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Download the Instacart app to get free delivery on your first three orders while supplies last. Minimum $10 per order additional terms apply. Hello, hi and cani chihuah, friends. And welcome to Empathic with John Hyalman, a puck and Odyssey joint. Dropping fresh topical candy conversations twice a week with the people who roam the quarters of power in influence in America from Washington to Wall Street. Silicon Valley Hollywood and beyond.
Shifting and shaping the warp and weft of our politics and culture. If the only thing you knew about Nate Silver was the first line of his entering Wikipedia. Nathaniel Reed Silver born January 13th 1978.
He is an American statistician, writer and poker player who analyzes baseball basketball and elections. You might conclude with a fairly high degree of certainty that the person being described was a grade A Dork, a brainy but socially awkward dude, more comfortable tweaking and twiddling with absurge algorithms and going on dates.
A guy who spins an unhealthy amount of time hunched over his keyboard in a dimly lit room fingers quite possibly coated in cheeto dust, employment status, indeterminate personality, wound tight as a top, and tendencies to sleep, bath or exercise, dubious.
Some of these positions are true about Nate Silver. He is hardcore data nerd and does log way too much screen time. But Silver also travels extensively, loves hanging out in Vegas casinos and other dens of iniquity, and has both a solid sense of humor even about himself and exemplary personal hygiene.
Not only has he been gainfully employed, pretty much constantly, as long as he count the three-year stretch where he made most of his money playing online poker after he graduated from the University of Chicago back in 2000.
As the founder and presiding genius behind 538, the seminal and for a time definitive website that pioneered the art and science of polling aggregation, election forecasting and high end political data journalism, he was ridiculously over employed at some of the most prestigious institutions in American media. The New York Times, ESPN, ABC News. And today he's working just as hard as the proprietor of one of the most highly trafficked popular substacks out there, Silver Bulletin.
Got the pun. Got a quarter million paying subscribers at Silver Bulletin, fork over between 95 and 250 dollars a year to gain access to Silver's brain and state of the art election forecasting model. And yes, if you do the math, you're right.
Nate is making an absolute fucking fortune. All of which is impressive enough, but it doesn't really capture the totality of what Nate Silver has become since he burst on the scene in 2008 and gained renown by correctly calling the results of the primaries in the presidential winner in 49 to 50 states and then followed that up by going 50 for 50 four years later.
Undoubtedly one of the most influential and important figures in contemporary political history, he's a guy who has changed the game and ushered in a new paradigm in political media and altered fundamentally the way that millions of people follow campaigns and understand their outcomes. He's also a figure of considerable controversy, the focus of countless utterly kooky conspiracy theories originating on both the left and the right.
And as the public face of a forecasting model in which ordinary people across the ideological spectrum place an inordinate degree of faith or at least invests with an off the charts level of interest, he is nothing less than an object of singular, unique, and I would say unnerving obsession. One that seems to be growing more palpably intense with each passing day as November 5th draws closer.
Given all this, could there be a better or more timely guess to have on the show that Nate, I mean really people, is there literally anyone out there who's bringing you rather pick right now?
I thought not. Nate and I talked on Wednesday, when I say we talked, I mean we talked and talked and talked about the election, of course, but also about poker, venture capital, the movie's rounders and money ball, all of which figure prominently in Nate's fantastic new book and New York Times bestseller on the edge, the art of risking everything.
And although this episode is for sure a long and winding road, I have to say that I found the journey entirely and grossing and thoroughly entertaining and I have a hunch that you will too. Even if, spoiler alert, you won't be any less nervous about the outcome of the election at the end of our conversation than you are at this very moment. As you sit there on the edge of your seat, waiting for me to finally shut up and let fly with Nate Silver on a politic with John Haileman in 3, 2, 1.
Listen, here's the thing, if you can't spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table and you are the sucker. Guys around here I'll tell you, you play for a living. It's like any other job, you don't gamble, you grind it out. Your goal is to win one big bet an hour, that's it. Get your money in when you have the best of it and protect it when you don't, don't give anything away. That's how I've paid my way through half a law school.
A true grinder. See, I learned how to win a little at a time, but finally I've learned this. If you're too careful, your whole life can become a fucking grind. That was the voice of a very young, I mean like 26, 27 year old Matt Damon delivering the opening lines underneath the credits from the movie Rounders. That's the movie that serious poker players pretty much universally consider the greatest poker movie ever made and Nate, Nate Silver, you sir are a very serious poker player.
So when I saw how much you write about poker in your new book on the edge, the art of risking everything, I wasn't totally surprised to find some references to Rounders in there. And even that you'd interviewed my friend Brian Coppeman, who wrote the screenplay for Rounders with his partner, Dave Levine, that was the first thing that two of them ever got made.
And I love Brian and any opportunity to get him and Rounders into this show is basically a win for me. So thank you for that. And how are you doing? I'm good. I think we're kind of entering a kind of slower doldrums period of the campaign, recovering from a lot of travel, but I'm good. I play that both because of course, like everything else in that movie, it's not just about poker, it's about life. And we were going to talk about the book and talk about poker and life.
And more about Rounders even later on the podcast, but as the former governor of Mississippi, Haley Barber likes to say, the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. And if you've got Nate Silver on the podcast, the main thing is going to be doldrums or not, the main thing is going to be the election.
So with that in mind, one of the things that I love about Silver Bulletin is that the landing page for the election forecast that you do, it always starts with the exact same opening line, which is, quote, let's cut to the chase. Who's going to win the election? Which, you know, frankly, is not a bad way to start a podcast. So Nate, let's cut to the chase. Who's going to win this election?
So I'll try to be as precise as I can in our forecast. That's publishing in a few minutes. We're updating. We updated every day. The probabilities are Harris 54% Trump 46%. There's a 0.2% chance of a tie, but we can ignore that for now. So if you're a poker player, you'd rather have the 54 than the 46. But for all intents and purposes, it's about as close as elections get.
Yeah. Well, and you know, it's interesting in politics, or first people talk in the practical side of it, they talk about like, would you rather play your hand or play the other person's hand? And you're they're usually not talking about polling. They're talking about things like candidate quality cash on hand boots on the ground, whatever.
And that's another place where I think the Harris people feel like they they recognize this is going to be really close, but they still for those reasons more money, more people on the ground and a better candidate. They'd rather have, whether I play their hand than play Trump's hand. And I think you know that in this case where the polling kind of matches up with that.
Yeah, look, they'll have more money to spend in the closing few weeks of the campaign. So they'll have like a few more add impressions and Charlotte and Raleigh and Philadelphia, etc. They probably have the superior ground game, which was Steinmead in 2020 by the pandemic, where Democrats not doing a lot of door knocking.
You know, I think there's some question of like, we haven't really had like a stable period in the race. Ever since Biden was pushed out and he was pushed, it wasn't voluntary. He was pushed by you, by you among others. We'll get to that too. It's been one tumultuous event, John, after another. And now we don't have any more debates. We have a VP debate schedule for next week, but those don't usually move the needle very much.
There's like not any major dramatic news on the horizon. I mean, there might be some East Coast like Port Strike, if you want to get really wonky. There's no more federal reserve meetings until the day after the election. So it's just like not all of a sudden a lot happening and we'll kind of find out where the natural gravity of the races and how much you can get over the finish line with the extra half point from for more add impressions and more ground game.
Yeah, and you know, the just I'll be clear and transparent here because transparency is one of Nate Silver's mantras is that we're taping this bycost on Wednesday. So and we'll come out on Friday. So there will be who knows the silver model could go completely pay wire on Thursday. This will be all overtaken by events, but I doubt it.
Given the way that the polling is going right now, I mean, you have you wrote the other day. And I, you know, found this striking. I don't disagree with it, by the way, or see the reason to dispute it. But it's still striking you wrote the other day and one of your missives in 16 years of running election forecast. I've never seen such a close election. And and so that's both a statement about the past, but also I believe you're also saying this is a really fucking close election.
I mean, it's like you can't overstate how close it is. Yeah. So in like literally all seven of the most important swing states are polling averages are within within two points. And I would bet that we probably don't get out of that range very much, maybe get to a three point leads somewhere by the time we get to November. So what that means is that, you know, you could have a case where on November 5th, Harris or Trump sweeps most of all the swing states.
It looks like a convincing win in the electoral college, but it just kind of lines up where look, Democrats have an electoral college disadvantage, at least in the past two elections.
Harris is ahead in most national polls. There are some exceptions, but on average ahead by two and a half three points and those things basically cancel each other out just about evenly, which by the way, I think for the country's sake, we, we, you know, maybe shouldn't be thrilled about the fact that one of the two parties has a little thumb on the scale in electoral college. We can talk about that. But that gets us to about as close to 50 50 as you can get.
Well, we're going to talk about the electoral college thing because of course, Nate Conan, the times published a piece that in combination with your forecast today is probably is like one of these days where, you know, you're going to have Democrats all over the earth city doing the snoopy dance because you know, but like, you know, this is how the everybody's rides the wave of these things.
Oh, the New York Times now says the electoral college advantages going away. So, and 54 in the silver forecast of God, we're home free. And I'm not a last for like 24 hours and they'll be killing themselves again on Friday. But I think it's it's worth. Well, there's a number of things we're saying here and one of the, I try to know I'm going to dive too deep in this disco weeds, but both because.
You know, when Matt Damon says that thing in rounders about, you know, if you don't know who the sucker is at the table, you're the sucker. I know who you are. I do why I definitely know I'm the sucker at the table. Okay. So I when it comes to talking about things statistical.
But, you know, there's always a, you know, in a race this close where you have a, where I'm two point, two point leads, you two points that is, but in every one of the swing states, you're talking about two points on the according to the averages. You know, that's even within the misunderstanding of a margin of error is it's not let alone in the properly understood version of margin of error.
So like, why is it not the case that it would be just better to say to people? And I don't mean to invalidate all your work, but I mean in general, to just speak of these things in public and say the race is tied. I know you do that. So the forecast, you say it's toss up, right. And you're, you're quite good about that. But on television, we all obsess over it. Well, she's up by, by one point in Arizona, you know, or up by one point in Nevada. And you're like, guys, like, do you understand? I think we, we cite the margin of error, but don't actually take it on board to basically say, this is a meaningless.
And unless it was a one point lead every day for a year, in which case you would say, okay, you know, small but persistent lead. It's just not a meaningful. It's toss up in all those states. No, on average, even when you take all the different polls and average them together, you could have what's called a systematic polling error, meaning as we saw happen in 2016 and 2020.
Yeah, no, but like, but all the polls were off in the same direction pretty much. And on average, the polls are off by three or four points. So let's say that the final six weeks of the campaign go well for Kamala Harris and instead of being up by a point and a half in Pennsylvania, she's up by two and a half points.
You'd rather have that than not, but like, it's still within the range where a normal polling error like we saw the past two elections would be enough to reelect Trump. Right. And vice versa, if Harris finds yourself down by a point or two. I mean, we have had years 2012 was one 2022, not as much as reputed, but some of the swing states in the Senate races, Pennsylvania, what not Democrats beat their polls by a couple of points.
We're not going to wake up on November 5th, knowing much more than we do now unless there's some October surprise, right? A ceasefire and Gaza or some major economic disruption, or I don't know what else. Martian innovation. A Martian invasion would be a problem. Where Kamala Harris fends it off from the way that's a lot. Be exciting from a silver bulletin traffic standpoint, but not a likely event.
No, not a high probability event. And look, I mean, we also know that to your point, you know, Pennsylvania still has these ridiculous bullshit, our cake laws in the books that don't allow them to count early vote when it comes in and when it comes in. So I just keep trying to say to everybody, guys, it's going to be close. It's going to be a margin of error race and a really narrow margin of error is probably until the very end. And we're not going to know on election night.
I mean, whether Pennsylvania is the tipping point state or not, it's probably going to factor into the into the calculation and they're going to take another week to count all the votes. You know, took five days last last last time, right? I mean, don't expect don't expect to get a good night sleep between now and November 5th. And don't expect to have the result on the night of November 5th. He's a pretty safe bet. I would say, probably, realistically speaking.
Yeah, there's even a 10% chance that there's a recount on the order of 2000 where the decisive state is within a half a point and you're in recount range. Although I look, I do we can have a discussion if you want about like threats to democracy and what that means. You know, I think people are maybe maybe underpricing the fact that like when you have an election result that takes five days to result and last time around one of the candidates, Donald Trump tried to overtake.
He's trying to overtake the election result like that's, yeah, that's maybe not a great scenario for the country. You know, in some ways people are more chill about the selection than they were four years ago. And I think that's good on balance. But, but the probability the majority of the time we're going to have a disputed or maybe not disputed, but very close election that comes down to a few thousand votes in three or four states, maybe just one state.
And that's going to be a tense time for America. Right. I mean, let's talk about those states real quick in that in that post that you talked about how close the election was closest ever talked about the two percentage points thing you went down you an order ranking of the states that Harris by starting with the most likely for her to win.
And the least likely on the base of the current numbers. And I'm just going to do them in order Michigan of the seven seven swings. I tell my leaf Florida out of this for now, but just say the seven the what we get in the normal seven battleground states Michigan most likely then Pennsylvania.
Then Wisconsin, then Nevada, the North Carolina, the Georgia, the Arizona. I have a number of questions about all that, which is which begins with the fact that are you surprised that Pennsylvania is the second most likely of those battleground states for a carry according to the data.
I, you know, in again, in the world of practical politics, I would say, you know, there's constant discussion about, you know, Democrat within the Harris campaign else where about the difficulties of Pennsylvania, not they can't win it, but that there everybody's don't like always really nervous about Pennsylvania, especially with they will tell you, you know, a black woman candidate, and they worry about that big chunk of Pennsylvania that's not Pittsburgh and and Philly, that's something that people worry about worry about, they worry about that way more than they worry about Nevada.
Or in some ways North Carolina, maybe because they think it's more out of reach, but Pennsylvania is at a point of obsession for people and I'm sort of stunned that it could be the second most likely of the seven for a win.
Yeah, so if you buy the polling, you've seen some actual racial depolarization, meaning that Harris is polling a little better with white voters and Biden did four years ago, and a little bit worse actually in some cases quite a bit worse with certain racial and ethnic minorities. So for example, among younger black voters, especially younger black men, it's still Democratic edge, but not like it has been typically in past elections.
So if that's true, then the states that are a bit wider, the Pennsylvania's the most consens, the New Hampshire's and so forth, become more swing states and the Georgia's and Arizona's become become less so. Now look, polling is a challenging enterprise in particular when you do polls, you tend to get like a lot of like old white women answering the first question. White women answering the phone, it can be harder to get like younger Hispanic men and younger black men on the phone.
But if you buy the polls and look, maybe this is good for the country, we actually have, it's a little bit less racially polarized. You see Harris doing better relatively speaking in the north of the country and struggling in the more diverse sun belt states.
What is the thing that accounts to the extent that you can do analysis of this for her persistent weakness in in Georgia and in Arizona, which I think part of the problem there, I clean from from everything I read here as part of the problem is a lack of high quality polling and we don't really know there is Arizona may be a little may not be exactly as bad as daunting as it appears. But talk about those two states and what we can clean from from what we know about them.
Yeah, look, I think you've seen a shift in kind of the working class vote, obviously over time toward Trump. But I also see that among among Hispanic and black working class voters, where maybe the memory of a civil rights era is a bit further removed. I mean, you know, in Georgia, you do have like a relatively sane Republican governor, whereas you don't have, for example, in North Carolina, a very sane Republican gubernatorial nominee.
That might matter a little bit at the margin. And look, it is worth noting that like Democrats have eaked out these races by half a point in Georgia, pretty consistently. You know, I think if you talk to the Harris campaign, they'd say, hey, that's the one state where turnout matters more than persuasion.
But you've seen things. You've also seen in registration a shift toward Republicans until recently, especially before Harris became the nominee, you saw more new voters registering as Republicans. And as Democrats, I think, look, if we look back on this race in Harris wins, I think people will say that Trump kind of blew it. Yeah.
He was way ahead of Joe Biden. And I guess he can't control what Democrats did. It was not very prepared for Kamala Harris. And so early on when she entered the race, her favorables went way up as did Tim Walsas. Meanwhile, he picked JD Vance, who is not a very popular guy. And I think it was a pretty foreseeable error. He had this opportunity at the convention to play into this sympathetic moment he had after he was nearly shot. I guess.
And instead, he kind of goes off on a tangent for an hour and a half. And then there's this Haitian migrants eating dogs and catch thing. And I don't know. If you could somehow have a transplant and Trump was able to run the normal campaign for a period of time, then I think you'd be the favorite. I know you affect that. That Trump speeches in a very close by parallel timeline that Trump speech is still going on in Milwaukee right now.
Like it's like it's not that far off. But I, but I, and yes, of course. And, and you know, if, if, as they say, you know, if my grandmother had balls, she'd be my grandfather, you know, Trump is, if Trump is a normal candidate who would not be Trump for better or worse. I still just to think about the about the Georgia thing of it a little bit, right.
There's a, because it gets into a couple of demographic things that are, I find them fascinating. And as of now, at least inexplicable, but, but not their counter intuitive. The idea that like Joe Biden, old white Joe Biden, who Kamala Harris trashed for being a supporter, an opponent of busing in the first, the first presidential debate in 2019, to great effect, at least in that debate.
That that guy would be the one who would bring Georgia into into the blue column in 2020 against Donald Trump. And then he would perform better there. Now he had a lot of his performance there as you know was driven by white suburban vote, not by increased African American vote, but he still performed really well with African American voters in in Georgia that he would over perform Kamala Harris there is not the most obvious or intuitive thing.
And she has still she's a big ground with with black voters, but she's still underperforming his black voter number. What what do you, what do you make of that? I think there are a couple of things. I mean, you know, people forget that in 2020 we were in the middle of a very mismanaged pandemic.
Even though you know, you can give Trump credit for operation, warp speed and things like that. In 2016, which you can argue is more comfortable to this campaign, Hitler Clinton lost the popular vote and was several points behind in Georgia.
Like I think a lot of the typical growing young suburbanites in Georgia were were fed up with the handling the pandemic and other things under Trump potentially and it was more an election about about Trump than about Biden. Where is this is different. This is about the Democrats really being the main characters.
If you produce content on the internet, you're quite self aware about like what headlines tend to click better. And in 2016, it was true. Some everything is about Trump. He's the focal point of the race this time around.
It's the Biden and Harris headlines that click better. Now the good news for Harris is I think she survived her two big tests are more than survived. I thought she gave a good convention speech back in August. And I thought, according to the polls, at least she had a good debate. And unusually for candidate now, she actually has break even favorable ratings. People hate most politicians. They only somewhat hate Kamala Harris, which is a miracle compared to how most people do these days.
But there are these people who who like Harris personally and or dislike Trump, all the tweeting or truth socializing, I guess now. But they're concerned about the economy. They're concerned about immigration. They're concerned about whether Harris is a 2019 more liberal woke progressive version of Harris or the more kind of pragmatic moderate side.
And and people are perpetually unhappy with direction of the country. And she's trying to define herself as a change candidate when she's been the vice president for three and a half years. So I look, I think she is in some sense, the better candidate. I think she also has the tougher task in in different ways.
And the ties go to the GOP in the electoral college. I mean, that just is, you know, she is a three to one four to one favor or something in her model to win the popular vote. But if you all the tide races go to the GOP that really skews the odds quite a bit. Well, let's get into that right now. I said we would. I think a second ago, you may have misspoke. And I think you said Hillary Clinton lost the popular vote in 2016, which I believe.
Oh, yeah. I think that was just that it was just a little flood there. So we'll just note that that maybe was just speaking too fast. The brain runs faster than the average brain. Let's talk about Nate cone, though. So, you know, you you've said this. I have, I have, I haven't done my research here and being a religious reader of silver.
And I saw it my into my inbox. There was a piece of my Nate silver on September 6th, the headline of which was the electoral college bias has returned with a vengeance. And laid out the the thing you just said, which basically is, you know, the end of that piece said that that her you thought that Harris to have point electoral college bias.
So she would have to win the popular vote by more than two and a half points in order to be to carry the electoral college. And you concluded by saying, which is pretty large, maybe a little less than 20, 20, but pretty large. And then you said she'd need to win the popular vote by roughly four points to truly be safe in the electoral college. That was your words.
And I thought that's basically what I believe or I thought I believed on the basis of, you know, of of of what we saw in 2020. And I'm like, she got basically do a Joe Biden did. And then Nate cone, the other Nate, I'll call him the lesser Nate for the purposes. I'm a big fan of I'm a big fan of the two. I'm just kidding. I just think if he was on the podcast, I'd be calling you the lesser Nate. So that's fine.
He comes out with peace on September 25th today Wednesday, in which he says, oh, no, no, no, no. It does not seem that come on some quoting does not seem to come on. So necessarily need to win the popular vote by much to prevail. And he basically is saying, maybe this thing's going away, the electoral college college bias.
He says that she leads in the national vote according to their average by 2.6 and she leads in Wisconsin, the current tipping point state by 1.8, which makes Mr. Trump's advantage less than a point.
And she says he attributes this. He says, look, on one hand, she's holding her own a Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. And on the other hand, Trump seems to be doing gay, he's gaining a non competitive states like New York, which is improves this position in the national popular vote without helping him much in the most important states.
So I guess I said, Democrats dancing in the aisle this morning, because they all think the New York Times is stacked against them because of this, the New York Times, CNN polls, which drive Joe Scarborough and others bonkers. What do you think about the peace and particularly in contrast to the thing you wrote just about two weeks ago?
So one thing we have seen is that Harris has had a relatively strong string of polls in Pennsylvania. There was a period after the DNC when she was supposed to have a convention bounce that instead very hard to find Harris leads in Pennsylvania. Now there have been polls like Quinn a P.I. that show her several points ahead. Now that might just be random noise, right?
People underestimate the margin of error in polls, even when you have five or six polls, there's still a couple of points in either direction. Look, there's a scenario where she wins with exactly 270 electoral votes through exactly Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan. You by the way also need the second congressional district of Nebraska, Nebraska awards votes by congressional district.
And so if she wins all of that and loses all the sunbelt, including Nevada, she's at 270 to 268. And that is a winning map just narrowly. So that scenario could be a case where there's not much of a popular vote edge at all. Our model tends to look at things more probabilistically, Wisconsin, for example, as a state where the polls have considerably overestimated Democrats, the past couple of elections. Pennsylvania is a state where Joe Biden was a home son. He was born in Scranton.
And so it doesn't have that Obama did do well in Pennsylvania in 2008, 2012. So I don't know that inherently kind of running as a black woman makes it totally off limits. But those states would make me nervous. Michigan, a little bit safer. I mean, the one wild card Michigan is that you have a substantial Arab Palestinian American population.
It seems like Harris has defused that relative to Joe Biden, but you have to win all three of those states. So like the heartbreaking Stanford Democrats is that they win Pennsylvania by eight tenths of a point, a Michigan by 1.5 points and lose Wisconsin by two tenths of a point. And then there's like not really a grade A backup option. Nevada is only worth six electoral votes. It doesn't make up for the laws of Wisconsin, for example.
North Carolina would North Carolina is an interesting state given that you have this. I think I won't be too editorial to say quite scandalized crazy GOP.
GoPinotorial nominee Republicans are kind of giving up on that race that might have some usually you don't believe in these downward these upward coattails, but that might have some effect on enthusiasm and turnout. So North Carolina is a decent backup option for Harris. But there's nothing there's no no reason. I'll put it like this. There's every single feel safe about this Michigan Wisconsin Pennsylvania path given how given how narrow it is and given the polling errors in those states and recent past elections.
I would just say that I think that you were allowed to be editorial about the Republican candidate in North Carolina, who is like the things are so crazy that you couldn't write them. You couldn't pass the Hollywood writers or people would laugh you out of the room if you said that this would be accused of.
I also think that could you have anything better just or more delicious than Donald Trump calling him like two or three times better than Martin Luther King. It's just the you know these things don't get better than that. But but just to come back to the the electoral college question and this is like I think just this is a user kind of for the for the average user right.
You know they are going to read the New York Times and say we have been told for months that there's this electoral college bias some of them don't understand what that means they think it means like the electoral college favors the small states over the big states or the Midwestern states over the
white states are black states they have all kinds of cookie ideas about why that is but there is there has been this pronounced electoral college bias in the last couple of elections and we have seen Democrats win the popular vote pretty much every election in our our our adult lifetime and not always end up with the presidency.
So they see the times they say hey that's going away I don't have to worry about that so much and I guess my question to you is are you still I understand that the data is shifted a little Pennsylvania but are you still in a place where you're like I'm not going to feel comfortable unless she's I still believe basically she has to win the national popular by four points three to four points for her to win the
electoral college do you think that's the or are you are you persuaded without without well are you persuaded you know like reading the eight cone thing and going huh I see some of that the data to like what's your basic take away on that question.
So it's a matter of what you want your comfort level to be the points for it is about two points according to our model in the popular vote so if Harris were to win the popular vote by exactly two points in November 5th and you'd say the electoral college is a toss up which is less by the way then in 2016 or 2020 when it was three or four points on all their Nate has it at one point I think you might be over indexing to the times polls in particular versus the broader map.
I mean there are there's one that you mentioned earlier which is like there's been this big conservative backlash in the state where you're in New York too right where I live anyway New York.
You know Democrats are projected to do about eight or ten points worse than they were four years ago Kathy Hoke-Oll is in trouble when she runs again in 2026 or IP convention pricing that does have an effect at the margin it's we haven't seen as much evidence of that outside of New York like in Massachusetts or California or states like that you don't see quite as much I mean fundamentally Democrats still have this issue where there are all these states that are teases for them right there probably not going to be a lot of things.
There are probably not going to win Texas or Florida which are these very diverse states and our huge states but like but our states where Trump probably doesn't have to break too much of a sweat in although the floor is actually pulled a bit closer recently like that's a pretty efficient configuration still for the GOP.
And look it's not crazy I mean there's uncertainty in how all these states correlate but we I've spent a lot of time as a problem and I would still I would still bet on look yeah to be safe three or four points to have a chance one or two points it's a question of you know and who knows there are wild card scenarios where you have weird polling errors that can't
be different different directions but but you know I don't think Democrats should look at a poll showing Harris ahead by one point nationally and feel particularly comfortable about it.
I saw some there's I've already seen some nut basically saying starting to posit scenarios by which Harris wins the electoral college while losing the popular vote that's the idea is because of we can't there's no capacity for nuance or moderation of these discussions you have to go all the way to some other extreme. I want to ask you before we take a break just about about the vice presidential situation because you raised it before and you know we have the debate coming up next week.
There are I think basically two questions one is I mean I am a strong leave the view on the basis of of both by personal history and everything I've ever read in the history of political science literature that you know essentially running mates don't matter.
I'm and and and they're a bar you have to kind of clear you can do some damage to yourself you pick someone who's manifestly not ready to be president or who creates so much negative media attention it can be a problem for you in terms of news cycle squandered etc that does seem to be. The key I you know you wouldn't predict it but JD Vance has been an extraordinarily.
Electrifying the way that the right out of the gate someone finding that childless cat lady thing that is one of the things that like people who have no interest in politics of the attention at all how completely divorced from cable news it got everywhere and had a lot of residents right so that's one thing so how much how bad there's a is just how is JD Vance and.
How is JD Vance an actual problem for Donald Trump in terms of how they let the outcome the election and secondly on reflection as we say here today are you still of the view that man I wish you pick Josh appear rather than Tim walls who's performed well but are you still kind of thinking I don't know man I wish I hope it all works out but I'd rather have to go on with Pennsylvania governor yeah look there's a like a 35% chance at Pennsylvania is the tipping point state the decisive state and they have.
One extra point there would be something quite worthwhile to Harris look I think Vance was a bigger mistake you know in part because he was I think inspired by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump and not the strategist on the campaign in part because they made the pick at a time when I mean look.
John when we had the the day that Trump was shot at in Butler yeah you know I was out in Las Vegas appropriately playing a world's air spoke event and you know and busted out of the tournament was kind of wandering around the strip and like okay it's just Trump's just going to win right just going to win Joe Biden is still running into stubbornness step off the stage and he's down four points and six points of Pennsylvania and and.
Trump just going to win and in that environment they pick JD Vance thinking that they can extend the kind of maga legacy he's young I think I'm lucky probably is a smart dude in some sense but like the naturalness you know I mean he is a you know an author kind of anti Trump public intellectual that's kind of I'm not trying to muster up too much sympathy I am saying that there is like an.
cringy awkwardness to JD Vance's public interactions where like he's run one campaign before in what's now a very red state Ohio doesn't have a lot of experience as a politician and you know look at get kind of like swing state credit for doing well in Ohio and and you know this kind of world of venture capital meets Donald Trump Jr.
I mean you know the GOP has blown they should be have us 54 or 46 edge in the Senate right now but think about last cycle they nominate me met us and hersel Walker and Blake masters all these extremely subpar candidates and all these races.
You know Kelly leftler back in Georgia a couple years ago and as a result they are somehow having a disadvantage in the senate despite having the rural bias of the senate map toward having you know for centers and the quotas and to from California and so it's in the tradition I think of of you know not to put him quite like the hersel Walker category there's no like scandal per say but no.
But this is not a pick that was made with an eye toward appealing to the average swing voter whereas Tim walls is a normal pick I mean maybe you know maybe I'm from the west so I thought the stick the kind of football hockey dad stick was kind of funny at first and maybe like wears a bit thin I think the Harris campaign was caught a little drift in this period after the DNC when it's going back to a more normal news cycle the enthusiasm is fading a bit you know I think they were a little fat food I think they're smart not to be doing more more.
Media interviews and things like that but you know look I would have picked Shapiro taking the point in Pennsylvania but you have a basically normal VP pick versus one that was I think I think subpar maybe not to a Sarah Palin degree as you know about but but not a pick that you seem to make if you're trying to maximize your chance of winning.
You have spent a lot of time now and when we get to the book we'll talk about this with a lot of on the spectrum Silicon Valley dudes and I met Jeff Azoz back in 1987 was right up piece for the New Yorker and he was a tangential part of it he just take it to Amazon public and I remember sitting there the dorkiest way possible explaining to me that his decision to go start this company was because he covered his life through the regret minimization framework which was I thought was up you know which like hey don't don't do some of the things that I'm going to do.
Hey don't don't do shit don't pass up opportunities you think you'll regret passing up later is a good is actually good way to live regret minimization framework just seemed a little bit awkward as a way of talking about it but I it's running through my head ever since the choice of Tim Walls because if you're if you are
governing if you're picking through regret minimization framework and thinking about important business and think about that half point or one point that shipyard might have gotten you and thinking about the scenario waking up on election day and having lost the lost this four days after election day finding out you lost the state by 11,000 votes and saying if only we picked Josh Shapiro I'm like hey Jeff Azoz would have a like double word with you I'm will be right back with with Nate silver I want to really talk about pulling and forecasting in about his dorky away.
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all our all birds and skims sign up for your one dollar per month trial period at shopify dot com slash Odyssey podcast all lower case go to shopify dot com slash Odyssey podcast to upgrade your selling today shopify dot com slash Odyssey podcast this is Jean Marie Lascus with the podcast cement city so there's this election coming up a big one and one guy's been indicted people are talking voter fraud democracy itself is online sound familiar well this isn't that election this one is in
Denora Pennsylvania a dying town in the middle of nowhere where I bought a house and stayed for three years listen to and follow cement city and Odyssey original podcast in partnership with cement city productions available now for free on the Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. We have a special guest joining us now the 46th president of the United States and presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden calling in to morning Joe right now good morning sir.
I'm going to be the Democratic nominee this week I'm going to be hosting NATO summit here in DC can hold a press conference on Thursday I'm Wednesday I met with a national union leaders of the FLCIO on Friday I traveled to Detroit Michigan for campaign event.
I'm just on down the line and so I'm not getting any of what I was told I want to make sure I was right that the average voter out there still want to Joe Biden and I'm confident they do we are back with Nate silver and Nate that was of course Joe Biden calling into Joe and me
cut on morning Joe way back in July Monday July 8th one of the many key moments in the aftermath of the Biden Trump debate in June and just to remind everyone out there listening of the sequence of events that turned out to be so important the debate June 27th and Atlanta
Thursday night and immediately afterward the Democratic party had a cardiac arrest total panic congressman senators governors elected donors strategist pollsters total panic mode and started talking about replacing Biden privately they were talking about it but constantly like just nonstop a week passed 4th July weekend passed on July 8th Joe Biden went on offense and they sent this letter up to the hill and said you know you know
let's have all this discussion down about switching me I'm I'm staying I dare you to switch me I've got you know popular the will of the Democratic parties behind me I've got these boats we're not going to get a different choice that many went on morning Joe called in and said a bunch of stuff like that and it didn't stop it because for a lot of reasons Nancy Pelosi went on that show two days later to basically say we're still
waiting the president's decision you were up on on silver bulletin on two days after the debate you know with a piece that said Joe Biden should drop out and a lot I mean you were not alone there there were you know the people like Tom Friedman there were lots of voices for this but you have been bringing the alarm bell about the age issue for quite some time how I give him the kind of work you normally do which is analytical it's not generally you don't you're not like kind of your
thing is not been pun to tree right calling on a candidate to drop out did you did that seem weird to you to kind of decide you're going to take a to do a polemic basically it's a great question look I think we're trying to not just describe the polls but answer some of the why questions right Joe Biden won the popular vote by four and a
half points in 2020 this time around even before the debate he was down by a point a point in half so there was about a five point or six point swing which in a country is divided as ours is a pretty big deal if you look at any of the people about 80% of people say that Joe Biden is too old and also objectively he's too old you should not have a president as old as Trump would be in a second term and you should not have a
president who wants to present until he's 86 so look to me just trying to explain why we were seeing the polling that we were and that it wasn't skewed polls or wasn't sampling error whatever else and magically I mean you know Harris who is this and some ways very average democrats I think she's a very smart and charismatic person
but you know there's not like a super interesting back story just the fact that like usually democrats fight their way to like a three point win in the popular vote in the like your colleges close it's what you get an average between Biden and Harris and that's what you're between Biden and Clinton and that's what you have with Harris now but no look I think
to me it was a case where I became worried about the degree of reality denial in the democratic party we've seen lots of reality denial in the republican party right if you were not able to say that Joe Biden was clearly incapable of completing a complete sentence in the debate and clearly not fit for another four years in office then the near partisan hack right I mean it's just I hate to be so blunt about it but like if you can't call reality reality
when something like that happens beforehand it's all speculation but after the debate then I really worry about kind of how grounded you are in the way that like actual voters see the race and maybe he could have gotten by it with the superior ground game or some Trump scandal or whatever else but you know look credit to Nancy Pelosi I mean democrats are pretty good at like at winning elections they had a very good 2022 relative to our parties usually do it in terms
they mostly nominate relatively sane candidates in swing districts and if they want to have progressive candidates in blue districts good for them right but they mostly are pretty good at picking candidates and I think they made a smart decision well look so just to be clear right like I always the first poll came out that I can remember the fall of 2021
the first time I wrote October of 2021 there was a poll the first one that I saw that poll Biden's age about whether he could stand for a second term you know it was the numbers are basically like they were towards the end they got worse but they were already a majority of the country and I think maybe a majority or a plurality the Democratic party didn't want to stand in October of 2021 even in office for nine months and it never changed it never he never he never beat that thing back right
so I you know and of course you get shouted down even if you just sighted the polls you know that these polls people who are talking to people in polls if you reported on the polls you were said to be stirring up this issue when if you went around the country and talked to anybody at a bar a gas station of baseball game they all were like all they talked about was Joe Biden's age you know they saw him shuffling across the South lawn and said they were worried about him if they were Democrats they were concerned they weren't even critical they were just like is he okay can he can he serve out his term can he can he beat Trump again you know so
like the idea I so I'm hugely I didn't ask the question in a way to kind of suggest you done anything inappropriate in calling for it and again you were far from alone in saying it but I don't recall ever seeing you take a make an argument for a political outcome like you explain what's going on you explain why as you just said like what are the dynamics going on here and to explain probably
politically what powerful thing which was at increasingly the numbers that you were seeing truck that Biden was going to lose the election and political parties are about winning elections if they're about anything those are all things that what that when I was struck me as being part of the normal Nate silver and bit I get maybe I'm not I'm not in cyclic pedic student but I don't recall you ever kind of being like advocating for a particular tax policy or for a particular or for a Democrat candidate in the in the nomination fight ever kind of having a position
about what you wanted to see as an outcome before and all I'm really asking about that is not that it's inappropriate but just feel weird to be to inject yourself because you have a very big megaphone now and you and you wrote peace after peace in that period of that month again all of them highly well argued
I think influential but it's just a very kind of slightly different position than hey when you're occupied before as a public political commenter I guess like I felt like I had a duty to do it on some level where I mean look there are other voices I mean as we're inclined was very vocal about this for example look in some sense I think I have an obligation because I don't give a shit about pissing off partisan Democrats but I'm also not some maga conservative right I'm going to vote for
cum laude Harris I don't see that as an endorsement I say I just so you can have more transparency about kind of where I'm coming from and I don't know I think there's a lot of power in ignoring the haters and there are a lot of people that appreciate what I do you see a huge audience for the
newsletter and the book and things like that and so it's kind of like I don't know if you're going to if you're going to achieve some degree of success financially or in terms of influence then then you shouldn't care about like what annoying people think you know well yeah and I mean as you said you wrote the other than some
COVID stuff nothing has made a certain type of politically engaged democratic angry at me than my insistence Democrats needed to take the electorates concerns about Joe Biden's age seriously everybody in my everyone in my world understands this you know I'm going to talk to John Stewart about the kind of abuse that he got when he said it is for a show back that both Trump and Biden shouldn't be on the stage they're both too old you know also liberals were like you know Judas at Stewart I mean he's just a millions of people incredible amount of abuse
and you know you're you are obviously someone who on some level is incredible how much about how little you seem to give a shit about about about this stuff although we'll get to this you can sometimes be like prickly with people on the on the Twitter machine which I don't understand because I don't think Twitter is a real place and I can't imagine getting annoyed by anybody there but we'll get to that here's my question is this is is you know you are the role you've come to occupy
in the 2008 2012 2016 2020 cycles you know enormous influence you know at I said before that you know 2016 like 538 was the most traffic thing on the whole the whole Internet you know you get huge audience you do that silver bulletin again right but before that at the end of 2020 in the period between 2020
and the year you have written about the fact that you were totally sure you're going to come back and you know and do this again in 2024 I just like you to talk a little bit about your your what your your anxiety about it and and and what tipped you over into deciding to do an obviously silver bulletin has been hugely successful
and they've been indicated making the choice but I'm interested you wrestled with some kind of kind of kind of kind of I think it was seem like relatively serious qualms about whether you wanted to be part of this again in 2024 yeah look there is a sense in which I quote unquote like don't like politics by which I mean that like I don't know there's a certain
high neuroticism I don't know first of all I don't like the fact that like it gives license to people to be jerks to one another including on social media and things like that there is not really a lot of probabilistic thinking in politics people think every election is a special snowflake and is ordained by God or the progress of whatever the arc of history bends toward progress
whatever else and there's like a little bit of like a not one-hit wonder factor but like you know if you're like some indie band that makes some more pop focused album that becomes really successful and every show you play for the rest of your life right although if you're in the audience it's super fucking annoying when the band doesn't play the hits you know what I mean you're like fuck these guys who do they think they are
but there's a little bit of that problem where like you know if you're gonna you know if I was gonna do this election then you're probably stuck being known as the elections guy for the rest of your career
and I just I don't know and there are also concerns like I thought this is gonna be a very close election and maybe a very tedious election it's turned out to be very close but not particularly tedious but like but I know I just like look we have the model it's not that much marginal cost to run it
I'm trying to build a newsletter product you know I feel like I'm the only person who's done this for this long right there's posters but I'm only one who's had a forecast every year since for 16 years now and so I took the plunge and I have some nice doing this since you had to walk to school through the snow with tennis rack it's strapped to your feet old man silver he said I've become a grand daddy the grand daddy of of of big data probabilistic forecasting
so it's just funny interesting because you you know one of the things you said you know was that you would kind of looking bad when you just a year ago or so you wrote a thing that said here the things I've been wrestling with you later called you're being a little bit of a drama queen about whether you're going to come back when you wrote about it a month ago you're later you said that the thing that you had
underestimated or the one of the downsides that you forgot about was how emotional you said how many people understand we feel incredibly emotional about the election and that it led to it could lead to abusive behavior and that polls and models become a vehicle for what psychologist called transference basically people
displace all their anxieties about the election under the forecast and the people who designed them and you know you are you know in some ways the the face of a lot of of what's this large industry now of of polling the polling industrial complex the the poll aggregating and consolidating and and then the then the the probabilistic forecasting which is which is at great gain greater
cycle does it stress you out to be not just I mean feel yell at you on Twitter all the time people yell at every anyways a public person get yelled at on Twitter but that so many people invest so much faith or at least emotional interest in what you do on a daily basis I'm daily with this model that you put out every day does that are you call you now fully comfortable
that that big done it for this long as you have old man silver or you so little weird that by it doesn't feel more intense this time that it had even in the past three cycles no I think we shouldn't neglect how crazy 2016 and 2020 were I mean 2020 was the middle of a pandemic I think people are are stepping back from I mean 2020 was one of the most horrible years for our country ever right which
is all made in January six by the way it's not forget about that either so I think people step back a little bit from the break but I look I have a I have a high capacity for for tolerating stress you know part of what happens to get a little introspective in election years is like if you take those personality tests where are you like an introvert or an extrovert I'm like right in the middle I'm like not as introvert as you think I'm like 50 50 basically
and in the election you're always on you're doing you're doing media appearances you're writing for the internet the whole time right if you're out with friends they want to chat with you you're doing lots lots of stuff and so it can be like taxing in a sense of just being like and you're
traveling a lot physically tiring but but I don't know I mean it's look I don't think I'm taking any type of existential risk right if it winds up being which it probably won't be probably be 60 40 someone other day if it's 80 20 Harris and Trump wins then okay things like that have happened before and I have like lots of other ways to find fulfillment in life so I'm a little bit more chill about it but like it's
it's hard to describe because like I to some extent it's because I don't give a shit that I do engage to some degree on on Twitter someone who's being an I think you have to sometimes be willing to to counter punch and they are people who are in my social circle and so if they feel offended or their friends feel offended then like then like they
doesn't really have any consequence for me as much and so but yeah I don't know I mean I think I think I think look there's a lot of value to in deescalation I tried to decide to be like a little bit calmer on the Twitter sphere at least for the rest election we'll see how long that lasts a lot of it is meant kind of in a trollish humorous way there's an element I try not to go after
I almost never after someone's like race gender appearance a very good of you very good that's very that's very very very respectful and civil of you no no racist tweets from from Nate's over I it's what I like about it is like like that midler will tweet you and say who bought Nate silver and how much to do go for and you get a while you put the little waving hand emoji and it starts out hey that with the
next nation point as friendly as can be understand you may still be frustrated that signs the lambs came out the same years for the first time in a while so you were pretty much always going to lose best actress to Joey Foster and poker we call that a bad beat but that's no
reason to tweet out conspiracy theories which is such a just very kind genial kind of response but also you know he's sort of being conspiracy mongering crazy person do you think that the has the is the business if you put aside the polling business and obviously this is a big deal but what I would let's call it the aggregating and forecasting business that the sector that does that whether it's the time that we exist in the old 538 the New York Times and realtor politics and all these various
enterprises and others like what's what do you think is significantly different about this cycle then pass cycles I mean the probabilistic forecasting seems to have much be maybe have much bigger role than it had in in pass cycles do you think there's a how is it changed meaningfully and is it changing for the better do you think the marketplace for that the mediation between the data and the voters is a marketplace that's evolving in a positive direction a static
direction and negative direction look in principle the polling should be getting worse and the reason is we're kind of moving away from this very strange period where you know when I grew up born 1978 right in the 80s 90s 2000s 95% of Americans have a landline telephone and the social custom is that you actually answer a phone call from a stranger on your landline phone which is an objectively kind of a weird thing to do I think so that social experiment happened to be extremely
hospitable to polling where you can like literally dial random numbers in the phone book people will answer the phone and you get a representative sample we are not in the era any longer pollsters are using a lot more statistical magic if you will right the polls are
almost like models unto themselves and and you know I think they've realized like the gold standard method doesn't work anymore like I think it's good that we're people are looking at averages and aggregates and and forecasts and models I think there's been some
progress in people understanding that like being ahead by two points in a poll does not equate to certain victory but yeah every time people swear off the polls they can never they can never quite quit them and the US by the way we have better polls and like in the UK or India as a country the polls are off by like 10 or 15 points on average people just can't there's a school the train of like media critic twitter where it's like we should just focus on on policy it's like well the fact is that
like there are far more people that vote and follow elections out of rooting interest as fans of one party or another or fans of the system than people who are deeply interested in like US trade policy toward Taiwan or something like that and I don't feel too ashamed to offer a product for those people but at the same time I mean the headlines on the newsletter often like they're often like chill out they're often like we don't know very much and we're
not going to learn very much more right so I'm trying not to like treat every one point shift in the polls as though it's a revolutionary development well so right I mean look speaking of someone who you know has had to listen to people complain about like horse race coverage my my whole life and I'm always like it's like one of the most intense important competitions between two people on the planet like you guys complain about horse race
coverage like at the Super Bowl or the World Series it's like you know that these are shake spirit people love stories like you know and I was just kind of aseolic horse race coverage that I would say think about some some of the focus on polls but like the idea that we don't cover these things as
what they are which is high human drama with with the large consequence it's like you know in the same reason people want to know the data they also want to know about these people who are running and what they're doing to how they're running this race which is what it is a race I guess you know my
guess we're like my question gets into the the question of the of the model right not the deep guts of the model but just this thing right you know you say there will be people who when they hear you say I'm not a few people when they hear you say Kamala Harris according to the model today Kamala Harris a 54 chance of 54 percent chance of winning they think that you're saying her vote share is going to be 54 yeah they don't even know that they're they're they're confused by that that's not your
fault but they are and and given what we talked about earlier in terms of how what that basically points to is still a toss up I guess one of my questions is I love all this stuff right and it's not a personal beef that I have with this but like is about the part of the reason why you do this you
have said is because you think it provides some social utility and I think that that averaging polls that that that that that looking at aggregates of polling was a absolute benefit you know making people see that there was a there's an un-intentioned
vertical on a saleable that's better to look at at all the polls together than any individual poll that's just true that gives you a better understanding of what's going on do you think that there's that that that that this the kind of model that you've created
and that is you put behind a paywall but in fact is out in the world just inevitably because things too popular as you have said do you think that like do you worry at all about whether that actually has the kind of social utility that you're trying to serve which is that it's actually helpful for people to who don't really understand it to be hearing these numbers and in all cases misconstruing them again people don't really understand how margin of error works by the way look I
again it gets a little bit of the band back to the problem of the band that has this one breakout hit and they kind of get you know get associated with that or stand by I mean I it's always been shocking to me how many people are interested in the numbers and at the same time I think there is this like there are a lot of people who are who are quantitatively literate believe it or not I think sometimes what's the term the word soul term is like people who are more verbally
oriented and I love writing not an insult but like but I think sometimes that customer is actually underserved but yeah just because like elections are such a such a huge thing and I thought by kind of putting it behind the paywall you would keep it a little secret with the subscribers that didn't exactly work it still very popular but look I look I I think when people are exposed to probability repeatedly that they begin to understand it a little bit better
and there's no better way to learn this than in poker where you just know that if you're all in with three of a kind and your opponent has a flush draw you know there's a flush draw a third of the time if you get in on the flop and you just have seen that happen thousands of times you calibrate that sense and when people are making every day decisions like what route should I take to work or should I carry an umbrella they do fine and like I'm trying to I'm trying to
reduce the phobia around probability even though I understand as you said John that like sometimes people are misinterpreting what those numbers mean with a with a poker reference when I'm excuse I hear the word the flop that's when I know it's time to take a break
because we can then get to the book we'll be right back to talk about Nate Silver's book is it which must be of what to how high did you get on the New York Times best soloist with that we got to five that was pretty good that's pretty good to five for a
book for a book that is as intellectually sophisticated and deals with some of the some of the stuff you grapple with in the book number five in the New York Times you can expect to be stuck in state of Hawking right you're not going to be not going to be policy came out our week to right
oh she's still number four for most of you and your books better than hers we'll take a break and we'll come back with Nate Silver after this these two have no idea what they're about to walk into down here to have a good time they figure why not give poker a try
after all how different can it be from the home games they've played their whole lives all the luck in the world isn't going to change things for these guys they're simply overmatched we're not playing together but then again we're not playing against each other
either it's like the nature channel you don't see piranhas eating each other do you they wear their tails like signs around their neck facial thick nervous fingers a hand over them out the way to cigarette a smoke little unconscious gestures that reveal the cards in their hands
we catch everything I told you we were going to come back to rounders Nate and and there it was Matt Damon again doing the voiceover for a scene another famous scene that takes place in Atlantic City at a casino where his character is sitting at a punker table with Ed Norton and John Terturo
and a crazy young Brian compliment and a cameo all of them are playing professional card sharks who are basically waiting for some unwitting tourists you know robes I think you call them in toker the poker to the right is fish I
think if you're like a totally unskilled player to sit down at that table so that they short they those guys the sharks can just eat them alive and that's what that monologue of Damon is describing I mean how great is rounders I mean it's classic it's it's part of what got my generation into poker
and I love the fact that I know Brian compliment a little bit myself and like he loves poker more than anything else I think in life pretty much and that and that really shows through in and everything that he you know that he puts up you know whether it's billions or rounders and he puts a poker
element into yeah I mean Brian is a great dude and then the story of him how he researched that thing and and wrote he wrote a big magazine made for the observer I think was the piece that he wrote originally before before doing the script with with Dave Levine his partner I book that movie can I
it never gets old for me I can and that's a that's a ultimate watchable for me I can watch that thing a hundred times and it was on cable right now I watch it again but it does relate to the thing it's for poker people they love it he made they made a movie that's that's a fun watch for a normal person but every person I replace poker like reveres it is the best poker movie of all poker movies just a lot in it and poker means a lot to you you are you were a professional poker player
now although you mentioned you were at the world series of poker on this year you spent a ton of time in casinos for your book so let's just start with that because the first couple chapters of the book are very poker focused and there's a reason why that not just a certain kind of person likes to play poker but there are ways in which the that connection between a certain kind of person that connection between a certain kind of person and poker leads you down a path
towards a larger kind of theory about risk and how to live in the world just talk about the poker is the gateway drug into the book and into a way of living and looking at the world yeah it's just if I know that somebody is a poker or a fish and that oh there's like a 95% chance that I want to be friends with them right which is like not true for anything else I can think of there's just something about the way of looking at the world where in the one hand
you appreciate math and analytics on the other hand you appreciate being really competitive on the third hand we're running out of hands it's also people game obviously there's a lot of people reading the notion of kind of sitting back and observing and kind of quietly collecting information that then you use later on at a time when it's here a bandage and the fourth component is like a little bit of an anti-authority streak to poker it's the one job where you
don't have a set schedule at all most poker players are pretty nice but if you want to be ill mannered then there's not too much of a consequence to that you know you're responsible for yourself pretty much and so this kind of like
lone wolf mindset combined with competitiveness the analytic part and the people reading it it's something about that really really appeals to me you divide the world into basically two quadrants or two types in a way or kind of psychic spaces I guess or prototypes phenotypes I don't know
which is the river and the village and well you just simply it's like the establishment is the village not surprisingly and the river is risk takers iconoclass contrarians etc is that basically a fair thumbnail yeah I mean you can think of the village is the establishment the New York Times and
the Washington Post and Harvard and Yale East Coast progressive more collective in its mindset you're worried about being ostracized or canceled whereas the river is the rugged and rugged analytic individualists although that kind of puts too positive a frame if you read the book then it kind of taunts you into like a false sense of security because like they're the profiles of all these interesting poker players and certain frameworks like expected
value or game theory apply really well to poker but poker is although a complicated game for a card game is simple as compared to like you know how should we develop artificial intelligence or what's the best use of your charitable money
which is what the effective altruist do and so it kind of and also like and you know poker is a relatively level playing field you show up and play that's not true in Silicon Valley or Wall Street or whatever else so you learn in the book that this mindset although it's my mindset and when I find
admirable in some ways also comes with plenty of problems right well and let me just say about the village in the river you know I think even you slightly over simplified the village that the kind of the most public version of the village is the kind of most caricaturedable is this
the establishment as you described it which is kind of the smuggler establishment really is a habit of mind or is a personality trait villagers are conformists and people who are highly risk averse right it's kind of like that where that's the real the real division between these humans is
is with appetite for risk versus risk aversion and and iconoclasm or contrarianist versus versus conformity right because you can be someone who lives in the village who lives far away from the beltway or didn't go to Harvard right you can be you can be a villager who lives in can no
high oh and just you know is is basically a conformist who is very square essentially intellectually yeah no I mean it's it's the risk taking coupled with the individualism and these things tend to go tend to go together a lot yeah I remember a I've always had an unfairly
negative impression of DC in part because I had a coworker at my first job who's like I don't think I don't think I'm fairly at all totally totally totally totally legit a proud Washingtonian who refused and was just Chicago who refused to J walk right if there's like no car
within five miles he's like I'm a law abiding rule about a person like you got a fucking J walk and there's no traffic right nothing's going to be harmed from that and so yeah it's it's the the turbo used for that and gambling circles is nitty n itt y meaning the combination of risk
averse and and contrarian although again I mean you know look you see some leveling out of this mindset Democrats were smart enough to make this bold move to replace Joe Biden sure sure you know meanwhile Republicans I you know look the book argues that like the river has
been doing well just in the sense that Las Vegas Silicon Valley Wall growing is second to the economy but I you know I think they maybe got like a little bit cocky about about certain things well I'd say a little bit yeah especially given some of the people you profile like
Sam Bankman freed and Peter teal and other people in the book I want to talk about a little bit about those guys but let me just come back to one more fundamental thing right because you know these are phrases terms of arts that are essential to understanding a whole
lot of really important things about how the world works but for a lot of people who have not dabbled in this world at all they don't know what they mean and they kind of scare them off expected value is there are but you start talking about Bayesian you know the other is
the those are way too far those kids get a shit out of anybody yeah but I will say expected value is central and because really what you what when you talk about the difference between these things and people in the river people think about the world in terms of expected value
that's the club really I would say the core thing right that sets them apart from the village explain what that is so let me start with the poker definition of it because that's easiest in poker it's the outcome that you get on average if you play out the hand
in every possible way so you know if I make a big bet and that bet results in me winning a big pot if an Acer King comes and losing a big pod if a queen or a jet comes and averaging that out is expected value you don't know what the next card is going to be and for
like lots of ordinary kind of things we do in life we kind of subconsciously consider expected value whether we put it in those terms or not right you know let's say you're a little tired on Thursday night you've been working a lot you get invited to some
party look on some level I don't think about this quite so explicitly but you're thinking about hey what are the chances I could make a friend there or meet someone of my preferred sex or network or have fun and have good conversations versus like I'm
tired you know how much will I offend my friend if I don't go to her party and that kind of thing I mean you're probably calculating out some things under conditions of uncertainty so for every day types of decisions I think it works fairly well when you get into
these big existential decisions like what's the risk of a nuclear war or what's the risk of having runaway artificial intelligence then I might understand more my more why people are more risk of worse potentially but understanding that things that are highly consequential you know to have a one
in a 100 chance that when you invest in a startup it's going to be worth 1000 times the amount that you're investing in it like that breath actually works out very well if you're a Silicon Valley firm that invests in a whole bunch of companies then that's what makes you rich over the long run and so understanding that framework in a world where things are as uncertain as ever and there are kind of fewer guardrails than ever just to a a a sign of kind of modern thinking I suppose when I
when I'm talked about made me Jeff Bezos years ago is because I was writing a profile of John Dorr for the for the New Magazine when really nobody knew who he was and and I though I'm from California knew a little bit about venture capital I
didn't know that much and and the and John Dorr who ran this story from called Clientburg and so called field and buyers I just remember it's really was it's really a head fuck at the beginning when someone says to you we're going to make 20 bets and what we hope is that is that we're fine if 17 of
them fail you know couple of the few million dollars and 17 bets we expect 17 to fail and we hope that we get a moderate payout from from to and then we hope we had one home run and that's and that's a shitty batting average but because the payout from the home run is so vast that's that's the model
for venture capital which is which is perfect kind of overlaid of the thing you're talking about and a thing that actually has all kinds of common everyday applications that if you scale them down and take a bunch of zeros off the end of the the financial risk involved you know you talk to
Peter teal in for the book and and I I'm curious what you're kind of take away with him is and I I'll get in one quick prior question right you're now an advisor at polymarket right let's correct yeah right and I think you know we talk before I am one of the least I
am at least considerate the reminded people in the world but when I think about people attacking you on Twitter that decision Stuart Stevens like tweeted out and was like you know Nate Silvernell works for Peter teal and you think about all the various bullshit conspiracy theories that
take root on the on the on the Twitter sphere I ask this just to allow you to just to say out loud what do you say to people who say that you've been fundamentally compromised by the fact that you're now on in their view Peter teal's payroll at polymarket millions and millions of
Americans are on Peter teal's payroll by the definition so he invests in Uber as Uber left one of them an Airbnb and Facebook right so if you're you know if you're active on Facebook which founders fund has an investment in and generating revenue for Facebook then
you're then you're in Peter teal's pocket by that definition but no look it's it's the degree to which people assume that you can't be acting in good faith that if you say that the election is 55 45 Trump instead of Harris as it was a few weeks ago in our model that like you must be
being you know a paid agent of Peter teal it just kind of it's kind of nuts I don't know I won't talk about like Stewart Stevens or something in particular but like it's it's kind of deranged I agree it's I agree it's kind of deranged I would say just for purposes of intellectual
consistency being someone who contributes to Peter teal's net worth by using Facebook is different from being paid by Peter teal to work for him I mean there there is a reasonable point that those are you're you're complicit with Peter teal if you use any of those products but the
flow of funds is is a is a relevant factor there I think it's a people's minds if you work if you if you work for Facebook then right like I I don't yeah I don't get any I mean you know founders fund is one of many investors in polymarket and polymarket is one of hundreds
of companies they invested in yeah and look I would say you know look at for me it's always the proofs in the pudding take a look at the work at the output and if you start to see the work at the work overtime and it consists of way starts to seem corrupt and you've got a
problem if it's not you're going to be you're fine what do you think of him you know when you when you what's your takeaway about him in the way that you write about him in the book which I would say is my reading of it was neither you're not I it's clear I didn't my my view is it's not
you're not either you're pretty measured in your views of him at least the way comes across the book to my reading of it but I'm curious what your what your real thoughts about it work yeah and look part of it is I you know I believe in the authorship thing of like showing and not
telling you know I I I there's no criticism I hate more than the media critics who think like the New York Times don't use enough like mean adjectives about Donald Trump right you know Donald Trump who is a fascist is ahead by one point in the poll of North Carolina hopefully the
fascist won't wait them it's just it's I'm trying to like let you see the evidence for yourself I think Peters unusual in the sense that he is I think quite religious and even a determinist so he's in this world where everyone's a probabilist and thinks in terms of
expected value he obviously grasp that on some level but he also I think kind of thinks maybe he's pre ordained to have the success that he has when he talked about Elon Musk who he's kind of like frenemies with at best they gotten some famous car crash and the way to a domestic
pitch meeting in Silicon Valley you know he's like yeah Elon if you looked at this probabilistically space acts it was kind of a crazy idea but but maybe it's not how the world works anymore so he has like interesting like anti-money ball spiel I'm sure if the audience
like rounders don't know money ball to but like he thinks that like we're now in a world where everything is overly optimized and algorithmized and that maybe there's more edge to be had from from the vibes which is a very interesting thing for someone who is in this very quantitative
space I like optimized and algorithmized I didn't know algorithmized was a word but yes it's super interesting I grew with you and you know since you mentioned money ball Nate having now heard me play two clips from rounders you may not be totally shocked to learn that I was
going to also play something from money ball so money ball of course the great great 2011 movie started Bradpin Jonah Hill written by two great screenwriter Steve Zalien and Aaron Sorkin based on the great great book by Michael Lewis which is about Billy Bean the GM of
the Oakland A's and how Billy Bean ushered in the like the Nate Silver of baseball he should have the quantitative analytical saber metric revolution in the major league baseball so I do want to play that clip as long as we've gone this long let's do a more clip this clip has Joe to Hill who is pits
kind of dorky assistant general manager the kind of stat head in the office here he lays out the theory of how numbers could turn the A's into a world series team what's this this is a code that written for a year to year projections this is building in all the
intelligence that we have to project players okay it's about getting things down to one number using stats the way we read them we'll find value in players that nobody else can see people are overlooked for a variety of biased reasons and perceived flaws age appearance personality build James and mathematics cut straight through that.
Billy of the 20,000 notable players for us to consider I believe that there's a championship team of 25 people that we could afford because everyone else in baseball under values and like an island of misfit toys. I let a misfit toys and Billy being still has a world of world series and and and it raises the question it does real well I love that movie I think it's so great it's like one of my really one of my all-time favorite movies so I mean you're I presume you're a huge fan of money ball.
Of course. I was sorry I just I just want to get on the record. In case you're like no I actually thought that they took too many liberties with what happened in the scouts meeting. But it's an interesting question because like the stuff that you write about you mentioned money ball in the book but you write about all the stuff you're writing about in in on the edge.
It's like the way that math has kind of taken over the world and and money ball had a moment where it was very much both controversial and invoked. I do you feel like that the that essentially what's happened with with the saber metrics revolution is that it's just become so much the way that everyone operates now that we just don't talk about it or that the fact that Billy being never did win a world series and I know
the red socks obviously adopted and did win a world series I know all that stuff but do you feel as though it's been like that it's kind of we it's it's out of fashion or is it just so deeply been kind of integrated into the way that baseball works and other sports work for that matter that we just talk about it explicitly anymore.
Oh no more more the latter for sure right the stupidest I know what the stupidest baseball team is today in terms of analytics is probably smarter than the smartest teams were when money ball was written you know 20 years ago now. And part of the narrative arc that I think correctly makes people like me I suppose less sympathetic is that like money ball is no longer the scrappy underdog story of the Oakland days and this forsaken market they move to
Sacramento now by the way. Trying to win on us us shoestring payroll you know money ball is the New York Yankees Los Angeles Dodgers it's Wall Street and venture capital firms and like you know it's this ruthlessly efficient system we have and I'm a capitalist I'm
not ashamed to say that but like this ruthless efficiency we have and like every dimension of our lives where things are very much optimized to maximize whenever your objectives are your profit if you're running some type of for profit corporation and and so I think people are correct to be like
on some level suspicious of this kind of hegemony of of numbers even though it's I think you know it's the superior way to do lots of things we can get into cases where models are there's a term called overfitting where you rigidly fit a model to pass data and doesn't apply as well
in the future you know there is a role in some things for intuition and things like poker we get a lot of experience the intuition can be valuable maybe not in rare situations but no it's it's you know this is ruling everything now and so it may have become less fashionable because it's not cutting edge it's not the underdog story anymore but that's that's kind of the way the world works for better or worse.
I want to just end on a on two quick questions about politics because we got to come back to the main thing keeping it the main thing you were quoted in the Guardian a couple of days ago saying talking about one of the advantages of forecast models is that you can kind of prepare keep
a lot of people to prepare you said if the forecast says it's 50-50 people should be making their contingency about the election people should make their contingency plans like right away it doesn't mean you need to stockpile ammo and peanut butter but it means you know what your strategy
protect American institutions in the event of a Trump second term I actually think ammo and peanut butter or I've already got my ammo and peanut butter if you're if you haven't got your at or what peanut butter at this point you guys you're running late do you I mean like when you tangibly to you are you making contingency plans and what are they?
I'm not in the sense that you know I'm a lucky and privileged person who probably doesn't have existential stakes although I'm a little as a gay person a little worried about the GOP shift toward new waves of anti-LGBTQ whatever you want to but you know hysteria in some ways but yeah look I mean
lots of lots of hours of being in the hot seat playing poker I understand that like I don't have control over the election outcome as much as people might want me to or as much as people might try to read ulterior motives into into forecasting but the point I mean the Guardian is that like you know
I haven't seen like you know there is not as far as I can tell like one big organizational brand that's devoted toward protecting democracy now we can debate what that means right Democratic party would like to have word with you now
well I think it's actually really important that that is a non-partisan brand I do see this conflation of things that are good for you know so the Democratic Party back when they I mean I run it it was a bad decision right they were lobbying to get RFK junior off the ballot
and all these swing states for example like in a narrow sense that is on lowercase the Democratic it gives voters less choice for example you know so I don't think that everything they do I don't think they're shit never stinks Democratic Party yeah but I think it's important friends by the way I think it's really important for for news media it can be opinionated but for news media to like not carry the water for one party or another having having this fourth estate is a big check
you know one reason why I'd say I mean look I am worried about if there's another Trump term I think the basic story John is that like we had pretty strong guardrails and they were weakened over four years and I don't want to predict what would happen over over another four years
but I think it's really important that we have you know independent institutions one thing Trump did not do in his four years in office was like meaningfully curb the freedom of the press and I think preserving those sorts of institutions is very important
yeah and and look I will say when you started he said well I'm a privileged person and I have a lot of advantages and I don't feel an existential threat like dude you know you're the first you know a white rich gay data nerd you're like first up against the wall in the revolution buddy
I mean I don't see the I don't see a maggot I don't see a maggot nation as part of the village you know I mean I'm not sure where they are I'm not sure they're part of the village and also not part of the river I mean there's a unit in the in the in the in the paperback for the book
you're gonna have to have a third thing which is going to be the Magosphere because they're really neatly fitted either one of those first two categories my last thing for you is just this I think the most valuable thing you've written of late is just the thing that was just about how to put try to think about these polling things in context which is like came in people are going to want this data and they're going to consume it like crazy we know that there's no stopping it
and you're making a lot of money off it and we all and those of us who pay you I'm a member of the silver bullet community I'm happy to be happy to keep paying you I get a lot of value out of what you write but you did say this thing where you wrote
anything I say about the election or any poll or what anything any poll says isn't going to change the outcome of the election you said if you care about the outcome then vote donate volunteer or try to persuade your friends there's also another option chill the you said f e f which I object to so I will say as properly should be said chill the fuck out and then you get a little admonition about not saying nasty shit about people on social media telling people that I think telling people
that do stuff super valuable I think telling people to chill the f out is is probably is a nice sentiment but I think that's probably a whistle like best the graveyard I think that that horse is already out of the barn chill the fuck out in between now I remember
yeah but look I think and you look at you know you get to be I mean my mid 40s now you get to see people who are more successful professionally at least and like in general there's a strong inverse correlation between complaining and doing and between complaining and success you know often whining about the polls or wanting about a New York Times headline is a way to feel like oh I've done my political good deed for the day when go help a local candidate I mean I think
one thing Republicans realized years ago is like things like state Supreme Court races are really important to the downstream ecosystem of American politics state legislative races which determine the gerrymandering or redistricting that we have every 10 years in Congress things like this matter
matter a lot and people are probably too focused on on the presidential race and the big headlines and not the not the grind of politics Nathaniel Reed Silver thank you for taking the show today it's been the life like it talked to you practically
certainly at ad nauseam and maybe at it tonight I really appreciate it man it was great talking to you in politics with john hyalman is a puck podcasting partnership with Odyssey thanks again the Nate soper for coming on the show if you enjoyed this episode and
want to be sure not to miss out on the amazing guests we have in the pipeline please follow in politics with john hyalman and sheriff's rate us review us on the free Odyssey app or wherever you have the basket the splendor of the podcast universe I am john hyalman the chief political columnist for puck where you can peruse my prattling every Sunday along with the work of all of my colleagues by going to puck dot news slash j hyal that's puck dot news slash j he i l
and claiming your 20% discount on an annual subscription by putting your name on the dotted line speaking of puck my partners john kelly and ben landy are executive producers of this podcast glory blackbird is our guest rangling guru alay clancy is our gal monday through friday jade crowley and geno ice bourbon are leather and lace and obviously and bob tabitore is our very own sultan of swing flawlessly producing editing mixing and mastering the show and yes like
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