Quizbook
A friend of mine went to an Olivia Rodrigo concert. He was on his own. He’s 6’2 and has a beard. Olivia Rodrigo is a 21-year old Californian. Her target audience is young women.
He was stopped by security on his way in:
“As I’m sure you know, you’re not the sort of attendee we’re expecting. We just need to ask you a few questions, if you wouldn’t mind stepping aside. How did she come up? What’s her biggest song? What do you know about her?”
He handled it well: he pulled out texts from his sister and friends showing that they weren’t able to make it, calmly defused the situation, and that was that. Everyone had a great evening.
The story is interesting to me partly because I wasn’t able to go with him, and partly because I would have handled that situation rather less smoothly. Specifically, I think that in the moment, I might not have appreciated what was actually going on.
The thing is, I love quizzes; I’ve talked about it before on here, but I was completely obsessed with University Challenge for a while, and my biggest regret from Oxford (alongside not getting a Vinnie’s membership) was not making onto TV to compete in the real thing.
One of the fun bits about raising venture capital is that people ask you questions and if you come up with good answers on the spot, you get millions of dollars. Isn’t that awesome?
So when a security guard says, “Oh, you like Olivia Rodrigo? Name all her songs”, I think I would have gotten excited, and treated it as a quiz. And in doing so, I would have completely missed the point.
Because while the ability to name a bunch of Olivia Rodrigo songs might be inversely correlated with paedophilia, 1. the distribution of Olivia-Rodrigo-song-naming ability among paedophiles is probably bimodal and 2. the variable the security guard was actually testing for was “being a paedophile” - and there are things that are much more tightly correlated with that, like texts with your little sister from a few weeks ago.
Vinnie’s is the wood-panelled, leather-sofaed private member’s club for distinguished Oxford athletes. Because I was a pretty undistinguished Oxford athlete, I didn’t get membership, but one of the reasons I wanted one was that in Vinnie’s, you play a game called Quizbook.
The Quizbook is an old and tattered binder of typewriter pages. It’s dog-eared and beer-stained; many are like it, but this one is ours.
It’s got a few great quirks. First, it was printed in like, 1983, and so has questions like “who won the Five Nations last year?” Second, it’s not actually that long - so Quizbook veterans know that the only two possible answers to a question beginning “which US state…” are Ohio and Utah.
To play Quizbook, you need a circle of people; one person asks the questions, and as soon as someone thinks they know the answer, they shout “Buzz! X fingers! Y!” - much like in Jeopardy, where answers must come in the format “What is Y?” In this context, however, X is your bet, a number between 1 and 4. If you get the question right, you can hand out X fingers to other members of the circle, and they drink that much of their drink. If you’re wrong, you drink X fingers. If nobody can answer the question, someone else becomes quizmaster.
By explaining all this, I’ve broken a rule - no coaching. You’re not allowed to explain the rules to anyone that doesn’t already know them. And of course, by explaining that, I’ve broken the rule again. If you think that sounds fun, we should play Black White Black.
Now, if you’re like me, you probably think that Quizbook is a quiz game. The aim of the game is to get as many questions right as possible, calibrating your betting to make yourself look really smart while inflicting fingers on everyone else.
At this point, you can insert your own reference to Liar’s Poker or Sam Bankman-Fried’s coinflipping. I don’t know if there are any Vinnie’s members at Jane Street, but I do know that there are some at OpenAI.
The problem is that Quizbook is a game for 4-12 people, and you can’t get every question right.
And so people smarter than me, people with better impulse control than me, people who are less driven by a desire to show off than me, appreciate that Quizbook is not about answering questions. Quizbook is politics.
Quizbook is actually a game of avoiding fingers, because if you rack up 20 fingers and you’re drinking Pinkies, you’re probably done for the evening. The best Quizbook players are politicians, flying under the radar, cultivating alliances. They understand the game they’re actually playing. Speaking softly is more important to them than carrying a big stick.
A really smart person would figure out how to apply the lessons of Quizbook to raising venture capital.