Meet the Edge Lord: Secrets of a Gambler Winning America's Money

He's a hedge-fund exec by day... and a blacklisted sports-betting savant by night. On the eve of your March Madness pool, Galen Hall breaks down his Oceans 11-style strategy that dominated a ruthless, $18.7 million NFL pick-'em contest — including game-theory negotiations with a multi-national syndicate and speaking through the podcast void to "Juicy K." Turns out, optimizing for underdogs across a portfolio of brackets comes down to psychology more than math. • Previously on PTFO: The Best Bettor in NBA History on How to Solve a Gambling Crisis https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/NjkwYmZjMTIyZjVmZGVkZTM0NWI1NDdi Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

  Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out, presented by eBay Live. I am Pablo Torre, and today you're going to find out what this sound is. How many rackets are you entering? I usually am good for about 100.

• 0:13Pablo Torre?

  Right after this ad.

• 0:17Speaker 01

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• 0:47Pablo Torre?

  This episode is brought to you by Apollo.io. A lot of the stories on this show start the same way. Something that looks pretty simple turns out to be a mess once you look under the hood. Well, it's no different in the sales world. Your team has a tool for finding prospects, a different tool for reaching out to them, and a third for keeping track of it all. On paper, that's a system. In practice, it's a salesperson spending the better part of the day copying names from one tab into another and not much of it actually selling. Apollo.io is a platform that helps sales teams find the right buyers and reach out to them. It brings prospecting, outreach, and follow-up into one place instead of several separate tools.

• 1:29Pablo Torre?

  It's used by sales teams of all sizes, from small businesses to larger organizations, and it's built for teams who want less manual busywork and more time with buyers. If your marketing and sales teams are trying to work from the same view of the customer, it's worth a look. Sign up for free at Apollo.io. That's Apollo.io.

• 1:55Pablo Torre?

  The notion of an edge and the competitive edge, the advantage that you have, I do want to explain to people who the [bleep] you are. Because you're not merely just some random guy. Your day job, for those who are not familiar with what it is, is what?

• 2:10Speaker 02

  I'm a founding partner in a hedge fund. I used to work at Bridgewater, which is the largest hedge fund in the world. I left with my then-boss, now-partner, five years ago. We run our own hedge fund, doing this stuff by day. And then, you know, in my spare time, I'm doing a lot of the sports betting-type things, the survivor pool, playing poker.

• 2:29Pablo Torre?

  How do you describe yourself to people who've never met you before?

• 2:33Speaker 02

  I'm not sure about what I'm like as a person, but the one thing I really enjoy the most and think I'm good at is playing competitive games. And in particular, the part of the game that's sort of at the highest level of abstraction, like, how does this game work? What are the key levers for success? How do you think about this game from a fundamental level? And how can you create an edge in whatever it is that you're doing? Whether it's finding the fastest route to get somewhere, or, you know, doing my day job, or doing this circus survivor, it's just sort of what I do and what I enjoy across everything.

• 3:13Pablo Torre?

  Okay. So you may have noticed on this show that I think it's pretty important that we scrutinize the effects and unintended consequences of legalized sports betting and the rise of these multi-billion-dollar prediction markets. And so we've investigated the gambling scandals that threaten the NBA. We've covered the scams that touch the White House. You've heard me interrogate experts and call for actual regulation.

• 3:38Pablo Torre?

  But part of the reason that a 40-year-old partner at a quantitative hedge fund named Galen Hall is sitting across from me here today is simple.

• 3:48Pablo Torre?

  It is NCAA tournament time. It is March Madness coming up. And this is otherwise known as America's longest running prediction contest, and also Galen Hall's favorite thing in the world. And I keep thinking about all of these increasingly competitive and allegedly enriching pools of money. And I'm always fascinated by who ends up actually winning? Because I think who loses is pretty well established now. Pretty much everyone else. But you're the guy who actually wins.

• 4:25Pablo Torre?

  And I should say that when I first met Galen years ago through friends here in New York City, where he lives with his wife Ciara, I became curious how much he's won across all sorts of NCAA brackets and legal wagers and high stakes competitions. And Galen has estimated to me that he's won more than $15 million from various World Series of Poker to the 2023 Backgammon World Championship in Monte Carlo, the broadcast of which was very funny to watch on YouTube, by the way, if only because Galen had entered that contest after learning to play Backgammon for the first time.

• 5:04Speaker 03

  For three months? Are you kidding? I've never seen anybody this good in three months of Backgammon. So this guy is brilliant.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  It's not that common that I will look at something and then seek to bet on it. It's more like I will hear about how something works. I'll listen to somebody talking about something, and I'll say, oh, that can't possibly be right. It's usually how it starts. It starts with some conceptual gap on how things are working. And then the figuring it out for myself comes later. And then the betting comes in, the difference between what I think and what the world thinks.

• 5:38Pablo Torre?

  But the contest that finally made me bring Galen Hall into this studio was something decidedly more American.

• 5:48Speaker 04

  What's up, everybody? I'm Dana White. This is the biggest legal sports betting competition in the world. You know that's why I'm here.

• 5:53Speaker 05

  My name's Ryan Hogue. I've played for five different NFL teams. I was Mr. Irrelevant in 2003 NFL Draft. It'll be fun to just last for a while. And, you know, if you get down to the end, kind of see what happens.

• 6:04Speaker 06

  The Circa Survivor contest stands as Las Vegas's most ruthless NFL elimination game, attracting thousands of fans, celebrities, and bettors, all willing to put up $1,000 for a shot at millions. The rules are straightforward and simple. Participants pick one team weekly to win straight up. No spreads, no safety nets. Sounds easy, right? The catch? You can only pick each team once, and one loss eliminates you permanently.

• 6:34Pablo Torre?

  Only five entries out of an unprecedented 18,718 submissions survived the record-setting 2025-2026 Circa Las Vegas NFL Survivor pool. And Galen Hall didn't have one of those five winning entries, which shared an $18.7 million pot. Galen Hall, as a tweet from his poker friend, Phil Hellmuth, announced, had two of those winners. And yet, that's not even close to the real story here, which we will reveal for the first time on this show, starting with this apparently not illegal strategy.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, out of the 18,000 entries, I put in 50 entries. And each individual person is limited to 10, so I had to get a group of friends together, put in 10 each, and then I centralized control over all the picks.

• 7:29Pablo Torre?

  Which is all to say that this episode is a case study in the type of brain that is winning the public's money these days. With all due apologies, of course, to Galen's group of friends and also his wife.

• 7:45Pablo Torre?

  Because relentlessly seeking an edge as someone with a quantitative probabilistic sort of perspective, I've noticed among the people who are very good at sports betting and winning competitive games, it doesn't turn off.

• 7:59Speaker 02

  You know, one of the aspects of meeting somebody later in life and getting married when you're 30 instead of when you're 22 is you kind of know who you are and you know who the other person is and you know who you're marrying. So this is what I was like when she met me and this is what I'm still like today. So she just mostly kind of turns me loose and lets me go. There are certain areas of our life where she has very strong opinions and those are thankfully areas where I have no opinion.

• 8:22Pablo Torre?

  Give you an example of the arbitrage opportunity there where Ciara really cares about something and you're like, great, because I don't give a [BLEEP].

• 8:30Speaker 02

  When we moved in, I don't think I've ever bought a piece of furniture that didn't come from Ikea. I was sleeping on a mattress on the floor, so she wanted to take full control. I said, go for it. I have no input, no opinions. And the result is pretty good.

• 8:43Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, over here, I'm gonna be on my laptop, one of the two objects that I own in this apartment, betting on at times the WNBA.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, I love betting on the WNBA.

• 9:08Pablo Torre?

  This message is brought to you by Apple Card. With Apple Card, you earn unlimited daily cash back on everyday purchases like groceries or merch or tickets to the game. Plus, it can be used anywhere MasterCard is accepted. No matter your team, no matter where you shop, Apple Card is here to help you tackle game day. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank, USA, Salt Lake City Branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 9:41Speaker 07

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• 11:16Speaker 02

  I used to do a lot of sports betting. Then it basically became impossible. I mean, I've been banned from every sportsbook. My wife has been banned from every sportsbook. Most of my close friends have been banned from the sportsbooks. Are very important for those only listening to this podcast. It's just, first of all, it's disgusting to me that this is how we let these sites. You know, advertise to people and sell this image of becoming a big winner. I think it's terrible for people, but I can sort of get my head around the, you know, don't be an anti-state capitalism. Okay, fine, sure. But then if you're going to live in that world, the fact that you instantly cut anybody who has any chance of winning is pretty low down and dirty, I think.

• 11:54Pablo Torre?

  But that's something that Bob Vulgaris, Haral Bob Vulgaris, who is arguably by acclamation, the greatest NBA better of the modern era in the pre-legalized period. And yeah, he's eternally frustrated by how the house will just cut you off if you pose anything resembling the beginning of a threat. And so how did you accommodate the fact that you too, like Bob Vulgaris, were getting blacklisted from all these places?

• 12:19Speaker 02

  I just stopped doing sports betting for a long time because I wasn't interested in spending all of my time trying to find beards. I had a day job that's going pretty well. And so that's why I'm mostly attracted to peer-to-peer betting. So things like poker where you can win as much as you want. The casino doesn't care. The Circus Survivor, you're competing against other players. The house actually doesn't even take a cut. Kudos to them. You know, March Madness, contests and things like that where you're competing against other players. And then, you know, now with prediction markets, which are also peer-to-peer, sports betting is becoming more appealing again in the short term.

• 12:51Pablo Torre?

  But the idea of your edge being fundamentally, and this is something that I didn't really appreciate until I spent time talking to my friends who became like hedge fund managers. The edge tends to be information.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  Most of the people making money have an edge in one of two ways, or they sort of fall into one of two groups. The first group is you just try and build a model that describes how the world works. So if you're building a basketball model, you start with, you know, compensated points per possession, and then you adjust for the quality of your opponents. And then you discount games against that are blowouts. And then you build a player model so you can model injuries and, you know, a luck model so you can model opponents' free throws and so on and so forth. And you just try to make your model as accurate as possible. And then the differences between the world and what your model says, you think that there's some alpha there, there's some edge, and then you bet on those.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  But the downside is unless you're incorporating things in your model that the marketer Vegas is not accounting for, you have no edge. And then the other way to get an edge is You sort of assume that the markets or Vegas is by and large pricing in most of the available information in a pretty good way and the price, whatever it is, is fair. And you focus your time on trying to find things that you think are unlikely to be reflected in the price. You want to bet college football totals and you just want to become an expert on the weather, predicting the weather. Snow will affect games in a different way depending on if they run or not. Wind is actually pretty important and which way is the wind blowing and then you can bet halftime totals.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  So you become like the expert on knowing something that you think everybody else doesn't know and you just assume everything else is fairly priced. You could post up at the campus bar and see whether the players are drinking the night before the game and regardless of what the spread is, you have no idea, but you're like, if everybody's in here drinking, I bet it's probably good to bet against them and if they're not, I'll bet on them. And so these are kind of the two classic ways to generate edge in these kind of competitive environments. The parts that I enjoy the most comes from kind of a very narrow third path, which is I think people are making some sort of fundamental conceptual mistake. I think they are not thinking about something in the right way. Their whole framework is wrong or they're making what I would call like a logical error.

• 15:12Pablo Torre?

  Which is not a thing that many people say with confidence because part of the whole premise, by the way, the conventional wisdom around like, hey, be wary about sports betting is the house always wins is an aphorism and also generally speaking statistically accurate.

• 15:27Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:28Pablo Torre?

  Again, in general. And so what you're saying is that even among those who are sophisticated and who are truly incentivized to have the most precision when it comes to their modeling, there are these gaps and those gaps in that third way you described, that's where you find an edge, which is to say you're in every part of the rabbit hole you can find. And so, look, I'm not here to say in literal terms that you Are doing quantitative Oceans 11. Although I kind of enjoy thinking about it that way. Because Vegas, I mean Circa, they've set up this giant contest, which I've read about in the past. I've seen lots of people talk about it. It is legendary in its scale and never more so than when more than 18,700 people

• 16:14Pablo Torre?

  enter, which is a record. Must, I mean-

• 16:16Speaker 02

  It sets a record every year.

• 16:17Pablo Torre?

  Every year, right, right. Every week you pick a team. If the team you picked loses, you're out of the pool. You can only choose a team once.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  Right.

• 16:27Pablo Torre?

  The rules of this game, the security system that has been set up around the Circa, that you are trying to figure out and suss out the vulnerabilities in. Give us just the layout of what the rules are.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  And Circa, because it's so large, has an additional wrinkle, which ends up being very important, which is that Thanksgiving and Christmas are treated as extra weeks.

• 16:49Pablo Torre?

  Which blew my mind.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  Instead of ending after 18 weeks, it essentially ends after 20 weeks because you've got two bonus weeks in the middle. And the weeks are quite important because on Christmas, there's only six teams playing. And so your options at that point are very limited because you're deep into the season. You've used up a lot of teams. And so people often get forced into picking certain teams. And you know, you can see that coming well in advance. So oftentimes the picks get very crowded. There's a big chance to eliminate a lot of opponents all at once.

• 17:18Pablo Torre?

  Right. So that happens Thanksgiving and Christmas.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 17:21Pablo Torre?

  And so basically the herd is culled in massive quantities at those two points. But again, it's $1,000 apiece. You're apparently able to submit many entries. And other than that, though, it's familiar. It's a straight ahead survivor pool. That's how this works.

• 17:39Speaker 02

  I think it's actually quite a beautiful design and concept. The rules are so simple. You can explain it so quickly. A person can pick it up and start playing with very little friction. But the amount of depth and thought and complexity that you're able to generate from this small set of rules is quite incredible. Poker is like this. You know, you can explain poker to some- Somebody pretty quickly and then you can spend 10,000 hours before you've even scratched some of the most interesting parts of poker and Survivor is just pretty similar. On its surface, it seems so simple. It's just, okay, just pick a team every week, survive.

• 18:17Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, find the weakest team that week.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, like, like, find a good value where a sort of mediocre team is a seven-point favorite because they're playing the Jets and, you know, this is, this is a good spot to use them and, and, and save the better teams for later and then just kind of keep doing this and maybe even have some approximate map of who you're going to pick when throughout the rest of the season and like, how hard could it be?

• 18:38Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  The answer is, it can get really, really complex and this is also a good example of what I was talking about, about the third path where just conceptually, I think most of the people playing Survivor don't even know what game they're playing. They think they're playing a game, they're like, oh, it's a football game. It's a game about picking football teams and knowing football and that's just not what it is at all. The three most important skills are modeling the behavior of your opponents and understanding how many people are going to pick which team when and how that might change depending on who wins and loses. Being able to project the uncertainty of win probabilities of teams far into the future where the difference between sort of the average and the distribution

• 19:20Speaker 02

  can be quite important. And then third, negotiating. The game has an unbelievable game theoretic negotiation element, particularly really deep in the contest where a very small number of people remain and it's just incredibly, incredibly important because you can generate so much value by entering with deals or buying pieces of other people's entries or collaborating with other players. You can just generate a tremendous amount of value this way and it is explicitly legal. It's totally fine according to the rules and it's a big component of the game. And so, you know, if you're getting into the game thinking that it's, it's about football, it's just, that's about the eighth, eighth on the list of things that are important here.

• 20:04Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 20:04Speaker 02

  Uncertainty modeling plus game theory negotiation game is actually what you've, what you've entered into without knowing it.

• 20:11Pablo Torre?

  Which is a comfort zone for the dude who is specifically now, our listeners will understand, you.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, me, yes.

• 20:21Pablo Torre?

  I should be clear, you've won this contest before.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  I won in 2019, what was at the time the largest Survivor contest, which had about 1,000 people and it was only $300 per entry. It wasn't sponsored by Circa, so it was just the largest one available at the time. Now I've been thinking about some of the things for a few years and there are a couple of little different twists and wrinkles.

• 20:43Pablo Torre?

  And the Thanksgiving-Christmas, those inflection points, I am going to assume now that that is less glaringly vital to many of your competitors as it is to you. Or is that obviously what the game is?

• 20:58Speaker 02

  I'm not sure, coming into this year, how aware people were, but one mistake people make is they are really, really, really averse to picking an underdog. It's called Survivor, their goal is to survive. They want to survive for as long as possible. It's the wrong goal, the goal is to win. And so in order to win, you need other people to lose. And so sometimes it's right to play an underdog. And so Thanksgiving is such a case where Baltimore and Philadelphia were both about 2 to 1 favorites. I think 50 to 55% of people picked the Eagles and 30 to 35% of people picked Baltimore. And that's too much. And in particular, if you just look at the, you know, the odds of winning a two-game parlay, you're about 1 in 3 in each one.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  So you've got about a 9, 10% chance of both of those teams losing and 90% of the field gets eliminated if that happens. Then if, combined with the other two games, which some people picked, but not that many, you can, if all four of the underdogs win, you get 95, 96% of the field is gone. And the price you're getting paid to bet on that very unlikely scenario is just not, it's too, it's too, it's too cheap. So picking the underdogs on Thanksgiving is a very positive wager just because of the number of people on the other side of the game.

• 22:19Speaker 05

  Looking around in trouble. He flips it to Williams for the touchdown at the last moment.

• 22:26Speaker 02

  And so this year, sort of the dream scenario happened, which is all four underdogs won on Thanksgiving.

• 22:31Speaker 05

  Pressure comes, picked up for Yosefash, touchdown Cincinnati.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  Hit the, you know, unlikely four game parlay and the field got cut from 1,000 remaining to 50 in one day.

• 22:47Speaker 05

  Williams rolling, throwing open, making the grab, touchdown, Cole Komet into the end zone.

• 22:56Speaker 02

  So anyway, the long answer to your question is if it wasn't obvious before this year, the events of this year, I think will make it very obvious going forward. You know, sort of people can't really imagine something happens until it happens, even though you can just look at the odds and know there's a N% chance. But it doesn't become real until they've seen it, I think.

• 23:13Pablo Torre?

  So something that you're doing this entire time, which are just like table stakes, basic approaches to how you compete in these games is you have your own model and you're obviously going to see the schedule through that. But then you have the strategic question of how do you reverse engineer?

• 23:33Speaker 02

  Every week you sort of model the entire remainder of the season and you're not only modeling all of the different likelihoods of teams winning games, but also, you know, depending on who wins or loses this week, the value of future picks also changes a lot. So like in the example, let's say you pick Cincinnati and Cincinnati wins and Philadelphia wins. So you've eliminated like 35%, but there's still hundreds of people left. An underrated bonus of that is that of the remaining people, almost all of them have now used Philadelphia. And you are one of the only people in the contest who still has Philadelphia left. So you get to use Philadelphia in week 16 and nobody else does. And so you get a tremendous edge then too.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  And so being able to project forward like, okay, well, under these scenarios, you know, Philadelphia is really valuable. And that is tremendously complicated and tremendously important. And then another thing that's interesting is people are often looking at the sort of average value of a team in the future, but you actually don't care about the average. You care about the distribution of possible values.

• 24:36Pablo Torre?

  So explain for those who are not fluent in any way in math, what that means.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  So let me give you two examples. If you're in week three or four and you're trying to project the value of Cincinnati in week 14, you have some estimate of the average strength of Cincinnati in that week. But if you look at the distribution, it's not some normal distribution. It's sort of, there's two scenarios. Either Joe Burrow is playing or he's not, right? And if he's not playing, they're not good. And if he is playing, they're pretty good. So instead of thinking, oh, on average, they're a, you know, six out of 10, you're like, well, actually, there's some chance they're an eight and there's some chance there's a four out of 10. Either they're going to be a really good pick or really bad pick. And you often want to save those kinds of teams because even if the average is not good, if you end up in the world where they're a bad pick, you just don't play them. You play somebody else.

• 25:25Speaker 02

  And if you end up with the world where they're a good pick, then you've got a great pick.

• 25:28Pablo Torre?

  So you've already sort of assessed, here are the most bipolar NFL franchises.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  Right. And then in some circumstances, that's exactly what you're looking for. So for example, there's an interesting debate about the value of having Philadelphia as a possible pick in the final week where, you know, it was pricing something like a 70% chance that they rested their starters and they were not a big favorite and you wouldn't use them, but a 30% chance that they had to play their starters, in which case they'd be a big favorite over Washington, in which case they're tremendously valuable.

• 25:59Pablo Torre?

  Right. And I just want to spell this part out because in the NFL season, of course, which is totally unconcerned with what survivor pool players are doing.

• 26:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 26:08Pablo Torre?

  They are looking to the actual real life postseason and resting players, which could be a real wrench in the, yeah, in the model of somebody who is trying to make sure, oh, wait, I'm getting the real Philadelphia Eagles when I need them to be the full strength Philadelphia Eagles.

• 26:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. And when the contest is down to a small number of people and all of the tens of millions of dollars are on the line and there's one or two weeks left. The entire game is about figuring out who's going to rest their people or not. So being able to see that coming and being able to really like have a good model for what happens in week 17 and 18 is another really important aspect.

• 26:43Pablo Torre?

  Right, so you had 50 entries at the start and then Thanksgiving comes around and so much, 95% or so of the field is wiped out.

• 26:50Speaker 02

  Right.

• 26:51Pablo Torre?

  And into Christmas and then out of Christmas, how many entries do you have left?

• 26:57Speaker 02

  So coming to Thanksgiving, there were 1,000 left and I had seven. I put five of them on Chicago and Cincinnati. After Thanksgiving, I had, I owned five out of the 50. A couple got whittled away here, you know, the field got whittled away. And then so going into Christmas, there were 10 entries left. I had two of them. And it was this incredibly interesting scenario where I kind of got screwed in that I was the only person who had Kansas City. I had been saving Kansas City for this spot.

• 27:26Pablo Torre?

  Because they're a favorite, they're, they're...

• 27:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're playing Denver at home, they're going to be favored. And then in one fell swoop...

• 27:34Pablo Torre?

  Now remembering what happened in that game.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  One of the most dynamic athletes in all of sports is injured on this fourth and one carry and it was the right knee. Mahomes gets injured, they get eliminated from the playoffs, then Minshew gets injured.

• 27:49Pablo Torre?

  That's right.

• 27:55Speaker 02

  And then say, okay, well, I've got Minnesota, you know, J.J. McCarthy gets injured.

• 27:58Speaker 05

  J.J. McCarthy has been ruled out for the second half for the Minnesota Vikings.

• 28:04Speaker 02

  The backup was already injured and then Washington, Jaden Daniels and Mariano are injured. So all, so the three teams I have.

• 28:10Pablo Torre?

  All the quarterbacks are getting [BLEEP].

• 28:12Speaker 02

  All the starters are out and all this, all the backups are out. Everybody has used Detroit, everybody has used Denver. So you're in this situation where five of the people have Dallas and they're going to play Dallas. Dallas is favored, they're going to play Dallas no matter what. So one of my brackets and three of the other people are basically forced into playing either Minnesota or Washington, both of whom are, you know, pretty substantial and similarly sized underdogs. Washington and Minnesota are basically equally likely to win, but if, if you pick Washington and Washington wins, at least you know that guarantees I'm going to beat the five Dallas people. And this, you know, you can do the math, this turns out to be tremendously powerful.

• 28:51Pablo Torre?

  How well do you know the other competitors at this point in the pool?

• 28:55Speaker 02

  Not at all. I mean, there's some podcasts, so I watch them on the podcast just to kind of get a feel for what they're thinking.

• 29:01Pablo Torre?

  There's a podcast that is released about the competition during the competition.

• 29:06Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 29:07Pablo Torre?

  And what information is gleaned from the podcast?

• 29:10Speaker 02

  You can kind of get a sense of how people are thinking about things, what they're weighing. Sometimes they explicitly say, you know, what their strategy is.

• 29:18Speaker 05

  Welcome to Last Men Standing, the Circus Survivor podcast. If you're new here, on this show, we talk all things Circus Survivor, the strategy, the drama, the intrigue throughout the season. There's a lot of intrigue right now because there's 10 people left fighting for $18.72 million.

• 29:35Pablo Torre?

  Were you ever interviewed on the podcast?

• 29:36Speaker 02

  I went on the podcast for one specific reason. An interesting game theoretic element that happens in Survivor is when the field gets to very small, your expected value of making a certain pick is highly determined by how many other people are also making that pick. And when you're down to 10 people, even one other person on the same pick can dramatically alter the value.

• 29:55Pablo Torre?

  And can I just have you explain expected value to a person who has no idea what that concept even is?

• 30:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, so expected value is sort of this very common gambling term, which basically means, look, any given bet you may win or lose, but if you were given the opportunity to make this choice an infinite number of times, on average, would you expect to make money or lose money? And that that sort of amount of money that you expect to make or lose is what you would call your expected value. So in general, your goal is to always be trying to find and make positive expected value bets. And then, you know, over the course of your life, you win a bunch, you lose a bunch. But on average, if you're constantly making positive expected value bets, you're going to end up a winner.

• 30:35Pablo Torre?

  And I would say that this is a really central concept when it comes to anybody who is quote-unquote quantitative in nature. What is the... Probability derived expected value of any given decision.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I would say that people who do this for a living are not just thinking about gambling when they're doing this. This is how they live in their life, you know, should I buy or should I rent? Should I live in this city or that city? Should I, you know, marry this person or should I keep, keep dating? You know, these are all expected value questions. Maybe the thing you're optimizing for is your happiness or, uh, you know, your longevity or something like that. But you have some distribution. And then there are other mathematical terms that, you know, uh, describe other things you would care about too.

• 31:12Pablo Torre?

  It's just so funny to me because this is so obvious.

• 31:16Speaker 02

  Right.

• 31:17Pablo Torre?

  To everybody who is in your line of work and who does this professionally with any level of sophistication. And it's just not a way that people see the world in general, which is part of the advantage.

• 31:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I remember when a bunch of my poker friends came to visit me at business school and it was like Phil was there. So you had.

• 31:37Pablo Torre?

  Hellmuth?

• 31:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, tall Phil Hellmuth, Vanessa Salps, you know, lesbian woman. Joe Chong was there, Asian guy. Liv was there, British woman, you know, so you had this group of people that looked more dissimilar, been from more different places. And somebody said, oh, you know, I was sort of surprised that your poker friends are so diverse. And I laugh, you know, I was like, this is the most similar group of people that you're ever going to meet in your entire life. It's just the same brain in 10 different bodies.

• 32:00Pablo Torre?

  This gets us back though, to how you are now trying to beat out other people who may at this point be thinking similarly.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, so back to the survivor, like the one time I went on the podcast was, uh, to announce that I was going to pick a particular team. Because according to the math, once I announced that I'm taking a particular team and locked the pick in, uh, there's one particular opponent who I was sort of speaking to through the void where, given that I have picked this team, you should choose a different team. I haven't been able to contact juicy K at all, um, or get out. That's sort of the main reason I'm on the pod is to. Sort of make sure, I'm sure they understand and I would be shocked if they played anything other than San Francisco, but they're the only one of us three with San Francisco. It would be just a spectacular blunder if they did anything other than San Francisco. And, you know, lest you think that I'm trying to- So that's why I went on the podcast.

• 32:49Pablo Torre?

  Just to explain that, because basically what you're doing is you're declaring a commitment that is now giving this target demographic of one person.

• 33:00Speaker 02

  One person. I went on a podcast to talk to one person because I couldn't get his phone number.

• 33:03Pablo Torre?

  And to basically say to him, whatever math you're doing, just know that I am verbally committing to this. And you're basically hoping that tilts his analysis in a direction that you obviously prefer.

• 33:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, he should. It is mutually beneficial for both him and I for him to select a different team. And the cool thing about the Circa is once you lock your pick in, you can't change it. So in addition to doing this, I posted a little video of the phone where it's like, look, the pick is actually locked in.

• 33:28Pablo Torre?

  How's he gonna say, was that a bluff? Was that real?

• 33:30Speaker 02

  No, it was real. It was real. You run a little bit of risk doing this because you lock in your pick on a Thursday and then on Friday, you know, the quarterback gets into a car accident. I mean, that's, you know, small but real risk you run in order to make this play.

• 33:42Pablo Torre?

  But you saw that the play, given-

• 33:44Speaker 02

  It was worth it.

• 33:45Pablo Torre?

  The first mover advantage there was gonna be worth that.

• 33:48Speaker 02

  Right. Coming into Christmas, first of all, there's this very interesting dynamic, which, you know, I think went unnoticed by a lot of people, but it's like, how, you know, you already knew weeks in advance that a bunch, five of the people were gonna be on Dallas and four of the people are gonna be on Washington. And you knew that one of those two was gonna get eliminated on that day. So in essence, I don't care about the Dallas guys. Either they're gonna lose anyway, in which case I don't care, or I'm gonna lose, in which case I don't care. So you only care about competing against the other Washington people. But then, once the fateful day arrives, now we're a couple of days before Christmas, I take a look at the situation. I say, look,

• 34:27Speaker 02

  Everybody has some expected value. You know, there's 10 left. On average, each entry is worth 1.8 million. Some are worth more, some are worth less, depending on which teams you have remaining. And I said, well, now it's time to do some game theory negotiation. And so I was like, look, if all of the Washington people, if I could just buy all of those entries and own them all myself, then there's no need to play more than one Washington. Because if Washington wins, all the Dallas people are eliminated, and you could play the other three Washingtons on Minnesota and give yourself a fighting chance. If Dallas wins, you now have some free equity, which is, well, if Minnesota wins too, you're staying alive.

• 35:09Pablo Torre?

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:10Speaker 02

  And so it turns out the value of this is worth about a million dollars.

• 35:12Pablo Torre?

  And you model this out and you figure out that math.

• 35:14Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah, yeah. And it's explicitly legal. You can buy, you can trade, you can do whatever you want.

• 35:19Pablo Torre?

  I like how often you are reaffirming this is according to the rules.

• 35:23Speaker 02

  And I'll tell you why. The reason is because a lot of the people in the contest are poker players. And in poker, this is called collusion. It is explicitly illegal.

• 35:32Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 35:33Speaker 02

  And so to a poker player, this feels very, you know, sort of verboten. It's like, well, you're not supposed to be doing that. It's like, well, not in poker. This is a different game with different rules. You know, some people were complaining about it, and I felt a bit like a bunch of soccer players had come and played rugby, and they were like, ah, well, this guy is tackling me. And I talked to the ref, and he said it's legal, so I guess it's okay. It's like, no, dude, you're playing a different game. This game has different rules. It's not like the game that you know and love, poker. It's a totally different game.

• 36:00Pablo Torre?

  And I imagine, to the extent that you allow yourself to feel emotions during a very dispassionate analysis, there is that frustration that you just expressed, but also like the, great, you guys don't even want to try to do the thing that I'm trying to do.

• 36:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, and you know where it gets really interesting is modeling these opportunities out before they even arrive. I had actually sent messages to a couple of the players three weeks prior, saying, hey, if we get to Christmas, here's what we should do. But again, negotiating in these contests is very hard.

• 36:32Pablo Torre?

  Where the people, when you reached out to them to formally negotiate.

• 36:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 36:38Pablo Torre?

  Were they of your mentality?

• 36:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, so here's the thing that was great. Horolabas talked about, you know, interacting with Floyd Mayweather, which it just, that hit a question.

• 36:47Pablo Torre?

  So Bob used Floyd famously, and briefly, as a beard. And Floyd found himself...

• 36:54Pablo Torre?

  Truly thinking almost diametrically opposite how Bob thought about anything.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:59Pablo Torre?

  And there's one part of the story that I think amused you.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  Bob is using Floyd as a beard and Bob says, okay, we want to bet on Denver. And Floyd says, no, I like San Antonio. And then Bob says, well, the play is Denver, so we're gonna bet. And Floyd says, no, I like San Antonio. And then Bob says, okay, great. So why don't we just bet with each other, cut the house out of it? I'll take Denver, you take San Antonio. And Floyd says, no, no, I don't want to do that. You always win. Right, which is just such a funny, like, how does the world work versus how do gamblers think about the world?

• 37:26Pablo Torre?

  Exactly. These are psychology questions as opposed to math questions for so many of us.

• 37:30Speaker 02

  Right, and so negotiating in Survivor is often like that. You're trying to negotiate with people who are completely delusional. They've used every, every good team and, you know, they have nothing but hand grenades left. And then they say, oh, I want, you know, I think my bracket is worth a million. You're like, no, it's worth maybe 10% of that. But the thing that I did not fully appreciate until it happened was on Thanksgiving, it was mostly very sharp players, very smart players who played the underdogs. And then the underdogs all won, so the average skill of the remaining competitors was quite high. So a bunch of weak players got cleaned out then. So the players who were left in the contest at this point were very, very, very smart, very sharp, and thought about the game in basically the same way.

• 38:14Speaker 02

  And so I reached out to these guys and everybody was on the same page immediately. They were like, yep, this generates a ton of value. It would, it would be silly not to do this.

• 38:21Pablo Torre?

  You did need to explain expected value to them.

• 38:22Speaker 02

  Did need to explain expected value. Didn't need to explain why this was generating a bunch of expected value. We're sending, you know, computer programs and spreadsheets back and forth. It was just actually just a true pleasure to, to, to really work with these guys.

• 38:35Pablo Torre?

  You're almost romantic, talking about comparing models.

• 38:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was the night before Christmas. I was on vacation in London. It's freezing cold outside. Everybody's working together to put this deal together. You know, there's like a Jewish lawyer who doesn't celebrate Christmas and he had COVID, so he was home alone. He wrote all the paperwork for us.

• 38:51Pablo Torre?

  Because you're getting contracts drawn up.

• 38:53Speaker 02

  Contracts drawn up.

• 38:54Pablo Torre?

  I mean, these are seven-figure.

• 38:55Speaker 02

  $19 million on the line, you know, it's important. Usually in these things, it's very hard to put a deal together. And I think we must have spent 20 hours on the phone, like. Caching out various details and the structure of how things work and, you know, exactly how much each person's get paid. But it was nice because I had sort of a natural lead to sort of be like team captain because I had two of the five remaining picks.

• 39:20Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 39:21Speaker 02

  And also because I was also not, one of them was going to be on Minnesota and one of them was going to be on Washington. I was actually already sort of naturally diversified. I sort of had the leverage to really kind of put the deal together.

• 39:32Pablo Torre?

  So at this point, this is the night before Christmas, there are how many entries?

• 39:36Speaker 02

  10 total entries remaining. Five of them are going to play Dallas, who is playing against Washington.

• 39:42Pablo Torre?

  Yeah.

• 39:42Speaker 02

  Four, including one of mine, will be on Washington and one will be on Minnesota, which is also mine. And then by structuring a deal, we moved three Minnesotas as a group. And if Washington wins, the whole thing's over, we scoop. If Dallas wins, we now have a shot to advance four picks and stay in the fight if Minnesota can pull the upset. And that's actually what happened, like Dallas won their game, actually closer than expected against Washington.

• 40:08Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 40:08Speaker 02

  And then Minnesota won one of the most preposterous games I've ever seen against Detroit.

• 40:13Pablo Torre?

  Dude, it's so funny that that game was the game in question.

• 40:18Speaker 02

  Because you can only use each team once, you would never use a strong team when they're playing another strong team. Because, you know, you get a lot more value when they're playing somebody else. So almost always you're picking some mediocre team playing the Jets or playing the Raiders. So the games that have the most impact on the season are often the crappiest games. That Minnesota Detroit game was really quintessential Survivor, I think.

• 40:43Pablo Torre?

  So this is the 23 to 10 Vikings win.

• 40:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, where.

• 40:47Pablo Torre?

  We'll wind up eight and eight.

• 40:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, the Vikings were starting Max Brosmer, a third string quarterback. I think he's a rookie from Minnesota. I think he finished with negative three passing yards. It was really like the Olympics should put one regular guy

• 41:00Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  out there just so you can see how good everyone. He really seemed like it was basically like a regular guy out there trying to play NFL quarterback.

• 41:07Pablo Torre?

  But when you as Galen are watching this game, what are you like? Are you actually disciplined emotionally? Are you at peace with whatever is happening because you've done the math? And this is the right process, if not the preferred result?

• 41:21Speaker 02

  If I made the right decision, I never feel regret. But you know, I like watching, I like watching the games, you know, it's, it's, it's exciting to have a sweat.

• 41:28Pablo Torre?

  Max Brosmer is the only NFL quarterback in the Super Bowl era to play the entire game and finish with under 70 passing yards and seven plus sacks.

• 41:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:37Pablo Torre?

  And yet still win.

• 41:39Speaker 02

  Detroit had, I think, six turnovers.

• 41:53Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, a disgusting football game.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  Disgusting football game. It was a true Christmas miracle from my perspective.

• 41:57Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, four fumbles, lost two interceptions by Detroit.

• 41:59Speaker 02

  It's just such a classic thing, like, don't celebrate before you cross the finish line. And sometimes in gambling, people really complain and despair before the game's over. And it's like, we lost two starting quarterbacks for Kansas City, then two starting quarterbacks for Washington, and two starting quarterbacks for Minnesota. And it's like, guess what? You got a miracle anyway. So sometimes things can work out, even when it looks pretty grim.

• 42:20Pablo Torre?

  So, coming out of that game, then, give us the State of the Union.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  Now, we were down to nine players. Of those, two of them were mine, but now really, it's a syndicate, a group of us who are sharing the equity of four. So we own four out of the nine. And then, um, you know, we played those as a group optimally over the final two weeks. So we own four out of nine, finished with two out of six. And then, you know, the great irony is the two out of six that finished were both of the ones that I had started with. You know, so the outside world, it was like, oh my God, Galen wins, you know.

• 42:54Pablo Torre?

  That's Phil Hellman.

• 42:55Speaker 02

  Phil Hellman saying, oh, he's won two out of six. And it's like, well, you know.

• 42:58Pablo Torre?

  $7.48 million.

• 43:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, uh, you know, Galen and friends.

• 43:03Pablo Torre?

  How embarrassing to only have one. What did you actually win, then? What did you take home?

• 43:07Speaker 02

  I won, uh, in the seven figures. So I was, I was quite happy with the take. And also, emotionally importantly, nobody won more than me in our group. So, uh, you know, I had the biggest chunk by far.

• 43:21Pablo Torre?

  A group project where someone, yeah, took, took the initiative.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, yeah.

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• 45:11Pablo Torre?

  And now we get to this part in the afterglow of your circus support survivor pool win to the tune of seven figures. We get to March Madness.

• 45:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:20Pablo Torre?

  And look, I assume, I can only assume that you're a March Madness vet.

• 45:24Speaker 02

  March Madness is my favorite thing in the world. I've only ever had really one real job. But when I started that real job, on the first day, I said, where do I take time off? I will not be here on the first two days of March Madness. It's like a religious holiday for me, like.

• 45:38Pablo Torre?

  That Thursday, Friday.

• 45:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I just, I will, I will work on Christmas. I will work on Hanukkah like I don't care. I will not, I don't care what is happening. I will not be here those two days. And March Madness has a lot of the same things where similar to Circa. It's like a lot of the people who participate. And again, I don't want to like denigrate people like they're doing it for fun. They're trying to have a good time.

• 45:58Pablo Torre?

  Let me denigrate as a citizen of the country you are about to denigrate. It's well established now that people who know less seem to do often better than people who know something.

• 46:09Speaker 02

  Two points to address that. Are you familiar with like a Bayes' theory?

• 46:13Pablo Torre?

  I would love for you to explain Bayesian.

• 46:15Speaker 02

  So let's just go with an example. Suppose there's a disease and you're a doctor and you go into a town. And you have a test that is 90% accurate. So it'll give you the right answer 90% of the time. Actually, let's make it more like, let's say 5% of the people have the disease and your test is 90% accurate.

• 46:32Pablo Torre?

  I'm glad we're sticking with disease though, as the matter of fact.

• 46:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so you give somebody the test and the test comes up positive. What are the chances that that person actually has the disease? So most people say, oh, 90% chance. Like you tested them, the test is 90% accurate. So there's 90% chance they have the disease. Bayes says, well, you have to actually understand the background distribution. The background distribution is, you know, the disease is quite rare. Only 5% of people have it. So let's look at the group of positive tests. In a group of 1,000 people, there are 50 people who have the disease. And you will test them and 45 of them will come up positive. And there are 950 people who do not have the disease and 95 will come up positive.

• 47:14Speaker 02

  So if you look at the group of positives, you'll see that roughly two thirds of them, you know, 95 out of 140. You'll see most of the positives are actually people who do not have the disease. Thinking about the distribution and then reasoning backwards towards the outcomes and understanding the likelihood. The reason I explain that is, you know, we were saying, oh, it often seems that people who have no clue what they're doing do better in March Madness. And then the answer is like, no, the clueless people do worse. But there's just so many of them. If 95% of the people are just kind of closing their eyes and filling out the bracket based on, you know, whose mascot they like more, those people might be half as likely, or a third as likely, or a 10th as likely to win as somebody who really knows what they're

• 47:59Speaker 02

  doing. But there's so many of them that at the end, the odds that you end up with one of those people winning is actually quite high. But it doesn't mean the group of them were doing something sensible. It just means like, you know.

• 48:11Pablo Torre?

  It just feels that way.

• 48:12Speaker 02

  Just feels that way.

• 48:13Pablo Torre?

  But this is, I think, a crucial, again, we keep on coming back, lapsing back into this, into this bifurcation of like, people who feel and people who are actually calculating.

• 48:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. Although I will say the second point is, specifically with March Madness, one of the quote-unquote mistakes that people make is they're often trying to get as many picks right as possible, or try and fill out the most accurate bracket instead of trying to win the contest. So they overpick the favorite to win the title. And so it's like, you know, somebody will be a 20% favorite and 45% of the people will pick them. And it's like, congratulations, you picked the most likely team. Now you have to beat 45% of the field who also picked them.

• 48:53Pablo Torre?

  Right. The best-case scenario is a lot worse than they realize.

• 48:56Speaker 02

  Right. And so like, you know, oftentimes, some of the people just randomly filling out a bracket are kind of accidentally making quite good brackets. Turns out like, an optimal type of bracket is like, picking a number three seed and all chalk. And then, you know, that three seed has a 3% chance of winning. And if you're in like a 100% pool, you now have a 3% chance of winning your 100% pool because you're the only person who picked them. Brackets like that often are overrepresented among the random filler outers.

• 49:24Pablo Torre?

  How many brackets are you entering?

• 49:26Speaker 02

  I usually am good for about 100.

• 49:30Speaker 02

  I've been, um.

• 49:31Pablo Torre?

  Somehow, somehow despite being this deep into the conversation with you, I had the under.

• 49:35Speaker 02

  I mean, the true answer is as many as I can get my hands on. And again, it's probably not like economically the best use of my time, but I just love it so much. But any pool, any pool I can get into, I'm going there. And then I just building a portfolio of, you know, 100 different brackets. That's, you know, nicely balanced and, uh, and, you know, generating maximum value at every possible node. And then, you know, I sort of end up with a couple, like, you know, usually I'm short. The, the big, you know, the most likely team I, is overrepresented, so I don't pick them.

• 50:07Pablo Torre?

  Right.

• 50:07Speaker 02

  Um, so I end up with some liabilities on like, well, if, if, if, you know, the best team wins, then I, none of my hundred are going to win. Um, and then you can just go on, you know, uh, prediction market, Kalshi or something like that. And just bet on that team to win at 10 to one or five to one or whatever. And then now you're covered for that.

• 50:24Pablo Torre?

  I was gonna say, so you're actually somehow you are finding a way to fulfill the promise of the prediction market. By, yeah, hedging.

• 50:33Speaker 02

  Part of the pitch of prediction markets is actually they can be useful for hedging in certain circumstances.

• 50:38Pablo Torre?

  Oh, I was talking to a former employee of the CFTC.

• 50:41Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 50:41Pablo Torre?

  And this person was telling me, like, look, the most sort of like real world case of using an event contract to protect against downside risk is like, let's say you're a sports bar in New England.

• 50:56Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 50:57Pablo Torre?

  And there is the eventuality, the possibility that the Patriots are not going to make a run to the Super Bowl.

• 51:03Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 51:03Pablo Torre?

  So let me buy event contracts such that I can protect my business, which is gonna boom based on the Patriots' success. Let me protect myself in the case that they don't.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. Totally reasonable.

• 51:16Pablo Torre?

  But I just say this all to point out that like, most people aren't sports bar owners.

• 51:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, right, right, right, right, right.

• 51:21Pablo Torre?

  And they're people who are, who are gambling. And in this case, I think you are, once again, sussing out, what are the available opportunities here? What are the rules available to me? And how can I combine this into a? Diversified portfolio that protects me in ways that other people have not even in the main begun to contemplate.

• 51:41Speaker 02

  An overarching principle on all these is you've got to make sure you're asking yourself the right question. You've got to make sure you are playing the right game, right? Like, March Madness is not about basketball. It's how many people are going to pick which team? That's, that's the right game. That's the question. If you're going to build a model, that's, that's the model you should, you should be building. Not like, is UNLV going to beat Duke? If you're building a model, what is the distribution of future probabilities look like? What is the number of people picking each team look like? What are the negotiation options? That's where your time is. But you know, you've just got to make sure you're playing the right game. If you're trying to make money, you know, which not, which not everybody is.

• 52:16Pablo Torre?

  I think this is a crucial thing I have found out today, as I just try to simplify what is complicated as much as I can, so I can understand it and my audience can, is that whether or not we realize it, we are not behaving in the main as if we want to win money.

• 52:36Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, which like.

• 52:38Pablo Torre?

  Which is a real advantage to the people who are.

• 52:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, which is fine. Like not, not everything.

• 52:43Pablo Torre?

  It's great for you.

• 52:44Speaker 02

  Right. Like, like, I mean, in the, in the World Series of Poker main event, right? Somebody's been saving up. They've been wanting to play this their whole life. Maybe 10 friends got together, put in a thousand dollars and the winner goes to the main. Um, and so they get there and it's like, you know, they're trying to play well. They're trying to win money, but they also have non-economic incentives, which totally makes sense. Like humans are not robots, right? The person doesn't want to bust on hand one, right? Like if you gave them a pretty attractive opportunity on hand one, but there's a 30% chance they're going to go broke, they might not take it because they're like, look, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. I don't want to bust on hand one. That, that would really like make me extremely sad, you know, and economists would call it utility. Like I

• 53:26Speaker 02

  would experience a lot of disutility if that happened. That's totally reasonable.

• 53:31Pablo Torre?

  And so the question that I enter the studio with of like, so who's winning these things? I, I realize, I find out, of course it's Galen, Galens. And the question that you have to ask yourself, if you are somebody who wants to plausibly compete with Galens, is are you even aware what Galens are doing?

• 53:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:03Pablo Torre?

  Pablo Torre Finds Out is produced by Walter Avaroma, Maxwell Carney, Ryan Cortez, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Lohman, Rob McCray, Matt Sullivan, Claire Taylor, and Chris Tubinello. Our studio engineering is by RG Systems. Our sound design by Andrew Bersik and NGW Post. Digital strategy by Bailey Carlin and Andrew Northern. And our theme song, as always, by John Bravo. We'll talk to you next time.