Counting Cards & Quantitative Thinking

What does it take to count cards? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly explore blackjack, quantitative thinking, and the journey from MIT blackjack player to angel investor with Semyon Dukach, Managing Partner at One Way Ventures.

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

• 0:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, very good. You're the good guys.

• 0:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. There you go.

• 0:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk Sports Edition. Today, we're gonna talk about counting cards. Stuff that the casinos hate about you, if you have the talent to pull that off. I got with me, as always, my co-host Chuck Nice, Chucker Baby. Hey, what's happening? Our professional standard comedian and actor and game show host. Brain Games on National Geographic, very cool. Yes, and card counter.

• 0:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the one person who has actual professional athletic street cred among us, Gary O'Reilly. Gary, always good to have you here, man.

• 1:05Gary O'Reilly?

  Pleasure's mine. Thank you, Neil.

• 1:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks for making us legit. So, Gary, what, I mean, card counting, we've all heard about it. We've seen movies about it. We wish we had that ability. And again, we don't know if you can be trained for it. And so you decided to create a whole show on it. So what do you have in store for us today?

• 1:24Gary O'Reilly?

  A very, hopefully, a story that will not just be fascinating, but so interesting to a number of people. We are gonna meet someone with an interesting and amazing life story. Basically starts as a pre-teen refugee who became a professional blackjack player on the infamous MIT blackjack team. So Neil, please meet our guest.

• 1:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Semyon, welcome to StarTalk.

• 1:48Speaker 02

  Thank you. Thanks for having me.

• 1:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent, excellent. So there's been a film made and books based on you and documentaries about your life. How do you go from being a computer science, early, early, computer science geek to cards or blackjacks? Like, what is the, how do you go from A to B in that conversation?

• 2:11Speaker 02

  Oh, well, one day in 1991, I was walking down the infinite corridor at MIT, and I saw a poster on the wall, and the poster said, "Make $10,000 over the summer. Play blackjack in the Vegas casinos."

• 2:28Speaker 02

  And you know, that sounded pretty good. So I love.

• 2:32Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 2:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, just to be clear, um, MIT, you could probably get away with that. But but there could be some places where that same sign would say, this summer, lose $10,000. Casino.

• 2:48Chuck Nice?

  Right, but MIT is probably one of the few places where the poster would be believed.

• 2:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But believable poster.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  I think that's right. And you know, the truth is, I I I'm not sure I would have believed it, except I happened to play a lot of Pac-Man when I was a kid in Texas. And, uh, you know, the video game. And so one day I went to the library and I needed to make my quarter last a very long time. I I couldn't get a second quarter, you know, it was just one quarter to be had. Um, and so I went to the library and I found, I looked at books on Pac-Man and there was only one book. Uh, by this guy named Ken Ustin. I read the book and I was able to play Pac-Man for a long, long time until I didn't feel like playing it anymore. Uh, but then I went back and and noticed that he had a bunch of other books and all his other books were about blackjack.

• 3:35Speaker 02

  So he was this one of these guys that was able to beat, I guess, the casinos in Atlantic City when they first opened up about a decade before before I played.

• 3:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so all this started because you tried to milk a quarter for as much Pac-Man time as you could get from it.

• 3:51Speaker 02

  That's right, in the very beginning.

• 3:53Chuck Nice?

  See, but this is, this, this is so very important right now for all of you parents out there to to take note. Okay. Because we all think that video games are deleterious to our children's mental health and to their academ- academics. And, uh, we say, oh, you're gonna ruin yourself by playing these video games. But it's really not about the video games, it's about the child, the kid. So if your kid ever says, I'm going to the library to get some books on video games, they're gonna be okay.

• 4:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 4:32Chuck Nice?

  You know what I mean? That kid's gonna be all right.

• 4:36Gary O'Reilly?

  As long as they're telling the truth, because if they're not, I may go somewhere else. Right. Forget about it. So, Semyon, okay, so you go from Pac-Man to Blackjack. It's a pretty big leap. So you must have had some kind of superpower somewhere up your sleeve. So, so what is it? Is it total recall, concentration, or do you just have to be good with numbers? What's the deal there for a Blackjack player?

• 5:01Speaker 02

  None of the above. I mean,

• 5:03Gary O'Reilly?

  All right.

• 5:04Speaker 02

  The superpower, I think, was twofold. Well, one was, I guess, that I had this notion that I might go to the library and read something. That's already, right? Like, that's the privileged background, right? The examples set in the youth, I think, that I had, right? I had educated parents. The other superpower, I think, maybe was just not being able to get that second quarter, like, having the motivation to read the book and then later having the motivation.

• 5:29Gary O'Reilly?

  You were incentivized.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  Work my ass off. Like, when I saw, when I met the MRT Blackjack team, having read the books about it, you know, I felt like it was a very lucky opportunity that I actually could meet these people, you know? And I wanted to make money. I wanted to make a lot more than $10,000. I needed to. It was a real, you know, goal for me at the time. It's not necessarily the best goal for a young man to have, but for me at the time, you know, that was the goal. We were poor, right? Like, we lived in the projects. It sucked. And, you know, that was the main, that was the main differentiator. It's just the willingness to work my ass off and, like, do this stuff over and over and over and over again. There was no rocket science. There was no math genius, you know? I mean, coming up with those systems probably required a lot of knowledge and intelligence, but I actually didn't come up with them, you know?

• 6:11Speaker 02

  I was taught how to do it, and then I ended up, you know, running my own group and teaching a bunch of other people how to do it. But it was all about, like, diligence, hard work, record-keeping, for sure, and just repeating things over and over and over again until they got it, right?

• 6:27Chuck Nice?

  So there's another thing for you parents out there to understand, okay? Is if you are doing okay, maybe you are a middle class or a middle, middle class, upper middle class, okay? Let your children be poor. Don't give your children any money. That will motivate them. You know, my father used to say all the time, I'd be like, Dad, can I get some sneakers? He'd be like, go ahead. I'd be like, okay, can I have the money? And be like, you, you want sneakers, you go get them. And then I would say, but, and I would say, but Dad, we have money. And then he would say, no, son, I have money.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  I earned the money.

• 7:08Chuck Nice?

  I have money. You are broke. You are poor. You don't have crap. See? So there you go.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  And that's how Chuck started Robin Banks. It's hard, right? It's really hard to pull off. I mean, I have six kids, right? And I mean, I have money now, right? And so like, it's easier to live than done. It sounds like you've had a pretty good job. I do my best, but it's not easy, right? It's not easy.

• 7:32Chuck Nice?

  No, it's not.

• 7:33Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, let's, let's jump from being really incentivized to make this thing successful. You then have to, you must have to acquire a certain skill set. Um, are we, are we into game series here? Do you start to deploy those sort of things or is it something different again?

• 7:51Speaker 02

  Or probabilities as well.

• 7:52Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, totally.

• 7:53Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 7:54Speaker 02

  There's none of those things, you know?

• 7:59Chuck Nice?

  It had to be something. It had to be something.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  That could be the answer to every question. I don't know, I just did it, I don't know. Like 20 years ago, these books and stories about what they did came out and I did a lot of interviews. And, you know, people always wanted to hear about the mess you made and stuff. And I kind of played along, but at this point, you know, I'll, I'll tell it to you like it really was, okay? We, we couldn't have trained anybody to do it. It was the same as like the math skills required were, you know, second grade level, like literally counting like three, four, five, five, four, three, two, you know? Um, just keeping track of like one number and adding ones and subtracting ones and, and just not getting distracted. Now that's the level of skills that were required. The rest of it was just memorizing a system that other people already came up with. It, it was pretty rudimentary. It, it required discipline.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  It required not drinking while you're doing it, stuff like that. It didn't require any great theoretical mathematical thinking that was in this.

• 8:53Chuck Nice?

  So, you know, it's

• 8:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go on Chuck.

• 8:55Chuck Nice?

  I was just gonna say, it's, uh, so, I'm really attached to this story because my father was a gambler. And I don't mean like, he gambled, I mean, he was a gambler.

• 9:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, that sounds like a blues song ready to be written. My father was a gambling man.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  He went to hold him and went to walk away.

• 9:15Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 9:18Chuck Nice?

  My daddy was a gambler.

• 9:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In Philadelphia.

• 9:24Chuck Nice?

  Didn't always win.

• 9:27Gary O'Reilly?

  We got a number one on our hands.

• 9:30Chuck Nice?

  But the funny thing is that, uh, he did count cards. And I don't, I don't know the system that he used, but, uh, it was, and, and maybe Simeon could tell me what it is. But it basically was, there's a count, it's plus one, zero, or minus one. That's all he did. And, uh, you bet according to where the count is, where, uh, the number of decks and the cards that are in the deck. And you had, just have to have the discipline to bet wisely during the entire shoe. And, you know, to know when to bet when the count is up, down, or zero. I mean, that's, I never did it, so that's what I understood him to be doing. But there were times I would see him make a crap ton of money.

• 10:14Chuck Nice?

  And then there were times that, you know, uh, that led to him being divorced, uh, from my mother.

• 10:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And his dog left him.

• 10:28Speaker 02

  I'm not sure those two are related or all that, you know? Money can, can lead to getting divorced, but making a whole bunch of money could also lead to getting divorced.

• 10:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, very good point.

• 10:38Chuck Nice?

  You're absolutely right. You're right about that, you're right about that.

• 10:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so if you didn't do anything, we're asking you, what did, what did you do?

• 10:45Speaker 02

  That's what I did, I did the same thing your father did. I think the difference was that we had a group of people who were very diligent about doing it. I think those people kind of learn, sort of think they can kind of do it, right? We tested people all the time. We checked their skills, uh, not only once, but before each trip, uh, it You have a very small advantage, right? And it takes a long time to get to the long term. And in any short period of time, you could win or lose, it's kind of random, right? You have like this tiny little one percentage or half a percentage. And after months or even years of playing, you're gonna know you're gonna be ahead.

• 11:20Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 11:21Speaker 02

  In the real world, people get distracted, people get tired, right? People get emotional about their wins and losses. And they deviate from the system without even realizing it. So that's, I think, what distinguishes us as real professionals from the many thousands of other people who kind of do very counter.

• 11:39Chuck Nice?

  And it's funny because the casino does that, but they don't need the discipline because the house rules don't change no matter what. But the house rules are set up so that this slight percentage of advantage that they have means that over the long term, they're always going to win over the long term as a casino.

• 12:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, just maybe be clear. What he said was, Chuck, that there are fluctuations from hand to hand.

• 12:11Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 12:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even from day to day, that can go up or down. But if you stay diligent with the system.

• 12:17Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 12:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The small percent that you gain against the average will accumulate. And then you can basically bank those winnings reliably.

• 12:27Chuck Nice?

  And that's the deal. And they call that having long money. You gotta have long money.

• 12:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Long money, okay.

• 12:32Gary O'Reilly?

  So Simeon, in the intro, I talked about high-low system and card steering. So break down card steering for me because I think we've realized now that if you're gonna play blackjack, you have got to have ninja-like concentration and, as they say, always watching. So can you just, even just for me and the rest of our audience that don't know, card steering, please unlock that for us.

• 12:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary, we'll get to that question after the break. Cause I'm dying. I know, sorry. See what I did there?

• 13:00Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Keep them hanging, keep them hanging.

• 13:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we'll be right back with our special guest, card counter extraordinaire, Simeon Ducash on Starcom Fortune Show.

• 13:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back with Semyon Dukach. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, StarTalk Sports Edition. Semyon Dukach is an MIT computer scientist, entrepreneur, and who made his mark counting cards in blackjack. And we're trying to get to the bottom of this. Where how did it happen? Where it came from? What special talents it was? And by the way, it's not illegal to count cards. It's just casinos don't like it when you do that. Because it tips things in your favor instead of their favor.

• 13:55Chuck Nice?

  Which brings us to our first question. How did you get out of Vegas with both of your knees?

• 14:02Gary O'Reilly?

  Still in your legs.

• 14:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so Semyon, I need you to define for us certain terms. We went into the break with Gary asking you about, what was it Gary?

• 14:12Gary O'Reilly?

  So, there's a couple of techniques. And Semyon, I'm sure will be able to, as I said, unlock those for us. One in particular which sounds very interesting, card steering.

• 14:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Card steering.

• 14:24Gary O'Reilly?

  So if you...

• 14:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not only that, I want to know about quantified thinking. There's all these terms.

• 14:29Gary O'Reilly?

  We're gonna get there.

• 14:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay, good. It's card steering. So, Semyon, what do you got for us there?

• 14:35Speaker 02

  So, we have a number of, let's say, more advanced, more complicated techniques that at least in theory could generate a bigger advantage than the 1% or so advantage you can get with card counting. And so, card steering, there was a few variations of it. Sometimes it involved tracking sequences of cards through the shuffle, roughly being able to kind of see that there might be four or five cards in between each in a sequence after shuffling and kind of predict when the last one is gonna come. It wasn't always possible, right? Sometimes we could see the last card at one shoe after all the shuffling is done. And then when you cut the cards, we would learn to cut a precise number of cards, like exactly fifty two cards.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  Let's say exactly that from the back of the shoe. And then we would know that the back card would come out number fifty two, right? And that's exactly how many you cut, which you could get good at by just practicing for hours a day of cutting exactly fifty two cards.

• 15:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, don't people get shot for this?

• 15:35Speaker 02

  Well, uh, maybe.

• 15:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've seen enough movies where like a Smith and Wesson beats four aces, okay?

• 15:43Speaker 02

  Smith and Wesson beats four aces, but not so much in the corporate run, public company run Vegas of the nineties. In the Vegas of the sixties and seventies, yeah, it wouldn't have worked very well. And we did play a lot internationally and there were some places where we probably shouldn't have played. Um, but.

• 16:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You think?

• 16:04Speaker 02

  The stuff we did wasn't legal. We didn't, we didn't violate any rules to the game. We didn't cheat, which was important because we didn't get kicked out all the time, caught all the time. So had we done anything illegal, they would prosecute us certainly. Uh, so we were careful not to break the law.

• 16:20Gary O'Reilly?

  You were running computer simulations. You were replicating live casino environments. So as your blackjack players would be comfortable and not dazzled by a casino environment. I mean, this basically is almost when you say you analyzed results, you looked at things. And you weren't just looking at successes, you were looking at failures. Now, then if you apply quantified thinking, how do you approach this group of data? And then bring it forward successfully for you?

• 16:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a really good question. I'll give you an example because that's some of the work that actually distinguished us from some of the other groups that weren't as successful. Right? It wasn't those card steaming advanced techniques because those ended up not working most of the time. Honestly, they only worked in certain situations. At the end of the day, we made the money doing the well-known card arithmetic techniques that have already been written about. But we did it more diligently and I think, um. Running simulations to predict, you know, how much you should have won uh in order to kind of track what really happened. And then running these examinations, basically, where in in our own sort of classroom environment, we would try to distract people, right?

• 17:38Speaker 02

  We would have one person test another person, but someone else would be distracting them, like trying to talk to them, trying to, you know, offer them drinks or whatever happens in the real casino. And we would track how many mistakes people would make. People would always invariably make some mistakes in the counting. Like, they just weren't perfect, they couldn't see every single card, right? And so we would get a better understanding model of of the real life performance of of the card counter in the casino, rather than a theoretical performance that, you know, the books say you're gonna have. And so based on that, we would know the right amount to bet and the right way to play. And that made all the difference, right? Is using that data and being realistic about our own capabilities.

• 18:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But from one decade to another, computers gain speed and precision and accuracy and algorithms get better. So did any of this improve over the decades from the nineties to today, for example?

• 18:33Speaker 02

  Probably to some extent, but I I would say, you know, we've never used computers in the casino or anything like that. Like, that would, that probably would be cheating. Uh, we didn't work on any of those kinds of things. Uh, we merely used them to better analyze and better understand how we should be playing. Uh, and I think, yeah, I'm sure there were improvements, but uh for the most part, I think the technology was sufficient at the time uh to be able to improve discipline, right? And to be able to model how we will perform realistically in a casino environment. And and design the tests that we had to apply to each other to make sure that we were good enough. Because you really have to be very precise, you couldn't make very many errors, right?

• 19:16Gary O'Reilly?

  Right. So, Semyon, if if we look at, if we look at sport, their their quantified thinking, their data analytics, they analyze different things now, different metrics than the ones they did ten, twenty years ago. What were, what would you be looking at now that you weren't looking at back then in the nineties that would change the game even more? Or have you just washed it away and not considered it?

• 19:40Speaker 02

  You know, I haven't given much thought to the game of blackjack.

• 19:43Chuck Nice?

  Well, I mean, the one thing that's changed dramatically in many casinos, and I'm not particularly sure if it's because of, you know, people like Simeon, but is the auto shuffler combined with eight decks. And the auto shuffler shuffles after like so many hands, not even, it doesn't go an entire shoe. It's like you pick it up, you put it back in, it's shuffled like after three hands. Or sometimes you'll see that they do it, it looks random. I like, is it, I'm not even sure if the dealer is just instructed to do it,

• 20:27Chuck Nice?

  or if they're just like, eh, just do it, just do it, you know? But that's, that's got to have changed things tremendously for card counters.

• 20:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's right, because Simeon, you know, when you're just playing at home, it's one deck of cards. And so you can get a sense whether the remaining cards to be dealt are royal heavy or, you know, low card heavy, you get a sense of that. But with eight decks, how can you possibly know that?

• 20:49Speaker 02

  You get a sense of it in the same exact way. You know, it's just that with one deck of cards, let's say three little, three extra little cards came out, and you know there are three extra big cards left on the deck. Okay, so there's eight decks, you're gonna want to see a lot more. You're gonna want to see like 20 or 25 little extra cards come out. Which will still happen the same fraction of the time, right? Like you just have to play long enough until that happens. And then you bet a lot. So it's, it's no different, the numbers are just a little larger.

• 21:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you do have to reset every time they, reset your, your brain computer every time they shuffle?

• 21:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that's right. So, so to answer your other question, yes, if they start shuffling all the time, you can't, these techniques don't work. And, but however, this isn't like a modern tournament. The casinos knew about card counting since the 60s.

• 21:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Right.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  They occasionally make the rules. And there's a bunch of other rule variations besides shuffling that they could do to make card counting not work very well. But- The thing is, millions of people know about card counting. It's it's marketing for the game, like blackjack. They make more money than any other card game in a casino, or really anything else besides slot machines. Precisely because people know it can be beat. And so I think there's competition between casinos. They players. Players who think they're doing well card counting, you know, they want the best possible rules. They don't want the houses stop all the time. And ninety nine percent of them lose money. And so the casinos eventually grounded it back to making the game be beatable at the edge.

• 22:20Speaker 02

  As long as it's only beatable by a small number of people, it kind of works.

• 22:24Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  And as long as those rare people who could actually beat the game. Don't start betting table maximum, which is what we did, right? That is the problem.

• 22:34Chuck Nice?

  But that's brilliant. What you're saying is that um they use their vulnerability as a marketing tool.

• 22:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As bait.

• 22:42Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it's like, yeah, you know, we're not. Yeah, we're not going to shuffle it all the time. Come on in and play, take, you know, you got a better chance here. Come on and sit down and play because they're still going to win.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  That's exactly it. With most people, they're still going to win.

• 22:56Gary O'Reilly?

  OK, Semyon, the MIT Blackjack Club was just famous, infamous, choose it whichever way you wish. But you're a professional blackjack player. You are. You've left ten grand during the summer way behind in the rearview mirror. Why then, if you're doing this successfully, did you decide to walk away?

• 23:17Speaker 02

  That's a good question, too. So it wasn't because I was kicked out of all the casinos and the jig was up. Because I was actually kicked out of all the casinos very quickly and continued doing it anyway.

• 23:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or because you're missing your kneecaps, as Chuck had suggested earlier.

• 23:31Speaker 02

  There were a few threats here and there, but really they're big public corporations that they generally just don't do that anymore. Um, it's not really worse for them, right? We don't really win that much. I got bored of it, right? I just started feeling like it was kind of pointless. You know, it sounds like we really made that much money. It was a few million dollars. It wasn't, it seemed like a lot, right? But by the time we were doing it.

• 23:55Chuck Nice?

  A few million bucks, I mean, seriously. This is the borderline. Wait, by the way.

• 24:01Gary O'Reilly?

  That's a few million, that's a few million dollars in the early nineties.

• 24:06Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  You don't understand what else happened.

• 24:07Gary O'Reilly?

  Back to that into today.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  You have to consider what else happened in that time period, okay? So, and where we came from. So, yeah, we were the MIT blackjack team, right? I was studying computer science several levels. In my own particular, specific example, I was in the process of completing a PhD dissertation on the very first way to transfer money over the internet. Like, that's the thing.

• 24:31Chuck Nice?

  Oh, okay.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  I published it. You know, you could look it up. Like, the people who then started PayPal, for example, right? They cited my paper as an earlier work. It wasn't very good perhaps, but it was first. That's what I dropped.

• 24:43Chuck Nice?

  Just to be clear, wasn't that Elon Musk?

• 24:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, Elon, Elon and Peter T. Young and all those guys, you know, they, they did better. Their technology worked better, but it's because I quit, right? To play blackjack. So, no, in retrospect, the, I mean, the one million dollars I personally made and the five million dollars the whole group made were not at all interesting or significant. And we had multiple people come out of the group who became billionaires in technology.

• 25:08Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 25:09Speaker 02

  So, we just wasted a bunch of time, financially speaking. But then there was a whole other side to it, okay? We didn't generate any value. We had no customers. Nobody ever said, "Thank you," right? We just moved money from one place to another. And we felt really smart because we thought we were smarter than these people who worked for the casinos. And, you know, okay, so we were smarter than these people, but, you know, so what? Like, that's not really something to be particularly proud of, right?

• 25:32Chuck Nice?

  It's interesting. It, it, what, what you're really talking about here is... Well, he grew a conscience. He grew a conscience. Well, more than that is, is, is the value of purpose. In what we do.

• 25:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 25:44Chuck Nice?

  The value of purpose in in your endeavors probably outweighs any financial gain that you might glean from what it is that you do.

• 25:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck the life counselor. I love it.

• 25:56Speaker 02

  The world is kind of funny that way, right? Because if you actually follow the sense of purpose and you exceed and succeed and excel at that, right? And deliver a lot of value to people who we want to help and and get their gratitude in exchange, right? You're gonna end up making way more money than if you just try to make money. Like at the end of the day, you're gonna do better anyway. So.

• 26:20Gary O'Reilly?

  Samyam, you said there that the the MIT Blackjack team basically was a hothouse for future entrepreneurs. Was it just by chance that this happened? Or do you think playing Blackjack the way that you did as a team was enabling people to develop certain parts in the future?

• 26:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait, just to be clear. Gary, Gary, we're talking about MIT here.

• 26:47Chuck Nice?

  I was about to say.

• 26:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Computer science people at the birth of an entire internet.

• 26:51Speaker 02

  Exactly. And more than that, it's among the computer science people, there's lots of people who just became programmers with Microsoft, right? These are the computer science people who wanted to take risks, who wanted to be entrepreneurial, to think outside the box, to tackle something that's supposed to be impossible, right? These are all personal characteristics conducive to doing really, really well.

• 27:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 27:11Speaker 02

  For the first.

• 27:12Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. That's what I'm thinking was the case here. So this this this game of Blackjack attracted a certain thinker, a certain dynamic within a person that then found another path to take itself forward.

• 27:27Speaker 02

  After that, like, it was the commercial aspect of it, the fact that we're trying to make money rather than playing chess or or or play with paper airplanes, right? We're specifically motivated by generating profits. So that combination, right, of the quantity of thinking and discipline and diligence and the desire to do well financially ended up being very lucrative for computer science.

• 27:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was any of it to sticking it to the man? You know, casinos, you know.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  Definitely about sticking it to the man, definitely. That was a big part of it.

• 27:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A big part of it, because you wouldn't do that to a homeless shelter. Uh, you'd do it to a casino, right?

• 28:04Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. I mean, we really did, you know, there was also a sense of teamwork. There was a little bit of a war going on. It was like us against them and we were the good guys, right? And they were the evil people who tricked all the poor people into losing all their money, right?

• 28:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly.

• 28:18Speaker 02

  Getting them drunk, right? With three drinks. And we hated them. We really hated them.

• 28:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, guys, we've got to take a quick break, but when we come back, more conversation with Semyon Dukach. We're going to find out what floats his boat today, because it's not the card counting anymore, but he's doing some really cool stuff. We're going to find out when we return on StarTalk Sports Edition.

• 28:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk Sports Edition, and we've got our special guest today, MIT alumnus Semyon Dukach. And Semyon, do you have a social media presence? Or do you lead the private life of some?

• 29:11Speaker 02

  No, no, you can find me @SemyonDukach on Twitter.

• 29:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On Twitter, so S E M Y O N, Semyon Dukach, D U K A C H. We'll find you there on Twitter. So, so Gary, take this thing home. Where are we going next?

• 29:28Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, so we've walked away from the tables with a big beaming smile on our face, but you weren't happy. You've become now a mentor. Um, why? Was the emptiness of being a blackjack player and just not really having any thanks and gratitude in your life in that regards a reason why you went to mentoring? Or was there another dynamic in play here?

• 29:54Speaker 02

  I would say I didn't go straight to mentoring, right? I first went back to technology and I started some companies that used more of my skills and knowledge than just blackjack. And yeah, I definitely sensed a contrast where customers would buy my software, would not only send money, but would also say thank you, right? And talk about how the software helped them solve their problems. And that felt really good, right? In a way that blackjack hasn't. But then I also realized fairly quickly after a few years, by the year 2000 or so, that I didn't really want to build my company, a single company, you know, for a decade or two.

• 30:35Speaker 02

  I enjoyed dabbling in many and I had made some money from selling my first one. And so I started investing. For the first 10 or 15 years, personally, as an angel, I would basically give a founder the early stages, fifty or a hundred thousand dollars of my money and I would try to help them. So the mentoring came as an add-on to the investing, where in addition to putting a lot of money in, I would try to help however I could. I didn't often know how to help, but you know, the effort, the motivation really matters. I generally wanted to help. It actually ended up being better for me financially as well, because founders would appreciate the help I gave them and I would be referred to other ones.

• 31:17Speaker 02

  I would see better deals, more interesting companies than I used to see before then. And eventually, you know, I got to the point now where I run a venture capital fund and I have hundreds of people behind me and it's just a much more scalable, interesting thing.

• 31:32Gary O'Reilly?

  So that's One Way Ventures, correct?

• 31:35Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 31:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Explain to us, as well as our audience, what the ethos of One Way Ventures actually is and why it's so important to you?

• 31:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, so at One Way, you know, we have some beliefs. We really believe that people from anywhere in the world should be able to go wherever they want, to build businesses, to get jobs, to create value, right? We fundamentally believe that. We don't think that the US...

• 32:04Speaker 02

  For instance, ought to allow more immigrants in just because on average immigrants are more likely to create jobs and to add wealth. Uh, and to, to, to basically give more than they consume in services over the long term. I mean upfront, of course, they'll consume some services over the long term. Uh, there's a lot of evidence, although economists believe that uh, they, they are actually good for the country that they arrive in and that America is. So I'll say there is largely because over the last two hundred years, we've taken in a lot of immigrants. So that's all true, but that's not the reason we believe that America should allow immigrants to come here and build companies. The reason we think so is that we're immigrants and we think it's our goddamn right to come here, whether you like it or not. And, you know, we feel very, very strongly about that. We feel that uh, the random uh, documents.

• 32:49Speaker 02

  That you get based on where you were born should not determine your potential, your outcome, your opportunities. Any more than the color of your skin or any other arbitrary thing you don't control. You don't choose to be born in America or to be born in some other country, right? You're just born where you're born and I, we think everyone should have equal rights. So uh, that's why we, we focus on immigrants and it also so happens that immigrants, you know, make the best entrepreneurs. Uh, the majority of all very successful companies in the U S are started by immigrants. That, that's, that's an absolute fact, about fifty five percent of the, the so-called unicorns of immigrant founders.

• 33:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And let me add, I'd like to add something to that because I do this calculation annually. Uh, and it doesn't exist anywhere else except out of my shop. That the, uh, if you look at the Nobel prizes and the sciences. That are given to American citizens. A third of them have gone to immigrants to the United States. And so that, I mean, that's an extraordinary number. Uh, far above, you know, what the, the fraction that immigrants are in the United States. When you include not only those who are legally as well as, you know, undocumented.

• 34:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You add those two up, it's like ten percent, twelve, so it's a factor of three higher than what that is. So, so this is just another bit of information there, but you're saying, but, but, but Semyon, what you're saying there is, is not entirely realistic for, let me just. So you came to the United States uh, from Moscow, from Soviet Union Moscow. When basically there's a wall, all right? I know the wall's in Berlin, but there's a, there's a philosophical wall. If that wall did not exist, and it was still the Soviet Union, and you didn't have KGB or whatever else, and borders stopped, do you think everyone would have left the Soviet Union the way you did?

• 34:47Speaker 02

  No, I think most people would never leave their home. There's tremendous social pressure, your network, your community, everybody wants you to stay. In order to permanently leave the place you grew up, you're gonna have to betray your whole community in a sense. You have to abandon them. And they're not gonna root for you, you know, they're gonna hope you fail. Because they're in this. And it takes a special kind of person, who is willing to take on that hardship, who has an unusual level of ambition, right, believe in themselves, drive, an ax to grind, a chip on their shoulder, right? These are not ordinary people.

• 35:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so these are people who are highly upwardly mobile because of their ambitions. And you're saying they should be able to exit their country and go anywhere in the world, wherever they are welcomed or embraced.

• 35:31Chuck Nice?

  I just wanna know why they can't come from Norway. That's all. Where are the Norwegians when you need them? You know it, I know it, America first.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think in a logic, you know, I think the gentleman who said that is severely underestimating, you know, the folks that are coming here from Africa and South America. I think he is judging them by stereotypes that fail to take into account that these are actually select individuals. Like, most people in South America don't make it to the US. Even if you take the really uneducated ones that will require a lot more services, not the folks with computer science degrees or whatever, right? But the really poor, uneducated people who walk, like, walk on foot in caravans, right, and make it all the way to the borders in Texas and Arizona and California. You know, they're still extraordinary. And I would say, if I had a construction business and had to hire a bunch of people for demolition,

• 36:27Speaker 02

  I would absolutely hire people from the caravan or anybody who had an easier time, who was born here, because it takes a very extraordinary person to walk 2,000 miles on foot, you know? It's just, most people would not do that.

• 36:40Gary O'Reilly?

  Absolutely. So, so are you telling, are you saying, Semyon, that an immigrant's life story...

• 36:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Is more predisposed to the probability of success in a startup because of all of the things you've just highlighted.

• 36:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:58Gary O'Reilly?

  That's why you that's why you that's why you get involved.

• 37:00Speaker 02

  And the and the reason, you know, we're able to raise a hundred million dollars and invested and now show, you know, more than tripling in the in the first five years kind of results. The reason it's working out so well is that we actually have hard data to support that. Like, I mean, we can guess, we have theories of why immigrants make the best.

• 37:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Says the man from MIT, we got data, right?

• 37:21Speaker 02

  Exactly, right? We believe that there's all these reasons that I'm talking about for why these immigrant founders are more likely to build big businesses, but it doesn't really matter what we believe or what those reasons might be.

• 37:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's with the data.

• 37:34Speaker 02

  Is fifty five percent of the unicorns was started by immigrants. A much smaller percentage of all companies in America started by immigrants, but fifty five percent, over half of the unicorns was started by immigrants. That's a fact, right? So it's it's no coincidence that with our thesis, our fund is having really great results.

• 37:52Chuck Nice?

  What you're talking about are is is a an allocation of resources that we are the beneficiary, where we are the beneficiary to this allocation of resources. People coming here and making a contribution. And I forget this gentleman's name, but he's he's he's Indian, came here and somehow the the visa didn't work out. And, you know, being Indian, and this was under, you know, this particular anti-immigration administration. And I think it was the, you know, um, hi hi hi his visa being revoked and had to leave.

• 38:35Chuck Nice?

  And so he said, I here I am, I just got out of Princeton or Harvard, I forget, and I'm back in India, I'm basically kicked out of the United States where I just spent like twelve years in school.

• 38:52Chuck Nice?

  So what did I do? Well, I started an internet company. It's now like the second largest internet company. You know, it's the largest in India and like third largest in the world. Or in other words, what he did was he took everything that this country had to offer. And he planted it someplace else. So, you know, when you allow people to come here and you allow people to flourish and contribute, what you're doing is making everything better. You know, but the only thing that stops that, believe it or not, I'm sorry to say it, is bigotry and bias. That's it. Because there is no actual data that you can say.

• 39:35Chuck Nice?

  For instance, one quick little thing and I'll shut up. Oh, they're bringing crime. They're bringing crime. No. So, sorry, guys. You know, these things feel good when you say them. They're like a rallying cry, but it's bullshit. I'm sorry, it's not true. This is Chuck Martin Luther King nice speaking to us now.

• 39:57Gary O'Reilly?

  All right. So, Semyon, we've done what you've, your past. We've looked to the now. What's next in your life? Have you got this map or is it just, you know, one day at a time?

• 40:10Speaker 02

  Well, we have a long way to go in the one way, certainly. We're still growing. We're opening more locations and raising larger funds down the road. But this year spent quite a bit of time as well on the nonprofits that I actually started with my wife in February. That helps refugees from the war in Ukraine get cash in their hands to actually improve their day to day to give them a sense of agency. So I've made several trips down there and I'm heading over there again soon.

• 40:42Gary O'Reilly?

  All right.

• 40:43Speaker 02

  And beyond that, I mean, I have six kids, so there's plenty of stuff to keep me busy.

• 40:48Gary O'Reilly?

  Wow. Just six?

• 40:51Chuck Nice?

  Six. I'm gonna say, you better be rich.

• 41:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Unless he's taking his playbook from your daddy, that's a different.

• 41:05Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 41:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No. So, this has been a wonderful story just to hear. And the story is a certain uniqueness to it. So, take us out with some reflective thoughts, just to make a better world, because there's a lot of crap going on out there in the world right now. What wisdom do you have based on your life?

• 41:26Speaker 02

  Well, I think as a person, you know, I mentioned earlier that when I stopped worrying so much about, "How can I make the most money?", and actually started caring more about doing some good to others, together with my existing skill set, you know, I was able to do better. And I think the parting thought is that perhaps as a nation, we can do the same, that if we think a little bit more about how to make the world a better place, and when to do the right thing, right? And when you think about foreign policy, you know, what's actually right? What maximizes human rights? Not only short term, what's best for our national interests, but what's the right thing to do? In the very long term, we're gonna do the best ourselves as well. In this story told about immigrants is just one example. Let's not worry about the fact that they create walls here.

• 42:11Speaker 02

  Let's just let them in because we recognize their right to come in, right? And what will follow from that is that they'll come here and not somewhere else, and we're gonna all do way better.

• 42:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 42:23Chuck Nice?

  Love it.

• 42:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, dude. Semyon, thank you for joining us on StarTalk.

• 42:28Speaker 02

  That was really fun.

• 42:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, all right. Gary, Chuck, always good to have you there. Always a pleasure, Neil, thank you. All right, this has been StarTalk Sports Edition, all about card counting and doing the right thing in the world before, during, and after. You take the casino to the bank. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, as always. Keep looking up.