someone, it's almost worse to have it be someone I've worked with than to have it be someone that I'm working with for the first time.

Speaker 1 So, I don't actually think that that absolves them in any way. And, you know, it was actually a very interesting impulse on Alan Keating's part to

Speaker 1 air this on Twitter as opposed to going directly to the producer behind the scenes. Because if he had gone behind the scenes, I don't think any of probably this would not have come out.

Speaker 1 But I think that he clearly felt betrayed, right? Like that's a very public way of doing it.

Speaker 1 And like, and then the original apology, I don't remember what his response to it was, but it was like, are you kidding me?

Speaker 1 Like, this, no, like, that's not an apology yeah apparently he said that he that the apology does not deserve a response and you know why so he was pissed right so this is a way to take it to the public forum i'm not actually sure why he took it down these guys who are like

Speaker 17 very promotiony they're like hey i'll help promote your shit and you're like yeah this guy seems a little cringe but maybe i need some cringe help right maybe need some cringe help who will boost my social media channels and blah blah blah i mean how much poker content do you watch?

Speaker 1 I watch poker content in the form of like instructional videos, right? Like I will watch run it once videos.

Speaker 1 I will watch the course that Isaac Haxton and you know Nick Petrangelo and Dan Tvoros put out for GTO Lab. I will watch kind of some of the videos that like GTO Wizard does.

Speaker 1 I usually watch poker content to learn and I don't usually watch kind of the dramatic what's happening in the world of poker content. I did watch the first episode of this documentary.

Speaker 1 I ended up watching it on two times speed because it was really,

Speaker 1 I'm sorry, even before I knew about the AI, I was not enjoying it.

Speaker 1 I found it quite boring.

Speaker 1 I don't usually like to say, I didn't say this at all publicly because I didn't, I don't like to say anything negative about content that might bring more people, you know, into poker or whatnot.

Speaker 1 Like, it's not like there was anything bad about it I just don't really think it was good but now that we know that it was boring while taking these liberties with with people's speech now I feel perfectly entitled to say that after one episode I did not think it was good and I never watch video on more than 1x speed.

Speaker 1 I actually am someone who listens in real time. I do not speed shit up.
I sped shit up.

Speaker 1 That tells you something.

Speaker 17 I'm a good 1.2. By the way,

Speaker 17 listen, you got to be careful with the 1.2, 1.3 in this shell.

Speaker 17 I'm a pretty fast talker. You can't apply your generic 1.2s and 1.25s and 1.3s to risky business.

Speaker 17 I'm telling you that much.

Speaker 17 Yeah, there's this perpetual debate.

Speaker 17 in the kind of poker media world about like content that's made for pros versus content that's made for for new players rec players right i you know i think i probably agree with the critique that like

Speaker 17 too much of this content is too

Speaker 17 pro-driven, right?

Speaker 1 The

Speaker 17 content has shifted more toward high-stakes cash games, stream cash games, because like you get a little bit more personality in there. I mean, all the critiques are like partly true.

Speaker 17 Like one critique is that like before computers and solvers,

Speaker 17 there was more variety in how people played and so

Speaker 17 you had more personalities and more different playing styles, right? I think that's basically true, right? I think now that, like, with

Speaker 17 a

Speaker 17 theoretically unsound

Speaker 17 but good poker sense kind of skill set. I mean, Mike Mizraki might have that, frankly, right? Which is part of why he was instantly inducted into the Hall of Fame.

Speaker 1 And for people who don't remember, Mike Mizraki is the winner of the World Series of Poker main main event this year, The Grinder, and he also won the Players Championship and, yes, was immediately inducted into the Hall of Fame after.

Speaker 1 Unprecedented. No one's ever done that before.

Speaker 17 Pretty good summer, I would say.

Speaker 17 But in general, you've had a shift away from like...

Speaker 17 mainstream broadcast stuff toward like PokerGo. And I like PokerGo.
I like their tournaments. However, that's a subscription service targeted toward people

Speaker 17 like you and me that are either poker junkies or have some professional or adjacent to professional interests in the game.

Speaker 17 You know, the large field

Speaker 17 WPT World Series of poker tournaments, right?

Speaker 17 Where like you have a big four or five day event and then you narrow that down to a small handful of players, a few of which you just by luck of the draw have good stories, right?

Speaker 17 Like is is the main event of the World Series even on like linear TV anymore? Like a little bit on CDS, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, it is. It is

Speaker 1 after the fact. So not

Speaker 1 so during the event, you have live streams, and then those are edited down to, I believe, 30-minute kind of broadcasts that are more made-for-TV. And so there are kind of there's

Speaker 1 limited coverage after the fact, where you have new announcers, sometimes

Speaker 1 new announcers, sometimes the same announcing team, where they actually kind of do new coverage,

Speaker 1 new kind of new soundtracks and make it into more of a polished final product as opposed to, you know, let's watch all of these hands hand by hand so that it looks more dramatic. Right.

Speaker 1 And, you know, I totally respect that. I think if you're going for a wide TV audience, poker can be so boring, Nate, right? Like you, you can sometimes be like sitting and for us, like we're

Speaker 17 like oh yeah um i'm gonna be in vegas but mostly playing poker they're like can i come watch you i'm like yeah exactly like

Speaker 17 the final table would be boring as fuck right

Speaker 1 even at the final table you know i actually always encourage people like it's nice to have people on your rail which are you know the people who are watching but i would never force someone i love to come on the rail and watch because you can't see the cards it's much more more interesting to watch the stream on a screen where you can see what people have and you can follow along.

Speaker 1 When you're there live, like

Speaker 1 all you see are the all-in confrontations or when you know a hand goes to showdown, you don't see the cards otherwise.

Speaker 1 But even if you're watching on screen, it can be quite boring because there are so many different things happening. So I understand

Speaker 1 the desire to bring people,

Speaker 1 you know, to craft narratives, to have drama, to bring people to the game in a way that makes them excited about poker.

Speaker 1 But, you know,

Speaker 1 how did people

Speaker 1 craft narratives that make people excited about chess or Formula One or whatever it is?

Speaker 1 It's by being a good storyteller, finding the stories, finding the people, using the material that you have rather than kind of taking liberty and creating material on your own.

Speaker 1 So just to kind of bring this full circle, I think that

Speaker 1 you,

Speaker 1 by the way, like we would be doing this.

Speaker 1 I think we'd be having this conversation even if this documentary had just smashed everything in the sense that people were like, oh my God, this is phenomenal. This is so good.

Speaker 1 And it had just like through the roof viewership, which it did not.

Speaker 1 Someone took a screenshot of the number of views of each episode before they were taken off of YouTube. And it was like, I think it was like 20,000, 30,000.
Like, it was not big numbers, right?

Speaker 1 Like it was much worse than a lot of the great poker content creators who actually have, you know, many more views. I think the biggest one had like 40,000 views or something.

Speaker 1 And with every episode, it just like, it went down. And so.

Speaker 1 If it had been huge and hugely kind of successful with millions of views, this would have, I think, in some ways been even more of an issue, right?

Speaker 1 Like that you had to create, that you had to lie, that you had to make shit up to bring in an audience. But now, like, you did that and it was boring, right?

Speaker 1 Like you did that and you didn't do anything new. You did that and you didn't actually craft drama, bring people in, like, you know, come

Speaker 1 create something that made people excited about the game that wasn't already somebody who loved the game, right?

Speaker 1 And so I think that that's sort of beside the point.

Speaker 1 And it's, and it's also, it's absolutely not an excuse. In some ways, the more people,

Speaker 1 like if you're writing for an audience of one, right? Like if I had a private newsletter that was like on a private thing and I used AI to try to experiment and do things,

Speaker 1 I didn't really have to do, like, I don't have to tell anyone, right? I'm my own audience, right? I can just do, I can just do whatever and like play around.

Speaker 1 But if I have, as my audience grows, then I start having a responsibility to other people to actually kind of uphold uphold some sort of standards.

Speaker 1 And so in some ways, like the bigger the success, the more responsibility you have to your subjects, to your audience, to the sport, right? You have a responsibility to poker.

Speaker 1 Why is it, Nate, that every single time we talk about poker, unless you or I have won something and there's like fun news that way, it's almost always some sort of a scandal, right?

Speaker 1 It's something, it's something negative. Like, why don't we actually try to do things the right way to bring people into the game for the right reasons?

Speaker 1 We'll be back right after this.

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