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

Summary

Podcast Summary

Podcast: Pablo Torre Finds Out
Episode: Meet the Edge Lord: Secrets of a Gambler Winning America's Money
Host: Pablo Torre (The Athletic)
Guest: Galen Hall (Professional Gambler, Hedge Fund Partner)
Date: March 13, 2026

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Overview

In this episode, Pablo Torre sits down with Galen Hall, a quantitative hedge fund partner and one of America’s most successful gamblers, to dissect the secrets behind winning high-stakes sports contests—most recently, Las Vegas’ legendary Survivor Pool. They unpack how Hall’s analytical mind, game theory, negotiation, and edge-seeking habits set him apart from casual bettors. The episode becomes a masterclass in out-thinking both the public and one's direct competitors in games that seem simple but hide deep complexity.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Who is Galen Hall?

• Background: Former Bridgewater hedge fund analyst; now partner at his own quant fund (02:40).
• Game Philosopher: Enjoys mastering competitive games at their highest level of abstraction, always searching for the “edge.” (03:02, Galen Hall)
• Multi-Million Winner: Estimated over $15 million in winnings, including World Series of Poker, and a backgammon world championship he picked up after only 3 months of study (04:49–05:38).

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2. Inside the Circa Survivor Pool

• Contest Description: Las Vegas’ most ruthless NFL elimination game, $1,000 per entry, 18,718 entries, choose a winner weekly, can only use each team once, one loss and you’re out (06:33–07:03).
• Hall’s Strategy: Entered 50 entries via a network of friends (limit is 10 each), centrally managed all picks (07:42).
• Key Rule Complexity: Thanksgiving and Christmas weeks count as extra “weeks” but with limited team options, which culls the pool dramatically (18:05–18:47).
• Complexity Under the Surface:
  • “Most people don’t even know what game they’re playing… Survivor is not about football. The three most important skills are: modeling opponent behavior, projecting uncertainty far into the future, and negotiating game-theoretic deals deep in the contest.” — Galen Hall, 20:05
• Galen’s 2019 Victory: Previously won the largest survivor contest at the time (21:47–22:08).

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3. Critical Edges and Game Theory

• Two Main Ways to Find an Edge (14:30):
  • Build a better statistical model than the market
  • Identify information or situations not accounted for (e.g. weather, player behavior)
• The Third Path: Spotting fundamental, conceptual errors in how participants or the market are thinking about the game, not just details or data (15:45, 20:05).
• Thanksgiving as Mass Extinction Event:
  • Hall explains how herd-mentality and clustering on favorites open up high-expected value plays in picking underdogs on constrained “bonus” weeks (22:24).
• Notable Quote:
  • “The goal is not to survive as long as possible. The goal is to win… Sometimes it’s right to play an underdog because that’s how people get eliminated.” — Galen Hall, 22:24

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4. Modeling, Opponent Analysis, and Negotiation

• Forward-Looking Modeling: Constantly projecting the value and probable outcomes of future team picks for both himself and others (24:59–26:07).
• Distribution Not Averages: Focused on the range/distribution of team outcomes—not average—e.g., if the starting quarterback is out, the pick’s value swings massively (26:07).
• Negotiation at the Endgame: When down to a small pool (e.g., Christmas), coordinated with other savvy players to optimize expected value and split winnings—explicitly legal in Survivor though illegal in poker (34:15–36:46).
• Memorable Moment:
  • Hall goes on a podcast to announce his pick, strategically signaling to an opponent to coordinate without direct contact.
  • “I went on the podcast to talk to one person because I couldn’t get his phone number.” — Galen Hall, 34:26
• Game Theory Application:
  • “It would be silly not to do this. Didn’t need to explain expected value, sending computer programs and spreadsheets back and forth. It was almost romantic…” — Galen Hall, 39:47

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5. Psychology and Peer-to-Peer Gambling

• Bans from Sportsbooks: Both Hall and his wife blacklisted from all major sportsbooks for being too successful (12:42–13:45).
• Peer-to-Peer Can’t Ban Winners: Poker, Survivor, prediction markets more appealing because there are no house bans; only player outperformance.
• Notable Quote:
  • “If you’re going to let us play, don’t cut anybody who has any chance of winning.” — Galen Hall, 12:56

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6. March Madness & Misconceptions

• March Madness as Edge Opportunity:
  • Hall takes March Madness off work religiously and enters upwards of 100 brackets, optimizing for portfolio balancing and hedging (46:49–51:36).
• Bayesian Lesson:
  • Many believe random bracket-fillers win more, but the volume of entries creates this illusion (47:38–49:43).
• Most People Play the Wrong Game:
  • “People try to fill out the most accurate bracket instead of trying to win the contest. They over-pick favorites…” — Galen Hall, 49:52
  • “March Madness is not about basketball. It’s how many people are going to pick which team. That’s the right game.” — Galen Hall, 53:10
• Hedging via Prediction Markets: Using betting markets to offset risk exposures from bracket pools (51:36–53:10).

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7. Human Nature & The Real Stakes

• Non-Economic Motives:
  • Many play for fun or emotional experience, not to maximize winnings—and that’s okay.
  • “Humans are not robots. The person doesn’t want to bust on hand one in the poker main event. Economists would call it utility… Disutility if that happened. That’s totally reasonable.” — Galen Hall, 54:10

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “The most similar group of people you’ll ever meet—it’s just the same brain in ten different bodies.” — Galen Hall on serious gamblers/poker pros (32:57)
• “If I made the right decision, I never feel regret.” — Galen Hall, in reference to watching games (42:47)
• “March Madness is my favorite thing in the world… It’s like a religious holiday for me.” — Galen Hall (46:53)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Galen’s Background & Philosophy – 02:40–05:38
• Explaining Survivor Pool & Strategies – 06:33–21:38
• On Finding an Edge (Three Ways & Game Theory) – 14:17–21:38
• Thanksgiving/Christmas: Mass Knockout – 18:05–24:40
• Negotiation & Endgame Deal-Making – 34:15–41:40
• The Psychology of Winning & Peer Gaming – 12:42–13:45; 37:27–41:02
• March Madness Approaches & Bayesian Insight – 46:41–53:10
• Human Emotional Stake vs Utility – 54:10

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Final Takeaways

• The “Edge Lord” isn’t playing the game you think—he’s playing the meta-game: The critical skills are not knowledge of sports, but understanding rules, modeling opponent behavior, and leveraging game theory for maximum expected value.
• Most people are playing for survival or fun, not for winning: There’s a vast, structural edge for those who see through the surface, model and adapt accordingly.
• Game theory negotiation and mathematical modeling are the modern gambler's secret weapons
• “Play the right game—ask the right question”: Whether it’s Survivor, March Madness, or any contest, understanding what actually matters is more important than what fans think matters.
• If you want to compete with pros, you need to understand their methods—not just mimic their picks.

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[Summary prepared for those who want the rich, strategic, and psychological insights from this episode, skipping sponsor messages and episode credits.]

Transcript

[Pablo 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 brackets are you entering?

[Galen Hall]

I usually am good for about a hundred

[Pablo Torre]

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[Pablo Torre]

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[Galen Hall]

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 the, a lot of the sports betting type things. The survivor pool, playing poker.

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Galen Hall]

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, 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 is just sort of what I do and what I enjoy across everything.

[Pablo 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 these scams that touched the White House. You've heard me interrogate experts and call for actual regulation. 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, here today is simple. 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, I think who loses is pretty well established now.

[Galen Hall]

Pretty much everyone else, pretty much everybody

[Pablo Torre]

else, but you're the guy who actually wins. 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 Sierra, 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 for three months. Are you kidding? I've never seen anybody this good in three months of backgammon.

[Galen Hall]

So this guy is brilliant. 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, you know, figuring it out for myself comes later. And then the betting comes in. The difference between what I think and what the world thinks.

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Galen Hall]

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.

[Pablo Torre]

My name's Ryan Hogue.

[Galen Hall]

I played for five different NFL teams. I was Mr. Irrelevant to the 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.

[Circus Survivor Podcast Host]

The Circus Survivor contest stands as Las Vegas most ruthless NFL elimination game, attracting thousands of fans, celebrities and betters, 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.

[Pablo 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.

[Galen Hall]

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 pics.

[Pablo 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, 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.

[Galen Hall]

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, 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's certain areas of our life where she has very strong opinions and those are thankfully areas where I have no opinion.

[Pablo 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.

[Galen Hall]

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.

[Pablo Torre]

Yeah, over here I'm going to be on my laptop, one of the two objects that I own in this apartment. Betting on, at times, the wnba.

[Galen Hall]

Oh yeah, I love betting on the wnba.

[Pablo Torre]

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[Galen Hall]

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. All the sports books are very important

[Pablo Torre]

for those only listening to this podcast.

[Galen Hall]

It's just, first of all, it's, it's like 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 a nanny 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.

[Pablo 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?

[Galen Hall]

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.

[Pablo Torre]

But the idea of your edge being fundamentally, and this is something 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.

[Galen Hall]

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, you bet on those. But the downside is unless you are incorporating things in your model that the market or 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, 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 a lot. You know, wind is actually pretty important and which way is the wind blowing. And then you can bet halftime total. 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. In. In. 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. Or they're making what I would call, like, a logical error, which is not

[Pablo Torre]

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.

[Galen Hall]

Right.

[Pablo Torre]

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. I'm not here to say in literal terms that you are doing quantitative. Ocean's Eleven, 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 is legendary in its scale and never more so than when more than 18, 700 people enter, which is a record must.

[Galen Hall]

I mean, it sets a record every year.

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Galen Hall]

Right.

[Pablo 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

[Galen Hall]

what the rules are 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.

[Pablo Torre]

So, which blew my mind.

[Galen Hall]

Instead of ending after 18 weeks, it essentially ends after 20 weeks because you've got two bonus weeks in the middle. And, 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.

[Pablo Torre]

Right. So that happens Thanksgiving and Christmas.

[Galen Hall]

Right.

[Pablo Torre]

And so basically the herd is culled in massive quantities at those two points. But again, it's $1,000 a piece. 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, I think.

[Galen Hall]

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 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 Survivors just pretty similar on its surface, it seems so simple. It's just, okay, just pick a team every week. Survive.

[Pablo Torre]

Um, yeah, find the weak, Find the weakest team that week.

[Galen Hall]

Yeah, yeah, you know, like, like find a good value where 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, 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?

[Pablo Torre]

Right.

[Galen Hall]

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 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, right? Uncertainty modeling plus game theory, negotiation game is actually what you've, what you've entered into without knowing it, which is a

[Pablo Torre]

comfort zone for the dude who is specifically. Now our listeners will understand you.

[Galen Hall]

Yeah, me. Yes.

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Galen Hall]

I won in 2019 what was at the time the largest Survivor contest, which had about a thousand 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 little different twists

[Pablo Torre]

and wrinkles 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?

[Galen Hall]

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 two to one favorites. I think 50, 50 to 55% of people pick the Eagles and 30 to 35% of people picked Baltimore and that's too much. And if in particular, if you just look at the, you know, the odds of winning a two game parlay, you're about one in three in each one. 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, you can, if all four of the underdogs win, you get 95, 96% of the field is gone. And, 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. And the fake glove got a man wide open. It's craft who's going to walk in for the touchdown. Prescott looking around in Trouble. He did 20% to Williams for the touchdown at the last moment. And so this year sort of the dream scenario happened which is all four underdogs one on Thanksgiving, pressure comes, picked up burrow y touchdown. Cincinnati hit the, you know, unlikely four game parlay and the field got cut from a thousand remaining to 50 in one day. Williams rolling, throwing open, making the grab, touchdown cold comet into the end zone. 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 percent chance, but it doesn't become real until they've seen it, I think.

[Pablo 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 every

[Galen Hall]

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 in 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. 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. So explain.

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Galen Hall]

So. 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. 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, they're either there's some chance they're an 8, and there's some chance there's a 4 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. And if you end up with a world where they're a good pick, then you've got a great pick.

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Galen Hall]

And then in some circumstances, that's exactly what you're looking for. So, for example, there's an interesting debate about the. The value of. Oh. 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.

[Pablo 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.

[Galen Hall]

Yes.

[Pablo 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.

[Galen Hall]

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 and the entire game is about figuring out who's going to arrest 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. Is another really important aspect.

[Pablo 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.

[Galen Hall]

Right.

[Pablo Torre]

And into Christmas and then out of Christmas. How many entries do you have left?

[Galen Hall]

So coming to Thanksgiving, there were a thousand 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

[Pablo Torre]

this spot because they're a favorite. They're. They're.

[Galen Hall]

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

[Pablo Torre]

Now remembering what happened in that game,

[Galen Hall]

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. That's right. Serious it is. We don't know how long he's going to be out.

[Boost Mobile Sponsor Voice]

He may go to the tunnel and

[Galen Hall]

come running back in, who knows? And then say, okay, well I've got Minnesota, you know, J.J. mcCarthy gets injured. J.J. mcCarthy has been ruled out for the second half for the Minnesota Vikings. The backup was already injured. And then Washington, Jaden Daniels and Mariana injured. So all. So the three teams I have, all

[Pablo Torre]

the quarterbacks are getting, all the starters

[Galen Hall]

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 5 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.

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Galen Hall]

Not. 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.

[Pablo Torre]

And there, there's an, there's a, a podcast that is released about the competition. During the competition and what, what information is gleaned from the podcast.

[Galen Hall]

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. 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

[Pablo Torre]

because there's 10 people left fighting for $18.72 million. Were you ever interviewed on the podcast?

[Galen Hall]

I went on the podcast for one specific reason, an interesting game theoretic element that happens in Survivors 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.

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Galen Hall]

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 to 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, 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, you're, you're going to end up a winner.

[Pablo 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?

[Galen Hall]

Yeah. And I would say that the 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, you know, your longevity or something like that, but you have some distribution. And then there are other mathematical terms that, you know, describe other things you would care about, too.

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Galen Hall]

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 Hellmuth? Yeah, tall Phil, Hellmuth. Vanessa Selps, 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.

[Pablo 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.

[Galen Hall]

Yeah. So. So back to the Survivor. Like, the one time I went on the podcast was to announce that I was going to pick a particular team, because according to the math, once I announce that I'm taking a particular team and lock the pick in, 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 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. So that's why I went on the

[Pablo Torre]

podcast, 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.

[Galen Hall]

One person. Went on a podcast to talk to one person because I couldn't get his phone number, and to basically say to

[Pablo Torre]

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.

[Galen Hall]

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.

[Pablo Torre]

You know what you say? Was that a bluff? Was that real?

[Galen Hall]

No, it's 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, it's, you know, small but real risk you run in order to. To make this play.

[Pablo Torre]

But you saw that the play given,

[Galen Hall]

it was worth it.

[Pablo Torre]

The first mover advantage there was was going to be worth it.

[Galen Hall]

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 that a bunch of 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 days before Christmas, I take a look at the situation, I say, look, 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. Some game theory negotiation. And so I was like, look, if. 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. And so it turns out the value of this is worth about a million dollars.

[Pablo Torre]

And you model this out and you figure out that.

[Galen Hall]

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

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Galen Hall]

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. 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 a bit about it, and I felt a bit like a bunch of soccer players had come and played rugby, and they were like, 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. 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.

[Pablo 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.

[Galen Hall]

Yeah. I mean, and. And. 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.

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Galen Hall]

Right.

[Pablo Torre]

Were they of your mentality?

[Galen Hall]

Yeah. So here's the thing that was great. Hierarolobus talked about, you know, interacting with Floyd Mayweather, which it just. That hit a chord.

[Pablo Torre]

Bob used Floyd famously and briefly as a beard, and Floyd found himself truly thinking almost diametrically opposite of how Bob thought about anything.

[Galen Hall]

Yeah, yeah.

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Galen Hall]

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 going to 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, like, gamblers think about the world?

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Galen Hall]

And so, so negotiating in survivors 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, I, I think my bracket is worth a million. You're like, no, it's, 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. 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.

[Pablo Torre]

You didn't need to explain expected value.

[Galen Hall]

Didn't 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 really. We're almost romantic.

[Pablo Torre]

Talk about comparing models.

[Galen Hall]

Yeah. It was 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's home alone. He wrote all the paperwork for us. You're getting contracts drawn up, Contracts drawn up. I mean, you know, seven figure, $19 million on the line. I mean, gosh, 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 hashing 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 cause I had sort of a natural lead to sort of be like team captain because I had two of the five remaining picks, right. And also because I was also 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.

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Galen Hall]

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

[Pablo Torre]

Right.

[Galen Hall]

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

[Pablo Torre]

Dude. It's so funny that that game was

[Galen Hall]

the game in question 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.

[Pablo Torre]

So this is the 23 to 10 Vikings win.

[Galen Hall]

Yeah.

[Pablo Torre]

Where both wind up 8 and 8.

[Galen Hall]

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 3 passing yards. It's. It was really like the Olympics should put one regular guy out there just so you can see how good he really seemed. Like it was basically like a regular guy out there trying to play NFL quarterback.

[Pablo Torre]

But when you as Galen are watching this game, what are you like? Are you actually disciplined emotionally? Are you, 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.

[Galen Hall]

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.

[Pablo 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 and yet still win.

[Galen Hall]

Detroit had, I think, six turnovers. See what Golf and Co. Can do here? Not much. Golf gets one. Oh, ball comes out. Minnesota's right there. This Vikings defense is relentless.

[Pablo Torre]

Yeah, a disgusting football game.

[Galen Hall]

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

[Pablo Torre]

Yeah, Four fumbles lost, two interceptions by Detroit.

[Galen Hall]

It's just such a classic thing like don't celebrate before you cross the finish line. And sometimes in gambling, people really complain in 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.

[Pablo Torre]

So coming out of that game, then give us the state of the union.

[Galen Hall]

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, 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. Well, that's, that's Phil Hellman saying, oh, he's won two out of six.

[Pablo Torre]

It's like, well, you know, $7.48 million.

[Galen Hall]

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

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Galen Hall]

I won 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, you know, I had the biggest chunk by far a group project where someone, yeah.

[Pablo Torre]

Took took the initiative.

[Galen Hall]

Yes. Yes. Yeah.

[Instacart/Bumble Sponsor Voice]

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[Circus Survivor Podcast Host]

This is a Monday.com ad. The same Monday.com designed for every team. The same Monday.com with built in AI scaling your work from day one. The same Monday.comwith an email. Easy and intuitive setup. Go to Monday.com and try it for free with VRBoCare. Help is always ready before, during and after your stay.

[Pablo Torre]

We've planned for the plot twists, so

[Circus Survivor Podcast Host]

support is always available because a great trip starts with peace of mind.

[Pablo Torre]

And now we get to this part. In the afterglow of your circus sports survivor pool win to the tune of seven figures, we get to March Madness.

[Galen Hall]

Yeah.

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Galen Hall]

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.

[Pablo Torre]

Like that Thursday, Friday.

[Galen Hall]

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, trying to have a good time.

[Pablo 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.

[Galen Hall]

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

[Pablo Torre]

I would love for you to explain Bayesian.

[Galen Hall]

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 a. Let's say 5% of the people have the disease and your test is 90% accurate.

[Pablo Torre]

I'm glad we're sticking with disease, though, as the metaphor.

[Galen Hall]

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 a thousand 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. So if you look at the group of positives, you'll see that roughly 2/3 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 explained that is, you know, we were saying, ah, 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. 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 tenth as likely to win as somebody who really knows what they're 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, it just feels that. Just feels that way. But this is, I think, a crucial.

[Pablo Torre]

Again, we keep on going back, lapsing back into this, into this bifurcation of, like, people who feel and people who are actually calculating.

[Galen Hall]

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 over pick 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 and now you have to beat 45% of the field who also picked them. Right.

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Galen Hall]

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 100% pool, uh, you now have a 3% chance of winning your a hundred percent pool. Cause you're the only person who picked them. Brackets like that often are overrepresented among the, the random filler outers.

[Pablo Torre]

How many brackets are you entering?

[Galen Hall]

I usually am good for about a hundred. Is I've been somehow, somehow despite being

[Pablo Torre]

this deep into conversation with you, I had the under.

[Galen Hall]

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, I'm going there and then I just building a portfolio of, you know, a hundred different brackets that's you know, nicely balanced and, and you know, generating maximum value at every possible node. And then, you know, I sort of end up with a couple, you know, usually I'm short the, the big, you know, the most likely team I, I is overrepresented. So I don't pick them.

[Pablo Torre]

Right.

[Galen Hall]

So I end up with some liabilities on like well if, if, if, if you know, the best team wins, then I none of my hundred are going to win. And then you can just go on, you know, prediction market calc or something like that and just bet on that team to win at 10 to 1 or 5 to 1 or whatever. And then now you're covered for that.

[Pablo Torre]

I was going to say. So you're actually somehow you are finding a way to fulfill the promise of the prediction market by. Yeah, hedging.

[Galen Hall]

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

[Pablo Torre]

Oh I was talking to a former employee of the cftc 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 and there is the eventuality, the possibility that the Patriots are not going to make a run to the Super Bowl. So let me buy event contracts such that I can protect my business, which is going to boom based on the Patriot success. Let me protect myself in the case that they don't.

[Galen Hall]

Yeah, for sure. Totally reasonable.

[Pablo Torre]

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

[Galen Hall]

Yeah, right, right, right, right, right. And they're people who are.

[Pablo Torre]

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.

[Galen Hall]

An overarching principle on all these is you got to make sure you're asking yourself the right question. You 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. You know, you 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.

[Pablo 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. Yeah.

[Galen Hall]

Which, like, which is a real advantage

[Pablo Torre]

of the people who are.

[Galen Hall]

Yeah. Which is fine. Like, not, not everything is great for you. 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 $1,000, and the winner goes to the main. 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 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, economists would call it utility. Like I would experience a lot of disutility if that happened. That's totally reasonable.

[Pablo Torre]

And so the question that I enter the studio with of like, so who's winning these things? I realize I find out, of course it's Galen Galen's. 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?

[Galen Hall]

Yeah.

[Pablo Torre]

Pablo Torre finds out is produced by Walter Averoma, Maxwell Carney, Ryan Cortez, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, neely Loman, Rob McRae, Matt Sullivan, Claire Taylor and Chris Tubanello. Our studio engineering is by RG Systems. Our sound design by Andrew Bersick at 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.

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[Galen Hall]

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[Galen Hall]

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[Pablo Torre]

Com.