*This transcript is produced using transcription software and reviewed for quality. Despite our best efforts, some passages may be incomplete or contain errors due to audio quality or software limitations.*
Matthew
Hello and welcome to this episode of Superhero Ethics. Recently we talked about the concept of quitting, and how one of the reasons why we often say it’s okay to quit in poker and in life is the idea that there’s probably always another hand. There’s always another buy-in. There’s always another game you can play tomorrow, or next week, or whatever.
But obviously that’s not always true at poker, and a lot of times when we apply that idea as a metaphor to life, it’s definitely not true. And one thing that’s being talked about a lot in the entertainment world recently is the deaths of a number of celebrity figures. I think most prominently Dolly Parton and Tim Curry, but also the voice actor of Optimus Prime from Transformers, whose name I do not recall, but I’m sure Paul does.
Peter Cullen, thank you. Yeah, and a number of others. And we just wanted to talk about those performers a little bit. We’re gonna do a longer discussion about Tim Curry and Rocky Horror with Mandy from Make Me a Nerd at some point soon.
We already did an episode with her on Dolly Parton that’s definitely worth checking out. But today we’re gonna talk about this idea of being short stacked, of being under-bankrolled, and how it affects the way poker is or is not a good metaphor for life, and how do we play short stacked, both in poker and in life. And so Paul, we’re gonna get into all that, but why don’t you start by talking about Tim Curry and Dolly Parton a bit, or Peter Cullen. You and I have touched on celebrity deaths before, and so it’s not really about how you feel about them dying as much as how you feel remembering their lives.
Paul
Yeah, I mean, one of my first thoughts every time any of these things come up is, I kind of wish we’d done a tribute episode while they were alive, you know. And it’s like, well, you’re not necessarily gonna go and do an episode for every actor or famous person or whatever, but there is always an element of something that feels a little, I don’t know, itchy almost, to me. But yeah, I mean, Tim Curry obviously is a great actor in tons of stuff. I watched Clue so many times. That’s my Tim Curry movie, the one I really associate him with.
He was fantastic in it. And just overall, I love mysteries in general, and it’s kind of a parody mystery, which I guess is also a mystery, but it’s more of a comedy, I would say. And it’s based on a board game, and I think it’s nice that you can actually make a good movie based on a board game. I think that’s kind of cool.
Matthew
I’m not sure Parcheesi is really a film adaptation waiting to happen. But there’s like… wait.
Paul
Is Jumanji not actually a board game? It’s just a fictional board game.
Matthew
I think there’s a real board game, or video game. I don’t know.
Paul
Because I think of it and I’m like, I got it mixed up with Django for some reason. But anyway, yeah, I don’t think there are tons of board games that are really gonna make great movies. But it’s like, you write a good script, you cast the right people, they give great performances, you cut it together, throw some music on, and you end up with a great film.
Matthew
I watched Clue recently, and there’s so much about it that I love. I love the mystery aspects of it. I love the characters. I think everyone in that movie is fantastic, which is a statement also about great dialogue and direction. But I’d forgotten how good of a physical comedian Tim Curry is.
Paul
Oh, yeah.
Matthew
He takes so many pratfalls, and so much hitting of other people, and so many physical gags, in ways that can often sort of take away from everything else, but they don’t. They just add to his character and add to the hilarity.
Paul
Yeah, and I wouldn’t necessarily co-sign the “can take away from” part. I think some people just like some of that humor more. But what I will latch on to there is, I feel like he manages to do it with a level of sophistication at the same time.
Matthew
Yeah, right.
Paul
That I think is hard to pull off. There’s not just the sophistication of the physical humor itself, but the character, and being able to do many things well at the same time that aren’t necessarily intuitive to go together.
Matthew
For sure.
Paul
For sure. Then Dolly Parton. I didn’t really listen to a ton of her music. I’m aware of how much of a songwriter she was beyond just a performer. But I did watch 9 to 5 back in the day, when I watched tons of movies.
And I enjoyed it. And Optimus Prime was more of a formative figure in my childhood, so Peter Cullen. And some of the stories he told I thought were really great, about how he found the voice for Optimus Prime, how it was kind of inspired by his brother.
And that it’s not just aggressive, authoritative leadership, but this kind of gentle giant kind of voice, you know. And then I loved Heroes as well, and Hayden Panettiere. I thought we were safe with three, you know, like they say these things come in threes, but really, a lot of people die all the time, and there are a lot of famous people now.
Matthew
Yeah, and it’s funny, because I hadn’t even thought of Hayden, because her death I think was a couple of weeks before Parton and Curry, coming in the same week. But no, she’s definitely part of all that, and there’s a lot of discussion about her death. I think it’s a little more controversial than some of the others, and a lot of that discussion I admit I do not know much about, but I think there are a lot of important issues coming out of her time in Hollywood and things like that. But yeah, I thought she was fantastic in Heroes, fantastic in a number of things that I saw her in.
Paul
Yeah, I liked Heroes a lot, and she was definitely a big part of it. Save her, save the world.
Matthew
Right, yeah. And like I said, I did an episode on Dolly Parton already, so definitely listen to that. I’ll just reiterate, though, that I think I’m the same way. Her style of music was never the style I most gravitated towards, but I heard “9 to 5” on the radio all the time, because I think it was one of those crossover hits that just everyone loved. I saw the movie a long time ago, I think with my mom, because she was a big fan of it, and then saw it again recently, the night she passed away. And it reminded me that it is a fantastic movie. One or two things maybe have not aged perfectly, but it’s mostly aged very well.
And unfortunately, it’s aged very well because most of the things they were saying about the way people in the workplace, and especially women, are treated in the workplace are still issues we’re dealing with today.
Paul
Yeah.
Matthew
So yeah, all that. I don’t have as many memories of Transformers, but I definitely have some, and I think you’re right that he always felt to me like the gentle giant. I think that’s a very good phrase for it. It always felt more like a father figure than like a dictator, you know, than like a…
Paul
General. Yeah, yeah. I mean, when you contrast him with Megatron, I guess.
Matthew
Yeah, exactly, exactly. And the level of care, and I appreciate that. I’m not a huge fan of the newer movies, but some of them are pretty good, and I think the other people who’ve played him since have kind of continued in that, which is a nice tribute to him.
Paul
Yeah, well, he played him in the movies too.
Matthew
Oh, it was him as well? Okay, yeah.
Paul
Yeah, so, you know. Cool.
Matthew
And I will say, Paul and I did an episode on one of the animated shows of the Transformers that came out a couple years ago, so definitely check that out. That will be in the show notes.
Paul
Yeah, I’m not sure if that was him.
Matthew
Right. So yeah, and it’s funny to say, but it’s a reminder that we’re short stacked in life, that we’re under-bankrolled in life, because we only have so many opportunities. Parton and Curry, and I think Cullen as well, all led very full, fairly long lives by most estimations.
Hayden obviously did not, and as I said, there’s a lot about her death that I think is still to be discussed, and that’s not something I know enough about to get into now. But it is still a reminder that this idea that we can always play another hand, we can always rebuy, we can always build another bankroll, is not actually unlimited. It’s not unlimited in poker either, unless you’re playing small stakes and you’re rich enough to not even think about it. But in much of the poker discussion, we’re often talking from the perspective that you play a game where you have enough to buy in for the maximum, and you have enough of a bankroll that you’re not looking at only one buy-in and then you’re out. And that’s often something we apply in the metaphor to life. Like I said, you can always quit and start something new.
It’s not always true. And so we want to talk about that, and certainly also about it in terms of superheroes, because yes, that is the connection we’re still drawing here. And by the way, we’re kind of just fumbling in the dark here to figure out how we’re pairing all these different elements that we’re bringing in. So let us know what you think.
If you’re like, “God damn, why is all this poker talk happening?” let us know. If you think this is great, let us know. If you want us to just ditch the superhero part and just do poker and life, let us know.
We’re kind of in an open, trying-things stage right now. But in terms of this actual conversation, Paul, let’s start by defining terms, because I’ve also been using two terms fairly interchangeably that I think are kind of important for the metaphor, but in poker are quite different: short stacked, and under-bankrolled or underrolled. Tell us what those two terms mean.
Paul
Yeah. So poker generally, regardless of what you see in the movies, is played table stakes, which means you have chips in front of you, or you could have dollars or euros or whatever.
Right. But you have something representing currency in front of you, and that’s the maximum that you can be asked to wager at any point in a hand of poker. And when you win, that number will go up. The chips in front of you will swell.
And when you lose hands, that will go down. The most popular format played these days is no limit, specifically No-Limit Hold’em. And it’s called no limit, but really the limit is the stack size. If I have a thousand in front of me and you have a hundred in front of you, and I try to bet a thousand, I can put that in the pot, but 900 of it would just come back to me if you call with your hundred. Basically, whatever you have in front of you gets matched by something in front of me, and then that goes in the middle. And so in that example, you would be short stacked. You would have a hundred, and I would have a thousand. If we’re playing one-on-one, there’s not actually any structural advantage to having the extra chips.
It’s because we’re effectively playing with a hundred dollars in front of us. If there are a bunch of players at a table, then the whole thing can get kind of complicated. Often when people are talking about a big stack advantage compared to a small stack, they’re talking about tournaments, which are another popular format. People talk about your tournament life, right? You buy into the tournament, you get a certain amount of chips, then you play, and when you bust, you’re done.
Now they have all these ones with rebuys and re-entries that kind of cancel out some of this concept. But the idea being, if I have a thousand chips and you have a hundred chips, and the goal of the thing is to get to the end, then whenever I bet all in, all of your chips are at risk. So you’re deciding, do I want to basically play for my tournament life?
Whereas if you go all in, I’m like, do I want to play for a tenth of the chips in front of me? I don’t know, I’ll decide.
Matthew
Right.
Paul
Right. So that’s a spot where there’s unequal power, and one person can threaten the other with elimination.
Matthew
We’ll get more into it once we’ve focused on the definitions, but I’m glad you said unequal power, because that’s a good way of also seeing why this is part of the metaphor. The idea that you can always quit a bad job is different if rent is due tomorrow.
And certainly a lot of the reforms people talk about, like minimum wage and worker laws and stuff like that, are about removing more of that, because the boss is often much more stacked than the employee they’re negotiating with.
Paul
Yeah, in a metaphorical way, sure. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, and having greater financial power definitely makes it easier to walk away from certain opportunities, right? To give a baseball example, when you have a cartel like Major League Baseball, a player literally can’t be like, “Well, I’m not gonna play for Major League Baseball. I’m just gonna go play somewhere else that has equal opportunities.” Yeah, you could go play in some other league outside of the United States, or maybe in an independent league, but your pay is going to be dramatically lower.
So there really is this monopoly on the highest level of job opportunities, essentially, right? But anyway, the chips in front of you are your stack, and that’s, for any given hand, how much you can wager. And then also in a tournament, once you run out of chips, you’re done with the tournament, which kind of makes tournaments a little bit better of an analogy in some ways for what we’re talking about. Bankroll would be, forget a tournament, you’re playing the cash game. I mean, it applies to other games and tournaments or whatever, but you’re playing the cash game, and you’ve got a hundred in front of you, and I’ve got a thousand in front of me. So it’s like, oh, well, I can threaten you with running out of chips. But if you have a thousand dollars in your pocket, you can just take out a hundred at a time and keep playing, right?
Right, or you can walk away and play another time. And so bankroll is essentially the amount of money that you have allocated to playing poker, or if you’re a blackjack player or a sports bettor or whatever, allocated to that. It’s essentially why, when you go all in and win or lose a hand, it’s not that big a deal in a cash game, because it’s like, well, you’re gonna win or lose some money, but then you’re gonna play another hand, right? There’s always another hand. That’s that idea. In a tournament, there’s not always another hand, and maybe that’s a little bit more like life in some spots.
Matthew
Well, and I think this is really important, because a lot of what we talk about, and we’re gonna do an episode, I think probably our next one, on variance specifically. But in all these poker discussions and all the times we talk about the metaphor, we’re often talking about what are the odds? What are the chances of success, and how does that balance against what you might win versus what you might lose? And so, if I have only a one in three chance, and granted, poker’s never this simple, but just to have the math for the metaphor: if you have a one in three chance of winning, but you’re gonna win five times your bet, then yeah, do it. It’s not that you’re guaranteed to win one out of those three times. You might win two out of those three times. You might win three. You might lose all three. But if you do it three hundred times, you’re likely to win somewhere around a hundred, maybe eighty-five to a hundred fifteen, or fifty to a hundred fifty, but either way, whatever it is, you’re gonna win enough, because you’re winning five times your bet for every set of three, that it makes it overall worth it.
But if you take the one in three chance and you don’t get to do those two other tries, or the 299 other tries, then it doesn’t matter. All that conversation always has to assume that you have enough to keep playing the odds, with the idea that the variance will… and again, I’m sure Paul’s making faces, because there are so many technical terms that I’m misusing here. But that the variance will kind of even out over time. Doing it once out of three, yes, there’s a risk. Doing it 300 times, 3,000 times, 30,000 times, the variance kind of gets evened out somewhat.
Paul
Yeah, I mean, with a larger sample size, your chance of loss will be decreased, right? If you keep running plus-EV spots, it’ll become so small as to be almost unthinkable that you could actually lose over a certain sample. Having said that, the fact that the wager is plus EV doesn’t hinge on the fact that you can replicate it.
It’s still plus EV. In a vacuum, that’s what it is. But what it is, is a distribution of outcomes, where two out of three times you’re gonna lose whatever it is, and one out of three you’re gonna have a windfall.
Right. And the thing is, I think people often have a big loss aversion also. If I tell you you can run that a hundred times, you’ll probably be like, “Hell yes, let’s go,” right? But if I say, “Oh, but we’re gonna run it one time,” then it might be like, “Eh, I don’t know.” In order to really evaluate that decision, you’d need to not just assume that all money is equal. If you assume all money is equal, then you would just take it, even if you can only run it once. But say I’ll let you take your entire net worth, including your house and whatever, and run it, and there’s a one in 100 chance that you get 100 times that, and a 99 in a hundred chance that you lose everything. And it’s like, okay, well, a 99% chance that I lose everything doesn’t seem worth the one percent chance that I become fantastically wealthy, even if that’s plus EV. The utility of that additional money is not the same as the utility of what you have now.
Matthew
Yeah. In some ways, we talked before, in the quitting episode, a lot about opportunity cost, and the idea of, if you’re doing something, what’s the opportunity cost? Like the time that I spend mindlessly scrolling on Twitter.
Paul
It’s very high.
Matthew
Yeah, it’s very high, because A, of the damage it does to me and maybe even the world, but also just all the other things I could do with that time.
Paul
Right, yeah.
Matthew
In the same way here, I think part of the conversation is, what’s the opportunity cost of what you’re putting at risk?
Paul
Yeah.
Matthew
Because if someone told me, “Hey, do you want to put up a hundred bucks? You have a one in ninety-nine chance of winning, but if you win, you’re gonna get five billion dollars.”
Paul
Right.
Matthew
I might do that. Might. Well, it depends on the circumstance. Right now, under my financial circumstances, yeah, losing a hundred bucks is not going to hurt me, and frankly, the daydreaming I’m gonna get to have in the five seconds or five minutes before it happens, I’d pay a hundred bucks for that. That sounds fun. There have been times in my life where that hundred bucks would be, do I eat that weekend or not?
In which case I might say, “I’d love to do it, but I don’t think I can.” Now, the flip side here, and this is also, I think, an important part of these discussions, is the unfortunate fact that if that hundred dollars is my only chance to eat for the next three days, a lot of folks, and at times myself included, are now actually gonna be more likely to want to take that chance, because our financial circumstances are so dire, or even to do it for a lot less.
Paul
Yeah, or to take it a little further, if you need five hundred dollars to eat for the rest of the month and you only have a hundred, then there’s likely to be a mentality of, well, what’s the difference, right? I don’t have enough anyway.
Matthew
Right.
Paul
So I might have to do that.
Matthew
Yeah, and that, I think, is also where a lot of these things can become incredibly exploitative. I am deeply against lotteries, because I think lotteries are often taxes on the poor, or taxes on people who don’t really understand variance and stuff like that.
Paul
I have a very different lotto take I’ve developed recently.
Matthew
Okay.
Paul
Yeah.
Matthew
I don’t want to go too far into it.
Paul
No, no, no, we don’t have to get into it deeply. I just think they’re taxes on hope. But there’s something else there. Yeah, anyway.
Matthew
I mean, I think that’s very wrapped up with poverty and bad situations and stuff like that. But yeah, I hear what you’re saying.
Paul
But I mean, Lucasfilm built the whole franchise on hope, you know what I mean?
Matthew
That’s true. That’s true. That’s true. There’s a whole thing I want to say about privatizing Social Security being built on hope. But okay, I think all of what we’re saying is, if I tell you I have a thousand dollars and I’m going to Vegas to play poker, and I say, “Okay, well, any given hand, I think I have a decent chance of doing well. Should I sit down at a table where the table stakes are a thousand dollars?” You’re probably gonna say absolutely not, right?
Paul
Well, no, I’m going to say, what are your goals for the weekend? What are you trying to do? Is your goal to make money in the long term playing poker? If so, yeah, don’t go buy in with a thousand dollars into one game and just hope you run it up, right? There are not a lot of games where you can, with a thousand-dollar roll, be like, “Yeah, I’m gonna play live really seriously” or whatever. That’s tough. But just generally, yeah, don’t buy in with your whole roll at one game where you can just lose it all at once. Unless you’re like, “I’m going there to have fun. I’m gonna play poker for a short period of time.”
“What I prioritize is the kind of emotional ups and downs.”
Matthew
Yeah.
Paul
“And I have other stuff I’m gonna do while I’m there. So if I play for five minutes, that’s not the end of the world.”
And if I play for five hours, that’s fine too. So to me, a lot of these things often come down to, well, what are you trying to do, right? What are you trying to get out of this experience?
Matthew
And I think that’s a really good way of thinking about this, because to me, often my goal when I go to Vegas or something like that to play poker is not even just to win money. If that’s the goal, I’m probably gonna play poker in a way where the opportunity costs are much lower, like in a home game in my neighborhood, or online. If I go to Vegas, part of what I’m gonna do is have fun until it’s time to fly home.
And so that’s a good reason not to sit down with a thousand dollars, because I might lose in five minutes, and then I’m sitting around with nothing to do for three days until my flight home.
Paul
Yeah, if you want to play ten to twenty hours of poker, probably bring the stakes down a bit.
Matthew
Yeah, whereas if I buy in at a table that has a $200 buy-in, then I can play, buy back in, lose again, maybe buy back in, maybe then take a break, go see a show or get dinner, come back the next day, all that kind of thing. And what I think also really helps the metaphor, and I’m being careful here, because I’m trying to speak in generalities about something Paul knows much better than I do, so Paul will probably correct me…
Paul
But you know, that’s one of my great joys in life.
Matthew
So, I mean, also this is a good idea. I appreciate you. And the EV of Paul’s pedantry is very, very high. Oh gosh, does that mean the enjoyment of talking to me is because I’m often wrong? Anyway, I’m not even gonna think about it.
Paul
No, no, no. That’s supplemental.
Matthew
Yeah. What I think also helps the metaphor is that when we talk about poker itself, we kind of assume some degree of being deep stacked and some degree of being bankrolled, again, unless it’s a tournament conversation, which is a big part of poker theory conversation, to be clear. Because we’re kind of trying to create a situation where those other factors don’t matter. Where it’s not a situation where you would say that how you would play this particular hand is different depending on whether your plane leaves today or your plane leaves in two more days. That might be a life factor, but a lot of times in the poker conversation, we want you to be deep stacked enough. We want you to be at a table where you think those factors can kind of get written out. And the reality is, especially when it becomes the metaphor, I think a lot of times we apply the poker metaphor and then kind of take away everything else. We can focus on the immediate risks of a situation and not take into account the larger factors, all those other factors that can either add EV or take away EV, and can add additional risk or take away risk.
Paul
Yeah, I mean, in poker it’s generally pretty simple. To the best of your ability, if you can minimize external factors and the pressure they apply to the decisions you make at the table, you have the best chance of finding the best plays and making the most money in the long run.
Matthew
Right.
Paul
There is a reality that every hand you play is a hand you play on a day that you did other stuff.
Right. I mean, except for that one day when I played like 25 hours straight. But aside from that, you’re doing other stuff, and every session takes place in the context of your life. And going on long winning streaks or long losing streaks can really affect a player and can affect their judgment. And that’s usually seen as a negative thing, because it is, for the most part, right?
In that these are things that can compromise your decision-making process. But also, they need to be understood within the context of, sometimes, harm reduction, right? Where if you’re on a really long downswing, and you lose like five sessions in a row, and then you’re up pretty well early on in a session, it’s okay to book that win. Generally, people will tell you, “Oh, well, don’t just book wins when you’re ahead and then have these really long losing sessions,” and whatever. That’s not good practice fundamentally, right?
It’s much better to be like, “I’m gonna play my hours,” and maybe alter them based on how the game is and all that stuff we were talking about when we were talking about quitting or not quitting. But there are exceptions, right? And the exceptions might be when there’s a blizzard, when there are whatever external factors to the situation that you’re looking at, and those things are real, right? If you’re ignoring the risk of going to and from an event, then you’re not really holistically analyzing the actual risk, right?
Right. So if you’re not examining the whole context within which decisions are made, within which actions are taken, then you’re just missing part of the picture. And on the one hand, it’s probably best to avoid focusing too much on all of that, to the point where you end up just justifying bad decisions all the time. People do this all the time, right?
It’s very easy to fall into this. But at the same time, it’s not good to be so dogmatic about, “Oh, I have to make the best decision within this narrow set of circumstances,” such that you’re totally ignoring any outside factors and just being willfully ignorant of when something’s an exception.
Matthew
Right. Yeah, I think that’s really helpful, especially in the way we’re talking about the metaphor. And we’ll circle to the superhero part of it, because superhero situations are so often all in. Literally everything is on the line, whether it is personal, the city, the planet, whatever.
Paul
Yeah. And how can we raise the stakes? This is what Hollywood’s constantly asking.
Matthew
And I think that’s part of it. I’ve often brought up the actions at the end of the first Avengers movie, where the council wants to send in a nuclear missile to destroy the Chitauri and the portal, and destroy New York.
Paul
Yeah, well, with very high collateral costs.
Matthew
Yeah. And Nick Fury is saying, “No, you have to trust that my folks are gonna do it.” And to me, in the movie, we’re supposed to cheer for Nick, and I think for good reason, because the movie’s about our heroes, and so of course we want to believe that they’re doing it. But when you use actual risk analysis, conversations like we’re having, there’s a really interesting conversation to be had there. And granted, I think for the point of the story, they kind of say, “Oh no, the nuclear missile won’t work,” as a way to sort of show the council being out of touch. But what if it would?
And now you have a question of, do you take a higher chance of risking seven billion people, but at a lower cost, or a significantly higher cost of losing seven million people, with a higher chance of saving seven billion? And those numbers I’m pulling out of my ass, based on my knowledge of the city.
Paul
No, no, that’s ballpark. I mean, it’s like eight million.
Matthew
Yeah, exactly. And again, I think if you turn it into a pure mathematical analysis, now we’re into the worst sides of utilitarianism and the problems there. But I think in essence, that’s one of the most important and interesting conversations around superheroes, because they’re always playing that numbers game in some way, even if they’re not saying that they are. When Steve Rogers says “I can do this all day,” often it’s because there is literally no other option. But sometimes in his movies there is, and so it’s worth asking about the opportunity cost of what is happening there.
I want to get back to the main topic, but let me just ask you, what do you think of the various risks and EV involved in the Nick Fury versus the council decision there at the end of the Avengers movie?
Paul
Yeah, well, I think it’s hugely problematic to look at it in that way. I think it’s a very reasonable thing to do, but also very problematic.
I would make you restate it, as if you were the one going to do it. Do you choose to murder 10 million people because you think that will save the world?
Matthew
Right.
Paul
Or do you choose not to murder 10 million people, and basically see what happens? And so to me, that’s the choice. It’s murder, deliberately, right? And obviously, the exact particulars of the scenario, where it actually wasn’t a good idea, because just send it into the portal, like, what were they even doing? You know what I mean?
Right. And so it was kind of this false choice, and they often do that in superhero films. They find a way to make a really interesting choice, and then they’re like, “But this is why it’s not actually an interesting choice,” so that you can’t really argue about it later, kind of. And Civil War, to me, is: do you, Steve Rogers, choose to let this international organization murder your friend, or do you try to stop them, at the potential cost of whatever the fallout is? And again, I feel like they managed to make the Team Tony side of things wrong enough that, I respect the reason you want to be Team Tony, but when you get down to what actually happens in the movie, it becomes hard to defend. And I think that’s deliberate.
Matthew
And to be clear, when I say I’m Team Tony, I don’t think that at the decision point you’re talking about there is any Team Tony. Tony’s just wrong.
To me, the more interesting question there is, do you put Scarlet Witch in the field? What level of training do you need Scarlet Witch to have in order to believe that incidents like the one that led to the deaths of the Wakandan citizens will be minimized as much as possible? Part of why I love the movie, but I’m also frustrated by it, is that we get into this whole thing about what should or shouldn’t happen to Bucky, and I’m like, no, I don’t care about that. I care about what should happen to Scarlet Witch.
Who should decide? Because I think, again, there’s another EV conversation.
Paul
Yeah.
Matthew
If she lets him explode where he is, far more people are gonna die than died in that building.
Paul
Yeah.
Matthew
So she takes a chance to prevent those deaths and winds up causing other deaths, a smaller number. Does that mean that what she did was okay? Maybe, maybe not. And because I would…
Paul
I would add, I do think intent matters there.
Matthew
Yeah.
Paul
It wasn’t a trolley problem.
Matthew
Right, right.
Paul
If the trolley problem is, you can either let the trolley run over these five people, or you can divert the trolley and you’re not sure what’s gonna happen, that’s essentially the trolley problem she was doing. And then, “Oh, there’s someone on the other tracks. I didn’t know,” that kind of thing.
Matthew
Right. And to me, I think it carries the metaphor a little far, to ridiculous, but the point, I think, is when we think about what we want out of our military, what we want out of our law…
Paul
I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
Matthew
Yeah, I know it’s not anything like it, but in theory, the idea should be that they have the skills to recognize which is the safest track to divert it onto.
Paul
Right, right.
Matthew
And so there’s a conversation about that. And obviously that does not happen at all in either law enforcement or the military.
Paul
Which is the most profitable track to divert it onto.
Matthew
Right, exactly. Exactly.
Paul
That’s the question that comes up.
Matthew
And to pull it back also to the events in Avengers, here’s where I think the questions of responsibility and decisions and opportunity cost are really helpful. Because I think you’re right, by shooting that missile, they are making a conscious decision to murder everyone in New York City, or Manhattan, or even just the Times Square area.
Paul
Or fallout.
Matthew
Either way, it is a huge, huge number of people. On the flip side, there’s a degree to which I think we are much more likely to count the cost of taking an action versus failing to take an action.
Paul
Yeah.
Matthew
But let’s say that they think there is a far more likely chance of saving billions of people by actively murdering those people.
Paul
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Matthew
If they don’t shoot the missile, are they on some level deciding to create a situation with a much higher probability of letting those eight billion people die? And is that also an act of murder?
Paul
No. Because they’re not choosing to create a situation. The situation’s there.
Matthew
Right.
Paul
The idea that they’re creating it, I think, is the issue. Although SHIELD was responsible for the thing and the other thing and whatever. But then it all kind of comes around to, who the hell are they to make these decisions? You know what I mean? And I know then you can say, “Oh, well, what about the heroes themselves?” Fine, right? But this is some shadowy extragovernmental organization that wants to be pulling these strings, and it’s like, no.
Matthew
And I think that’s part of the point as well, is that it shouldn’t be shadowy. Because again, I think part of the idea of SHIELD is supposed to be that they have that responsibility because they’ve taken it for themselves, right? And they have often stopped other people from taking that responsibility for themselves.
Paul
Yeah.
Matthew
And my problem is that Steve Rogers takes that responsibility, and no one gave him that. But also, yeah, I prefer Steve Rogers having it to SHIELD having it, for sure.
But I’ll give you an example from what I think is another one of my favorite movies, but this part has always bothered me. T’Challa is the leader of Wakanda, and that is perfectly fair. I’m a democrat. I believe in democracy much more than monarchy, but that’s what Wakanda has, and that’s fine. But they make a decision that they’re going to fight Thanos here and now, and they talk about the cost of all the people who die if they don’t do this.
Paul
Yeah.
Matthew
But in so doing, they also sacrifice the lives of hundreds or thousands of Wakandans, all the soldiers who die in that fight.
Paul
Yeah.
Matthew
That cost is never discussed.
Paul
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that’s definitely right.
Matthew
And more than anything, that’s part of what I like about poker. Paul is coaching me in poker, and so many times we’re looking at: what are the factors that I’m missing? What are the costs that I’m paying that I’m not thinking about? What is the value that I could gain that I’m not thinking about? And in some ways, that’s the poker part I most want to be able to apply to life: getting people to think more about all the costs they’re talking about, all the opportunities they’re talking about. Yes, I think the death caused by you intentionally pressing a button and the death caused by you not taking a chance to save someone are categorically different. I’m not equating those as the same thing.
Paul
Sure.
Matthew
But they are deaths that you are in some way responsible for. And in the same kind of way, you can talk about “with great power comes great responsibility.” I think we have often largely negated that idea, but there is some truth there. A lot of times when people talk about the risks they take, we don’t talk about what’s actually being risked by non-action.
Paul
Yeah, for sure, for sure. And to bring it back to how many runs you get at a thing. That’s the idea when you have a bunch of chips or you have a deep bankroll. You lose? Okay, let’s try it again, right? The Earth getting destroyed, you don’t really get a second, “Oh, let’s run that one again. Let’s learn from that mistake.”
Matthew
You’re distinctly underrolled and short stacked.
Paul
Exactly. Unless you can find a Time Stone or something like that.
Matthew
Yeah.
Paul
So it’s a very large decision made under time pressure, where you really only get one rep. So when you’re evaluating the expectation, you can’t… I mean, here’s the thing. They’re obviously operating under the assumption that the thing will work, right? But if we say all lives are equal in that or whatever, and we try to do an EV calculation, it’s about a factor of a thousand, right?
A thousand to one. So if it was even just a one percent chance, that would be ten times as good odds as you’d need. So it’s like, “Oh yeah, we’ll just nuke New York on a one percent chance that it works.” That’s basically taking all of your net worth and wagering it for your one chance at five billion, where you’re like, “Oh well, this would be great,” or you get a hundred X or something, and you’re like, “That’s great,” right? But there’s a really high chance that you just screwed everything up, and you don’t get to run it multiple times, right? That’s one of your favorite poker things, right? Running it twice.
Matthew
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that. Well, I don’t know, and Paul’s at some point gonna teach me when I should and when I shouldn’t do it, because it’s about better EV, but I’m not there yet.
Paul
Yeah, I’m not… I mean, there are some exceptions, but I’ll just very briefly aside that. When you get all in before all the cards have been dealt out, usually you’ll just run out the rest of the cards, and then one player wins, or you chop if you have the same hand. But you can agree in some games to run out multiple possibilities. That would be almost like the end of Doctor Strange or something. And in poker, you’ll split the pot between whoever wins the first one and whoever wins the second one, and sometimes someone wins both and they win the whole pot. But this reduces your variance relative to your expectation. And in life, you can rarely do that. But there are maybe some cases where you can kind of hedge things so that you’re more likely to get an average outcome than a very good or very bad outcome.
Matthew
No, that makes sense. And I think that actually is a good way to cycle into the last thing I wanted to raise here. This is gonna sound paradoxical, but I think it’s because we’re trying to talk about walking a middle ground. Up until this point, I’ve been talking about people who aren’t aware of the risks that are there, that they’re not calculating in. Every time you go somewhere, there’s a risk.
Every time you get behind the wheel of a car, there is a risk involved, and that risk goes up a lot depending on what the weather is like, what state you’re in, whether you’ve taken a medication, or you’re intoxicated.
Paul
And what state you’re in.
Matthew
Yeah, and what condition the other drivers are in. I could be stone sober, and taking a drive at 2 a.m. on New Year’s Day is just statistically a more dangerous situation, because you have a higher number of drunk people on the road. Same with the night of a college graduation in a huge college town, or whatever it is.
Paul
Yeah, yeah.
Matthew
But I also think the flip side, and I have been working on this in my poker game, and I think a lot of people need to, and I also think we need to look at it a lot more in life, and this is probably gonna foreshadow the variance conversation we’ll have soon: there are also a lot of times where people truly see risk that isn’t actually there. In poker…
Paul
Hallucinate risk, essentially.
Matthew
Yeah, I mean, I think hallucinating is a very specific, like, chemical idea that we’re not playing with, which is a metaphor. Or just, yeah, overemphasize fear. At poker, there are times where, if I have a high pair and the board is out, there’s not a very good chance, but there’s a decent chance that the next card, or one of the next two cards, could make it so that a flush is possible, and my hand is not gonna be the good hand anymore. I have at times overestimated that fear, because the reality is it’s less than 25% that either one of those two cards is gonna be it, and so then it’s less than 50% on the other two cards. And again, you look at all the math and stuff like that, and I’m probably often overestimating it, or I’m overestimating the chance that, even if that flush card does come, my opponent has it.
Paul
There’s the thing, yeah.
Matthew
Yeah, that’s the real thing. Or even more so, if the third card does come, I’m like, “Oh well, there’s the flush, my straight is dead,” when actually, a lot of times, they don’t have it.
Paul
Yes.
Matthew
In the same way, and so now let me take that to the personal level, a huge amount of interpersonal problems come because of fear. People are afraid that someone else at their workplace being praised by the boss means they might be in trouble with the boss, and they have tension with the other person. So much of jealousy and relationship problems can often come from, “My partner is texting, and I don’t know what they’re texting.”
“What if they’re texting some other person, someone who might be a risk to my marriage,” or whatever it is. And take it to the larger level: so much of politics, and I think this has always been true on all sides, but especially in recent years, Republicans and conservatives have been using this 100%. Politics is driven by fear. Fear of the trans woman in the bathroom, fear of the immigrant, fear of the communist Democrats, none of which fears are based in anything factual. I mean, are there individual incidents of terrible things happening in all these situations? Yes, of course.
But nothing to justify the kind of fear that is spread. And I don’t know, I think I’m more making a statement than asking a question here, but I’ll let you jump in. To me, that’s the other part of thinking about the short stack: a lot of the time you’re a lot deeper stacked than you think. Maybe actually a better example in this part of it is, people get into relationships and put up with horrible situations because they think, “I’m never gonna find someone this good again.” People are like, “If I get fired from this job, I’m never gonna be able to get a good job again.” The perception that you are under-bankrolled a lot more than you probably are, I think, becomes a real big problem for a lot of folks, both at the table and in life.
Paul
Yeah, I mean, the one thing you were talking about would seem more like overestimating the odds that the bad thing’s gonna happen.
Matthew
Uh-huh.
Paul
Or that things are as bad as you think they are. But then the other, yeah, I think people have a tendency to not see how much time they have a lot of times, not see how many opportunities they really have. I think a lot of people don’t think they have as many opportunities as they want, and this might be specifically because there are specific opportunities they want that aren’t as present as would be nice. But at the same time, I think most people do have a much wider range of possible courses of action or trajectories for their life than are easy to see in the moment, in the local situation, as opposed to looking at the bigger picture. I mean, the number of things you could actually choose to do are essentially limitless. And it’s very easy, though, to let life kind of tell you that they’re not.
Matthew
Yeah.
Paul
And none of that’s to say that the hurdles, or the things in your way of doing the things you want to do, aren’t real. I’m not saying that.
Matthew
Right.
Paul
But I’m saying that despite whatever real things exist that are inhibiting this or that, you usually have a really wide range of choices to choose from. And when it feels like you’ve narrowed it down to a really tiny number of options, most of the time that’s because you’ve narrowed it down by accepting certain limitations. Maybe they’re good limitations to accept, but I think it’s important to remember, if you’re like, “Okay, well, I’m in this relationship,” or “I’m in this job,” or whatever, you’ve chosen that at some point.
Matthew
Right.
Paul
Perhaps not from as wide a range of options, or as straightforward options, as you’d like, but still, there’s agency in there somewhere. And you have the choice. You have the option to choose otherwise.
Matthew
Right.
Paul
But you don’t have to. And so I think sometimes even just getting to that point of realizing, “Hey, I don’t have to be stuck where I am. I do have all these other things I could choose to do,” and then coming around to, “But actually, I’d rather keep doing the thing I’m doing.”
I think that’s very valid, and it can be empowering, and a reminder of, okay, maybe you don’t love your job, but it does certain things for you, and you have explored the alternatives, you’ve thought about them more deeply, and decided, okay, this is the way to proceed.
Matthew
Right. And I think that’s so important. If you look at what people talk about as the basis for minimum wage laws and maximum hour laws and overtime and worker safety and stuff like that, part of it’s to narrow that somewhat and say, we want to create situations where the risk involved in not having a job is not as dire as it could be, and where the options of a bad job are not as bad as they could be.
And those protections are not really as strong as they should be, but that’s the thinking. And two things come to mind for me on this. First of all, think about any teen movie or TV show, and this can be something that’s just that, or like Arrow, or shows about teenage superheroes. There’s probably a plot line about whether someone will get into the college they want. And there are ways in which, and I don’t think these are good, but it is a reality, if you go to one of the top schools in the nation, Harvard, Yale, or the state college in your state if you’re gonna be very active in your state, whatever it is, that does open more doors for you than going to other colleges might. That’s a reality, and it’s shitty in some ways. But the way that is framed in some of these movies, of “If I don’t go to Yale, I’m ruined,” is completely ridiculous.
Because the fact is, yeah, you might not have an old boys’ network to rely on, but guess what? If you’re not a white male at those schools, you’re probably not gonna have it either. But also, in most worlds, after your first job, no one really cares where you went to college.
Or if you go to grad school, I care much more about that. And I think that’s one way in which there may be some truth to that fear, but it gets massively overplayed. The other one that I’ve seen was with me and Mary attempting to have a child. Because there is a biological reality that there is an age at which your body is most prepared, for a female body, to deal with pregnancy, but also for a male body, to produce sperm that can cause a pregnancy, and also just to be able to do the physical things that are required in childbirth, but also in parenting. Turns out you need to have a good back, because you’re gonna be picking up a kid.
I shouldn’t say need, because there are always other opportunities, but it certainly helps. I started trying to have a kid in my mid-40s, and I was well aware that there were some risks: a higher risk that I would be able to contribute what was needed for pregnancy, a higher risk of disability in a possible pregnancy, or life-altering ones. Mary was starting at 30. And the reality is, yeah, as you get older, some of the chances go up, but for Mary especially, we were both pretty happily surprised at the number of doctors who were like, “Yeah, no, 30, 25, that’s not really a factor.”
Because we had both grown up in a world where we were told all the time, by people who have a political and social agenda and by people who have an economic agenda, “No, no, no, you gotta have kids as soon as you can.” Women especially: “You need to have kids by the time you’re 25, 21, 18, 16,” according to some complete idiots who are now complaining that we don’t have enough teenage births out there. It’s ridiculous, but it’s a real thing.
Paul
Yeah.
Matthew
There are entire industries and political organizations that are really dedicated to advancing this fear that you cannot be a parent unless you do it while you’re quite young. When the reality is, biologically it is still very possible, but also, guess what?
There are a lot of ways to become a parent that don’t involve your own biology, or involve your biology done in a different way. So I just think we see that kind of thing all the time. And it is a good reminder to me that the point of this isn’t to say everything is too risky or nothing is risky. It’s to say: be thoughtful, be aware of the risks. If you’re sitting down at a poker table, you need to have an instinctual knowledge of, okay, there’s now a third card to a flush.
That makes a flush possible, but how much? Knowing what the actual odds are matters. And in life situations, there are so many things that will try to tell you that things are a lot more scary than they are, and other things are gonna tell you that’s not scary at all. Do the research.
Paul
Yeah, and be careful when you drive.
Matthew
Yes, yes. And always wear your seatbelt. All right, we’re done with the PSA part.
Paul
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m all out. I’m all out.
Matthew
Well, we didn’t really get into the last part, and we’re almost at an hour, we’re at an hour, but I’ll give you just a chance to give a couple of sentences about this, and maybe we’ll talk about it more: from the poker perspective, how do you play when you’re short stacked, or when you’re under-bankrolled? You shouldn’t, for the most part, but tournaments happen, bad decisions happen.
Your friend gets into really bad debt, and your only way of getting both his life and your life out of it is to play while you’re severely understacked…
Paul
Underrolled.
Matthew
Underrolled. Any poker game where losing involves the death of you or someone you care about, or just a random person, you’re by definition underrolled. Those are high, high stakes. But yeah, how do you play in those situations?
Paul
I mean, yeah, I think generally, don’t play games you’re not properly rolled for, right? Don’t play games you’re not properly rolled for. Find a way to have a sufficient bankroll that you can put yourself in position to succeed, right? You’re usually putting yourself in a difficult situation if you’re playing underrolled. Having said that, it’s the same thing in poker where there’s like, “Oh, you need a hundred buy-ins,” this or that, blah, blah, blah. And it’s like, okay, if you’re playing one limit professionally, you need to rely on it for income, and you can’t move down in stakes because then you wouldn’t make enough money. All right, maybe you should have a hundred buy-ins.
Matthew
Yeah.
Paul
But if you have the flexibility of being able to move up, move down, and you have money in savings that has nothing to do with your bankroll, a lot of people have these broad rules that are kind of just scary sounding and totally unnecessary.
Matthew
Yeah.
Paul
So you have to actually learn things like how to calculate risk of ruin based on your bankroll and your win rate and your variance and all these things. And it’s not that hard, the math itself. It’s hard to ever really know what your win rate is. That’s the thing, right? Like a lot of things we’re talking about. It’s like, okay, the chances of a flush coming, I can tell you that mathematically in a given situation. I can tell you about how much of somebody’s range is going to be a flush in a given situation. But there are a lot of situations where it’s just like, yeah, I don’t know. We’re just estimating.
Matthew
Yeah.
Paul
We’re just trying to do well enough. And when it comes to having not a lot of chips, yeah, you probably shouldn’t play a cash game without a lot of chips. But you can if you want to. It’s not actually a structural disadvantage. In a tournament, if you’re short stacked, you’re short stacked.
It’s because something didn’t go well earlier, or just the blinds went up really fast. And then usually you just find a good hand and you go with it, you know. And it’s like, when it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go. That’s a poker expression in tournaments. And I guess it’s true in life too. Yeah, make the most of the time that you have, of the chips, when you’re in a tournament, and in life, I guess, make the most of what you’ve got too.
Matthew
Pretty much, and figure out what the actual value is that you’re gonna get, you know?
Paul
Yeah. What matters to you? What do you value?
Matthew
A lot of the early poker games Paul and I played in were at Paul’s house, or sometimes at someone else’s house, at a time when I was really economically struggling. And there was a time when I was trying to use those games to get more money when I didn’t have enough of a stake to do it, and I was getting really upset about doing it. I was able to shift my mindset to say, I’m not going to try to go and win money.
I think it’s really fun to play poker with my friends. And so I’m going to play, but if I go with only enough for one buy-in, and I’m done in 20 minutes, and I’m just sitting there, possibly making a bad final decision to buy back in, or I feel like I have to leave or whatever, that sucks. So I played more conservatively, and I was able to find ways to lose slowly.
Yeah, it eroded the chance that I was going to win. But it was a choice I could make in that one particular situation where, due to circumstances, I wanted to play in this game, but I was going to be short stacked or underrolled. And other times you make a different decision. So yeah, this has been a good conversation, Paul.
Thank you. I think in some ways, for those who feel like this discussion was all over the place, this is kind of establishing fundamentals that we’re probably going to use a lot more in future discussions. But we’d love to hear your thoughts.
What are times where you felt like you were underrolled or short stacked in life in some way or another, and how does this apply to your thinking? Let us know in the comments. All that information is in the show notes. We referenced a lot of different podcasts that we’ve done in the past, and all those will be in the show notes. Of course, Paul is continuing to write and create. There’s a way to buy his book in the show notes where you get a big discount, and some of that money also comes back to help support the podcast and keep the lights on and all that. But Paul, tell us a little about your writing and what people have a chance to read.
Paul
Yeah, I’m writing a newsletter called Friday Night Is My Monday Morning, and the first bunch of editions are assembled in my book, Zen Madman’s Friday Night Is My Monday Morning, Volume One. I was recently writing about the first Taekwondo class I taught, and then going to play poker after that, going to eat, and then a not-so-average day the day after, and then a pretty average day the day after that. Lots of death in that one.
Matthew
But, you know, I imagine that has something to do with the fact that we were both in New York City about 20 years ago.
Paul
25 years ago. Yeah. So I get a little philosophical with it here and there, but sometimes not as philosophical, just kind of matter of fact, here’s what happened, kind of thing.
Matthew
No, it’s good writing, and I think your writing was part of what inspired me to take us in some of this direction, because you write a lot about poker, but in terms of how poker has influenced your ideas of losing, and what that means in life, and so many other life things. So definitely check that out. Check out also the writing of Pete Wright, our frequent guest on this podcast, and host of a number of podcasts here on the TruStory FM family of podcasts. That information’s in the show notes, as are all the other great things.
So please check all that out. Thank you so much for listening. Please hit subscribe and like and leave us reviews and do all the good things, and tell us what you think of this experiment we’re doing.
There’s kind of one more big part of it that I want to do, which is put the information on our website about what we’re doing, and then try to do some big publicity pushes to see how many more people we can get involved. But I want to know what you’re thinking. Do you miss the old formats? Do you really like this?
Do you want us to go more in one direction or another? Write in, let us know. All that’s in the show notes. But more than anything, on behalf of myself and Paul, thank you all so much for listening. May the Force be with you.
Paul
Oh, use the Force.
