The AI Metagame

Brad Delong is an economic historian at UC-Berkeley. A former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton Administration, he frequently writes about policy issues on Twitter as @delong, where he has over 80,000 followers, and on his popular blog Grasping Reality (https://braddelong.substack.com). He is the author of a new book, Slouching Towards Utopia, that has been widely lauded as the most important book in economic history in many years.

Shaun Deeb is, far and away, the most successful player at the World Series of Poker over the past decade (when evaluated based on WSOP leaderboard points). We discuss, among other things: his daily routine, WSOP fantasy poker, his view on tournament edges, his rise in poker (playing at Turning Stone in NY as an 18yr old) to his near fall (playing in Mexico post Black Friday), mixing family and poker, and his philosophies about learning in poker.

Eric Olson (@IPlayedD1) is the co-founder of Consensus, a leading start-up in natural language processing. I was interested in learning about the specific topic of AI/machine learning in the social sciences, and Eric was a brilliant guide in this area.

Eric is a former football player at Northwestern who graduated with a master's in predictive analytics. With co-founder Christian Salem, he build Consensus, a search engine that uses AI to extract findings from scientific research.

Patrik Antonius is one of the biggest winners in the history of poker. Even seasoned poker fans will be shocked by some of stories in this pod. We cover all aspects of his approach; we deep-dive into health, the mental game of poker, fun off the felt (especially crazy prop bets), and key aspects of Pat's personal poker history.

Edward Chancellor is a British financial historian, financial journalist, and former investment strategist. He wrote the bestselling book Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation in 1999 and Crunch-Time for Credit in 2005. He has just published The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest, which I rate as the best book I've read this year.

Fortune has called Chancellor "one of the greatest financial historians alive, and the Financial Analysts Journal called him "one of the greatest financial writers of our era." Our chat mostly covers The Price of Time. Jim Grant says this work is "A masterpiece of history, analysis--and property understated outrage."

Matt Kalish (@mattkalish) is the Co-Founder and President of Draftkings. A computer science major from Columbia, Matt is a passionate gamer who also has one of the largest personal collections of NFTs in the world. In this podcast, we take a deep-dive into the new Reignmakers project at Draftkings, where players assemble fantasy teams using player NFTs that they have purchased and compete for tens of millions in prizes.

Peter Jennings (@CSURAM88) is one of the most successful daily fantasy sports players of all times. Notably, he won the first ever six-figure DFS prize, as well as the first ever $1 million Draftkings live final. He is a popular podcaster, and an extremely successful sports entrepreneur and investor. He co-founded Fantasy Labs (sold to Action Network), as well as Lucky Trader HQ (an analytics company focused on NFTs), and he has invested in many top companies in the gaming, analytics, and crytpo spaces.

Hugh Hendry was the founder and Chief Investment Officer of the macro hedge fund Eclectica Asset Management. After strong returns before and during the Great Financial Crisis, he became a popular figure in the financial media. He retired in 2017 to run a luxury hotel in St Barts, but has lately been increasingly active in financial media, tweeting as @hendry_hugh (60k followers) and podcasting (The Acid Capitalist).

Ben Hunt (@epsilontheory) earned a PhD in Government from Harvard in 1991. He was a research academic for a decade before founding two technology companies. He then worked in investment management for a decade, before starting a content community at www.epsilontheory.com in 2013. Epsilon Theory quickly found a large audience of over 100,000 email subscribers. For the past several years, Epsilon Theory has been a vibrant, paywalled content community.

We discuss three primary topics in this podcast. In the first 50 minutes, we discuss Ben's recent long piece on Fed policy, "NGMI". Ben makes it clear that his stance on risk assets has mostly changed from one of bullishness to one of bearishness, based on his view that there has been a sustained change in the Fed narrative. We then move on to discuss Ben's long piece on cryptocurrency, "The MacGuffin, Part 1". We end with fifteen minutes on the current state of the paid content space (Ben surprised me by being bearish on Substack and the micropayments model).

Kyle Boddy (@drivelinebases) is the founder of Driveline Baseball, the best data-driven baseball development program in the world. I recently taught a course in sports analytics at the University of Miami, and Kyle was gracious enough to provide materials to Nikolai Yakovenko for a guest lecture on "What Makes Good Pitching?" The material is fascinating and surprising for anyone with the slightest interest in baseball. Much of that material is covered in the first half of the podcast. Other podcast topics include: Kyle's transition from poker to sports analytics, the early coaching experience that led to the development of Driveline, the new Driveline metric Stuff+ (which quantifies pitch effectiveness), his recent experience with the Cincinnati Reds, and his future ambitions.