The Approxinator

“I admit it's a stupid name that I came up with when I was about twelve years old.” he said after introducing himself. "I got it from a movie, and it sounded cool at the time. I thought that I could be a superhero or something. I kept on using the name and it stuck. Now if I change it, it'll just confuse people."

Jethro "the Approxinator" Medley was a minor celebrity to the wider world and a widely popular controversial figure of the math world. He sat across from me doing a crossword while he talked. His apartment was on the sixty-fourth floor of the thirty-second street in the sixteenth district of the eight largest metropolitan areas of the country. It was an apartment fit for one and a half people, with a cozy living room area that facing towards the water. His couches were set up facing each other diagonally to facilitate conversation with a view. He had prepared some tea that he did not drink, and sandwiches for me before the interview began. I drank some tea, then began.

"Explain to me precisely what you can do."

He put down his crossword and pointed his pencil at me. "Precisely what I do is tell you the odds. That's about the best I can put it. And I'm not talking just about if you're going to get a straight flush in your next poker hand. I mean any event, anything that can happen, I can tell you the odds. The odds my mother will skydive, one in twenty thousand nine hundred and six; the odds the elevator will stop working today, one in seven hundred fifty-four; the odds the blue train will get delayed an hour when I take it tomorrow, one in nineteen. Give me any real-life scenario and situation, I'll give you the odds. Accurate odds too."

"How accurate?"

"Always on the dot... and if you're wondering, six in seven."

"Six in seven for what?"

"Straight flush, you should go hit a casino after this." He said, wagging his finger at me.

"Wait, wait, wait, we should take a step back. How do you know your odds are exact?"

He chuckled a little to himself and sat up. "One, I just do, and it doesn't really matter to me what anyone thinks of my odds. Two, after I started to come up in academia, people started to call me out. So, being young and not tired of it yet, I let anyone test my odds. Over four years there were two hundred and thirty-seven formal studies across thirty universities. I won't get into the nitty gritty details, but I was never off [by] a significant figure. People in the [mathematics] field just started to accept the reality."

"And people everywhere else?"

"Nope, apparently I'm a really good fraud." He slouched back into his chair. "It's been a thing since I came up with the dumb name." 

"How did you realize you could do this?"

"Well, when I was young my parents were really into making me do math. My mom was a titan of computer science, math was the thing she wanted me to latch onto. I used to have to memorize my multiplication tables or do my fractions before I could go out and play. When I was eight, I was part of this competition where you had to guess really big numbers, like how many pennies could fit inside the moon. Numbers were everywhere for me! I first noticed it riding the bus, I remember specifically the first odds that popped into my head were about if I'd see a red car on my way home. Then the odds of stuff like 'what's for lunch in the cafeteria' or even odds with the weather. I thought I was just really good at guessing, but the big breakthrough with me was the coin flip stuff."

"The coinflip stuff?"

"Yeah, there was a day when I was ten that I realized coin flips were not fifty to fifty."

"They're not?"

"Nope. I was sitting around waiting for the bus flipping this coin, when I kept feeling each flip's odds were a bit off fifty-fifty. I spent the whole night and the next day flipping. I discovered that flips were always skewed toward the side that was up when the coin was flipped. I kept checking my gut odds against all the things going on in my life and I came to the conclusion that I could do this thing. And it turns out was right."

"Is it an exact number that pops into your head? How does it work?"

"... Yeah, at this point it's exact. But sometimes the numbers go really long, and I trim them down a bit."

"Do you ever get odds that are a hundred percent? Zero?"

"Never. Some are really close. But, you know, you can really feel that billionth of a percentage point. It's like when you're lying in the grass, and you feel that one blade that rubs you the wrong way. It's just a thing that you intuit."

"Did you ever have an experience where that near zero or near hundred event went the opposite way you expected it to?"

He chuckled a bit. "You're not going to like my answer. I don't expect things to go one way or another because I know the way the dice rolls. When things with small odds happen, it doesn't surprise me at all. I knew it could happen because I knew there was that possibility. Things with long odds happen all the time. People win the lottery, lightning strikes, and paths cross between complete strangers."

"I'm sure you've been asked about this before-"

"-Please!" He interrupted me with a sneer and a wave of his hands. "There's a forty nine out of a fifty chance you were going to ask about my love life, and I'll save you some trouble. Every minor internet blogger the year it happened beat the subject to death. All I will say is this: I regret everything, it was all my fault, and Skyla please take me back."

"I apologi-"

He held up his finger. "-There's a one in seven hundred, twenty-six thousand, eight hundred and forty-five chance that the last bit there would win her back, but I have to do my due diligence, just like you have to do yours."

"Of course."

"Damn! Saying that just decreased my odds a significant figure."

After a few seconds of silence, I broke it.

"So, now that all the dust has settled from your earlier years, what do you do for a living?"

"Well, I was long since banned from any casino or any betting avenue. I think that industry even lobbied for a very specific law that technically bans anyone from taking betting advice from me. So it would actually be illegal for you to go to a casino anytime soon because of the odds I gave you earlier. Since I can't be a gambler, I own and run an ice cream shop on 8th."

"A Chance of Heaven? I've been there once or twice, I think when you weren't there, it's very good."

"Thank you."

"I'm surprised when I found this about you, I thought you would be a math professor. Or an accountant. Forgive me, but I assumed at least something with a lot of numbers."

"Well it was the greatest odds for me that I could look back at my life and feel the least amount of regret."

"Really?"

"Yes. There were other things that would have been more exciting, maybe even more fulfilling, but I already regret a great deal, so I didn't want to regret this part of my life, and the odds for the other options weren't enough for me."

"You have what some might call a super power. Do you ever think of how much bigger your life could be?"

"Maybe in another life. Maybe in a life where I wasn't so rational or risk averse. There were millions of things that I could be doing that had better than one in two odds for me to be successful. A lot of people have better than one in two odds of being wildly successful. There are billions of options for any one person. I can't try everything, so why take the chance? I can sell ice cream and be happy."

"No offense to your little shop-"

"-None taken for what you are probably about to say."

"-But don't you find that a bit depressing? I mean there's a good enough chance for most that you could do better. Don't you feel just a little bit of regret from that?"

"To be honest with you: No. I'll leave the risk taking to the people who aren't bogged down by knowing the odds."

I thanked him for his time. He showed me to the door. I took the blue train home thinking about what the odds were that my editor would even be interested in this interview. When I got home, I messaged some of my friends to see if they wanted to play poker soon.