00:00 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
On this week's episode of Circles Off. We're going to talk to a man that went from posting baseball picks on gambling Twitter to joining a large-scale betting operation. Barry Horse joins us today. We'll talk about his journey. We'll talk about the rule changes in Major League Baseball this season and a little bit of Bitcoin discussion as well. All that and more. Circles Off starts now. Come on, let's go On this week's episode of Circles Off. We get into a discussion about the state of cryptocurrency. The views in this recording are the personal views of myself, johnny and our guest, barry Holmes. The commentary is provided for general informational and entertainment purposes only. It does not constitute financial or investment accounting advice. Your individual circumstances and current events are critical to sound investment planning. Anyone watching to act on this interview should do their own research or consult with a financial advisor. Welcome to Circles Off episode number 95 here on the Hammer Betting Network, rob Pizzola joined by Johnny from Betstamp. What's going on? 

01:07 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Nothing much, Rob. I'm excited for our guest today. Episode 95, who do we got? 

01:12 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Miles Garrett would be the big 95. 

01:14 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Nice helmet throw Miles. 

01:16 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Garrett Miles. 

01:16 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Garrett helmet throw the NHL Matt Duchesne. 

01:19 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Yes. 

01:19 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
AKA also a nice country singer. If you guys didn't know that, look it up. It's pretty cool. 

01:23 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
I didn't know that actually I should know that, I guess he moved to nashville. 

01:26 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
I think it's safe to say he's. He's safe in nashville. He's um learned the guitar and he's been, uh, actually performing at some bars in nashville as a country music singer. Yeah, he's not bad, it's pretty good. 

01:36 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
I will say I'm not a country music fan, but I do. I do love broadway in nashville, just for the vibes, just like the party atmosphere. You know it's great. It's great. I didn't know that about Matt Duchesne. As always here on Circles Off, we are sponsored by Pinnacle. Pinnacle is the world's sharpest sportsbook and now available to bettors in Ontario. Find out what professional bettors have known for decades. Pinnacle is where the best bettors play. You must be 19 or older not available to those in the us and once again, please play responsibly for those tuning in here. You see myself and johnny in the blue jay shirts. Baseball is upon us, opening day on thursday. No better guest to bring in than the man, the myth, the legend. You know him as Barry Horse. You can follow him on Twitter at Barry Horse underscore 29 professional baseball better and more. We'll get into that. Now joins us on Circles Off, barry Horse. How are things? 

02:45 - Berryhorse (Guest)
Great Thanks for having me. 

02:47 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
No problem at all, obviously, baseball betting. I couldn't think of anyone better to bring on. I'm very familiar with the story and went through your personal rise in the industry back in 2018. But let's hear a little bit more about you. For people that don't know, give us some of your own personal background and how you were first introduced to the betting space. 

03:12 - Berryhorse (Guest)
So my background is math, physics, computer science, which makes me a riveting podcast guest. This is so stupid, but ESPN had this game called streak for the cash. I don't know if you guys played it every day. 

03:29
I don't think there's any like money at risk, but it was basically you win 25 grand if you pick 25 games in a row, right, it's something like this. And, uh, 2013,. I was a freshman in college working for a basketball company called second spectrum. If you have any NBA fans who listen to this, they'll probably know about it. But back then it was literally just starting. There was like seven of us working and very inexperienced engineer my job, you know. 

03:55
I eventually started doing like real stuff, but at the start it was more or less labeling and charting events. So to then run machine learning algorithms to identify these basketball events. So the company has all the xyz data of all the players on the court and the ball and you can make sense of identifying that's a pick and roll, etc. Etc. And then you can say when chris paul's the ball handler in a pick and roll, deandre jordan's saying the screen, they score 1.2 points per possession if you blitz it, or 1.6 if you switch. You know yada, yada, and that's way better to do with a computer identifying those events than like a human labeling them all. But you need some training data. 

04:33
So I watched literally every single minute of boston, celtic, houston, rocket, sacramento king and la clipper basketball games from 2012 through 2014 and, uh, just in doing that, basically had like every rotation mismatch strategy nailed on those four teams, um. And so, like, in my little pool with college friends, I would always like win our little 100 monthly bet for who had the longest streak, because I would just bet all the nba games for that. Well, not that, but put on that um. And then you know 2014. I started becoming like a lot more aware that, like these betting markets existed and then left the company basically to start building my own models and betting. So interesting. 

05:15 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Uh, how did it work out for you at the start? 

05:18 - Berryhorse (Guest)
yeah, I mean this. This probably makes me very punchable, but it pretty much just worked like, um, I, I have like zero gamble in me. I'm really not interested in like speculating. I don't say this from like a moral high horse like I if people can responsibly have fun, be my guest. But um, it was purely like an academic endeavor and pretty rigorously tested. When I started I had I had like very little money, um, you know, 19 year old college kid. But the first thing well, maybe not, maybe like six months after like starting, learned out about, uh, bitcoin as a way to send money to and from sports books of the next 72 hours. After hearing that word, I probably slept for like three and had every dollar to my name in bitcoin after those three days. 

06:04 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
And there was a. 

06:07 - Berryhorse (Guest)
my version of the kimchi premium was there was a site called LocalBitcoins which, for those who don't know, is more or less like Craigslist for Bitcoin, which sadly died this year and but back in 2015, there were people willing to pay like pretty outrageous premiums to buy and sell Bitcoin in cash with anonymity. So, like I would buy Bitcoin for $300 on Coinbase, drive up to Beverly Hills, presumably to some drug dealer or something who wanted to buy Bitcoin for $350 or $400 and rinse and repeat over and over, taking the $5,000 premium, and then had a bankroll from that. And then the sports did well for four years and got on Twitter. 

06:46 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
So let's get into that, because you basically blew up on gambling Twitter in 2018, baseball season 2018. That's where a lot of people will have first heard your name. I think you did the deep dive podcast that year as well, with Andy and Drew, got a little bit more exposure. But I want to dig into that a little bit and you built a large following very quickly, basically from zero to any. Everybody who was betting baseball whether they were tailing you or they were a doubter of you or whatever was following your account. What led you to post your baseball numbers online in the first place? 

07:32 - Berryhorse (Guest)
so I I was getting down basically just recycling I didn't even know this word existed, but essentially bearding through my friends in college offshores, um, and then you know the whatever four places in the world that actually take a bet and basically grew to the point where, like I had naively thought, like the ceiling was basically add up those four numbers and that's like what you can bet on a game, um, without understanding anything about how, what I've learned basically the last four or five years, about how the industry actually works. And so basically I I mean true, like this is not like virtue signaling, like I'm this altruistic angel, like truly, it was just I can't make more on this. Somebody else might as well. Here you go. Like there is no, I'm going to eventually sell picks or do like a business of it, like I had no intention other than like share. Here's a community, let's have fun. Like truly. 

08:22 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Fair enough Interesting. What was that overall experience like for you? Because I mean that goes. You go from a guy who's just like Frank I mean obviously you have your own personal life and your friends and but you go from that to this massive following where I mean there were, honestly, days that I can recall where people would just well, barry horse hasn't tweeted yet today, like people messaging you like are you okay, is everything good and this and that like having people glued to every single tweet. What was that like for you? 

08:53 - Berryhorse (Guest)
I mean in the moment like very much like a fun dopamine hit. Upon further reflection it was probably not the healthiest thing in the world for me to experience Like that, in tandem with the prior four years of not to sound like I haven't learned any lesson from this. But basically adding four digits to my bankroll and then, like overnight, going from like zero to 10,000 followers led to a very inflated sense of self and ego. Upon further review, I probably had some semblance of awareness in the time of this. It wasn't like I was out doing cocaine with strippers every night. 

09:40
The Barry Horse Twitter account was very much the most exaggerated, biggest douchebag version of myself on Twitter. But you know that led to me thinking I was much smarter than I am basically. So you know pros and cons. I think like a lot of it was largely positive. I met some like amazingly beautiful people. Even like to this day, like some of the most rewarding things I get are messages of people like thanking, the explanation of how to do bitcoin, cold storage etc. Or you know, those baseball games that year are still like very enjoyable for me to like connect with people in that way. So like it overall like completely changed my life, but you know there's good and bad oh, how many people you think had like tweet notifications on for you back then. 

10:24 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Did they exist at that time, I think? 

10:26 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
I think they did, yeah, yeah, they did. It's like I mean likely all of them. 

10:30 - Berryhorse (Guest)
I mean like I truly didn't post anything but games for like the first three or four months, so like I don't know why anybody would follow me other than the games. 

10:38 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
So yeah, like people following you, putting on the notification and then just being on their phone, being like Barry Horst just tweeted a baseball pick, bet, bet, bet. That was literally like. 

10:50 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
It got to a point where everyone, even if they didn't like you or you know, there were people that were skeptical. I'll put myself in that boat. At the same time, we still had to know what Barry Horst was playing, because there was going to be some market influence based off that. Because this this is like we talk about um Adam Chernoff nowadays, right, when he was running simple handicap and 8,000 people in a telegram group who are going to all go bet his pick. This was basically what was happening at the same time five years ago. 

11:23
So there was that, but there was a lot of doubters, including me, and the big thing for me was you would routinely actually post what your edge was on the game, right, Whether that was like the I can't remember, it was the Kelly stake or the implied probability you gave the team to win, but there was some notion of this. 

11:41
Is the edge that's on the game as well. It's not just a pick or this is the amount of units that you should bet on it. And I was a successful baseball better at that time and I'm not anymore, and what you were doing is very different in the sense that I never dreamed of having edges the size of the ones that you were posting, and I think that's what caused a lot of skepticism at the time. It's like there's no way there's a 10% edge on this baseball side at this point in the day, and I think that was shared in a lot of the sharper community, which, by the way, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's right. Sharp bettors, for whatever reason in this space, are just preconditioned to think that everyone else is going to fail and that they're the best. Can't explain it. 

12:32 - Berryhorse (Guest)
But what condition to think that everyone else is going to fail and that they're the best, can't explain it, but what was different about your process at that time that you think separated you from everyone else? Well, let's first address that. A big edge could exist in a liquid market. It's probably worth going over because, like, maybe we can just start with with this one example and if we just disagree it's not worth exploring more. But did you two watch TCU-Georgia National Championship game of football? 

12:50 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Of course I was actually out for a steak dinner with my wife. I was planning to watch the second half. 

12:58 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
I watched it, obviously yeah. 

13:00 - Berryhorse (Guest)
Okay, so let's envision the exact same players, exact same teams, same coaches, same fans, same referees are all in that field one week later and the exact same game gets replayed. Is that line 13 and a half again? 

13:12 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
I mean I would assume it'd be much higher than 13 and a half. Yeah, it's not 50, but maybe it's. 

13:16 - Berryhorse (Guest)
I mean, I really truly believe 19 and a half, 20, 20 and a half, maybe 21. 

13:20 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
I was going to say around, like if you got to 21 and a half, that's tough, but yeah, 20 would be fine. Let's say 21. 

13:27 - Berryhorse (Guest)
That's verse. 13 and a half. That'd be if 13 and a half if we assume was right 21 would be something in the realm of like minus 270, like 72-ish percent. So if you're laying minus 110 on 13 and a half, 52 percent, that's 20% edge over a 40% ROI on a bet on what theoretically is the most liquid, well-informed, efficient market of the college football season. Yep, absolutely. So clearly no one. And if you disagree, that's fine, we just disagree. But like I don't think clearly anyone objects to the fact that there could be a depth of edge that big at least once in a year. Maybe the suspicion is more that like, can five percent edge happen 500 times in a season? That's probably more the argument. 

14:10 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
But I would make the argument you know. 

14:12 - Berryhorse (Guest)
so we have the tcu game to demonstrate like the depth of edge is possible, but for how about the breadth? This might ruffle feathers, like the market is always wrong and I know I know like very much the opposite is preached. But just from and I'm not trying to be overly nebulous and philosophical here but truly we cannot know what any line should be. And this is not like a human limitation, like Heisenberg uncertainty principle. If we measured every little less electron in every single player that was going to play on the game, we knew every single calorie that every coach had had in the last week, we knew like which players girlfriends broke up with them the night before or not, and like which we knew like the literal, like biochemical information with every single little muscle cell and all the players bodies. And like we have some crazy third generation artificial general intelligence making sense of all of this like incomprehensible, almost absurd level of information about all these players. Still, in our 2023 level of understanding of quantum physics, there's some number of unknowable unknowns. This is not like a measurement problem. This is like a Bell's theorem. This is not like a measurement problem. This is like a Bell's theorem. 

15:25
If you're familiar with Gödel's incompleteness theorem. This is a near infinite number of things that we just cannot speculate on or fully understand the probability of, just down to the wave functions of electrons and all these people that are playing the sport. So if all that's way overly nerdy, you can dumb it down to this very common phrase, which is all models are wrong, most are harmful, some are useful. So when I say the market's always wrong, that's not to suggest that it's not a highly useful tool to assume that the market is always right, obviously spanky. And now today, with like some of these website services, there's like a thousand or more like little mini spankies running around. I don't I don't say this like disparagingly like yeah, it works like the proof's in the pudding, but it's still wrong and so imperfect as are all the models I use. 

16:11 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Imperfect is the term I would use. I know exactly what you're saying. Like we could we never have. There's no one who's going to be able to project an accurate probability of every single game but the point of any of any single game is my claim Agree. 

16:26 - Berryhorse (Guest)
I agree with you 100%, and we have 10 cents of juice on both directions to help cushion that, so that they just need to be in the ballpark. 

16:32 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Yes, the market being the most accurate doesn't mean the market's right. The market is obviously wrong because otherwise you would just win 100% of the bet to that closing line value In theory if the market was always right. 

16:45 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
it's not, it's just and every final score would end up on the market price and the total price Exactly. 

16:50 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
I truly believe that the market is just. That's sorry. 

16:53 - Berryhorse (Guest)
I, I'm sorry to interrupt but that's actually not. My claim is that the games would all land my like. Obviously we know the outcomes are probabilistic and there's a distribution of outcomes. Yep, my claim is that we can't even create that perfect distribution. I agree, and it might be off by a fraction of a cent or any, but like, even that, like we can claim the median outcome on the chiefs, kansas city, um, philly, uh, super bowl is pick in 51 or whatever it was, but it maybe it's pick minus o2 or pick minus o3, but it's not like. The novig price on the game by the market is not correct. 

17:26 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Yep, I agree. 

17:27 - Berryhorse (Guest)
I think not a single game in this year's sports. 

17:29 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
What I, which is like weird to think about. 

17:32
Yeah, what I would say in in kind of like rebuttal to that, is just that the the market in general should be. That's why it's called like a efficient market hypothesis, and it's by no means like an actual proven theory is that the hypothesis is that the market gets sharper with all the info that it gets and in theory, that that is, I believe that to be correct meaning Barry horse's model. When that was not being bet into the market did not inform the market and give it additional information. When you did bet into the market and released it publicly, it ultimately made the baseball lines sharper. So it's like I think what happened with Barry horse, by the way, in the 2018 season was actually this. 

18:16
So a lot of people were like oh, who is this kid? By the way, I'm younger than you, so I'm not calling you a kid by any means, but at the time, I think a lot of the sentiments I was pretty deep on twitter at that time was this kid comes up, it's a smart computer guy, genius, and he thinks he's just gonna have like 10 edges in baseball, which doesn't exist. There's no way. It's 10 edges and I do think that you did have an edge on the market but it was probably not 10, but still it was directly enough to be able to bet those out. If you had bet kelly stakin at 10, you probably would have ended up maybe going busto a little bit like faster or sure that. 

18:51
But realistically a million percent yeah, realistically, like if you had an edge, just wasn't 10 and I think a lot of people, because of the fact that you were like a new kid in the space, were like disguised like a fraud at that time. Does that make sense? 

19:05 - Berryhorse (Guest)
so yeah, I mean I can pull up the sheet. I think this implication that every game was 10 is, like, fully incorrect. Like I maybe had 50 games that I thought were that big and I mean I don't know if you, if you had an automaton, like let's pretend and I'm not saying I had this or currently have this, but pretend there's some like unthinkable level of consciousness, call it God, call it a third generation AGI, whatever you want to call it that could know everything and could perfectly do everything. Would not 50 out of the 2,500 MLB games in a season be off by 10%? 

19:37
I strongly suspect it Like yes, yeah. And so you know we're all striving to have high precision and recall of those 10% games. And you know we're all striving to have high precision and recall of those 10 games. 

19:45 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
and you know fair enough on that college football example that you mentioned here. One another thing I was just going to more of a question for you. So, obviously, if they replay the game right now, you're like, okay, spread seven points more in, either in the direction favoring georgia, right. But you're saying that that game was just mispriced prior to the game, which I agree. But if the market priced it at the 13 and a half, anyone in the entire world had a chance to move that number either way. So how is that game like I get? It's mispriced in actuality, but that is the best representation we have of price before the game kicks off. That's the best. That's the best we got. That's why I think people value the market so much. It's the best we we have of price Before the game kicks off. That's the best we got. That's why I think people value the market so much. It's the best we have. You think that's correct. It's the best easily available source. 

20:31 - Berryhorse (Guest)
I mean, it's the best easily publicly available source, fair enough, and it's an unbelievably useful heuristic to believe that it's always right. And of course there's fortunes that have been made by people just assuming that it's always right. 

20:44
I'm not suggesting no one attempt that, but it's still wrong and so anyways, to get more direct to your question about like, why do I think this is another thing I seem to be like on an island about. Is um, this, this uh, over this, this implication that it's bad to to trust this black box idea of using machine learning and just throwing all these numbers into a model which, first off, I think is very much strawmanning what machine learning even is. Well, let's assume that it's not, and I'm not trying to get like overly spiritual and weird here, but or like convince anybody of religion or anything. But there's two really good examples that I think might help at least have people like consider a different perspective about this. Um, one is from a podcast series with Robert Reed Love and Mike Hill about the best book I've ever read, called um Lila, by Robert Piercy, and Mike Hill goes over this, this experiment or example, where he's basically suggesting that it's a wild level of arrogance from human beings to assume that we have like the highest level of consciousness that could be had. And so he takes the example of imagine like a very like beautiful, picture perfect couple in New York City walking down the street, looking at the skyscrapers they see planes in the air, this beautiful sunset like, look at this, we innovated all of this. Baby, I love you. We're feeling these emotions. Man, is it sick to be a human? We're the best. And he compares it to I think he had he was doing like CrossFit or something, and so he gets these massages on his legs when his legs get sore and compared it. To imagine for a second, your two red blood cells going through his vessels, going up to his heart, down to his leg. They, like us, they have like a daily job. They have an idea of like night and day. They go up to work and down back to the home and, you know, maybe there's some human, imperceivable level of consciousness between the two red blood cells that are communicating like hey, hey, isn't this fun. We're running through this blood vessel right now. And then they feel like some Latino dude on his back, rubbing his shoulder or leg or whatever, and all this blood just starts rushing throughout the blood vessels and like what the fuck's going on? I have no idea what that is. And so this I live in Central America now and like this is very common in most of their religions, in South Native Americans, in North America and South America is to give like a tremendous amount of value to hurricanes, weather, storms of some higher level of consciousness, and I'm not trying to convince anybody of any religion or anything, but just to suggest that it's could totally be likely that humans are not the absolute maximum level of knowing everything about everything. And so what I really recommend people to do, if they feel this way about machine learning, is watch. 

23:33
It's a 90 minute video. It's a movie called AlphaGo on YouTube. It's free to watch. It's about this team of AI engineers who built the software I think called AlphaGo. 

23:43
To beat who basically, is the Tiger Woods of Go? If you don't know what Go is, it's a highly strategic game, much more strategic than chess. It's nearly infinitely more impressive than a computer beating a human in chess. And when you get through this movie somewhere near the middle, in Go you play kind of like tennis. You play five sets, and so the first set or the first game, whatever want to call it, the first match halfway through the computer makes this like completely unfathomable decision to move. I don't understand the game well enough to explain it to you, but they this this is being broadcast on tv all of the commentators, play-by-play announcers, the ai team itself behind the software, even the I forget the guy's name, but the guy who's like the tiger woods of go, he kind of like smirks at it. Everybody in the room like gasped at how idiotic that move seemed. And they go through and play the game and the computer dominates him and destroys him. 

24:33
And when they do, like the um post game review or whatever, yeah yeah, whatever you want to call it, that single, completely unfathomable by human moves was the single move that's following the entire match. And so I bring. All the people are like what the fuck is this kid talking about? I came here for sports, so, um, let's go to sports. So in 2006, I think it was 2006. 

24:58
There's a set of baseball data that came out called pitch FX. It gave you the X and Y of where the ball crossed over the plate and the movement profile, so how much it moved horizontally or vertically, and nobody even uttered the words seam shifted, wake until 2019. And so from 2006 until 2019, all of our understandings of pitch movement we dumbed down into being one of two things gravity and something called the Magnus effect, which describes how an object rotates through a fluid, and so, using just the XY of the ball and where the ball was released from, we could infer what the spin rates on all these pitches were, because we didn't even fathom that there could be some other effect we're not even thinking about. Basically, the Magnus effect is, like you imagine, like a perfect, like Garrett Cole, four-seam fastball rotating like this through the air. 

25:51 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Guy has a baseball on the screen for anyone listening. 

25:54 - Berryhorse (Guest)
Yeah, he's rotating, if you imagine, like the seams, like perfectly rotating end over end on, like a zero, neutral axis of rotation that would. It wouldn't quite offset gravity, but it would come very close to offsetting gravity and this is why hitters describe observing something like rise in a fastball. It's not actually happening. Gravity is still stronger, but this wake behind the ball offsets that Same thing with like a 12-6 curve ball would be the absolute opposite. It top spins basically towards the light. And, anyways, what we now understand is we were completely missing a third force on the ball called seam shifted wake which, like pitch development labs and everybody around baseball, has been all about the last three years or so and we didn't even know this was like remotely existent until 2020, when we had Hawkeye cameras starting to track. So, like the the track man, for, like baseball savant, and all this was not enough to tell us any of this, even in 2016, when that came out, there's still a three-year gap. And anyways, I'm saying all this, people are like, okay, cool, like I'm happy about these three examples. I'm just here to make money. It seems very likely to me and like it's hard to like rigorously prove this is exactly and, of course, course, like there's several dozen other things like this and, of course, if I thought this was like the end all be all unique source of my edge, I would not be talking on it with people, a thousand people listening on a podcast or whatever. But it seems very likely to me that one of the things my system was possibly picking up on, without giving it the name of seam shifted wake, was this impact of basically being able to move the ball differently than with just Magnus affecting gravity, and so, um, basically it's a multi-decade old question in sabermetrics about uh, how much impact does a pitcher have on quality of contact? Can pitchers induce weak contact or should we just all throw it out to randomness? So on one extreme you have FIP field and independent pitching, which just assumes any ball in play is just random, has nothing to do with the pitcher, like home runs, walks and strikeouts are the only thing we care about. You have something called Sierra is a little more in the middle skill interactive ERA. 

27:56
Basically it makes the assumption that if you get a bunch of strikeouts that means you're missing bats, that means you're probably likelier to miss the bat partially or hit it on the weak part. But that's obviously a poor assumption. Like there's endless examples. Hunter Green on the Cincinnati Reds is a great example. Like he gets a ton of strikeouts, but I do not think it's at all random that his contact quality is very poor and so, anyways, I'll end my ramble soon. But basically understanding this, in my opinion, has been a huge and you've seen it in the market the last three years. Since we've started to understand it better is that seam shifted wake very likely has a huge impact on quality of contact suppression from pitchers and that it's not random. And you know, pitchers like Kyle Hendricks can allow a ton of balls in play and predictably still be good at pitching. Sorry for the rain. 

28:41 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
No, no, no. This is actually really interesting, because the question I asked was what was different about your process at that time that separated you from everyone else, and I think this is extremely good insight. So the market-. 

28:52 - Berryhorse (Guest)
I could dumb it down to two words and say machine learning, but that was more fun, fair enough. 

28:56 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
No, and that's really good because it actually shows the scale at what you were thinking at at that time. And I scale at what you were thinking at at that time and I bet baseball successfully for years and, quite frankly, it was nowhere near the level of sophistication at what you're describing right now because it didn't need to be at the time. Like we had projection companies steamer, zips that were posting projections at that time which were actually good enough to beat market. If you were looking at you know proper weighting of both for some specific players now you would obviously learn okay, steamer really likes dan heron and you know he's not the type of pitcher they think he is. Let's maybe adjust his projection and you could do that for probably 20 pitchers in the league and have a very successful baseball model. And then over time, we started getting more and more data. We started to get the stat cast data years back as well, you know barreled balls and stuff like that, which kind of provides a different lens and a different filter in which you could look at things. 

29:59
I remember the first conversation we ever had in person, which was MIT Sloan I believe 2019, where I first met you and I asked you this exact same question that I have asked you now, and we chatted for a long time and it was actually a very valuable chat for me because it provided some perspective as to what other people or like fresh, newer, different thinking minds and how they're thinking about the game. 

30:30
And we probably talked for two hours about pitch framing in baseball and I was doing pitch framing at that time and incorporating into my models, but my numbers or who I would consider to be a good framer were very different from yours at the time. So my takeaway from that conversation was going home and spending months on okay, what is Barry Horse possibly doing here? Um and I thought that was pretty cool, um, to be able to, you know, go from candidly thinking I don't want to call you say that I was thought you were a fraud when you came on the scene, but definitely thought that you were um best terminology was thought more of yourself than maybe I did of you. 

31:15 - Berryhorse (Guest)
You weren't wrong. 

31:16 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Okay, Fair enough. But that one conversation really put things into perspective for me. And then I got to a point, probably in 2020, where I'm like this is basically going to be like a full-time thing for me. And then I got to a point probably in 2020, where I'm like this is basically going to be like a full time thing for me if I really like I'm going to have to invest a ton of time into originating baseball because of how competitive the market is. And I got to the point where I'm like I don't want to do this anymore. But I thought your answer was great and it's really provide some perspective in terms of how an originator needs to think in the space, Because, go ahead. 

31:47 - Berryhorse (Guest)
I was going to add two quick thoughts before I forget. One is towards Johnny's efficient market hypothesis thing and sort of milling it with what I think I was doing and still do. Is you know that holds when there's like thousands of entities betting tons of money? I mean you guys can tell me if you observe different things. But for me I think there's like, depending on what you mean by real money, there's like three or four people betting real money on base. It's not like there's 10 unbelievably high-end Harvard engineers on every single team and there's a thousand of those teams. I don't observe that existing. You guys can tell me if you see something different. 

32:23
And so part of the reason I say that is just with that small number of people who are moving there's plenty of games who it doesn't need to be like a Mike Trout level player. It could be something like Nico Horner on the Cubs, who's like a really solid, pretty underrated player, but he's not like some crazy star. But maybe his backup's really bad. Maybe it's worth like eight cents if he's out. No one was expecting him to be out. Everyone who's betting baseball in the middle of summer usually like closes their office at lunch or something and like that comes out at 2 pm, no one else cares. Okay, I already leaned the clubs by five cents. Now he's out. Maybe it's a 13 cent edge and I'll bet it. And you know there's like literally hundreds of those in a season. So like part of it's just like picking up on that, I should should say it's again. 

33:02
Sorry, rob, for cutting you off, but one other thing is you guys are familiar with the Pareto distribution, yeah, yeah. So for the listeners who aren't, basically like 80% of your outcomes will come from 20% of the decisions, or eight um 20% of your stocks will represent 80% of your gains. 80% of the problems in your life will come from 20% of the decisions you make, et cetera, et cetera. And you know rough numbers and you know I could probably like way overly dumb this down and say all of my big seasons. Basically I have two or three very strongly held, very anti-market opinions on like a couple of players or teams, and then the rest of just picking up trash, like those little false and edges on Nico Horner that just add up when you do it 400 times and then you know like my year on Twitter was more or less I bet on Tampa Bay literally every time they were an underdog and won like 30 units. 

33:49
Doing that, you can dumb it down to that, like you know and like I mean, you can say like no, like the market was right. But like I genuinely believe this before the season, genuinely believed it throughout the season and still believe it today that was like a fringe in 2018, like a fringe 91 team being priced as like a complete 70 75 win, non-contender, irrelevant team for like the entire year, just because no one knew any players on the team. But like and was the market that efficient I don't inefficient, I don't know but like, I just genuinely believe there was like a 10 15 win gap on teams like that. And there's plenty in reverse too I think it. 

34:23 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
I think I mean I have different perspective. Me and johnny bet in very different ways. Right and um, you very horse, you probably be familiar with the people that, or the group that moves my action for the most part. But it over the years kind of gave me a different perspective on how efficient the market is or not, and I think it's very dependent on a number of different factors. Right, like, I bet hockey predominantly and for years there was, candidly, no one else that was betting a lot of money on hockey. So, yeah, my closing line value numbers looked great and when I was going through a rough stretch I'd be like I'm getting closing line value but it didn't really matter, because it was be like I'm getting closing line value but it didn't really matter because it's kind of creating my own closing line value and there was nobody who was going to bet that back ever. So it was like, okay, how do I evaluate whether this is good or not? 

35:17
And you're talking about, you know, groups that bet baseball and how. There's very few of them. That's kind of the same thing that I see and we've talked to people candidly off air. Never would disclose their names or anything like that, or like we don't care about our closing line value we care about. We, have our models, we have our numbers, we're going to bet them. There's going to be people that disagree with them, but we're higher on these teams than others and we know that, and we know that and we think that they're right. So I this is kind of what I love about sports, honestly is that everything is a little bit imperfect, and take some deduction, and each passing year I think I learned more and more about the space and can figure things out a little bit more. 

36:01
But I don't think that there's one right answer, and I think that there's people that can have two firmly different beliefs on the market and still both be very successful at what they do. Like there could be people that just don't respect the market. Oh, so-and-so is going to go and move this line. Why should I give a shit about his opinion? He's just posting a bunch of short-term trends on his Twitter account. Why do we value what he thinks about on a bunch of short-term trends on his twitter account? Why do we value what he thinks about on a game? Um, and then there's people that they do and they're successful in doing that as well. So I I mean it's just really an interesting conversation. Um, your perspective is interesting as well. 

36:37
But yeah, there'd be, there'd be many times back in the day where you know you get even a bunch of late steam on games right, baseball, when you're betting. In 2018, there was one predominantly large group where it's like, okay, they like a game, they're going to bet it. The line is going to move a lot and it ain't going to move back period Because of the most respected group in the space. Does that mean that they're right every single time and moving those to the correct spots? No, people who were fading that steam at post made a killing over the course of those years. So I think it's like the space as a whole and the whole discussion about whether or not like the closing line has a ton of value. There could be a lot of different perspectives on it. Just so I don't get clipped. 

37:27 - Berryhorse (Guest)
I should make it clear I think the closing line value has an immense amount of value and is an extraordinarily useful tool and it would be wildly arrogant to ignore any move or any price or any closing line ever, and the market should always have some non-zero level of respect. But if you know Dylan Gabriel is out against Oklahoma, 100% he's out and you can lay Texas 7 and under 65 on the day of the game and then Oklahoma goes out and throws him out there and the game moves. And then Oklahoma goes and pretends like he's going to play for an hour and everybody on Twitter is speculating and moves back. You should bet more if you know he's out. 

38:02 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
And I think we all agree on that With the closing line value argument. 

38:06 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
The one thing that I think maybe you're overlooking a little here is is, like I've said it before, it always does become the most efficient tool over time. In a short period of time, it could be inefficient, right, but what you said here is like betting a massive group not naming names whatever massive group betting the baseball market. Moving everything probably doesn't have a big edge, or maybe only has an edge up to a certain level on the openers. Move everything way too far. You're like people fading that at post made a lot of money. 

38:34
Exactly what I'm saying, though, is that group was over betting at negative edges. Yeah, eventually had to stop playing positions out that much because they kept losing, and other people who were playing back on those positions made more money and was like we got to play back further because we're gonna make money and eventually it converges at a level. It's not the accurate predictor of the game, but, yeah, over an infinite amount of sample size, it's always going to add up, as long as the sports books are adjusting based on the positions, which they do I'm going to disagree with and I'm not. 

39:05 - Berryhorse (Guest)
We can move on after this, but just one thing I haven't seen discussed on any of these podcasts is theoretically envision this like end boss of betting who like, has the nuts on every single game, has infinite liquidity, that's whatever he wants. He reverses every game to get an amazing price. First theory and you know this is not a theoretical I've observed this is like very often. It's not rare for a group to then go basically hide their clv by. Basically, if listeners are probably familiar with the idea of reversing again, yeah, like, say you like houston minus 120 against the angels, you're definitely going to love houston minus 111, so you'll max bet angels, bring it down, bet it, they'll move back to minus 120. What I'm explaining is basically the opposite of getting houston minus 111, it goes to minus 120 and then banging the angels again after so that it closes 111. You know so anyways, I know. 

39:52 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
So I haven't seen that brought up. I can't really give out the info here, but we'll talk after. But like, there's other ways that that gets offset as well. And also, remember, people are greedy as well. So if you want to get the most amount of money down, you're never going to do that quietly or you're going to do that via people who are then going to eventually leak that back. So it never just fully works like that, and I'll say it off air, because I don't want to say it's on the air, but I will talk after and I have. I have a counterpoint to that. 

40:17 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
All right, uh, barry horse, so you go from Twitter. 

40:31 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Oh, hold up, Hold up. I'm sorry, it's a sad reality. You just heard what barry ors had to say on his mlb model. Let me just point this out. Okay, we're now in 2023. He was doing this back. Basically, what would you call when you started rigging 2016? 17?, 2014. 2014. So in 2014,. I don't even know what the fuck he was saying. To be honest, he's something wakeboard surfing, pitch seam wake. I don't even know what that is, and I'm telling you this guy had that predicted in his model back in 2014. He was taking into account all these pitch effects, everything framing, whatnot. And there are people today who message me say that they just pulled projections online and threw it into a Monte Carlo. 

41:15 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
They exported CSV from fan graphs. 

41:17 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Yes, so all this to say, if that's what Barry Orris had in 2015, imagine what he has now. Imagine what all the top bettors and then, as he mentioned, barry Orris is one person betting baseball. There might not be a million, but there might be 10. There might be 12 seriously betting MLB. All of them have or have access to similar people, resources, machine learning models, different models that all have factored in things that you probably have not even ever thought of. 

41:47
So it is foolish, as a person who's brand new, to come in and think that you could beat the market with a really shitty Monte Carlo sim, and that is why I typically preach the market efficiency model as a little more important than it is. If you get to a level where you're a computer science whiz kid and you're like, oh, I'm actually doing this for real and you think you can beat all the stuff barry horse just said, plus his last eight years of research, then you don't have to worry about the market. How's that for a for a saying. I think that's fair. Easier, barry horse, a lot better. 

42:19
On the market efficiencies, though yeah all right, let's get into the next uh aspect well, so you? 

42:25 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
you go from essentially being a kid, as you self-described yourself on twitter uh posting numbers to working for a large-scale betting operation. Can you discuss how that came to be essentially? 

42:44 - Berryhorse (Guest)
uh, I, I got a dm on twitter vaguely like hey, barry, thanks for all the winners. 

42:51
Um, I'd love to take you and a buddy on an all expenses paid golf trip to I won't say the country. And uh, figured 95 chance is a fake, five percent chance they're trying to kidnap me or scam me or something. But uh, you know and you know, entice that question. We went further, uh, and somehow convinced my friend to come with me and we ended up going down and um, basically was told like hey, uh, you're pretty naive, like you're, you're beating baseball within three hours of the game and you're posting college football on friday morning for saturday games and crushing like, if you really do crush, this is like worth a lot more than I think you think it is. Um, and you know, it sounded like hocus pocus and like kind of like too good to be true for me. So I spent like really like probably like three or four months basically saying no, a bunch, cause it sounded fake, and then, uh, you know, had enough evidence after football to see that it was like real and worth pursuing. 

43:46 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Um, that's what I've been doing for four years all right, um I I think people are very interested in how a large-scale betting operation works. We do get these questions that come in on our q and a's that we do. Obviously I'm not going to ask you to disclose anything that's going to, you know, reveal too much, but let's start with potentially what a typical day would look like for you right now. 

44:13 - Berryhorse (Guest)
Um, I'm up at like five usually, then uh, gym, meditation and then watch the screen. I have my numbers already and send in orders. If there's stuff to bet before lineups, send up. If there's lineups, then do a figure the next week. But I'm really not like. This is not like um to cover legal space. I'm truly like not involved in any of the betting. It doesn't interest me. I don't say this from like a moral high horse, but like it's just not. 

44:40 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
I'm into math and sports and that's what I stay into anyone who's followed you back from 2018 would know that that's the case. I don't think you've ever been. You've been pretty open that you're not really super interested in actually like the the betting portion more the the modeling and I think rob has too, pretty much I mean, I, I don't. 

44:57 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
I don't do most of my own betting, um, now, with legalized gaming in ontario and all the different sports books. For sure I'm an idiot not to with the amount of access that I have, but for the most part, I think I'm kind of in the same boat as as Barry, where I would just, it's basically send out an order Right, I like the Red Sox up to minus one thirty five, and a bunch of people bet it on my behalf and they give me a fill and I'm essentially I think that's what's happening with you Fair enough. 

45:25 - Berryhorse (Guest)
I should say like this market really really is a lot smaller than I thought it was and is probably shrinking at the top. I don't want to be too doomer, I'm not trying to inspire false hope either, but I truly believe it's actually probably never been easier to make five or six and maybe even seven figures in a year betting a year betting. But like, from my observation of how deep this market is, I see this implication for people that you can just like click a button and bet a million dollars on an nfl spread on sunday and like I need to meet someone who can do that, that simply like it. I mean, I don't know if you two do, but like there's a lot that goes into like making that happen and like people have this idea that you just all right, you have an edge in a real market Now you just go live on a yacht, it's like possible. 

46:08
It's really a much a much smaller market than I think. Most people think it's hard to get down like a crazy amount. 

46:15 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Fair enough. Yeah, I mean this is not my area of expertise. I know what my limits are within betting. I'm never going to be betting a million dollars in a game, probably not betting $100,000 a game either, just being honest with the audience. But I agree with you. I mean sometimes it's like we want to bet so-and-so game and we'll go up to X amount and we just we can't fill that order period. There's just not enough books that have that liquidity to fill it. That's just the nature of the game. 

46:42 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Well, it's different when you actually factor in pricing right, Because you can always fill a bet. It's just a matter of the price you're going to get. 

46:49 - Berryhorse (Guest)
I was just going to say that it actually might be worth for listeners to quickly go over an example of just how severe that can be in a year. Spanky. I assume if you're listening to this podcast you have an idea of who Spanky is. If you don't, he's a highly successful sports better, has a multi-decade career which by the day becomes more impressive to me to have that type of longevity, um, but he has a podcast called be better betters, maybe two months ago or something he has like basically a 45 minute monologue more or less bitching about how shitty this is. Um, you know we treat winning as trivial, but it's really not. 

47:25
Betting is like the tandem and the trade-offs between the two can make either of them hard. If you want to bet more, it's going to be harder to win. Collecting is nearly impossible. It involves basically spending your life networking to go meet some shady guy in New Jersey who runs betisland784.net and how you should tell these half, tell these half truths to him about why you should book my games and then like convince him like you're going to come from this ip address. It's just like all this whole game. It's. It's very small, like and, uh, you know it. 

48:01
It might be worth just going through a quick example of just how much that price interferes with when you try to bet more. So if you take like a random example, like say you're going to win 80 units on a thousand bets in a year but you want to bet significantly more than you can, just if you bet at Pinnacle, crisp, betonline and Circa, one way you might be able to do that is essentially like double bet or like allow people more or less to scalp, you take worse price. In the same way you guys preach like price sensitivity and shopping for the best line. Any of your listeners who have done that when the whole market's minus 110 and you find a rogue minus 07, have no doubt observed like the benefit of doing that. Yeah, well, the reverse is like equally as damaging as it is powerful in the first place. So if the whole market is minus 110 and you end up effectively laying minus 113 or minus 114 to fill like an imaginary, non-existent bad number to get down, that's going to add on. Let's say it's minus 114, four cents on a thousand games is going to be 20 units, so your 80 becomes 60 pretty quick. Now that's easily worth it if you're able to bet one and a half times more or more than that, because 60 times one and a half is 90. 

49:07
Now you might also like start looking for people to cross with or fill your orders and you're going to end up more or less experiencing the selection bias of the games where everybody in the world agrees with you are going to return a higher ROI than the games when everyone in the world who has influence disagrees with you. So, like I said, if, if you think you have 8% ROI on a thousand games, what that really means is you have two subsets of games, one of which is negative 2% ROI and one of which is plus 18% ROI, and or you know infinite number of subcategories, and you end up being, like, increasingly exposed to the bad games. If you start allowing that to happen and you know that's worth it to a degree, because if you, maybe you still win and I've used negative two as an example but maybe you still win a little on the disagreement games and it's worth it to get a little more down but it's going to disproportionately affect what you expect to return. So this is really hard to theorize. Just like four cents on a thousand games. 

49:55
We know is 20 units. But depending on the degree you do it, you might end up at the trade-off where you might want to sacrifice something like 20 games on a thousand units again. So now you're at 40 on a thousand units again. So now you're at 40 on thousand. But that's worth it. Everybody in three or four X the amount. And now you're stuck with all these accounts that you can't risk burning. You've farmed all these like amazing partners through. Sorry, is my audio messed up? 

50:17 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Nope, you're good. 

50:18 - Berryhorse (Guest)
Okay. So now you're stuck with basically having to only bet games where it's not going to get crazy CLB. So you find out Hayden O'Connell is out for Purdue against Florida Atlantic. You can bet FAU plus 21, but it's going to close 17 and they're going to nearly win the game. That's going to look horrible in any account, no one's going to take that anyways, and so you can't even really bet the games that are going to be moving fast Plus. You're stuck with, like there's to a bunch of people. It's not like. 

50:49
I find out mike trout is out 30 minutes before it's public. I can click a button and be in, and so you're basically forfeiting something like 100 or so injury games that would return 15, 20, I don't know. Let's round down and say 15. Now that 40 on a thousand becomes 25. Yeah, and now let's say you're waiting until the very last. You, you're going to be the last person in the world to bet. You're getting everyone's sloppy seconds. 

51:08
You're not betting games that you would have otherwise, because maybe you would have laid minus 110 and it was minus 108 in the morning, but then someone bet it before you announced minus 113 and it's donezo. You're missing like something like a hundred games. Again, these are games where you match with people that you're not even touching. That would have maybe returned 15%, let's say, and you end up at something like 10 units on a thousand games. And that's still worth it if you're betting 10X more than you would have to get your 80 on a thousand, because 10 times 10 is 100 and that's more than 80. 

51:38
But what you've done is created an extremely fragile system where, with each of those four sacrifices, you're widening the distribution of what could happen. 

51:46
And so while technically on paper, if you have a near infinite bankroll it's technically plus ev and your expectation in doing all of these decisions is technically more valuable you're exposing yourself to a situation where, conceivably, you could have a year where you deserve to win 80 units by being like a normal person and then deserve to win 40 units and feel like over two years two years you deserve to be up 120 times. You know, not a small number. You can still bet like real stuff on these games, um, and instead you're down or barely up or flat or whatever over two years. It's a very fragile like situation to make all those trade-offs. So I just I'm not really seeing the room to bet like crazy amounts on any of these sports and actually win and then sustain it for a decade and I see it shrinking year by year. So I would dissuade anyone from thinking that this is like a really big pot of gold at the end of the rainbow it's a very, very well said. 

52:37 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
I think everyone should hit the back 30 seconds button two times and re-listen to that. Um, super valuable. And if you, if you are unaware of what barry horse is talking about here, these are challenges that really only come after you might get limited at a few sportsbook accounts, or after you know you can't get enough volume on your own that you have to start expanding, right. So it doesn't happen to everyone. 

52:59 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
It's a very few, a very low percentage of people will ever even endure something like that, but extremely well said yeah, I mean, uh, I think also one of the inherent challenges with betting at the scale that you're betting at is that oftentimes you're going to get your biggest positions when everybody else disagrees with you and then you're kind of like on your lonely island of like we can fill x amount on this game because so and so likes the opposite, so and so likes the opposite, and you-and-so likes the opposite, and you end up having at least this is my experience, maybe it's not yours, but maybe 20 to 30 games a year that could potentially decide your entire season because they're so much larger than everything else. 

53:41
I'm not sure if you've personally experienced this in the baseball space. Maybe it's a little bit different now than it was previously, but we did notice that back in the day where it was just like okay, everybody likes the angels, we don't our number, what are we missing here? People will fill us on our A's bet and that just brings it to like a whole nother stress anxiety level, I would say. 

54:05 - Berryhorse (Guest)
And I should say like exploring what the ceiling on this is isn't all about like just I need to be a billionaire. Like I want all these amazing things. It's as Spanky goes through really well in that podcast like there are so many sucks and drains on your life by trying to pursue this that there better damn be some like pot of gold at the end of the rainbow to make it worth it. And I truthfully am like just really not seeing that and I see the pot shrinking through here. I mean it fosters like so much, like I saw this was a thing on Twitter the last couple of days about like it's so small that I observe people thinking they have to like shit on others in order to have their piece of the pie, because the pie is so small. The only way to be full is to take pieces of other people's pieces, and so you know like it people's pieces, and so you know like it's. 

54:51
It's fostering to me like a ton of like negativity because of how small it is. And it's kind of like if georgia and alabama are recruiting the same kid, you know the alabama coaches have to say like what's wrong with georgia and so what's right about alabama, and I observed that with betting partners too. It's like I want to root for you, johnny and rob and spanky, and I want to root for writing. I want everyone like I don't like, I guarantee you, justin herbert's rooting for jalen hurts to get absolutely paid this summer, and maybe he wants to make one dollar more. But you know, because our pie is so fucking miniature, we have to like, fight and bitch about each other, and it's, you know, a pretty depressingly small market but in theory though, and I agree with you, I don't want, I don't root for other people to succeed and, especially, like you, don't root't want. 

55:28 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
I don't root for other people to succeed in, especially like I don't root for other people to fail. 

55:30 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Oh, what was I going to say? Um, but especially the way I bet there's not really a need for for that. But for someone who's originating like, let's say, barry horse, right now, let's say you originate baseball, you are going to win the most If the other large groups in the space who are also betting hundreds of millions of dollars, lose money because the sports books right now do not take that large of positions. Obviously they're taking positions, but to think that you're just going to win against all sports books doesn't really add up. You're going to have to have let's say, I'll go, simplicity's sake, 100k. 

56:04
If you have 100K down the Brewers, they they're facing the a's and another group has, at that same sports book, 100k down and they kept moving the market back. The sports book's going to make their 10k and juice. The other group's going to lose 100 and you're going to make your 100. No one's going to be sports book doesn't care, they're going to keep doing that all season long or you cross direct. But the only way you're actually going to make millions of dollars per year, or I guess maybe not 1 million, but like $100 million. You could do that in a year. If someone else loses $100 million. If not, you can't do that. Do you know what I mean? 

56:34 - Berryhorse (Guest)
Yeah, I do think like the idea of like rooting against people or like needing their partners to then like come to you, and I know that's not your point, but, like just to this topic, I do think all of the calculations around, like the raw numbers of like maybe it makes sense, is like very high time preference thinking and very tunnel vision on just the bets. One example I can think of I don't even know if he remembers this, but if you look at the comments to this video, I'm sure you'll see like maybe not, but I'm sure you'll see like maybe not, but I'm guessing you'll see some negative comments like roasting me for pretty infamously having two horrendous months of baseball four years ago after being wildly overconfident and arrogant about how I thought my season would go and in the midst of that that was like a really challenging time of my life. Like I'm sure people can like start to imagine. I know this is all like first world problems, I get it, but that was like a really tough time for me and I just vividly remember Spanky and a couple of others like publicly standing up for me saying like he's a nice kid he means well like he's running bad. Why are we rooting against people and people are rooting against me because they think if I lose my like, betting partners will defect and then they can come recruit them. And I think what they're. And like Spanky could have thought that way, but he didn't and I really appreciate that and will never forget that. 

57:55
And the world is round and maybe that comes back in some like unforeseeable thing. 

57:59
Maybe it's something very direct, like I've recommended 50 friends to go sign up for Spank odds and five of them are going to convert when he starts charging. Or maybe it's like not to be too nebulous and down the road, but like maybe his kid loves Bitcoin and I've started some Bitcoin company and in 10 years he wants a job. And I don't forget that. And like I just think in general, all of us can root for others. Like especially on that, like defection of betting partners and stuff. Like I want people who bet like smaller stuff with Johnny to do really well, not because I don't want him to like, I want them to have a good experience, knowing that partnering works and then maybe one day there's some world where their bank roll grows a lot and now they want to bet something that maybe is a lower, little higher risk but a little higher reward, and like it makes more sense to bet something bigger, like baseball or whatever, and they had a good experience with Johnny and remembered it, and so I'm rooting for them to do well, um yeah. 

58:46 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Well said in general. I mean, life is quite long. We all look at our ages right now and people say life is short, but obviously it's the longest thing that anyone does individually. So if you look at it, life is so long. You're eventually going to run back into people. You don't want to. You definitely don't want to fuck people over, but I think you know rooting for people to fail is definitely. It's almost like you're also just bringing negativity into your own life, like when you. 

59:10 - Berryhorse (Guest)
It takes effort. Yes, it does. We're biologically evolved to root for each other and collaborate. That's like a pretty human superpower, like we were smaller, weaker and more feeble than neanderthals. We outlasted them because we worked together and collaborated and had these civilizations like we. We all prefer this. It you're. You're spending energy to hate and root against others and it seems not worth it to me. 

59:32 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Spoken like a guy who would be a massive Bitcoin believer, by the way. Seriously, I think that those are a lot of people who are Bitcoin truthers, have the same mentality as you in a sense, especially people who got in early. We'll get into that in a second, for now wanted to get your opinion on this. We cannot let this podcast go by and not ask you about some of the rule changes that are seemingly going to impact major league baseball this year, or maybe not. We'd love to get your thoughts on, kind of like you know, if you want to go through, what rule changes you think might have an impact, which ones don't, and any info you can give will be greatly appreciated for our baseball listeners there's the four, I think, that are being widely or highly talked about, which are the ban on shifting, which we've known for years now. 

01:00:18 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
The pitch clock changes. We have the larger bases, which is actually decreasing the distance between certain bases as well, and then we have the new pickoff rule. I know you've done a Twitter thread on this, but they're, frankly, quite lengthy and some people would wanna get your opinion in audio form as well. So let's start with. Do you think that the impacts of these rule changes are being over-accounted for by the average bettor? 

01:00:48 - Berryhorse (Guest)
Yeah, truthfully, I don't know how they're being accounted for, but I think it's decently easy to do like just some ballpark math on what they're all worth, and it comes out to like not nothing, but like pretty close to nothing, and just in my experience of the last 10 years of doing this, people tend to overrate things like this. So that might happen, but I don't know how they're being perceived. 

01:01:11 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
To be honest, For the average better, like like you know someone who might be looking at player props, something like that how would they be able to potentially gain an edge? And obviously we would like to give out something that maybe is not going to ruin your full market stuff sure, um, maybe we can start with the shift. 

01:01:27 - Berryhorse (Guest)
Um, I suspect this might be. You know, something on the order of an extra hit per team per month or something like this. So if you look up my name on twitter with shift, I'll walk through all the math. I don't have all the numbers memorized, but, um, more or less the reason for this and, and you know, in terms of like run scoring, basically nothing, I think um, most people, because it's so like visual and it's so like easy and obvious and jarring when there's just like a literal third person on a different half of the diamond that you're not used to seeing, it's like, oh, that was all because of the shift and it's it's missing what has been like a much more powerful version of the shift, which has been outfielders mostly aligning more deep but also shaded in different directions depending on the hitter. Um, but there's pretty strong evidence that the mlb in total has been overshifting for the last handful of years. That doesn't mean there aren't a small number of teams like the Astros, dodgers, rays, et cetera, who have done it properly, but especially against right-handed hitters, it seems like it's been actually a net negative by fielders to be shifting the amount they've been doing it the last two or three years in baseball. 

01:02:32
Um, the reason for this is for both handed hitters. Um, there is a sort of hidden externality in all of this, which is what's called like a walk penalty. So russell carlton at baseball prospectus has written about this a lot. But basically, when um a pitcher has the defense behind him shifted in a certain way, they tend to favor the inside half of the plate and they don't want any cheap hits on the outer half of the plate, and so basically they center their distribution of pitches too far out of the zone and are creating extra walks because of that, and so that has like more or less equally offset the gain in babbitt that defensive has had from this and it's like basically been next to nothing. I mean it's it's so small like it's been worth it to do it because it's like one percent. Why not grab it? But in terms of like pricing a game, it means almost nothing. Now there's tons of like maybe not tons, but like a small number of players for whom this will actually matter a lot if you play fantasy or bet props or whatever, there's certain left-handed pole ground ball hitters who obviously would benefit disproportionately. But like if you're just pricing a total on a game, it's it's very little. 

01:03:36
There is this implication I've seen from people that second base defense will matter more, and it seems like there might have been a trend the last few years from sharper analytical teams like those I named to favor like defensively weak um second baseman, or at least like not discount them as much. I'm not so sure that's true. Any of the analysis I've done when analyzing the correlation or more sophisticated statistical processes of how any of 10 different defensive metrics might apply for a second baseman to runs allowed for the team looks like a pretty meaningless zigzagging line and I think one of that is because, um, they're actually eliminating the depth I don't think you said, rob where there's a small number of infielders now who get an advantage by being a little bit deeper and on the grass and now they're forced to be on the dirt. So this is understood now, but for years it wasn't. 

01:04:28
The by far most important aspect of fielding baseball is actually arm strength, because your arm strength defines your depth. If you have a big arm, you can be deeper because you have more time to throw um, and your depth defines your range, and so really the arm defined all of these things that we think matter. It really just starts with the arm, and so it might actually discount some of the good feelers, in my opinion. Um, again, again. This is all something like if the market's eight and a half on a total for the last two years and now it might be eight and a half over, minus 11 or minus 12, you know, it's like next to nothing. In my opinion, the shift uh, pitch clock. 

01:05:02 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Um, I I mean, what are your thoughts on this also? 

01:05:05 - Berryhorse (Guest)
yeah, I I guess just as a baseball fan um, I, I, uh, I don't really mind. It seems weird to have a strong opinion about this. I like one small thing is like baseball has like been a pretty ideal, like background noise thing where you don't really have to pay attention. And at least for me, watching spring training, you actually like kind of have to pay attention now because it's bang, bang, bang, and so I kind of preferred like just having like noise in the background and like looking over every minute, but now you have to actually concentrate. So I'm not going to allow that to be a time suck. 

01:05:35 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
So I'll probably watch less baseball, to be honest, but for the average person who watches it for enjoyment, it's probably more enjoyable I guess, though, if you're, if you're quantifying it the way that you are and you think that there's such a marginal impact on run production in the games, like it doesn't really make sense to have a strong opinion one way or another, if, if you know, if people are to believe what you're, saying I got only so many fucks to give in this life yeah, like it's like people are getting so hung up on this and like oh, like they should. 

01:06:01
They should be allowed to play defense however they want and the larger bases are going to make it easier to steal bases is like a disgrace to the game and it's like I never understood that people get so emotional about this stuff, especially since it's going to have such a small impact on the game. Like imagine investing that much of your life just being angry at a professional sports league. 

01:06:23 - Berryhorse (Guest)
Says the guy who rants more about coaching playing decisions in football than anyone I've ever seen every Sunday. 

01:06:29 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Yes, fair enough. What if they like increase? 

01:06:32 - Berryhorse (Guest)
the what's the biggest one of those that could be like maybe there's a couple that are five, those are like usually one or three percent. 

01:06:37 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Right there are some that will exceed like five percent, but you're right really yeah, you're, it is a very valid I'm just busting your bones I need to. I need to do, like some, an introspective here, because uh rob just gets mad, if, if it's against his bed. 

01:06:53 - Berryhorse (Guest)
It is what it is um, but uh, no, that's. 

01:06:57 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
That's awesome, uh, interesting info. So I think we'll link barry horse's uh tweet threads actually in the description here for the youtube and you can read all about the exact effects, and he goes into great detail on the metrics. I think the overall summary for those who are not going to go read it is that these should have a small impact to certain things. However, in terms of the actual pricing for the games and the totals, it's going to be very minimal, um, if, if at all. 

01:07:23 - Berryhorse (Guest)
And I think, to be clear on the stolen bases and it's hard to attribute exactly if that's um the pitch clock or the pickoff rules or a combination of both, that will lead to like a very meaningful increase in stolen bases. So for sure, if you play fantasy or bet stolen base props, that matters a lot, um, but I think most people just kind of overrate what a stolen base is worth. Like it's something like a fifth of a run, a successful stolen base. So you know, and it's different if there's zero outs or one outs or two outs or if someone's on third or not, but you know it, it's, it's something like that. And so, like you know it, this might be something like um on the order of uh, if, if last few years a total would have been eight and a half flat, maybe it's like eight and a half over minus 15, but you know that's not nothing, but it's, it's not like, it's not like nine juice over or anything Like it's uh got got it and for those aren't that important. 

01:08:14 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
For those betting. If you do see stolen bases like rack up throughout the first month of the season, don't just go betting all the overs thinking like, oh, overs are going to be way up, because the market may have also adjusted by by that time as well and, as barry horse mentioned, the totals might just be eight and a half minus 15 over now um one more topic. 

01:08:36 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Yeah, or you, mr. 

01:08:37 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
You are one of the first people who I followed and was introduced to Bitcoin via. I know you're a big Bitcoin truther, if you can call it that. We got to hear essentially your take, because anytime this man rants about Bitcoin, it's always worth the read. It's always worth the read. It's always worth the listen. I know you did like a live thing once years ago where you just went on. It was great. So we got to hear give us some takes for the listeners here. 

01:09:07 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
I just want to add, I think, what makes this especially interesting for me. I basically acquired Bitcoin as a form of getting payment for gambling winnings and I thought it was a huge scam back in the day. I no longer believe that, but I've heard you in the past also describe yourself as a quote very risk averse person and you're a very huge proponent of Bitcoin. So kind of explain how this came to be and how you you solidified or got to your current stance on um, I guess being a huge optimist of Bitcoin moving forwards. 

01:09:47 - Berryhorse (Guest)
So I find it very easy for anybody who has extreme opinions on either direction to be like very dismissive of anybody else who's not in their camp. 

01:09:57
Um, and I think it makes sense like I mean, anybody who's listening to this podcast unless you have listeners who are over 110 years old has only ever lived in like a very debt-based economy and doesn't really know anything else and, um, nothing else has ever even worked, and so maybe they don't like it, but they might feel like nihilist about it, like how can I fix this or change it or make the world better with a better money? 

01:10:23
Um, a helpful metaphor might be if you envision like, maybe like humans, are this this weird species of fish that just swim around the very bottom floor of the ocean and we're just like floating through life in our own piss and half the time we get eaten by a shark. 

01:10:40
The five percent of us who ever even find out that the air exists is usually because there's a hook in our mouth and then they suffocate and get our head chopped off and most of us just go through life without even knowing that exists up there. And maybe one day some fish came along with this highly sophisticated, ironclad, foolproof oxygen tank that we could strap onto ourselves and fly up above the surface and live with humans and evolve. And I know I sound like a borderline religious cult crazy person when I describe it this way, but this is sort of how I think about it and why I think a lot of people, why I think's such like a giant gap in education. So I don't know if you guys want me to do like more than a one minute explainer or like we do. 

01:11:21 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
You know, whatever, we got as much time as you have and, honestly, I'm going to enjoy this a lot more than uh okay and stop. 

01:11:28 - Berryhorse (Guest)
You know I probably, uh, as I said, I learned my lesson, don't be? I just did like a whole hour talking about myself, so stop me if I'm like rambling or anything. 

01:11:37 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
The question is your podcast, though? 

01:11:38 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Yes, exactly, we are asking you about you because people are interested in that, so you don't have to apologize. 

01:11:44 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Anybody who hates Bitcoin, skip to wherever Zach puts in the description right now. 

01:11:50 - Berryhorse (Guest)
I'm going to disagree just because I don't want to preach to the choir, and if there's somebody who somehow is still listening and is like remotely at all open-minded to at least hear this, first off, please do. And second off, if you think everything I'm about to say is idiotic or I explain it poorly or I've lost my mind, please don't discount Bitcoin. I might not be the educator for you and somebody else on the internet might so like thank you for you and somebody else on the internet might so like thank you. The way I'm currently thinking about it is sort of like four-ish different like pillars or theses. The first is like how I first got into it, like through sports betting, which is, I guess, the censorship resistance. So like Alice can send Bob $5 whenever she wants, no matter the time. No one can say no. If she has money, she can send it to anyone in the world whenever, however much she has. 

01:12:42
And so for me, just like I basically back at the time, $300, I could do the ballpark math. I got something close to a trillion dollars just by adding up. Like porn, drugs, guns, gambling, fireworks, you know, like all gray area businesses where it'd be useful to be able to send money without people being able to meddle with it donations to WikiLeaks, whatever. What I've really missed in all of that analysis is not just that you can send and receive money without permission Very importantly, you can hold money without permission and that third thing I completely missed and in many ways, bitcoin is the only property that has ever existed. Any other physical property is only yours insofar as you can defend it, usually with the threat of violence. So, johnny, if you have a bar of gold and you and me are in the room, you might say that's your bar of gold, and then I pull a gun out of my pocket and point out your head and say it's mine. Whose bar of gold is it? 

01:13:46
so it would be your bar of gold I think so, but I mean you could try to fight, okay, see what happens before we go on. 

01:13:52 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
What if I had? What if I pointed a gun at you and said, give me all your coin? 

01:13:56 - Berryhorse (Guest)
It's in my head. The game theory doesn't exist. You just die with the coin, though it's not that much better. 

01:14:02 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
I could die with the gold bar. I guess you could take it. No, you're right, he checks out. 

01:14:07 - Berryhorse (Guest)
Ignore it it creates the game theory where it is worth killing you for your gold because I will get it. If I kill you, you will not get anything other than if you're this machiavellian sadist who gets off on killing people. By killing me, you will not get anything right he checks out. 

01:14:22 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
I rescind my argument. 

01:14:23 - Berryhorse (Guest)
Go back, you're up, yeah, um, and so like the implications of this are like really preposterous. Actually, like I don't think people have like fully considered what the implication of like having fully guaranteed property rights represents for people, and so that's sort of like. My first pillar is, like you could call this libertarian, adjacent like freedom, whatever you want to call it financial freedom. The second is, in a way, inflation, but my take, you know you can go listen to macro economists and everyone tell you whatever they think about inflation. What might be more valuable from a computer scientist is. So I live in Costa Rica and there's this Starbucks farm up on the hill and I went there with my girlfriend a couple weeks ago. It's fucking sick on the hill. And I went there with my girlfriend a couple weeks ago. Um, it's sick. 

01:15:16
Like, honestly, the technology they have in taking these little beans shooting down at like a million miles an hour. It has these little like claws, like punching out the ones that are the wrong colors. It shakes them into all over. It was like honestly mind-blowing the level of sophistication in the technology of like taking a coffee plant and turn it into a bean that you roast and drink from. Um, and I say all that because it's not surprising at all. But since 1980 a cup of coffee is 80 times cheaper to produce. This is the effect of technology you do things better, faster, cheaper, more intelligently. Um, and so when people see that in 1980 a cup of coffee was 50 cents and today it's five dollars, that's not a 10x inflation, it's something on the order of an 800x inflation, when you in fact for the deflationary effects that advances in technology should have had by now. So it is a humongous human deficiency to misunderstand exponentials. 

01:16:10
And for anybody who has no computer science background, there's something called Moore's law, which is basically the theory that every 18 to 30 months semiconductor technology, basically two x's, so we get double the compute power every two years or so, roughly. 

01:16:24
Um, I don't think people understand how much this has been hidden from us and stolen from us, um, and like the positive effects of what Moore's law should have had on our lives by now. And it's been completely perniciously hidden via inflation to hide the deflationary effects of technology. So yeah, and in the most generous case you could say whatever computers in, like the 1960s-ish until 1971, had a 10 year, let's say 1950, and be generous, they had a 20 year window, so that's 10, two year increments, maybe two to the 10 and maybe you a thousand X maybe, and maybe that reached society. But since, and if you go to WTF happened in 1971.com and you know there's plenty of graphs to demonstrate all of this it seems abundantly clear to me that the 25 or so iterations of Moore's law that should have been trickling down to making life amazingly cheap and more beautiful than it is today have been basically stolen from us through the debt-based system we've been in and this is no they. 

01:17:28
It's not like fuck the Fed, fuck the bankers, it's. Their only solution has been this, the only solution. You cannot let things fail. Our only way out of this is with an external opt-in technology like Bitcoin, and so it's my belief that eventually, when the world is on a Bitcoin standard, we'll see a nearly unthinkable level of abundance in the world due to the deflationary impact of technology, and that that should be trickling down to society. 

01:17:58
The third would be like basically Michael Saylor's thesis, which is digital energy. So basically, the story of our species for the last hundred thousand years has just been iterating on channeling energy better. That's basically all we do, and there's actually really no good way to store energy, or we haven't found one, at least until now. So if you go through all the ways, you could store a billion dollars worth of energy for the next hundred years. There's really no good solution. Obviously, fiat's going to inflate at like a half-life of three and a half five years, something like this. You'll lose all your money in 30 years. Gold has like a 2% inflation rate. You'll have a half-life of like 35 years or so. So you'll have something like you'll lose 90% of your money in a century. You know, if you look at like any of the biggest companies ever, they've all been about like channeling energy or storing it, so like. Why did Apple become massive lithium ion batteries and phone to allow mobile revolution where people could have technology anywhere in the world without plugging it into a wall? Why did Marjorie Mary, where the post, become the most wealthy woman in the history of the world? Her dad basically found vacuum sealing for food and frozen food, and that basically invented groceries. So we figured out a way to store energy in the form of calories, which are literally our unit of energy for longer periods of time. And so the reason I bring all this up is like Bitcoin is basically our first ever perfect battery to store energy for long time durations with zero leak. 

01:19:33
Fourth, and if you don't think I'm a crazy person yet, this is like kind of the one where people start losing me is, uh, basically the jason lowry thesis of like the end to warfare. Um, so, and this actually isn't even about how you need fiat to have war and you need war to have fiat. It's an entire four and a half billion year history of life on this planet. Even from the earliest ones, like 100 years into existence, were like these little membrane cells that they let some stuff in and some stuff out and they're completely unrecognizable as animals today. But, like these tiny little microbes, all the way up until today has been a consistently iterating cycle of proof of work of these living things fighting over scarce resources. 

01:20:14
And because, because of what I was explaining to Johnny earlier about how, if I have a gun and he has the gold, it's really mine, humans have not yet developed a way until Bitcoin, in my opinion, to resolve these conflicts over scarce resources without the threat of violence. And this is the first time ever where we've been able to like basically digitally abstract warfare into the clouds or, more accurately, physically, into Bitcoin miners that will definitely need to be physically defended. I'm not suggesting there's no like violence or like threat of bombs or whatever and control of different territories, but we can digitally transpose warfare into Bitcoin mining, where you know war, war is the least economic thing basically anyone could do. There's no winners. There's severe losers and less severe losers, and the end result is rubble and more expensive energy for everyone. Well, the result of a hash war is there's a severe winner and less severe winner, and the end result is cheaper energy and abundance for everyone in the world, and so I think it's our best way forward towards peace. Sorry, further. 

01:21:17 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
No, there's a lot to unpack there. 

01:21:20 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
We got to. We got to. I'm not saying we got to go in terms of any episode we got to go. There's some stuff we got to discuss here. 

01:21:26 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Well, I mean, it's a lot more descriptive than when people ask me why should I? 

01:21:32 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
own Bitcoin, rob just says, because you could put it into a sports book. 

01:21:37 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
No, no, it's actually really interesting and it's I think I would be doing a disservice right now If we could talk about this for hours let me put it that way Like hours. The last argument, especially interesting, I mean, I'm I'm more so buy into, let's say, the order of your operations there in terms of one, two, three, four. In terms of the usefulness, Um, but I mean, this is extremely personal and we can certainly not remove this, or we can certainly remove this if we want to, but you're a pretty young person. You've described yourself as risk averse. What percentage of your net worth is bitcoin based right now? 

01:22:27 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
every dollar every dollar, okay, every dollar you have yeah, is it? 

01:22:34 - Berryhorse (Guest)
I mean, I'm very open, like wait, bitcoin specifically. 

01:22:37
You're saying not no altcoins, by the way, just for the like people at home so, um, this is not like this self-righteous thing, like bitcoin is the only thing that's real. It is, but I also want to be rich, like everyone. Yep, um, and so you know I'm. I don't think like trading shit coins is this immoral thing. The perpetuators and creators of them, or people who are convinced that it's some sort of meaningful technology, are completely full of shit. So I mean they're? They're either evil or they're like deluded, horrendous engineers who don't understand what's going on. 

01:23:09 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
But uh, yeah, or, or, or. I mean it's, it's. I think more so it's the just wanting to make a buck. Really, I don't know that evil comes into play or, but I think there's ulterior motives in a lot of the altcoins that are out there. 

01:23:26 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
So one question I have is this is what I get the most when people ask me about Bitcoin. Ok, so the ownership principle. I'm very, very firm believer in this. The second point you made, which was the I guess, uh, we'll call it inflation hedge. Uh, I don't know what you would specifically want to call it, but that's the one that I think gets questioned to me the most. Obviously, it's very easy for people to understand why Bitcoin itself is deflationary, given that you can pretty easily explain the having, as well as, like, the limited supply and the fact that you can't just print more Bitcoin Outside of those two things which clearly make Bitcoin itself not inflationary. How does Bitcoin solve inflation in the world? That's what people ask me that I often struggle to provide a good answer with. I'm interested what you would kind of rebuttal, that because they'd still need people to be on bit, like the Bitcoin standard, everyone would have to use that and value it as a currency. 

01:24:24 - Berryhorse (Guest)
Essentially yeah, that's my thesis, is that will happen, so you so, but why? Why will it kill inflation? Because there will be no, no money. 

01:24:32 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Printer button to press so, in theory, how would that go about happening? So right now we have it, you see, like a bank collapse, for example, over the past few weeks. Yeah, where does where do we now head? This is what I. I can't, and when people ask me this question, I don't know how to answer. 

01:24:46 - Berryhorse (Guest)
That's why I'm asking it to you yeah, I mean, I think in decades I people probably have like suspicions about 2023 that banks. I have no clue. It starts with bridging a really massive gap in education because, like it's overwhelmingly obvious to me, we've had a hundred thousand year history of our species of just consistently recycling horrendous forms of money and in social revolution and replacing it with someone who says I promise I won't inflate it this time. That's just been happening for 100 000 years and there's no way out of this with trusting humans. We've, I think, demonstrated I mean, you'd be betting a thousand if you bet against that every time on humans. 

01:25:24 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
So um, so what about like people who currently own like millions of acres of land and own countries and things like that, and like old, old school money different places in the world, different places in America, canada, wherever it might be Wealth? How are those people then just going to not be wealthy at all Like? 

01:25:44 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
and people who just had to accept that, yeah, and accept that Like. 

01:25:47 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
and then people that just had Bitcoin earlier, just going to be the wealth. 

01:25:55 - Berryhorse (Guest)
It's a multi-decade, multi-century process of wealth reallocation, in my opinion and I could if I've learned anything. I mean I look back and cringe at like almost anything I said five years ago. As I assume, if this podcast exists in five years, I'll come back and listen and say you fucking idiot. 

01:26:07 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
So you know, all this is with 10 million grains of salt, but of course, we're all entitled to change our opinions based off of data, and I mean that just happens and things that we learn. I think the point you bring up about like I think general lack of education is a real problem, and barrier to entry is a problem with crypto and that's my biggest I'm pretty tech savvy guy. It was very easy for me to to understand how to trend. You know how to purchase crypto on an exchange, how to transfer it over to a cold storage wallet and there's without saying this arrogantly, that's a. It's tough for an average person and, by the way, like again, it's. I don't want this to come across the wrong way, but there's a significant portion of the population that has just gone through their entire lives without like, with a blind eye to this, and they're like. This is just so much more difficult than everything I'm accustomed to. 

01:27:09
I used to consult for offshore sports books. Very clearly, offshore sportsbooks have payment processing issues with banks in a lot of cases, so they would run a ton of educational materials, literally invest tens of millions of dollars a year in educational campaigns on Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies in general, but ultimately you still get so much that filters to Google page one about crypto being a scam, bitcoin being a scam, getting scammed out of Bitcoin, the price deviations or the variance in price volatility, all of this stuff. All of this stuff. There's just such a negative aura around it consistently that I'm not saying that can't change, but it just seems like a massive barrier, an obstacle in this becoming widely accepted. 

01:28:07 - Berryhorse (Guest)
Maybe they need more money to be stolen from them. Necessity is the mother invention. I mean, you could see an obese person. Maybe they're 400 pounds and don't want to lose weight yet maybe they will when they're 500, I don't know. Maybe the same will happen with people and their money fair enough, you can't, you can't be 12 000 pounds, so people will explode and capitulate at some point if someone were to ask you um, why is bitcoin so like? 

01:28:31 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
why is there so much variance in the price of Bitcoin? What would be a response? 

01:28:35 - Berryhorse (Guest)
there People speculate and you know there's two sides to the fraction. There's the numerator and denominator. So people attribute a lot of the variance to the numerator and ignore the noise in the denominator. And people think in very short time frames. 

01:28:51 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Well, do you think that's like a barrier to Bitcoin's growth, knowing that you know you could put your whole net worth into bitcoin? In theory, you have a million dollars today and have 700 000 tomorrow, whereas if you, if you, had it in a bank if you measure your net worth in dollars. 

01:29:04 - Berryhorse (Guest)
That's what I was gonna say, like bang so no but in theory, you you like. 

01:29:09 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Let's be realistic. I I'd love to joke around say that as well. Yes, it's gonna be just one bitcoin, but if you need to buy food today, then, like you do, have to convert to dollars as of now, as of right now, of course, but like as of today. 

01:29:21
You, you, it's going to be tough. You can't pay your rent in bitcoin and when you say, yes, you can convert, you can. Can you pay your rent in a fixed bitcoin amount? Like, hey, my rent is 0.0.02 month. Like, is that something that you can do? I don't think that is widely available. Maybe, maybe one of every hundred thousand. 

01:29:40 - Berryhorse (Guest)
So the question is do I do? I think volatility in price is a barrier. 

01:29:43 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Do you do, I think? Do you think the volatility? Do you think it's reasonable to keep a hundred percent of your net worth in Bitcoin right now? Um, given the volatility of it? 

01:29:55 - Berryhorse (Guest)
Yes. 

01:29:56 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Why. 

01:29:58 - Berryhorse (Guest)
What else am I going to own? 

01:30:00 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
Well, in theory, based on your theory, there's nothing else you can possibly own. Yeah, so fair enough. I mean, have you ever considered putting, like I don't know, keeping 80% in Bitcoin, 20% in fiat currency or other assets? 

01:30:16 - Berryhorse (Guest)
When Bitcoin's like monotap I mean I'm sure you guys have done the ballpark I mean, if there's one percent, some of those four pillars I said are right. This is like a 100, 200 trillion type market, not 300 billion or whatever it is today. So you know okay, maybe when it's over a million dollars and it's properly monetized, but not until all right. 

01:30:34 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Well, I Well, I'm not going to lie. You've made some compelling arguments here that might increase my Bitcoin net worth again in the recent, in the coming months. 

01:30:42 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
But yeah, I mean, I'm what's crazy here is like we're not talking about. This is what-. 

01:30:49 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
All the arguments make sense to me. 

01:30:50 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
They definitely all make sense. But also, when you look at someone like Barry Horse, right now, he's all in, he's all in. That's worth something Like he's not saying these arguments and then saying, yeah, I own a little bit of Bitcoin and, by the way, for those who have followed this guy since 2018 or earlier, we're not talking about like a million dollar net worth here, fyi. So it is definitely something where it's interesting, to say the least. It is it's very, very interesting, mr Sir Horse. 

01:31:16 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
All right, sir Horse, we'll let you go on this note. We ask the same question to every guest as our final question. A lot of them actually just say buy Bitcoin. I would have bought Bitcoin, but we're not. I mean, you can't actually say that because you have 100% of your net worth in Bitcoin. 

01:31:32 - Johnny Capo (Co-host)
You can't say Well, he did buy Bitcoin five years ago. 

01:31:33 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
He did so. If you could go back five years and talk to a previous version of yourself, what advice would you give to your former self? 

01:31:41 - Berryhorse (Guest)
Can I give two? Yes, of course. One is humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less. So when I previously described like the arrogance that started to breed within me from like this crazy Twitter run plus, you know, the financial success away from Twitter, um, like I said, I was probably vaguely aware, if I'm fully honest with myself, of like some of that happening and basically intentionally chose to continue to be that way. I think because, growing up around sports seeing, like you know, like Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan, like competition porn I'm the best all these athletes talking about how good they are there's this like natural hubris you have to have back to like our CLV conversation where like, yeah, there's all these algorithms, all these models, people paying tons of money I am significantly better than the perfectly weighted average of all those systems. 

01:32:38
I'm gonna bet like that takes like a certain level of arrogance to even get started, and so, to me, I think I'd probably deceive myself into thinking that, like the only way to maintain success is by like continuing to think that I'm amazing, and the exact opposite could not be more true. Um, I look back so much at like the way I talked and things I might have said, and you know again, like it's not like I forgive myself, you know I was 23 years old, like had some cool stuff happen to me. Like it's not like I'm beating myself up, but definitely like I look back and cringe at a lot of the way I carried myself as almost shutting myself off from ever potentially learning something new and knowing that I must look so stupid to everybody who is significantly above me and that when you're consistently talking about like yourself or anything, either they're below you and they're going to think you're a bragging douchebag, or they're above you and they are smarter than you're. Like wow, this idiot. And so like there's just no sense in all of this. I'd rather just listen and learn to a lot of people, um, and just because, uh, it's not like this 2d spectrum where you have to trade off humility with self-belief like you can have tremendous belief in yourself just by knowing you're a completely average human being, human being, and that just that is enough to accomplish like amazing things in life. If you understand, you have this incredible organ in your head called the brain that you can train and learn new skills and improve and just iterate and compound all these things you learn and you don't need to be like number one or 10 or a hundred or a thousand out of 8 billion. Like you can be number 4 billion and achieve amazing things. The second would be to be very careful with I am statements. 

01:34:25
So there's an amazing book, if any of your listeners like reading, called the master and his emissary, by Ian McElchrist. If you don't like reading, he has like a 30 minute podcast or like a YouTube video with Jordan Peterson and then a full, like 90 minute podcast also. Basically, the book explains how this trend of like left hemisphere of the brain and right hemisphere of the brain has been around like as long as neural networks have existed. So like even like a billion years ago there was like these weird sea anemones that had these neural networks in their mouth and it was the exact same thing. Left side was like what we today perceive as like math, science, things, analysis, and right side being like creativity, thoughtfulness, people, relationships, biologically and evolutionarily, what those things actually are from is sort of like um, the left side is sort of like be the predator, like go get the food, be detailed oriented, seek something. And the right side is sort of like error correction, anomaly detection, survive, do not be the prey, and so to lean into either side is probably incorrect and so like, even like you learn about this in elementary school, even like, what type of brain are you? And like it's, it's almost like encouraged to like lean into, like being an extremist, or like I'm a left brain maximalist um, and I certainly was a left brain maximalist and uh, this cost me hugely. I mean, we could do like a whole segment on, uh, the 2019 baseball. Just like the literal baseball itself is like a fascinating thing. 

01:35:54
But, um, during that so I talked before I pretty infamously, um, had a bad year of baseball in 2019 and so, um, for me, I would be tracking like extra inning results, like blown saves, all these things, and be very left brain analytical. Here's the numbers. I'm just getting screwed. Poor me. This is such bad luck without the anomaly detection of my right brain being fully turned on to appreciate there's a literal, complete. Here's the numbers. I'm just getting screwed. Poor me. This is such bad luck without the anomaly detection of my right brain being fully turned on to appreciate there's a literal, complete, physical change in the ball that the sport is being played with. That probably means more than nothing, maybe these blown saves, being completely biased against you, are not completely random. 

01:36:29
And so I look back so much at that year as, like it's it almost painful, because not only should I have avoided having a bad year with my understanding of like, how I understand the ball now and you know, luckily this paid off with the first six weeks or so last season, where basically the exact opposite happened, but I look back and be like, not only should I have not lost I mean, that should have been one of my best years ever is exploiting and understanding that, because I would have been very quick to adapt to and I was just so obsessed with like I'm getting good prices. Here's the math. I'm on the right sides. This shouldn't be happening. Rather than allowing any sort of like, artistic creativity of like, even considering that my model could be wrong which also ties closely to the arrogance thing is, I was so convinced what I had was the nuts Like. How would I ever budge off it? 

01:37:14 - Rob Pizzola (Co-host)
Well, this has been a very compelling and fascinating conversation. Really appreciate you joining us. For those who want to follow Barry Horse first name Barry, last name Horse on Twitter, it's at BarryHorse, underscore 29. Appreciate all of your time. Wish you all the best this upcoming baseball season. Hope you kill it. Hopefully those edges go back up and maybe we're not on the decline. Uh, really appreciate you joining us here. Thanks, guys. This has been circles off. Episode number 95. Make sure you're subscribed to the channel. Hit the subscribe button. If you do enjoy the content, like it on youtube if you're listening in audio form. Rate and review five stars. We'll catch everyone next week, peace.