Odd Lots - Annie Duke Explains How To Apply Poker Skills To Markets And Other Business Decisions

Episode Date: February 12, 2018

Anyone who watched poker on TV during the golden age of coverage a few years ago is familiar with Annie Duke. She's one of the most famous poker players of the era, and is one of the winningest women poker players of all time, with 38 money finishes at the World Series of Poker. She's been retired from poker for a few years now, but she has a new book called "Thinking In Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All The Facts." On this week's episode of the Odd Lots podcast, Annie talks about the skills that made her good in poker, and how they can be applied to many areas of our lives, including trading and business.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen on Bloomberg Radio, stream the show live on the Bloomberg business app, or listen to the podcast. That's Bloomberg this weekend. Saturdays and Sundays starting at 7 a.m. Eastern. Make us part of your weekend routine on Bloomberg Television, and wherever you get your podcasts. And welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenpaw.

And I'm Tracy Allaway. So Tracy, guess what? Today we are going to... You're already laughing? I am, because I know what you're going to say. Today, we are going to return to one of your favorite topics. It's a theme that we talk about a lot on this show, and I know you love it very much. Okay, so it's either chess or poker.

I see you knew that I was being facetious when I said it was one of your favorite topics. You could tell? Yeah. Okay. Yes. You are correct. Every single episode is all about games. We do talk a lot about games for good reason.

And we are going to be, among other things, talking about poker and some of the lessons that you can learn from playing poker. And of course, you know, we joke about how this is a frequent topic of our show. But, you know, there's good reason for it. Yeah, people draw quite a few parallels between investing and the sort of game theory that you see either in chess or in poker. So I get why there's a natural fit. I just struggle in every single one of these conversations because you start talking about a particular hand or a play either in poker or chess. And I am completely mystified. But I'm confident that one day we're actually going to sit down and play a game of poker.

And this is all going to become clear to me. But in the meantime, who are we going to be discussing the game with? Well, I know you claim to be mystified, but I think you saw yourself a little short because you ask great questions in all these that I wouldn't necessarily think of. I am so thrilled about today's episode. We're talking to one of my favorite poker players of all time. Annie Duke, she's one of the winningest players in World Series of Poker History. She won a bracelet in an Omaha High-Low tournament. She came 10th in the main event.

Basically, anyone who's ever watched poker for years on TV has seen her numerous times. And she is the author of a new book called Thinking in Betts, Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts. Anyway, she's sitting across from me. It's very awkward to talk about someone the third person and are four feet away. So, Andy, thank you very much for joining us. Well, thank you for having me and actually speaking to me as opposed to about me. That's very, it's getting, sorry to get very uncomfortable. Before we get into the book and we obviously talk about lessons you learn from playing poker,

how did you get into playing poker? I think anyone who watched poker for years knows your name and has seen you numerous times, but how did you get into playing? So it's a little bit of a windy path. After college, I went to graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania. I was studying cognitive science. I had a National Science Foundation Fellowship. I was there for five years, actually, and completed my master's, was getting my PhD, was right at the end going out to interview for professorships.

And when that happened, I actually got sick as I was going out for my, actually my first job interview, my first job talk. And in academics, you can only do that once a year. So because I was in the hospital, I had to defer basically for a year. So during that year, I wasn't in school. I didn't have a fellowship, I needed money. And my brother, Howard Letterer, was already an amazing player. He'd been playing for 10 years, a professional player. And actually, when I was in graduate school, used to bring me to Vegas once a year as like a treat, as a vacation.

And he would give me a tiny bit of money to go play like it was a little boring because he was playing all the time. So I would sit and watch him, but sometimes I'd be like, can I go play? And he'd go send me to some game where you'd buy in for like $50 and, you know, here, go have fun. And so I knew a little bit about the game and he obviously knew a lot about the game and suggested to me in that year that maybe I could play poker in the meantime while I was waiting to go back out onto the job market and academics. So, you know, the meantime turned into 20 years. And from 92 is when I first, that happened, 94 I turned pro and then I guess 2012 I retired.

So it was a very long meantime. But that's how I got in. And he, along with a group of players that he was very embedded with, became my mentors in the game. Do cognitive scientists make good poker players? Like, is there a natural edge that you would have over other players when it comes to analyzing, I guess, the behavior of other people at the table? So it's a small sample size. I'm not sure how much we can say from the data. But I would imagine that someone who studied cognitive science would have an edge because you spend a lot of time, obviously, in cognitive science thinking about how people think. Not only thinking about how people think, but thinking about how people learn, how are people biased in the way that they process information,

hopefully how you can debias yourself as you process information, just training in a scientist gets you to think, about doing like A-B testing or why is this hypothesis not true, which I think is very important for good decision-making in poker. And I think you get used to sort of dealing with very noisy data. So, you know, I'd like to think, yes, but, you know, we haven't really run the experiment too much because I'm not sure there's a lot of other cognitive scientists who went and became poker players. Your cognitive science background aside, you mentioned your brother Howard letter are also one of the most recognizable poker players in the world from recent years. Can you identify something that you and your brother have, that you would be able to recognize

outside the poker player, outside the poker table, that's sort of something about your characters or something what will you think of the world that worked for both of you as becoming such successful players? Well, I would say that the two things that my brother and I probably have in common, that was really helpful is neither, I think we're both kind of out at the tail in terms of how we emotional react to losing, which I think is really actually important.

I think that we're both relatively emotionally steady. We're not so... Well, in the book, I talk about this thing called tilt, which is what the poker players use for getting emotionally unhinged and them making bad decisions because of it. So I think that that's number one. And then I think the other thing

that we probably are pretty good at, And I think it's because of the way that our family had discussions when we were growing up is that I think we're pretty good at hearing opposing viewpoints and sort of dealing with dissent, hopefully in a non-disagreable way. But really thinking about let's try to get to the truth of the matter as opposed to sort of just making everybody feel good about themselves. That's just sort of the dinner table kind of conversation that we had when we were growing up, which I think actually ended up being incredibly good training. for becoming a good poker player. Wait, can I ask why in my poker ignorance once again? Like, why would having those sorts of discussions at the dinner table translate into a successful poker career? Well, that kind of view about information that disagrees with you is really good for poker,

but actually that's one of the central themes of my book, Thinking and Betts, is that it's really important for all good decision-making. We already know what we know and we already have the beliefs that we have. So the question is, do you approach the world from the standpoint of I want to be right versus I want to be accurate? And there's a difference, right? So if I want to be right, it means that I have these beliefs I have. I've made these decisions. I have these strategic viewpoints or this particular analysis. And I want to affirm that what I think is true.

So that's approaching the world from being right. And what's really bad about that kind of attitude of I want to be right is that you tend to swathing. away, information that dissents with you, information that disagrees with you, information that might cause you to calibrate your belief in some way away from your prior. That's not great for learning. And obviously because all of our decisions are informed by our beliefs, if we're not calibrating our beliefs well, our decisions are going to suffer for that. I know we're going to talk about the applicability of all this to markets, but I think right

there is one of the most clear lessons, and you hear it from traders, is you've traders form a thesis about or investors form a thesis about why they think some instrument will do X and Y. But the really good ones discard that belief as soon as the counter evidence emerges, whereas the bad ones, you know, really discard all the counter evidence because they just are so into the idea of having been right in their original formation. Right. Exactly. So if we approach the world from this idea of we want to be accurate, meaning that we want to be accurate, meaning that we want to form the most accurate representation of the objective truth. Now, what happens is the information that disagrees with us. Actually, we view through a totally different frame. It's no

longer threatening. It's actually, we think about it as incredibly helpful because it helps us move toward that goal of accuracy. And if you think about it, like, you already have this belief, so you can already argue for it just fine. You've probably already found a lot of information that supports the belief you have. So the people who disagree with you, who have alternative hypotheses or different perspectives or facts that maybe you haven't discovered that would argue against your belief are actually the most valuable. So having a really open stance toward that kind of information is what really allows you to be a good decision maker. And if you don't have that stance, what's going to happen is that you're going to swat away all the stuff that

disagrees. And here's the problem. And this is speaking to people who are traders who have that stance of wanting to swat away is it's a particularly bad problem for people who are smart. Right. Because if you're smart, you're really good at spin. You're really good at arguing your case or giving a rationale for why you're right or you're really good at picking apart and discrediting things that disagree with you, right? Like you're like, ah, you know, the N is too small or your hypothesis is wrong for this reason because you're missing this thing or whatever it might be.

You're so good at spin. I mean, if I'm a politician and I'm going to send someone to the spin room, I'm sending the super smart guy. Right. So what do you do if you're a smart trader and you're convinced that you've made the right decision, but the market moves against you, even though you're right? Like, you know, for instance, say you're looking at a product that you completely disagree with and you think at some point is going to end in a very, very bad way, but it doesn't happen for years. How do you convince yourself that something else might be true or how do you come to grips

that even though you're making the right decision, the market? just isn't playing along with you. So I think that the important thing is to realize that as we run on our own, it's very, very hard to overcome our own biases, this biased way that we really kind of want to approach the world and process information. But we're pretty good at spotting other people's biases. And you can kind of feel that, right? You can sort of tell like when another person like, oh, come on, like, clearly you're being

biased in the way that you're thinking about this. So we can use this to our advantage and we can form a really good decision part. So the idea is get a group around you. And you obviously can do this in your own enterprise. You can do this with a group of friends, whatever it might be. Create a charter, which is a commitment to accuracy, accountability to your beliefs, and openness to dissent. And then this is the really important thing.

Try to cordon yourself off from outcomes as much as possible. Because here's the problem. Yes, if we have like a big data set where we can go and look and we can say, we can say, well, you know, these are what I see in the data, like we have 10,000 coin flips. Great. Go look at the 10,000 coin flips and that's going to tell you something about the underlying mathematics. But when you're just looking at one or two results, it can become extremely difficult.

And if you know what the outcome is, it actually will really, in fact, your decision-making. So as much as you can discuss the decisions as to why you decided to bet on the product or against the product or whatever it might be, without 10,000. telling them sort of where it's sitting at that point and deconstruct the decision without the outcome as much as possible. Either do it before, say, like if you're a trader, do it before the option expires, that would be really good, and really go through that decision process as you're trying to think about further decision making that goes with that.

Or if the option has expired, go talk to people as if just don't tell them how it kind of turned out. And I think that then you can really check your biases for each other and really have that commitment to, look, I want to understand, why do you think I'm wrong? And if you're more willing to ask that question as opposed to why do you think I'm right, you're going to get a lot farther in these kinds of decision groups. You can get the news whenever you want it with Bloomberg News Now. I'm Amy Morris. And I'm Karen Moscow here to tell you about our new on-demand news report delivered right to your podcast feed. Bloomberg News Now is a short five-minute audio report on the day's top

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Get the reporting and the context from Bloomberg's 3,000 journalists and analysts we're all over the world. Listen to the latest from Bloomberg News Now on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you listen. Annie, the title of your book, Thinking in Betts, Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts, I'm sure we've discussed on previous episodes. But explain to it. I mean, this is like the essential element of poker, which is that you see your whole cards and you see the community cards that. in the middle, let's say you're playing Texas Hold'em, but everyone also has their cards that you don't see, and so you don't have all the facts in a given hand. So explain to us sort of like the essential way that just from a poker perspective that you think about the world. So poker is really different than a game like chess, right? So in chess, I can see all the

pieces. So theoretically, if I have enough computing power, and we actually kind of know this because of computers now. I mean, computers have soft checkers. If I have a lot of, if I have enough computing power, I can just sort of compute the game out because I can say if I do this move, I know what all your possible moves are, because I can see your whole position. Not only that, there's no element of luck. So nobody's like rolling a pair of dice, and then, you know, it lands 11, and your bishop goes away. So that makes it actually a really different decision problem than poker. In poker, I can't see everybody else's cards, and there's this big luck element. So I have no control over the cards that come, so I could have, you know, a

that's 80% to win, we could have all our money on the table and, you know, I lose because you hit the 20%. So what that means is that in poker, your approach has to be twofold. One is to get really comfortable with this luck element, that on any given try, on any given single flip of the coin, you can't predict whether it's going to land heads or tails, and you don't want to read too much into whether it landed heads or tails, right? So if I know that the coin is fair and I flip a coin three times and it lands heads three times, I wouldn't want to then want to call tails on the next one just because of those three outcomes. You have to get very, very comfortable with that separation between outcomes and decisions and understand that you need to pull those apart.

That's the luck thing that you have to get comfortable with. The hidden information thing is that you really have to approach the world by trying to get information out of the market that you're dealing with. So you have to think about how do I move within this market? How do I make tests within this market to get people to narrow down for me what their hand is. So the way that I bet is all about trying to get you to respond in a way that tells me a little bit about your whole cards. And then I also use a lot of stuff about what I know about human nature, the way that humans generally bet. So those would be, say, the prior that I come into if I've never played with you before. And then as soon as I see you start doing things, I adjust the prior immediately. So I start

updating off of that. So I'll look at the frequency with which generally you'll play hands. Whether you generally raise or fold, are you like a sneaky player or a straightforward player? And all of those things I'm updating as I start to collect data on you. And then again, I have to be asking the right questions with my chips in the way that I bet. So you really approach the world from I don't have a lot of control over the luck element. So let me not get too upset about that. What I do have control over is this hidden information element. So I want to approach the world as very hungry. Like, I want to be hungry to collect information about you and I want to make sure that I'm asking good questions to get it. So when it comes to collecting that sort of information, can you apply

your technique at the poker table outside of that realm? Like, in everyday decision making, how would you collect information from the people that you're dealing with? How would you ask the questions to get the hidden information that you're trying to seek? I think it's twofold. I think one is what I said before. I've approached the world by asking why I'm wrong. Right. So if I have some sort of belief, it would be really good, Tracy, if I said to you, so can

you argue against me? Like, tell me what I'm missing. Is there something you know that I'm missing? So you want to say, what am I missing a lot? I think the other thing that's actually really important is that you can get people to give you information naturally if you express yourself in a way that invites it. So there's a difference between saying, I believe that this is true and I'm 100% sure. And I believe this is true and I'm 80% on this or 60% on this.

And let me tell you how I came to this 60%. So like I'll give you like a super simple example. If I announce some movie won best picture, right? So let's say that I'm thinking, oh, some movie like Citizen Kane. Citizen Kane won best picture. And I just announced that. You might not share information with me for two reasons. is that you may believe that it didn't, but you may now think I'm wrong because I've expressed

myself with such great certainty. So you don't share it with me because you're afraid sort of being embarrassed and you're going to go look up on Google behind my back later, right? So to check on that. I wouldn't dream of it. The other reason why you might not share the information with me is that you're worried that I'm wrong. This is particularly a problem for people in leadership roles. So if a leader expresses something with great certainty in the room as if it's 100% sure and they are absolutely right, the people in the room will sometimes not share for fear of embarrassing the person at the front of the room or not being viewed as a team player. So they won't share information back with you for a variety of reasons, and that's really bad.

But if you say, I think Citizen Kane won best picture and I'm like 60% on it, I mean, I know it's a good film, but I also know that some of the things we think of as the greatest films of all time didn't necessarily win Best Picture, and that's how I express it to you. Now I've just opened the door wide for you to become a collaborator with me. So when you approach the world wrapping in this kind of uncertainty, you invite people to share information, and that causes you to be an information gatherer. Wait, did it win Best Picture?

Well, I Googled it for the book, and it did not. That's a good example. It did not. So I Googled it for the book because it feels like it should have, right? And I have a bunch of examples in there, like nobody's name got changed at Ellis Island. I'm sure you're pretty surprised by that. I didn't know that. I didn't either.

I'm very curious about ego. And so going back to this idea of getting attached to our stories and getting attached to being right, is there a process for sort of divorcing ourselves from our egos so that we're just not attached to the idea of being right? So it's a little bit of a complicated answer, but let me try to do this in a simple way. The answer is, no, we always want to feel good about ourselves. And we don't actually want to rip that one away from us, right? It's good to feel good about yourself. The question is, what is the thing that you're deriving the good feeling from?

And that's what you can change. So I can go around sort of the way that I'm born, say, I derive my good feeling from thinking that great things are to my credit, bad things aren't my fault, my beliefs are generally true, and I'm super smart. So that could be the way that I derive my good feeling. Or I could shift the rules of the game where for me, you know, the win is calibrating my beliefs, being a really good credit giver, being a really good mistake admiter. And if I can make it so that that's what feels good to me, that that's where I'm deriving feeling like I'm a good actor in the world and somehow I'm doing a better job than other people, then that's going to get me to where I need to be.

And the way that you do that is, remember I said, get this decision pod going. And make sure that the decision pod is reinforcing those kinds of behaviors and not reinforcing the stuff that we don't want to reinforce. So if you go up and you say, I can't believe how unlucky I got in this trade, like, this is so ridiculous. Like, I was totally right, but, like, I was so unlucky. Hopefully they're saying, why are you telling me this? I don't want to hear that.

Like, that's just a hard luck story. And if it was really bad luck, there's nothing to be learned from it. So you're just complaining. Like, please don't complain to me. But if you go up and you say, you know what, I had this position on and I really felt like it was right. And, you know, it went poorly. And now I'm thinking about it and I'm not sure. You know, did it go poorly just because of bad luck?

Or maybe I'm looking at these places where I think maybe the analysis wasn't quite right. Can I discuss that with you? Now you engage with me and you reinforce that behavior. Look what happens. I mean, we're all just rats running through a maze hoping to get a little bit. bit of some food at the end. What happens is that you're only giving me pellets and reinforcement when I'm acting like accuracy is the goal. And you're pushing me away and not reinforcing when I'm acting like being right as the goal. And so that's what I would say is don't try to divorce yourself

from ego. I don't even know what that means. Like we all have ego. We all want to feel good about ourselves. Instead, change what it is that you feel good about. But okay, I have a weird question. but isn't poker ultimately a sort of results-oriented game, the same way with trading? Like, everyone's in it to win it. So you can shift the way you view your own success, but ultimately, if it doesn't translate into you winning the game or the trade, you're not going to be considered a good player or a good trader. So how do you overcome that?

Well, I guess that the question is, are you losing on a single trade or is it long-term? So that's the problem that we have is that we're processing these results as they come in one at a time. And that's the problem for learning is that if we have a bad result come in and we swat it away to luck, we're not going to learn any from it. If we have a good result come in and we want to onboard it and take credit for it because that's the bias. It's called self-serving bias. You can see why. Then we're going to reinforce that behavior. But that's only based off of one outcome.

So we have a choice in life. We can say we're going to play for the long run and say, if my decisions in general are better, then in the long run, I will win. Or we can say, in the short run, I don't want to feel bad. So as I'm fielding these outcomes as they come in, and certainly they come in one at a time because we don't stand back and say, let me wait and aggregate the data before I'm processing this stuff. Then what will happen is that we'll start to swat away stuff and onboard stuff, not really about whether the decisions were good or bad, but just sort of based solely on how they're going. the outcome was. So we want to play for the long run and sort of get over this hump of wanting to feel good in the short run. Do you think the sort of golden age of poker TV instilled in some people some bad lessons? Because I'm sure they showed all the times when you made an incredible

call or an incredible laydown or someone put on sunglasses and pushed all in. But they didn't show the 35 hands where you probably just folded and folded and folded and folded, even though those might have been the hands that really separated you from all the other players? I can't agree more with what you just said. So there's actually two reasons that I think that it kind of messed things up. One is this problem of when you're watching TV and it's poker, you can see all the cards. So it looks like a very different problem than what it actually is because you're like, I can't believe Joe's such an idiot.

He folded there. Didn't he know he had the best hand? And it's like, no, he didn't because he couldn't see the other player's cards. So it's hard to sort of get into your head now and think about what are the kinds of things that you're actually considering. But poker's really boring to watch on TV if you hide all the cards so you can't do that. But yes, the other thing is that they only show the very big decisions. But, okay, so there, you know, every whatever, there's a big decision. It's all those little executional decisions that you make along the way.

And particularly something that you said, which is really true is when are you cutting your losses? So those might look like kind of boring decisions from a TV standpoint, but they're incredibly important decisions as you go along, right? It's considering a counterfactual. Well, I want to get rid of this. I don't want to play it because if I do, it won't go well. And we're not so great at understanding how those tiny little decisions where we just cut our losses at the right point really make a difference

or we take a little stab at the right point. And those are all sort of not shown. Speaking of personal experience, I'm not a very good poker player, all my worst hands are when I think I'm like, oh, I'm just going to inch in, but I'm not going to get attached to this hand. I'm just going to play like the five, seven suited because I'm late in the ring and I'll be okay. And the next thing I know I have like half my pot in because I got really attached to it. So I always try, you know, avoiding those things seems to be a big would help me a lot. Yeah, it's really interesting because I cannot tell you the number of times that I've been working with someone on poker. and they will ask me some decision that's occurred, say, on the fourth card.

And they'll say, oh, my gosh, I had this really big decision. I didn't know what to do. And I'll say to them, hold on a second. Can we go back like four cards? Because I don't understand how you were in this situation in the first place. And I think in general this is kind of a problem with our decision making is these big moments really kind of stand out for us. And so those are the ones we analyze.

but very often it's these smaller decisions that you made in the first place that actually caused you to get into this bad situation in the first place. But we ignore those tiny little executional decisions. That's exactly what you were saying, right? Like they're not showing on TV like, oh, look, she folded that 7-5. Hmm, that's a hand that I might have played and take a chance on. Maybe I should be thinking about why she's folding that. And that's so often the case, like we make some little decision that we don't even think is significant because it seems like it's a tiny little bit of risk. So whatever. And then later on, it turns into this complete disaster as you've put yourself into a really tough spot.

So do you ever adapt your decision-making process according to, I guess, the mode of the game that you're playing? Like if you're playing online poker, does your decision-making change at all? Well, so how I make a decision doesn't change, but what the decisions might be would change because I change according to how. So I really think about poker as a market, right? So I'm reacting to the market. So the analogy would I be is you have bear markets, you have bull markets. Now, your decision process hopefully is the same, but the result in terms of the way that you're reacting to that market should change.

And in poker, you have bear markets and bull markets as well. You sit at a table where the players can be relatively passive, for example, and they're not really trying to take on a lot of risk or do very much. So your strategy would change in that compared to one where everybody's trying to push you around. That's more like a bear market. Everyone's trying to push you around and they're going after you and they're all, you know, very excited to be playing. So you would, how your strategy, how your decision making would express itself in those two situations would be different.

But the structure of how you're making the decision would stay the same. Well, we've had a lot of volatility lately, so I think that's a perfect spot to end it. Annie Duke, legendary poker player and the author of Thinking and Betts, making smarter decisions when you don't have all the facts. Thank you so much for joining us. Well, thank you. And Tracy, I hope I get you to play poker someday. You'll have to come coach me. I really think I need it at this point. That would be great. That would be good TV.

So, Tracy, another poker episode in the books. But I really thought that one was one of our best. And I loved that point about my favorite point in all that, I think, was the sort of the disadvantage of being smart. Because I think as journalists, we are exposed every day to ourselves and to our colleagues who, Of course, we think we're the smartest people in the world. And I think all of us would be pretty terrible actual practitioners of what we do. I have said this more than once that if I had been trading, I would have made some very, very stupid calls over the years. For instance, I would have sat out the huge, huge run-up in Bitcoin and the short volatility products that we are seeing crash in recent days.

It's really, really difficult. As a journalist, you're sort of trained to find the smart angle, try to find the thing that no. one else is seeing, but when it comes to the market, sometimes if no one else is seeing it, there's probably a reason for that, right? Yeah. And our job is we just want to be smart every day and we want to say the most interesting things. And I guess that works in our career. But if we had to sort of systematically survive over time, it probably wouldn't be as good. It reminds me also, you know, we talked to Peter Borish a while ago, a long time, you know, veteran hedge fund trader. And his point that he's made

several times. Like all the great traders are really great at selling, like cutting their losses fast. And it fits with this idea that, you know, a lot of the real money is made, so to speak, infolding in preemptively avoiding bad decisions. Yeah, but this is also the point that Annie was making about the importance of getting comfortable with luck. And I think in the world of finance and markets and investing especially, people aren't comfortable enough with that. Everyone wants to say, oh, I was really smart. I called this first. I got it right. But actually, maybe you were just lucky. And in that same way, it can go against you, right? And if it does go against you, then you have to sort of have the self-confidence and the self-awareness to just cut your losses and walk away. Let's walk away.

On that note, let's walk away. This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisandthal. And I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway. Oh, and you can follow me on Twitter at the stalwart, and you can follow Annie on Twitter at Annie Duke. And you should follow our Oddlotz producer, Tofer Forges, at Forrest T, as well as the Bloomberg head of podcast Francesca Levy at Francesca today. Thanks for listening. On April 4, 23, around two in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next? What happened next? turned the story into a political firestorm.

Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16.