Show Notes
On Amazon: The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow
Scientific American article about the Talent vs. Luck study
Misha is now Mister Stochastic and Damon is now Sergeant Shuffle.
Listener Challenge
Get yourself a nom de game. Use our tables or make up your own.
| 1 Doctor | 1 Random |
| 2 Professor | 2 Chance |
| 3 Magister | 3 Haphazard |
| 4 Senator | 4 Aleatoric |
| 5 Judge | 5 Stochastic |
| 6 Mister | 6 Shuffle |
| 7 Reverend | 7 Dice |
| 8 Ambassador | 8 Slapdash |
| 9 Captain | 9 Happenstance |
| 10 Sergeant | 10 Mixage |
| 11 Mayor | 11 Topsy-Turvy |
| 12 Father | 12 Surprise |
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Transcript
00 Misha: Well, I constructed a prompt for Gemini to actually make a song with that string of notes, instead of just pasting the string of notes with no context. Oh, and it actually did a fairly decent job. So, um, I don’t think, well, we can talk about whether we’re going to use it for anything or not, but here it goes. Epic.
27 Misha: It is epic.
38 Damon: I need a boat.
41 Misha: Yeah. I’m thinking like a Viking boat. Yeah. So that was that followed the string of notes fairly well. Yeah, it was very epic. Very epic. Um, welcome to your random reality. Welcome. Welcome to your made up reality where people can fly around the moon now, apparently.
01:09 Damon: Right.
01:10 Misha: Welcome to the simulation, everybody.
01:12 Damon: Kubrick’s not even around anymore.
01:14 Misha: Welcome to Your Aleatoric Reality where we find the gaps in logic. Um, so I read a book.
01:26 Damon: Sweet!
01:27 Misha: About randomness called the Drunkard’s Walk. Okay, now you’ve heard me before talking the show about the random walk or the random dice walk. Um, drunkard’s walk is another term for that concept of you have a grid and then you have like start a path, but like each point in the grid, you choose randomly which way to go. Okay. And this is a concept that’s used in mathematics. It’s used in statistics.
01:54 Damon: Why is it drunk now.
01:56 Misha: Well, because the premise is that, like, if somebody is super drunk and they’re trying to get somewhere, they’re gonna wobble around and they’re gonna digress, and they’re gonna go this way and that way, and they might head in a direction, but it’s not going to be direct. It’s going to be all over the place.
02:11 Damon: So it’s an indirection.
02:12 Misha: Yes. Um, so this, this book, which is about all about randomness, is called The Drunkard’s Walk. And I gave it a read. I’m just looking up the. You’d think I’d have this information pre-planned, but I don’t preplan.
02:25 Damon: It feels judgy.
02:26 Misha: The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow or Mlodinow or Mlodinow. It’s very hard to pronounce last name, but he. I guess he’s a mathematician. Uh, he talks a lot about the history of probability math. He talks about Pascal and you know how he started off like, well, he was very sick his whole life. And then he got really good at mathematics. Like he was like an innovator in mathematics. But at one point, he got scared about going to hell, and he just became super religious. And that’s when he wrote all this stuff about like, it’s better to believe in God because if you’re wrong, you go to hell. But if you’re, if you believe like, if you, if you act like there’s no God and you’re wrong and there is a God, that’s some dire consequences. But if you choose to believe in God and there turns out to not be a god, there’s really no bad consequence. So you’re better off believing in God. That was his argument. But that was after he got all religious. I’m on my way off on a tangent.
03:25 Damon: What does that have to do with the programming language of Pascal?
03:29 Misha: It’s just named after him. Well, anyhow, there’s a bunch of chapters in it, but the thing that interested me.
03:34 Damon: That’s super helpful. Are the words in order?
03:40 Misha: Well, I’m gonna have to summarize it for you because you won’t read a book.
03:44 Damon: I read books all the time.
03:46 Misha: Not all the time. You have read a lot of books.
03:49 Damon: Yeah, but I don’t read anymore.
03:50 Misha: No. It’s got. Who’s got that kind of time these days?
03:53 Damon: It’s the future, man. It’s the future we don’t have to read.
03:56 Misha: That’s what I’m worried about. That’s what I talked about in the app episode that, like, people’s brains are gonna atrophy. I mean, they’re already atrophying.
04:03 Damon: All we need are those chairs, and we’re there, right?
04:06 Misha: We’re on a spaceship. We’re in a chair that moves by itself. We have a big gulp in one hand and a, like, nutrient deprived, like Happy Meal, I don’t know. I don’t know where this episode is going, do you?
04:21 Damon: Well, look, a robot.
04:22 Misha: I wanted to talk about this book I read, and you’re making fun of me. I’m not a book.
04:27 Damon: I’m just. I’m just quirky.
04:29 Misha: What do you want to know about this book?
04:31 Damon: Um. How many words were there?
04:33 Misha: I would estimate twenty thousand words.
04:36 Damon: What was the longest word?
04:38 Misha: Septuagenarian.
04:39 Damon: Sweet.
04:39 Misha: I should have just got a random word off of that unabridged OED. API but I didn’t have have it up and handy.
04:47 Damon: So yourn. So anyway, how did this book. Tell me all about it.
04:53 Misha: Pascal was the pioneer of probability mathematics, and he did a lot of work on randomness, chance, how it relates to gambling and whatnot, rolling dice and stuff like that. You know how you figure out the probabilities.
05:08 Damon: Didn’t we talk about this before where you said that probability wasn’t actually calculated until like way later? Nobody actually thought about it and they were gambling. All right.
05:16 Misha: Yes. Yeah. That’s why the rules of hazard are like you get to pick which like numbers mean what? But then when they made up craps, it was basically optimal hazard based on their knowledge of probability. Like, well, you’d be stupid to pick that. So let’s just not have that option. Right? Um, but it was, it was like the seventeen hundreds before anybody had any sense of probability, even though like in ancient Greece, they were basing major like civilizational important decisions on oracles that rolled dice or astrology. struggle. I um, the goat knuckles or whatever. Um, but they didn’t have any sense of one side is more likely to come up than another. Like they just assumed that the gods make it roll how it’s supposed to roll so that they make the right decision, right? Nobody thought about calculating probability until Pascal came along. Well, I think somebody before him did it. I didn’t take you know, I didn’t take notes on the book. And looking back now, if I was going to talk about it on the show, I probably should have taken notes.
06:16 Damon: Well, you can just vibe it.
06:17 Misha: I that’s what I’m trying to do. There’s no helping me. I’m helpless.
06:21 Damon: Didn’t even know what the biggest name of the word in the book was. I mean.
06:24 Misha: How can you read a book and not know what the longest word in that book was? When you’re done, when you were not told to scan for that ahead of time?
06:33 Damon: Like like how like do book reviews that are just that, like it had this many words and this was the longest word or whatever. There were four thousand periods.
06:47 Misha: So what? Malone. Malone. Nemo. What Mlodinow talks about in the book that I that I keyed into at least was how easy it is because we have like pattern recognition hardware inside our heads. Yes. That’s why you see animals in clouds and faces on parking meters, because.
07:08 Damon: Optical illusions.
07:09 Misha: Your brain is constantly trying to make a pattern out of everything it sees. So it’s very easy to see patterns in random data, which is essentially where superstitions come from. Mhm. Um, and, but it’s also just as easy to think something is random when it’s actually a pattern. And he goes into this mathematically and explaining how you can false identify a pattern. You can also false identify something as random, which is why when you see like an opinion poll or like a, you know, a percentage of like this, many people think this or whatever, and they always have a margin of error, you know, the margin of error on this is plus or minus three percent or whatever, because they’re they’re going for the you have to have a large enough sample size so that you can get an actually representative idea because nobody’s going out and asking every single person in the United States which their, which is their favorite brand of shoes, right? But if they ask a thousand people, then they can say, and I don’t know what it is, but there’s a whole series of equations that you can figure out. What’s the population? How many people did I ask, therefore, how much variance is there going to be to for this to reflect the opinion of the population at large? And I found that very fascinating because I’ve always seen that like the margin of error on this study or on this poll or whatever, but like finding out how they do that, there’s this will be like a critical minimum number that if you ask anybody less than that.
08:38 Damon: Mhm.
08:38 Misha: Your data is meaningless.
08:40 Damon: Right. But you can also stack it. Well, the demographics are also.
08:44 Misha: You can certainly lie with statistics. Absolutely.
08:46 Damon: No, but I mean, no, I’m not saying lie. Like a lot of times they’ll stack it by, by using predictive analysis to create, okay, this demographic is going to give us the right answer, the one that we want.
08:59 Misha: Well, that’s if someone’s doing it nefariously.
09:03 Damon: Everybody’s always doing everything nefarious.
09:05 Misha: Typically, if you’re a poll, like if you’re what’s that major polling company.
09:10 Damon: nefarious dot com, hollow mountain dot com.
09:15 Misha: Gallup.
09:16 Damon: Gallup.
09:16 Misha: Gallup, they’re open source. They’re telling everybody their methodology, they’re correcting for demographics and all that kind of stuff. I think, I think Gallup might have been the people that figured out, oh, we have to stop calling people. Because if we call people, we’re excluding people that don’t have phones or cell phones. Like if we’re calling from the phone book now, we’re excluding.
09:37 Damon: Yeah, it’s just trash.
09:38 Misha: It doesn’t work anymore. Um, but so they talk, he talks about that false patterns and false, false non patterns. Statistical margin of error. He has a chapter on luck. How important like we will attribute our successes to oh I had the right skill or I knew the right people. Or like we’ll attribute it to predictable factors when overwhelmingly it’s going to be luck. It’s going to be random chance. And he he, he goes in, he delves into like baseball records. Like when you say like when there was this, uh, Roger Maris was this baseball player, Roger Maris, who had like a record breaking season in nineteen sixty one of sixty one home runs. And everybody was like, he’s the most amazing baseball player ever. And then he never did that well again. Um, and, and so Mlodinow goes into like statistical analysis of like any, it ties into that idea of the minimum number in order to have a meaningful sense of how good a player is by talent, you would need. It was a crazy amount you would need like sixty years of their performance for that. How well they did to be statistically significant. So anybody who has like three years in a row, or they’re the MVP or, you know, whatever, that’s not statistically significant. That’s luck. Right. And then, um, and that reminded me of a twenty eighteen study by Pluchino Biondo and Rapisarda. And the study was called talent versus Luck The Role of Randomness in success. And they did a modeling thing where they had this giant population and they gave everybody a talent level, and then they simulated like forty years of career with, they would get like random good luck times and random bad luck times. And it would be proportional. Like if you got good luck, it would be better. Like it was proportional to your talent. If you had a higher talent, your luck would would get you better things.
11:45 Damon: Oh, interesting.
11:46 Misha: And they have they explain their whole methodology if you want to, if you’re a researcher, you want to go out there and see this.
11:50 Damon: Just because there’s more opportunity.
11:52 Misha: No, because if you are talented, you are better able to parlay the lucky things that happen.
11:57 Damon: Oh.
11:58 Misha: But essentially, they came up with this methodology for if we have this like population, is the curve of success going to match the curve of talent? Right. Because because talent is evenly distributed on a bell curve, there are people with low talent. There are people with extremely high talent. Most people are somewhere in the middle on the on the bell curve, right. Or the curve of the bell, the bell curve, the the camel hump part plateau, the camel hump part. It’s the technical term is camel hump.
12:26 Damon: I think it’s the Humpty Hump.
12:27 Misha: But so what they found was that success. This is actually the problem they were investigating. That talent is evenly distributed or it’s they call it the normal distribution in statistics on a bell curve. But wealth and success follow the power law, which is where you have, like most people with nothing. And then when you get to some critical point, there’s a pretty rapid rise in the graph. And then like the top, you know, like the top ten percent of people have eighty percent of the wealth or whatever, like eighty over twenty rule kind of thing. And so that’s called a power law, which is a completely different distribution than a bell curve. And so they were trying to figure out if talent is evenly distributed. Why is success and wealth, power law? And that’s why they ran this simulation. And the simulation time after time after time showed that no matter what your talent level was, good luck was going to get you way up higher in the success range than any amount of talent.
13:29 Damon: Interesting.
13:29 Misha: And their conclusion was that luck is the most important factor for any kind of success in wealth. And anybody who, you know, you interviewed Jeff Bezos. What do you need to do to get ahead? And he’s like, well, you’re gonna work hard, whatever. He I don’t know what he says, but like, he believes that he’s where he is because of his intelligence and his skill and his.
13:49 Damon: Arrogance.
13:50 Misha: His arrogance. You know, it is arrogance for all humans to believe that any successes they have are based on their inherent qualities, because it’s mostly luck.
14:02 Damon: But you can have all the luck in the world if you don’t know how to leverage it. That’s the I think that’s the important. Like people have opportunities all the time, but if you don’t take advantage of them or parlay them, you know, then.
14:14 Misha: Yes, that is also true. However, what they were pointing out in this study they did was even with the knowledge that it takes talent to get ahead. People with less talent but having a better string of random luck did way, way, way better than people with a lot of talent that didn’t get all the hits of luck. It’s counterintuitive, but like I said, talent is normal distribution and wealth and success is power distribution.
14:44 Damon: But if you don’t have the talent to achieve the opportunity or to take advantage of the opportunity, then is it still luck?
14:52 Misha: That’s I think you’re asking a different question than this research was trying to address.
14:56 Damon: I that’s fine with me. It’s the question I have.
15:03 Misha: So I am not a researcher, but I’m telling you about a thing I. Well, okay, so if you don’t have talent, is it still luck when opportunities come. Yes. In in this model, it would still be luck. You had.
15:20 Damon: Does it even move the needle, though?
15:22 Misha: What do you mean, move the needle?
15:23 Damon: If you. If you.
15:25 Misha: Now we’re playing a record.
15:26 Damon: No, no. Like seismograph. But but, uh. No, if. Let’s say you’re the luckiest person in the world.
15:34 Misha: Opportunity. Opportunity. Opportunity. Opportunity, opportunity.
15:37 Damon: And you’re a total daft moron. And you take advantage of none of these opportunities, can you?
15:45 Misha: Let me ask you this question. Can you name any talentless hacks that are rich and famous?
15:50 Damon: Yes.
15:51 Misha: Yeah. Lots. Right. So I think that’s the answer to your question.
15:55 Damon: But typically somebody has to be talented.
15:58 Misha: Somebody does. But not everybody who’s successful has to be talented, right? There are plenty of people who are wealthy, famous, doing great. Not a lot of talent.
16:07 Damon: Somebody is talented.
16:09 Misha: So you’re saying there’s somebody behind the scenes.
16:11 Damon: Somebody doing something you can’t be like?
16:15 Misha: That would be the luck factor because if you have.
16:18 Damon: This opportunity.
16:19 Misha: That yeah, it’s if you.
16:21 Damon: Don’t think like an opportunity, the same, you can buy opportunity.
16:24 Misha: Well, we’ll have to email Pluchino, Biondo and Rapisarda to see what their definition of luck was.
16:31 Damon: Luck to me implies randomness.
16:34 Misha: Yes.
16:35 Damon: But that doesn’t always. I don’t know. It just doesn’t it doesn’t correlate for me the way that it’s described.
16:41 Misha: Well, one thing that Mlodinow does pretty successfully in the Drunkard’s Walk is points out how people’s ideas of randomness, luck, determinism, success, and all that is counter to the mathematics. Which is why when probability came out, it changed how people gambled and everything. Because if you just look at the data and think for yourself, you’re oftentimes going to come up with wrong conclusions, because that’s not how our brains work.
17:10 Damon: Because we always try to contextualize, contextualize things that have no context.
17:13 Misha: Yes, we’re always making patterns where sometimes patterns aren’t there, and sometimes we’re not recognizing patterns that are a pattern.
17:21 Damon: Right. But if you don’t know how to play blackjack, humans are.
17:24 Misha: Humans are not rational creatures. They are creatures with the ability to rationalize. Very different thing.
17:30 Damon: I just think that luck is a form of opportunity. But if you can’t seize that opportunity, it’s not luck anymore. Luck has to be applicable.
17:40 Misha: Well, luck in this. Like luck when you just, like, take it out of a scientific con, like. I mean, it’s not even a scientific word. Luck is a very vague word, right?
17:48 Damon: That’s what I’m saying. That’s why I don’t like it. Like, given the luck of having all the most beautiful music in your head, but you play no instrument so you can never share it with anyone else.
17:57 Misha: Well, that’s an edge case.
17:59 Damon: Is it?
18:00 Misha: Probably.
18:00 Damon: Remember what they did to Paul?
18:01 Misha: Simon locked him in an elevator with Muzak versions of his hits.
18:05 Damon: But, um, I don’t know, I just, I just, I think there’s a third. Luck is only lucky if you are able to take advantage of it, is what I’m saying.
18:16 Misha: Okay, on an individual basis? Sure. What this is talking about is in aggregate, luck makes much more of a difference.
18:26 Damon: How do you measure.
18:27 Misha: Success than anything else?
18:29 Damon: What does that even mean though? What is luck? How do you measure luck?
18:33 Misha: Well, lucky events can multiply the person’s success if they can exploit them, and unlucky events reduce success.
18:43 Damon: I just think it’s a bad idea. It’s probably just the word that I’m wigging out on because I don’t think it’s the right word.
18:49 Misha: Chance. Then it’s chance. Chance. Randomness affects your success way more than anything else.
18:58 Damon: But if you can’t. Yeah. Okay.
18:59 Misha: And, uh, that’s according to Pluchino Biondo and Rapisarda in their twenty eighteen study.
19:07 Damon: Those are clearly fake names.
19:10 Misha: And also, Mlodinow in Drunkard’s Walk has a whole chapter about it, which you would know if you would crack a book once in a while.
19:17 Damon: Oh, I’ll crack a book upside your head.
19:19 Misha: I know, right. Well, anyhow, I.
19:22 Damon: Don’t know, just I, it’s just I don’t know why that bothers me so much, but the. It’s like being a rain god.
19:28 Misha: Elaborate.
19:29 Damon: Uh, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
19:31 Misha: I know what you’re talking about. When I say elaborate. I mean, you can’t just say like, we’re not primer. We’re not going to say, oh, hey, like that thing last week and then move on and never like, explain what we’re talking about. Right? We have listeners, I think a couple at least. And if you just say rain, God, we don’t know if they read Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
19:51 Damon: If they haven’t read Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
19:52 Misha: If you haven’t read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, read it.
19:56 Damon: If a new version coming out, it’s all illustrated.
19:58 Misha: Why?
19:59 Damon: Because Kickstarter. Anyway. Um, so yeah, the guy’s a rain guy. He’s a traveling salesman, and everywhere he goes, it rains on him all the time. And, and the, the, the rain clouds are so happy to follow him around and shower him with love and show him. And he’s just miserable all the time. And he just wishes it wouldn’t rain.
20:17 Misha: What does that have to do with what we’re talking about?
20:20 Damon: Is it luck?
20:21 Misha: No, that’s. He’s a rain god and doesn’t know it. And the clouds want to be near him. I wouldn’t call that luck Exactly. I wouldn’t call it randomness either. I would call it supernatural powers.
20:32 Damon: Okay. That’s fair.
20:33 Misha: Yeah. Anyhow, he does also have a chapter about computer randomness and he talks about pseudo randomness. Mhm. Um, and how.
20:42 Damon: All computational randomness is pseudo randomness.
20:44 Misha: Of course. Yeah. Because computers are procedural, right? Yeah. So, um.
20:50 Damon: Also true randomness is not very functional.
20:53 Misha: What do you mean by that?
20:54 Damon: Well, if you want to inject randomness into a game or whatever in the way that a program would use it, it would, it would, it would if true randomness would be very hard to incorporate having a wide berth of range of, of opportunities, both positive and negative is good for a program.
21:16 Misha: Well, if I, if I following you, I think what you’re talking about is the problem that, um, like Apple and Spotify had with their shuffle functions When it comes to random people, this is an example of people perceiving pattern when there isn’t like true randomness doesn’t seem like randomness to people because they’re expecting it to be mixed up, right in a certain way.
21:38 Damon: Right.
21:39 Misha: That would be a pattern.
21:40 Damon: But I think you would find more patterns with true randomness than you would with pseudo random.
21:45 Misha: Well, for instance, one of the things that Mlodinow says is like, if you did ten million coin flips, there would be like at least ten spots within that data where there would be one hundred tails in a row, or one hundred heads in a row, and someone looking at something that’s supposed to be random and seeing one hundred of something in a row would just automatically assume that the randomness is broken. That’s not working right? Right. Yeah. So that’s an extreme variable.
22:14 Damon: As to yeah.
22:14 Misha: Same principle. Yeah. Uh, like variability is not the same as randomness, correct. Correct. So yeah. So, but because, um, because all the computer randomness that we have available is pseudo random. I started thinking about the word pseudo random.
22:31 Damon: It’s the illusion of randomness. Yes.
22:33 Misha: Yeah. And it’s a pretty good one. But anyhow, it got me to thinking of other words that start with pseudo.
22:38 Damon: Okay.
22:39 Misha: Like pseudopod. Like an amoeba. Like stretches out a thing that is like a little limb.
22:46 Damon: Yeah.
22:47 Misha: And then it uses it to, like, swim around about Sudafed. Pseudopod. Sudafed. Uh, isn’t. Oh.
22:53 Damon: I know. I was just kidding. What about Sussudio?
22:57 Misha: I actually, when I used to take Sudafed for colds, it didn’t work for me. And so I started calling it Sudafed.
23:04 Damon: Oh, wow.
23:05 Misha: Because I was pseudo fed up with it.
23:07 Damon: That’s right.
23:08 Misha: But then you got like pseudonym, like a nom de plume. Mhm. And I was thinking like, well, why don’t we have like, there’s different types of pseudonym. Right. There’s like nom de plume, which is the name of the pen, which is like a fake name for an author. There’s nom de guerre, which is like, if you’re a revolutionary or like a guerrilla or something, you have this like fake name.
23:29 Damon: What does that actually literally.
23:30 Misha: You can’t get arrested. Guerrilla is a war warrior. Kind of guerrilla is like little war.
23:37 Damon: Okay.
23:37 Misha: In Spanish.
23:38 Damon: So the name of the little war?
23:40 Misha: No, it’ll be the person.
23:41 Damon: Oh.
23:42 Misha: Would like pick like like che che Guevara’s name wasn’t che was Ernesto, but everybody called him che.
23:48 Damon: Because on the t shirt.
23:49 Misha: Nom de guerre, it was on his t shirt. He had a t shirt of himself with a beret.
23:55 Damon: It was actually a Rage Against the Machine t shirt.
23:57 Misha: And you hate berets, so.
23:59 Damon: I do.
23:59 Misha: Yeah. Guy.
24:00 Damon: Yeah. Do you think so? You’re saying that the beret is a pseudo hat?
24:04 Misha: It’s a pseudo hat. I thought, wouldn’t it be neat to have.
24:09 Damon: It doesn’t look finished.
24:11 Misha: A nom de game.
24:12 Damon: A nom de game.
24:13 Misha: Nom de game. Okay, so have you got a twelve sider handy?
24:18 Damon: I do.
24:20 Misha: So I’m gonna roll on my table here.
24:22 Damon: All right. You don’t have to.
24:23 Misha: Say the terms. Or should I just tell you what I win? I should roll any time a question is asked.
24:29 Damon: Okay.
24:29 Misha: Um, if it’s seven higher, I’m gonna name twelve. All right. My list of titles is doctor, professor magister, Senator judge, Mister Reverend, ambassador, captain, sergeant, mayor and father.
24:45 Damon: Okay.
24:46 Misha: Like a priest. Potentially, I could get religious with this random stuff.
24:50 Damon: Okay.
24:50 Misha: And then do you have a seven sider? I can always go to your quest tools and get myself a random number from one to seven. I’m gonna roll a twelve. It’s a six, which is mister, which is the one I wanted least. Thanks, Fortuna. Um, I’m just gonna, um, go to your quest slash tools and get a random number from one to seven. Booyah. It’s a five which works out to be stochastic. What Mr. stochastic. That’s me.
25:29 Damon: Oh, hey.
25:30 Misha: And I have a tagline too.
25:32 Damon: Mr. stochastic goes. What is that? I’m very confused right now. Where does this stochastic.
25:38 Misha: Stochastic stochastic cost. Is the Greek version of stochastic.
25:43 Damon: Okay.
25:44 Misha: Which is the mathematical term for a non-deterministic series. It’s a synonym for random.
25:49 Damon: Okay.
25:49 Misha: We’ve been over this. There’s not a lot of good synonyms for random. You got random, you got chance, and then you’ve got, like, technical terms like aleatory.
25:56 Damon: Don’t I get one stochastic?
25:58 Misha: I’m not stopping you. What’d you get?
26:01 Damon: Nine.
26:02 Misha: You get to be captain.
26:04 Damon: Captain. All right.
26:05 Misha: All right. And then. Did you find a seven? No. Or do you want to go to your tools and get yourself a random number from one to seven?
26:12 Damon: I should really have more dice handy when we do this.
26:15 Misha: You should go use the random tools we have on our website.
26:19 Damon: seven.
26:20 Misha: Dice. Your Captain Dice, which is so appropriate.
26:24 Damon: Captain dice.
26:25 Misha: Yeah. Three. Four. Five. Seven. I gotta roll a sixer for my tagline.
26:29 Damon: Uh, just roll. Divide by.
26:30 Misha: two. I carry a six sider at all times.
26:34 Damon: Captain dice three.
26:36 Misha: It’s a three, which is haphazard. Oh, no. Sorry. It’s one two three. Dude. I came up with the the shuffle dude.
26:44 Damon: What?
26:45 Misha: Mr. stochastic chose the shuffle. Dude. That’s me now. From now on, on the show, I’m Mr. Stochastic chose the shuffle dude. And your captain dice. You need a roll a seven and roll a six.
26:58 Damon: I rolled oh, another.
27:00 Misha: Another seven and then a six. Two chance.
27:05 Damon: six.
27:06 Misha: Aficionado. The chance aficionado. Dice.
27:10 Damon: Captain dice. Hey!
27:16 Misha: You will never get tired of that joke, will you? Anytime we start talking about dice, you’re like, oh, little Miss Muffet.
27:23 Damon: Hickory dickory dock.
27:25 Misha: All right. If you if you want to be offended, if you’re a if you’re a millennial or younger and you want to be offended, look up Andrew Dice Clay, the comedian. The funny thing is that character was meant to be a parody of guys like that. But then everybody thought that he was a guy like that, right?
27:43 Damon: Like, I mean, Larry the Cable guy.
27:46 Misha: He has a PhD. Actually.
27:48 Damon: He doesn’t have a name anymore.
27:49 Misha: He’s just Larry the Cable guy.
27:51 Damon: Like in credits. That’s fucked up.
27:54 Misha: Well, that’s how people, uh, you know, people want an easy to understand brand. Like people will. People will peg you as something. And then it’s very, very difficult for anything you do. That’s why first impressions are so important because it’s very, very difficult for anything you do to change someone’s peg that they have you. Oh, you’re the guy that always drops your keys because you dropped your keys, like, twice in the four months they knew.
28:21 Damon: Or you fucked one goat.
28:22 Misha: You fucked one.
28:23 Damon: Goat.
28:26 Misha: Did they call me Lou the banker? No. Um, that’s probably a joke, Andrew Dice Clay would tell.
28:33 Damon: I love that joke. That’s a great joke. It’s a very old joke. I think we should. I think we should come up with with, uh, more names and then roll to pick one of the sets.
28:44 Misha: Because you don’t like the one you got.
28:46 Damon: No, I just think it’d be more fun. I want to roll on the table multiple times and then roll for the combination that is used.
28:54 Misha: How is that not rerolling?
28:57 Damon: It’s just more fun for a podcast, is it? I think so because you say more funny things.
29:02 Misha: So you how many do you want to roll?
29:05 Damon: Seventy.
29:08 Misha: Well, there are twelve titles and seven synonyms for dice, which means there are eighty four possibilities.
29:17 Damon: I will roll three.
29:18 Misha: Three. Okay.
29:19 Damon: All right, so we got Captain Dice.
29:22 Misha: Yeah, we got we got Captain Dice. Are you gonna reroll the taglines, too? Or we can just ditch the taglines.
29:29 Damon: I don’t care about them. Really?
29:30 Misha: Okay, so you got Captain Dice roll a twelve ten. That’s Sergeant.
29:37 Damon: Sergeant, and then a six.
29:39 Misha: seven.
29:40 Damon: A seven seven.
29:42 Misha: Dice.
29:43 Damon: No.
29:44 Misha: Captain dice, you got Sergeant Dice six. Oh, you want to change shuffle, Sergeant shuffle. I like I like that.
29:51 Damon: Yeah.
29:52 Misha: And then another twelve eight eight is ambassador. And your seven again.
29:58 Damon: For.
29:59 Misha: Aleatory.
30:00 Damon: Ambassador aleatoric.
30:02 Misha: Or aleatoric. Ambassador aleatoric.
30:04 Damon: Can I be the aleatoric ambassador? That’s the Egyptian magician.
30:09 Misha: The aleatoric Ambassador. That sounds more like a tagline than a name.
30:14 Damon: That’s true.
30:14 Misha: Sergeant shuffle, the aleatoric ambassador. I don’t know.
30:18 Damon: It’s pretty good.
30:19 Misha: So then you want to roll between those three?
30:22 Damon: Yeah.
30:22 Misha: All right.
30:24 Damon: Two.
30:25 Misha: You already divided? Yep. Okay, that’s Sergeant Shuffle.
30:28 Damon: Sergeant shuffle is my name.
30:30 Misha: All right? But you were Captain Dice, and you make dice.
30:33 Damon: That’s true.
30:34 Misha: Well, let’s say you’re Sergeant Shuffle, but one day you’ll, you know, raise up in rank.
30:41 Damon: I’ll just. I’ll just roll every day.
30:43 Misha: You might say random or you might say dipshit. I changed my name every day for a thousand days, and it got to be tedious.
30:51 Damon: I’m sure it started that way. Actually.
30:53 Misha: No. Well, actually, because when I first started telling people that I was going to change my name every day for a thousand days, the number one reaction I got was, how are you going to come up with so many names?
31:04 Damon: That’s easy.
31:05 Misha: And I’m like, that’s the easy part. What I don’t know is how I’m going to stop after a thousand. Because I still come up with to this day. Every now and then I like just the name pops in my mind and I’m like, oh man, why didn’t I use that when I was doing the thousand names? Like what I could have been. Sergeant shuffle.
31:21 Damon: Sergeant.
31:22 Misha: Missed opportunity. I could have been Commander Salamander. I could have been Freakazoid, Magicka, Zoid.
31:28 Damon: These all sound like real names to me. Yeah. I mean, people like this all the time, and.
31:32 Misha: I didn’t I didn’t use any of those. My name was minty. One day. What mid.
31:38 Damon: And to know why does it say I mean I know what that’s from.
31:42 Misha: Oh don’t say that out loud.
31:44 Damon: Okay.
31:44 Misha: Send me an email. There’s like a one in ten thousand chance of getting that message.
31:48 Damon: Really?
31:49 Misha: Yeah.
31:49 Damon: Cool.
31:50 Misha: There’s secrets on our website, man. You guys gotta like, check that.
31:54 Damon: But how would I even know?
31:55 Misha: What do you mean?
31:56 Damon: How would you know that I was supposed to do something about this?
31:58 Misha: It says that, doesn’t it?
31:59 Damon: No, it tells me to send my answer to old Pink care. The funny farm. Well, I need to do that in high school.
32:04 Misha: Oh, you didn’t then you didn’t discover the. Okay, there’s more than one of those. Gotcha. That are very, very rare. But that’s that’s a backwards message on the wall.
32:14 Damon: Yeah, I.
32:14 Misha: Know. Okay. It’s a Pink Floyd secret message that I put in there. I don’t even remember all the stuff I put in there. So we need, uh, do you want to wrap this up? Sure. Put a bow on this. Give me your your conclusion, captain. Shuffle. Sergeant. Shuffle.
32:30 Damon: Sergeant. Shuffle. Um, uh, conclusion of what?
32:34 Misha: The episode.
32:35 Damon: Misha read a book?
32:36 Misha: Yeah. Did I read a whole book all by myself?
32:41 Damon: That’s awesome.
32:41 Misha: Okay, so today I learned t I l, um, take better notes when you read a book. Actually, I, I took pretty copious notes. And then when I was looking at the notes, I was like, I don’t need these notes. And I deleted it.
32:58 Damon: That’s silly.
32:59 Misha: In a fit of pique.
33:00 Damon: You be one of those assholes that writes all over in every book.
33:03 Misha: No, because I usually read digital books. Now we need we do need a listener challenge.
33:08 Damon: All right. Let’s see.
33:10 Misha: I’m gonna say come up with a nom de game for yourself. And you can use the chart that we have, or you can make up your own chart or you can do to add to our chart.
33:20 Damon: Yeah.
33:20 Misha: Or um, the, the second table that I have is random chance, haphazard aleatory, stochastic chaos. Or you could just say stochastic shuffle, or you could leave that off your list. Shuffle and dice. We’re on my list. So get yourself a title and a name that sounds like randomness or whatever, however you want to do it. Email us, tell us what your name is and we’ll give you a shout out on the show.
33:44 Damon: I want to be Sergeant Yawn.
33:46 Misha: Of course you do. Your Aleatoric Reality is a production of Tuesday Productions, LLC. The opinions expressed in this podcast are not necessarily the opinions of the publishing company or the hosts.
33:59 Damon: Pretty much.
34:02 Speaker 5: Okay, here’s your random seven seconds of silence. You’re welcome.
34:16 Misha: Any last words?
34:17 Damon: Um.
34:18 Misha: Other than we shouldn’t publish this episode.
34:20 Damon: You get in life what you have the courage to ask for.
34:23 Misha: Good one.
34:24 Damon: That was my virtual fortune cookie.
34:26 Misha: Oh. Is that working? Did that work for you? I think that API was down for a while.
34:30 Damon: MM. Airfield.
34:32 Misha: Airfields is the random word you got. Cool.
34:35 Damon: Compound.
34:35 Misha: Lunge.
34:36 Damon: Mortal.
34:37 Misha: Cooing.
34:38 Damon: Relate.
34:39 Misha: Sticky.
34:40 Damon: Commander.
34:41 Misha: Excite.
34:41 Damon: Ice.
34:42 Misha: Football.
34:43 Damon: Scrutiny.
34:44 Misha: Okay.
34:45 Damon: Did I win?
34:45 Misha: Mornington. Crescent.
34:47 Damon: Lottery.
34:48 Misha: Fine. You win.
35:00 Robot: Your Aleatoric Reality.
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