All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - #AIS: FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver on how gamblers think

Episode Date: May 29, 2022

This talk was recorded LIVE at the All-In Summit in Miami and included slides. To watch on YouTube, check out our All-In Summit playlist: https://bit.ly/aisytplaylist 0:00 Nate Silver gives a presentation on how gamblers think 19:25 Bestie Q&A with Nate Silver: building probabilistic models, getting blamed for Trump winning in 2016, polarization reality, 2022 midterms Follow Nate: https://twitter.com/NateSilver538 Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect

We're really excited to have our next speaker here. Nate Silver is the editor-in-chief of 538. And he came to our poker game recently. Nate came to our game. Come on out, Nate. Ran the game over. Yeah. Let's see if I'm too good morning.

Come on out. Who was the big loser that night? I think, played. Who was the big loser? Because Nate was the big winner, right? Well, he was the big winner. I was basically trying to play. I think Jason, Jason, Jason, kind of the big loser that night? I think, who was the big loser? Because Nate was the big winner, right? Well, he was the big winner. I was basically trying to do some sort of big loser that night. I think I donated a little bit to Nate Silver's new model-s-plod.

Model-s-plod. Model-s-plod. Model-s-plod. I think you got the model-s-plod coming to the game. This was the largest poker win you've had in your life. Largest cash game win, yeah. By a factor of five. Two.

Two, okay. Well, we're happy to donate. You're getting, by the way, your speaker fee, I just canceled it. Okay. But ladies and gentlemen, Nate Silver on the Mind of a Gambler. Cool. I'm really excited to talk to you all today.

I'm working on a book about gambling, risk, and rationality for the term of critical thinking, to rationality. It's partly involved talking to people about global societal risks, so talking to people about the risk of nuclear war, which is not very cheery conversations, by the way. But also people who take risk for a living or at the very least manage risk and have real skin in the game. And not just some actuary getting a salary.

They're assessing risk and making big decisions financially mostly based on that assessment. So I've started out talking to poker players and sports betters. I'm a former poker player myself. I still play recreation in a lot. I'm currently, I think, number 301 in the global poker rankings, not that I look at every morning.

But mostly it's the examples of talking to other fantastic poker players and sports bettors about their process. And I'm also talking now more to VCs, to founders, to hedge fund managers, for example. There are a lot of similarities. There's a certain type of person that's what I'm talking about today. Personality traits, modes of thinking, it even

affects maybe their political views a little bit, and you see a lot of things in common. So I gave you some of this context already. This is a work in progress. I mean, the book is kind of halfway 0% written, about 50% research. So things may change. I'm evolving and learning and correcting things.

But it's fun to write a book. it's fun to have great conversations with the besties and the people and really kind of experiences firsthand. So I'm going to start with some things that I think are relatively straightforward and obvious and then getting at things that are maybe less so toward the end. But one really obvious one is that successful gamblers think probabilistically. It's not just a matter of understanding probability, but being comfortable with uncertainty, being willing to take bets on an uncertain basis. That's kind of table six even getting into any field involving risk. In poker at least, you probably also need a fair amount of mathematical

ability. There are now these things called solvers in poker that come up with a game theory, optimal strategy for every situation. It's a very complex situation. It's way too hard to memorize. You have to develop a mathematical intuition behind it. But even players with rare exception, Phil Helmuth might be the one exception actually, right? But even players who are known as being field players or

exploitive players, people who rely on tells and psychology and table talk. But even players who are known as being field players or exploitive players, people who rely on tells and psychology and table talk. I talked to Daniel Negron, for example, one of the probably five best book players of all time. And he told me about four years ago, he realized that these solver kids, as he calls them, the math whizzes were better than him. At least at certain forms of poker, he totally

remade his game to look at computer solutions to be more studious and mathematical and it's improved his results quite a bit. In the VC field, I don't really, if you're necessarily doing as much modeling as I might in an election model, for example, but at the very least, people understand the intuition and the intuition is, you need both, but I think the intuition is more important than the application. Number two, this one ought to be really obvious, but it needs to be said, successful gamblers are highly competitive. Things that you hear from people over and over again is, I want to kind of prove people

wrong. I want to outsmart the competition. I want to show who's best. It's almost more of this motivation than financial motivation, I think. It's partly a matter of, you can't settle for being average. As a gambler, the average poker player loses money to the house, so does the average sports better, so therefore you have to deviate from average in some ways. But kind of one conclusion I've come to talking to people for this book is that human beings

are our competitive species, right? To get people to get along in book is that human beings are competitive species, right? To get people to get along in society is pretty hard. One good thing about capitalism is that you have some managed type of competition. Democracy is kind of a type of competition, and that's probably a better way to kind of challenge these conflicting urges we have than things that are too centrally planned. But certainly people in this room, people I talk to are on

the high end of the competitive scale. Successful poker players and sports betters have to care a lot about small edges. It's a nature of placing bets and I feel you lose money on average. So a very good sports better might win 55% or so percent of his or her bets. You have to win 52 and a half percent to make up for the house cut for the rake or the big as different names. That means you can't afford to make 1% errors, right? You really have to squeeze every last drop of expected value or EV out of any situation that you're in. This makes people very, very, very detailed. Oriented poker players tend to be very studious about their craft.

They really kind of love poker. You can't just get the big things right in poker. You have to get the small things right, too. It's too competitive a field right now. This might not be asked, by the way, of VC. The average investment makes money. It may not make a above-market return, but it'll make money, which is not true for the average poker hand that you play. By the way, casinos, too, if you talk to casinos executives, you might think you walk into a casino and everything that you do is maximize to it and make the maximum amount of revenue possible. Not really, right?

They're pretty good at the big stuff. They protect their downside risk a lot. But they're not maximized as much as you think, because when you have a license to make money, you don't have to get the small stuff, right? But in poker where only 10% of players probably make money, a long run, you have to be very, very detailed oriented. Number four, you see here a polygram thread about Elon actually. Successful gamblers are comparing at least to some degree. And again, I'm kind of repeating myself a little bit, but there's no edge if someone, if everyone does the same thing in the same way,

you have to have some angle that you think makes you better than what the market thinks, and the market's pretty good, so it's a hard thing to manage. I think risk-takers tend to view themselves as outsiders, where they are or not is probably an open question, but they think of themselves as thinking differently from the are or not, is probably an open question. What they think of themselves is thinking differently from the rest of the world potentially. This can also make them potentially like a little bit annoying, like outside of investing and gambling context, right?

Where if you're kind of always the person who says, well, actually, that can get kind of push back in social settings, for example, or on Twitter. But you can't kind of settle for having the average view because the average view doesn't do better than the market. There is a fine line between being ahead of the curve and a permanent contrarian in sports, but if there's a line that's constantly mispriced, then I can just bet that I don't want that market

to correct itself. I want to keep exploding that error in pricing, right? In VC, I mean, you might want to find a founder or a sector or a company that's undervalued by the market, but eventually you want that sector to grow. You want to attract more talent. You want to attract future fundraising rounds. So you kind of are more being ahead of the curve by half a year to a year. I think in some ways it's analogous to real estate. We are trying to kind of anticipate where the market will be in the future. And that's a subtly different skill than being maybe contrarian per se, but relate at least. Number five, and again, this might be a little bit redundant, but successful gamblers take

shots. And this is very intuitive in VC where you have a field where you might only have a unicorn or a deca-corn, you know, 1% of the time, attempts of the time. Of course, you have a whole portfolio. It may not be that risky in the aggregate. But you have to be willing to make decisions under pressure and be somewhat fearless as a result, right? Timing is important. You want to be first to market and poker. You have a finite amount of time you can spend on a hand in practice.

Sometimes people take these risks in a calculated way, right? I talk to Sam Beckman-Freed for the book, for example, and he's like, yeah, I knew this would have like only a 50% chance of succeeding, but the payoff was so high, I would take it. Some people just kind of more intuitively, just kind of want to put skin in the game, want to take risks, get some excitement or pleasure take it. Some people just kind of more intuitively just kind of want to put skin in the game, want to take risks, get some excitement or pleasure from it. Again, we're talking about the very extreme tails here too, right? The people who are super uber successful, maybe are almost taking on more risk than they maybe should. You can instead like live

a very happy and complacent life as an investment banker or something, but people who are true entrepreneurs, they think at scale and think very, very big. I should say one challenge of writing the book is that talking to all of the successful people, you risk survivorship bias, right? So kind of which people fell along by the wayside. If you know unsuccessful investors or gamblers, then send them my way.

I need to talk to some of them as well. Number six, successful gamblers, especially in poker, and then send them my way, I need to talk to some of them as well. Number six, successful gamblers, especially in poker, work well with incomplete information. One thing that differentiates people in academia, and academia is very useful for basic research and for advancing science and things like that, right? But you don't get months and months and years and years to develop a hypothesis when there's actual money on the line. By that time, the people who were faster would already have moved. don't get months and months and years and years to develop a hypothesis when there's actual money on the line. By that time, the people who were faster were already have moved.

So the skills kind of knowing what information was available at the time you made the decision, I think there is a limit to how useful like an after-action review might be if you kind of pretend as though you had perfect hindsight, right? We can say, what we have done about COVID now, if we had known all, what we have done about COVID now, if we had known all the things we know now about it back in February, 2020, and it would be an easier problem to solve, but that's not how the real world works. So decision making under uncertainty

is I think a understudied and underappreciated topic. You can't be too much of a control freak, certainly in a game like poker. You can lose your temper very easily, emotional management's a big part. A people who are successful in these fields. But all the value is in making the hard decisions, right? Hard because they're edge cases, hard because you have

some information, but not others. And you're going to get some things wrong. But otherwise, if it's easy, then everyone else is already going to do it. There's no access returns to be made. I think related to this is that successful gamblers focus on process much more than results. One thing I found good for the book in refreshing is,

people if you ask them what makes you tick, what's your advantage, they're quite thoughtful and deliberate about it, they step back and think about what skills do I possess, what's the bigger problem that I'm trying to solve. Again, emotional displacement is a big part of this. about what skills do I possess, what's the bigger kind of problem that I'm trying to solve? Again, emotional displacement is a big part of this. I'm not saying that you're supposed to be totally emotionless. I mean, emotion can help to guide intuition. I'll just talk about

it in a bit. But it does mean you have to be willing to like lose poker hand, lose $10,000 bucks, and then play the next hand as best as you can, right? We have an investment, or many investments that go sour, and still be on your kind of best state of mind for making future investments. It's pretty hard. Most people aren't very good at this at all. You can't go too far and sometimes make excuses. There are lots of different ways to get unlucky,

in poker, or investing. But having that focus on kind of what was my thought process, it seems intuitive people in this audience maybe, but it's not intuitive for the average person. Differentiates successful gamblers quite a bit. This next slide here, you may have seen this video online where there are a bunch of girls bouncing basketballs, they ask you to count how many times

the basketball passed back and forth. And during the video, kind of unbeknownst to the watcher, a gorilla walks on stage, like things change colors, weird things happen, and the point is to try and say, okay, well, you were so focused on counting the number of basketballs being passed that you ignored the gorilla in the room, so to speak, right? I think, though, that if you're instructed to count the number of passes, that it actually

is sign of intelligence that you do focus on that, right? If you're an air traffic controller, and you're trying to land planes at Miami Airport, and you get a bunch of text messages from your teenage daughter, right, you shouldn't be distracted by that. You should focus on the task at hand. But the point is that people have an amazing ability to vary what they're paying attention to, especially in the moment.

And in poker, it's very important because most of the time poker is pretty boring, right? Good players fold 70% of their hands for the most part, right? A lot of decisions are fairly automatic, but maybe once an hour or once a day you'll have a decision for tens of thousands of dollars or where you'll be knocked out of the tournament or win the tournament, right? And so having that kind of knowing where you focus your attention and underrated skill

that I think people who are at least in poker are pretty good at. By the way, one thing I've noticed is that you used to kind of think of poker players as being kind of quite shlubby and sloppy, and some of them still are, but more and more of the good players are focusing on physical and mental fitness. It is like a demanding game. It's a little bit demanding physically to keep your composure and not give away information from your mental state.

And to really concentrate is actually a lot of work. They're famous studies of chess players. And now Magnus Carlson will lose five pounds over the course of a chess match, just thinking, which might seem ridiculous, but like, but if you're really playing poker at your A game at your A plus game, which you don't achieve very often, I often find that when I am able to do that,

rarely I'm completely wiped out afterward. It is a physically demanding game. But in general, kind of being having your ear to the ground, looking out for opportunities, and being flexible enough to take advantage of those opportunities, is an underrated skill set. Number nine, successful gamblers apply practice intuition. So, I'm 44. One of the things about becoming middle-aged,

you start to kind of potentially trust your gut? A lot more, which can be risky in some ways. I think people can, in matters that happen only occasionally, like a presidential election, people think, well, my gut is that so and so will win. You don't have enough practice at forecasting elections to really, for that to be very useful, right? We have one election every four years.

If you're a poker player, though, you're playing tens of thousands of hands every year. If you're a VC, you're hearing thousands of pitches every year, right? And part of what experience does is kind of take things that were once hard and then become more automatic, right? I mean, you'll hear people say, oh, I made a decision very quickly, right?

And I make exact decisions. You hear someone give a pitch and you decide maybe in 30 minutes whether or not to fund them or not hear examples like that. But that doesn't really reflect the fact that this person has spent years and years and years honing their insight and listening to

pitches that that produces value down the line. So it's intuition of a sword but it's practiced refined well- calibrated intuition that involves working really hard and learning, right? I mean, in poker, you kind of go through cycles where you kind of are grinding and get better at something, you feel like you achieve some condition of mastery, then you kind of slip, you get complacent, maybe you tilt a little bit, having the ability to like step back and re-evaluate your game, like nagraniw or someone and say,

look, I have to make some adjustments here. Maybe I'm doing better than I ever have, but now I learn different flaws that I have, right? My opponents are getting better too. That bottom of this chart here, where you re-evaluate and grind back up and expect that you're going to have to keep doing that for your whole life, frankly, differentiates successful people, I think. Number 10 is one of the more subtle ones, I think, but successful gamblers are structured

thinkers. They want to understand the process behind the outcome. Again, in poker, it's too complex a game just to purely learn through memorization and wrote skill, right? You want to understand how things adapt what the underlying kind of curvatures are and everything. Heuristics or rules of thumb are pretty useful. Like in Polkware, heuristic might be that you should call with your medium strength hands, right?

Your best hands, you raise, your worst hands, you fold, or check, right? And then you kind of call with your medium strength hands, but there are exceptions to that. And heuristics only go so far. But the kind of flip side your medium straight hands, but there are exceptions to that, and you risk only go so far. But the kind of flip side of this is like, so at this conference, there's a lot of talk about investing and gambling, but also politics. I do think when you're kind of a highly structured philosophical thinker, that politics is very

frustrating, right? People in the other world I work in, which is I, you know, I run a website, I talk to people in politics, talk to academics, you're trying to get on C-A-TV and stuff like that, right? It's a lot of very hypocritical and ad hoc thinking in politics, right? It's instrumental reasoning toward trying to win an argument at that moment in that day, and so you can see why someone like Elon Musk might get very fed up with the kind of hypocritical and natural political discourse. That's another conversation we might have in the Q&A, but it does lead to some personality clashes, I think.

The last one here, which is maybe a little bit counterintuitive, but I've kind of learned, I think, from observation, is that the most successful gamblers don't actually care that much about money. They tend to be, for the most part very generous. They're always going to pick up the tab. They're going to spend a lot on good wine and things like that, right? They're in it really for the love of the game and when they get bored they tend to quit. Again, this might differentiate the 0.01 percent or 0.001 percent from like the 1 percent. Certainly you want

to manage your money carefully in poker, but still, when you have people whose net worth fluctuates by the amount that poker players does, like in poker, it's basically like three states, right? Super rich, somewhat rich, and dead broke, like not a lot in between. When that's the nature of your field, and you've been in those states for different parts of your life, and many good hook-up players have had periods where they're broke, you tend to recognize the ephemeral nature of success and to celebrate life in the moment a bit more. So, that's all.

Thank you very much. Look forward to the Q&A now. Applause Ladies and gentlemen, Nate Silver. I don't know if this is in the introduction that you run 538. Does everyone know the site? So during the election cycle, Nate does the best job of anyone on earth gathering together polling data and then using statistical models to represent a distribution or a set of expected outcomes and making that known on his site in a way that's super, I think, informative better than anything else that's

out there. So, thanks for that. Now, I get really addicted to them leading up to elections. I'm like, I got to go in and check what Nate's changed on the site every day, and I know a lot of people did. Then what I observed on Twitter, which I think speaks to your first point here, was a lot of people followed your prediction on the Trump election. And they're like, Nate made a prediction that Trump was

going to win. But what you said was that there was a 43% chance that Trump would win, and therefore people assumed he was going to lose. And that the nature of a lot of people's understanding of things is very deterministic and binary. It's like win or lose as opposed to hey, the future is not Binary the future is not deterministic. It's there's a set of outcomes that may occur and you can get a better sense of what that set is You make that determination enough time so you'll you'll be right most of the time you'll be wrong some of the time

Do you think most so my question for you based on how I saw people react negatively? Yeah, you're polling Which was it was like, dude, he gave a really good set of statistical models. No, people blamed you. But the people, but the, but the, but the, but my question is like, do people have the ability to think probabilistically? Because you say, you need to think probabilistically, or is that a minority of people that can really get

themselves there? Because so many people just want to guess or no answer. They want to say, this is the future, this isn't. They don't want to think about a distribution of outcomes, which is really the way the world works. I mean, I think people think probably all the time in real life, right?

If you're like, running late for a meeting, you have to decide, should I speed? What's the risk of getting into an accident? What's the risk of getting pulled over, or things like that? I think in, you don't realize they're doing that. Yeah, I mean, they don't know they're doing that. Like, I think part of the answer is that,

I think politics kind of breaks people's brain, right? Because like before the 2016 election, we got a lot of criticism from liberals for being too bullish on Trump. The market price is about 15%. We have it 30%. So we are very bullish on Trump relative to other people. But like, people thought we were like playing with the numbers to try to, I don't know, affect turnout somehow or try to cover our

asses or things like that. So I just don't think that politics teaches people to think critically, and it's like, yeah, part of that is they're not thinking probabilistically, but it's more like, people just want to see their kind of priors confirmed. What was it like when people blamed you for Trump when? Yeah, there was a lot of that. Yeah. And why did you pick Trump as president? They literally, I think they pointed to you and they said,

You tip the election. It's almost as if you convinced people to go. How did you deal with that? You just kind of have to say, fuck you and move on with your life I mean, I don't like I've been very lucky in my life overall right including that like Things that I think are not that remarkable like you know saying all the polls are gonna be right usually Which they were in 2008 and 2012 like I think we got way too much credit for that but you can't like I mean again We're all poker players here, right? So it's kind of like if you kind of get your money in I mean, again, we're all poker players here, right? So it's kind of like, if you kind of get your money in

really good, right? And you make a flush or something, like you kind of have to have that attitude about it. So you were able to just basically shut it out and say this. And what about just the fact that like, you live inside of an organization, now 538 is owned by ABC News. ABC News, yeah.

ABC News, yeah. Was that before the election? That was, we were, we were, ESPN at the time of the 20th of the election, now we're ABC News currently. And so does that change sort of like, like, how do you make sure that you can actually just do your job no matter how unpopular the answer may be or the distribution of outcomes may be?

OK, so why I'm working on this book? It's partly because I want to diversify away from just, first of all, I think forecasting elections is an interesting problem, but it's not like the most interesting problem, right? But no, I'm not going to spend the rest of my life just like being in the election forecasting guy. It's, I mean, you also face disincentives where the downside, we got some elections really right. 2018 midterm, we nail perfectly,

about as good as you could, right? And people were like, oh, that's nice, right? If you get the 2020 primary, we were very bullish on Joe Biden when people weren't, and thought he was gonna lose, and so you don't get a lot of credit, and you do face a lot of downside for being actually wrong or perceived to be wrong.

And so yeah, I'm not going to spend the rest of my life making election forecast. I hope that's part of the portfolio of things that I do. But I'm interested in a lot of other questions about the world. Nate, what do you think about social markets that are defined about social behavior, like an election? People are going to vote one way or another.

You then make a prediction, and then that changes the way people vote. And the same is true in stock markets. I was going to ask you about your experiencing stock markets because people have an assumption about rate hikes. The market then reacts to the assumption about rate hikes. Then the market tanks, and then the Fed is like, let's change the rate hikes system because of the market's tanking.

How do you think about building probabilistic models that account for social feedback loops where the social decision that's made is driven by the forecast you make or by the market's taking a forecast? I think the evidence is that in two-way elections, so Democratic RISC Republican, that there's no clear effect from.

And by the way, what we do is a tradition. There's always been horse race media coverage. There's always been polling going back for many years. We think our version of it is a little bit more grounded and objective. In two-way races, it's not clear if there's any impact either way, where Canon effect is when you're having a multiple candidate race. In 2020, when Elizabeth Warren started to fall behind Bernie Sanders and the Poles,

if you're a left wing voter who prefers Warren to Sanders but Sanders to Biden, you may kind of switch your vote as a result of the poll that can create momentum, mathematically trying to model like a multi-way election we do it it's very hard it's way more complex in part because of the feedback loops that it introduces for sure and stock markets are the same again i don't know anymore any financial market behavior it is funny by the way that like if i like lose a thousand bucks at poker it'd be like furious right but like i lose like much more than that in the stock market and like they're like oh i don't care i just invest in you know low fee like mutual funds and stuff like that. I mean, for sure, I mean, it's, I don't know,

you guys know more than I would, but I think there are, there are certainly complexities that involve feedback loops, for sure. Nate, we live in a very polarized world right now. We all spend too far too much time on Twitter. And we're seeing this sort of house of mirrors, I'm curious how the 19% of people who believe in banning abortion and their impact

and their outsized voice versus the far left and their outsized voice with sort of democratic socialism affect your ability to predict what's gonna happen in the country, because the majority of the country's beliefs sometimes are in stark contrast to political things that happen. And even on our podcast, people want to pit, Saxonyas being incredible rivals.

You want to pit yourself for a suicide. But, in fact, we agree on almost everything. Yet, it feels like in our society, you know, they want to push us to pick very binary belief systems. And I'm just curious how that impacts what you do day to day in your job in predicting what's going to actually happen in reality. And maybe you could tell us, based on what you've learned over time, are people as polarized as it seems, or is America actually got a majority consensus on most of the issues that

we struggle with? Well, okay. One reason that markets work is because you get feedback in the market, right? And you adjust your strategy as a result of negative feedback from consumers, people running with their feet. I think one problem with Twitter and with kind of the political atmosphere more generally is that both the left and the right are now insulating themselves from feedback in a lot of ways. And if you're someone who kind of like tries to call BS, I mean, when, you know, if there's a 12 characters,

like having a good bullshit detector is kind of an implicit theme of people who are successful gamblers, right? And if you're like someone who like, I, that's kind of bullshit, I can't let that sit there. I have to say something about it, even though it'll piss off my followers. Like, you really get boundary police a lot.

And when totally, yeah. Boundary police, yes. Yeah, and when feedback and existence are broken, then you run into potentially some really dangerous outcomes, right? Like I think both the left and the right have become more authoritarian in certain ways. I think the type of authoritarianism on the right is quite a bit more dangerous in the moment.

But they're both moving away from liberalism in some kind of classical sense in some ways. I think they have to do with the feedback loops that social media tend to produce. The other thing about social media too is it really, really flattens things. One thing that people in Silicon Valley get right for all their faults and self-servingness in some ways, they get the orders of magnitudes, right? They understand scale and social media and the daily news like it really collapses that, right? So some extremely important problem and some trivial nonsense are kind of treated on the same level. One is one thousand

times more important than the other and that and that pretty slut- Right, in a feed it's one right after the other. Yeah, and again, I don't know if there are ways to redesign Twitter to make that better, but like the fact that you're kind of always on, right? I mean, the fourth Twitter, the kind of cable news cycle, you have to have like some controversy to talk about, and things are completely dropped. The next day, there's another news event.

I mean, some of this should be maybe actually this thing was terrible, but some of the thing is like, way more important, and so we should continue to focus on that, and so that's damaging, I think. Is there a way out of this? Will this pass in your estimation is this, you know, an intractable problem? I'm a little bit bearish and concerned in the short term, yeah. To be honest, I want to ask you something. Can you say more? What does that mean? I mean, there are different types of

risks that we face right i mean you know one problem in particular is that if we have a close election next time particularly one that's close where the where the democrat appears in early win right i mean you're having more or more republican elected officials at curves of state some of the candidates and perhaps a little bit for governor for example who kind of believe the election was

was stolen in twenty twenty and like uh 2020, which wasn't to be clear. And that's a very dangerous argument to have. It may not resolve itself in the end of democracy, but like that's like a risk that's in the 10 percent range or maybe higher of a severe constitutional crisis in 2024, and maybe repeated that in 2028 and so forth. That's the most immediate threat, but also government capacity to deal with big problems. I don't necessarily take the standard line about COVID where you say, we should have done

this and that and managed it more top down more, but clearly like state capacity seemed to be not so great, right? As we deal with other existential risks from climate change to AI potentially, to nuclear threats, a little bit bearish about state capacity to make good decisions in complex situations which is not perfect information.

Yeah, frankly like being down in Miami, or know, or traveling other parts of the world. You see like there's more reason to be optimistic, right? Where, where people at least are excited and dynamic and there's something happening. It may not be exactly the right thing, but people are happy. But no, I think, I don't know. I'm usually an optimistic person and I'm a little bit worried about... What should we expect then going into the 2020 midterms? 2022 midterms. 2022 midterms. So the baseline is pretty strong, which is that the president's party

loses seats the large majority of the time. And given that Democrats' majority are so narrow, they're pretty big underdogs to keep both the House and the Senate. With that said, in Senate race in particular, individual candidates do matter to some extent. And you might have enough off the wall of GFP candidates nominated that would cost them two or three seats potentially,

and that might be enough to save Democrats in the Senate. The House for the candidates are more anonymous, and their more seats in play is a little bit tougher. I do think something like Roe v. Wade is important. Democrats talk a lot about Republican extremism, but a lot of it is theoretical, right? It's saying, well, what will happen in 2024 will be this or that.

This is the kind of rare example of big social change by the opposition party, and that could I think motivate Democrats a little bit. But midterm elections are more predictable than presidential elections and the in the base cases that you wind up with with Republican majority of some magnitude. Sac Tanylotsnates handicapping of the situation and description of the political climate we're in.

Well, I mean pretty clearly the republicans are expected to have big pickups uh... in the smith term right i mean i agree with you the senate is tougher for the gop because there aren't that many mostly at rest seats on the republican side right not the democratic side yeah i mean there are there are there are so it's like pencil me in the gop hell then could lose potentially but you have like i mean i don't have to call you want to get

if you have a generic ballot that favors republicans by like two points the democrats can probably keep the senate it gets like six points or seven points then then the wall topples unlike the just too many forces going the other way and so yeah so what so what what do you, where is it right now? Are you looking at that?

Right now, it's two or three. However, that's among registered voters and doesn't reflect voter enthusiasm. So typically, the Challenger Party is more motivated to turn out. You saw that in states like Virginia last year. That gap seems to be closing a little bit. I do think some of the anti-abortion legislation, right, some of the fact the GOP kind of is now

a back on offense on culture wars against LGBT people, right? I think potentially is, is going to help motivate Democrats to turn out, right? It wasn't the stuff in Virginia where they were talking about, oh, schools, and kind of, I mean, you always want to like play counterattack in politics, right? And Republicans found some effective counterattacks with respect to educational policy, certain attitudes where kind of very left-wing ideas are crept into discussion of education and race and other things.

But now they're calling gay and lesbian people and trans people pedophiles and stuff like that. It's surprisingly mainstream discourse. It's not, I don't think, politically wise, it's also a little bit dangerous in terms of potentially triggering violence and things like that. So I don't know, I mean, neither party can really like help itself. I don't think can kind of being like the worst version of itself. Right, that's interesting.

But Youngkin is an interesting case because one year after Biden won that state by 10, Youngkin wins that race by two or three. So it was 12 points swing in one year. How emblematic is that of how quickly the mood of the country has changed? Is it like I'll want off because Youngkin was a strong candidate against a weak candidate or does it represent a much stronger generic Republican ballot?

I think it's, I mean, that's what you might get if you had 50 Glen Youngkins running for Senate, right? He clearly, I mean, there's usually a pretty big midterm shift, but that was a little bigger than normal in Virginia. And that reflects the fact that, I mean, you can like model it out mathematically. We have lots of data points. We have 35 Senate races every two years, right? And you can actually see the effect of being more moderate will gain you an extra two or three or four points, right? Being less moderate, more

radical in some case, will lose you two or three or four points. And so, and so the fact that the GIP didn't kind of take that lesson and say we can actually kind of occupy the mainstream and have potentially really large majorities at least in 2022. I mean, I think that's kind of this heartening in some ways. And of course, Trump is still a big figure in the future. And I have Democrats learned the lesson on that race either. No, of course they have. Yeah, I don't think it was really learned really well.

Nobody's learned the lesson at it this because it's okay the less than for democrats would be to tact towards the center as well and uh... instead of embracing sort of the the progressive left the democrats are still talking about canceling student debt which is a fringe issue that affects eight to ten percent of the democratic party without realizing that it actually is because it represents 50 or 60% of the working majority of the Democratic infrastructure.

No, absolutely. I mean, people are self-serving and if you don't have good BS detectors, then you become more self-serving, right? Like clearly, the class of people who are high student loaned, are people who are well educated and aren't necessarily making as much money, and those describe people that are tend to be Democrats, it describes people like academic, some people in media. I'd be very thin, but Democrats used to also be

the workers' party for the welders, the truckers, the construction workers. So what you should say, let's forgive up to $10,000 in debt for public university students undergraduate educations, right? That really does capture a lot more people who are truly middle class, right?

Half of students loaned at, if people go into graduate school, I'm not that simple. That's what you went to Dartmouth, think about a philosophy degree. masters right um yeah you're on your own to ask for space for and yeah i got a degree in nursing and are kind of why should an electrician bail out the person getting a master's in philosophy dark but like this is kind of a matter of like the i mean that's a reasonable thing to say yeah it doesn't seem

partisan doesn't seem unreasonable. Super-risen plan. But, you know, but I don't know. And again, people are, it's also different. I think if you needed more financial stimulus, then it might make more sense to find some way to do that. Is that thing that the president can probably do? By executive authority, it's a little bit disputed.

But no, you kind of have, I mean, both parties are quite self-serving, and if you're kind of not listening to critiques or feedback, then you kind of wallow in that self-servingness, I think, a little bit more easily. All right, everybody, please thank Nate Silver. Thank you. Oh Well, like your winners ride Rainman David Sack We open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy

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My ham is the actual meat. We should all just get a room and just have one big hug. Because they're all just like this sexual tension that they just need to release their house. What? That beat. What? Your feet. Beat. What? We need to get merged. I'm doing all it. you