The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 98. Nate Silver: Can we predict who will win the 2024 US election?

Episode Date: September 15, 2024

Who is going to win the 2024 election? What is the relationship between playing professional poker and betting on politics? Why has Elon Musk endorsed Donald Trump?  Alastair and Rory are joined by legendary forecaster, Nate Silver, to answer all these questions and more. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. TRIP TOUR: To buy tickets for our October Tour, just head to www.therestispolitics.com Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [e-mail] Audio Editor: Alice Horrell Assistant Producer: India Dunkley Video Editor: Teo Ayodeji-Ansell Social Producer: Jess Kidson Producer: Nicole Maslen and Fiona Douglas Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolities.com. That's the rest is politics.com. Welcome to the Restis Politics Leading with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alice Campbell. And today we have with us somebody I'm very excited to have, who is Nate Silver. And Nate actually basically coincides with almost every theme that we've been talking about in this podcast for the last couple of years. is. Politics very much, because he's one of the most famous pollsters in the United States,

but also AI, Sam Bankman-Fried, Elon Musk, effective altruism, giving, all of which is subject of your recent book on Risk. So, thank you for joining us. Just before we, I'm going to hand over to Alistair, but give us a bit of a sense of how you ended up where you are, a little bit about your childhood, your youth, and how these questions of risk analysis. Oh, and also I forgot to say another thing that Alastair cares deeply about, which is sport. You're also very interested in. So tell us about all this. I mean, it's a series of happy accidents, I think, basically. I grew up in East Lansing, Michigan, which is in the middle of the country, but, you know, it's an educated place to college town. My dad was a professor. Went to University of Chicago, so staying in the Midwest, graduated.

I actually spent a year at LSC. I spent a year abroad, London School of Economics. I'm embarrassed. Say that it's like 24, 25 years ago, right? I'm embarrassed. I'm not embarrassed, but like I come back here and I'm like, you know, it's actually like more than half my life has been lived since I last lived in London. LSC and then came back and hadn't really done very much planning in part because I had so much fun in London and 1999, 2000, whenever it was. Took a job as a consultant for a firm called KPMG doing something called Transfer Pricing Consulting,

which is every bit as boring as it sounds. That sounds horrific. But in the back when I was doing other things. things, one of which was developing a system to forecast how major league baseball players would perform. Statistical projections. It used all the statistical software that I had downloaded for work, so it looked like it was real work when it wasn't.

And the other was starting to play poker. This is when we had like in the mid 2000s, early mid 2000s, the poker boom years, or I think of it more as a poker bubble, really. A little bit, let me like the crypto bubble years later, where you have a lot of dumb money, I guess you'd say in the system. So eventually go home and play online poker at night and win considerably more money that was making out my consulting job

and was less and less effective, shall we say, at the consulting job. And so quit for a few years to go play poker online. What do you learn from poker and your passion for baseball and trying to predict how baseball players are going to perform?

What do you learn from that that you took into the predictive stuff that you do in politics? So it's pretty, direct in the sense that like, you know, from the baseball side, you learn how to build predictive models, which is a kind of a rare talent. There aren't that many people that do that or that do that effectively. And from the poker side, you learn kind of the gambler's mindset of thinking in terms of probability. So, you know, in 2016, to jump ahead a little bit, our model had Donald

Trump with the 30 percent, I'm rounding up a little bit, 29 percent chance of winning. 28.6. 28.6. Thank you. Thank you, Alist. 28.6. Yeah, Hillary's 71.4. Yeah. You got it wrong? No, we didn't.

Okay, carry on. To a gambler, the question is, what are the odds relative to the consensus? Okay. So if we have trumpet between two and a half to one, call it three to one against, but the vague odds are six to one against, then you wait your lot on Trump because you have better odds than the consensus. And most of the time you're wrong, but when you write, you make six-ex your money, which more than compensates for the times that you're wrong.

And so for me, this is like the most natural way to think about in the world. People in the politics space, the community I call the village, cringe a little bit. Yeah. And Nate, just help us just on a little bit. So obviously, we would think, straightforward way that we're ruining dice and giving a probability on a dice roll pretty straightforward. One in six chance of getting the number. When you say there is a 28.6% chance of Donald Trump becoming president, it's not exactly that a dice is being rolled. What is it that affects the probability and what would it mean to be right and what would it mean to be wrong?

I mean, because to some extent, there's a common sense sense in which Alastair's got a point, right? I mean, you've also got a point that you did better than other people, right? I mean, basically what you're telling us is that the others had an even more gloomy view than you did, right? But presumably there could be a sort of deterministic mindset that could almost say, well, yeah, if you're not over 50% on him, winning, then you've missed something, right? What it means is that every media outlet in the country conducts its own polling and reports in the polling. So essentially the model is handicapping.

What is a chance that the polling is wrong by enough to cause a change in the result, right? So in that election, Hillary Clinton had a narrow lead in the polls that people mistook for a large lead, and also there are other more fancy mathematical properties. Talks about the first thing. What do you mean a narrow lead that they mistook for a large lead? that polls are imperfect instruments, that if you have a two-point lead, say, in Michigan, which is a pivotal swing state or a three-point lead or whatever else, in practice, the polls miss on average by about four points. Therefore, you're not safely outside the margin of error,

whereas by contrast, in India, there's an election earlier this year where Modi vastly underperformed his polls, but because he was ahead by 30 points, they still managed to keep a coalition government, right? The BJP actually was not able to keep the majority of their own to get a technical here, but like, but, you know, that was more robust to a polling error. Or in 2020, Joe Biden's polls actually overrated him by more than Hillary Clinton's had, but he had a much larger lead and therefore, and therefore he was safe. This is margin of error stuff? Well, I mean, that's the right concept. But in practice, the margin of error assumes that you have an equal chance of reaching anybody in the target population, that I pick up the phone and randomly dial a number

and everyone answers the phone and say, I'm so excited to talk to a pollster, and I'll be extremely honest with the pollster. And like, that's not how it actually works, especially not in the U.S., country where we have, like, declining social trust. So what our models do is figure out empirically based on how accurate have the polls been in the past. We go all the way back to 1936 at a time before you even have telephone penetration. And based on that, how likely is it the polls will be wrong this time around? You kind of first became well known and prominent because you accurately predicted virtually every state in the 2008 election. And that became sort of quite a big deal. But actually, if you think about going to the election that we're going to have on November 5th, we can predict most states now.

I predict that Donald Trump will win Alabama. I predict. Yeah, exactly. And who's going to win California? Kamala Harris. Correct. Right. So we can predict a lot of those. So as we go into this election, how many of these states are actually quite difficult to call right now? A couple of months ahead. 7, 8, 9, 10, I mean, you know, 10, up to 10.

So Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada are kind of the seven core backgrounds. You know, New Hampshire is not quite certain. If things really trended toward Kamala Harris, you know, Florida and Texas are unlikely, but not in politics. If things really tended toward Trump, Minnesota, Virginia. But we're getting on a pretty fringy list. So on polling, what's the point in America of doing a kind of a nationwide poll? I more or less agree with that. A nationwide poll is helpful. Maybe if you only have the budget for one poll and therefore you want a snapshot, there's

a debate, see before and after. But yeah, I more or less agree that there are too many national polls and too few. Well, there are plenty of polls. We have plenty of polls. But your polling method essentially is relied upon there being a lot. loads and loads and loads and loads of polling, then you drill down to the numbers. It helps to have more data, but the models trained in back to 1936 in years where there was very little polling. So, you know, we had a situation where Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden,

and the model had to handle conditions where there is less polling. And so it's kind of common sense. When you have less data, there's more uncertainty. So the margins of error, and again, I'm using that term loosely, but like the error bars are wider. And you mentioned the states, that kind of possibly in play. If you only had one poll and you're going to go into one state, are you going to go into Pennsylvania? Is that the place you've got to work out what's happening? Yeah, Pennsylvania.

One of the fancy things that our model can do is do the math on like, if you simulate the election 40,000 times a day, how often is one state, what we call the tipping point state, the state that provides a decisive electoral votes. And Pennsylvania is a tipping point state around 35 or 40 percent of the time. So it matters not quite as much as all the other states. combined, but, you know, it matters a lot. Which kind of speaks to what a crazy system is, doesn't it? Yeah, it's, I think, a relatively hard to defend system, although the defense is that, like,

maybe we don't want federalized elections. We want checks and balances on power, is something designed to the American Constitution. But it creates skews. Yeah, I mean, Democrats have won the popular vote now four times in a row, and they'll probably win a fifth time in a row, but they haven't always occupied the presidency. You touched on so many different bits of our culture, this kind of culture of the 21st century, and one of them is that you link us from politics into the whole world of Silicon Valley and Elon Musk, and I guess through that AI and Sandbank and Freed. Tell us a little bit about that culture.

Give listeners a sense of who is Elon Musk, who is San Bernard and Freed, what are their personality types? What's driving that part of our cultural civilization? So in the book is kind of a literary device. I kind of create a map of two regions, one of which I call the village. The village is the East Coast progressive establishment, New York Times and Harvard and government when there's Democrat in charge, think tanks, policy people, all that. What makes them a village? Well, it's very small. So the book describes two groups of elites. This is the 1% versus the 1% and the 98% of people are maybe going to casinos now and then and things like that, but are not part of these warring. vibes. But the village is community oriented. In the village, you're very concerned about your social standing. You're very concerned about being canceled as a term that sometimes gets used in the United States. You know, you don't want a lot of dissent. You probably want, you know, the village is progressive. They probably want Democrats in the U.S. to win elections.

So you don't want to say things that would help Donald Trump. If they're true, you're not supposed to say that it's labeled as misinformation or whatever. So it's very kind of community-driven. Whereas the other community that I call the river is this group of calculated risk takers. It includes Elon Musk. It includes Sam McMahon-Fried. Plus, lots of people who are not quite as insane as those two. You know, Silicon Valley, Wall Street to some extent. Las Vegas, certainly, you know, Miami and the crypto boom.

People who take risks. The village is cautious. Absolutely. Yeah. Which you see, I think, a little bit with COVID in the U.S. You know, you go to Washington, D.C. and schools are closed for a year and everyone's wearing masks, right? You fly down to Miami, Florida, and it's as though nothing had changed whatsoever.

And tell us a little bit about this group, the risk takers, who you call the river. Tell us a little bit about their mindset, in particular, these people sort of more upstream in your river. And some of those big names bring to life the mindset of the Elon Musk's, particularly, I think, because we're talking a lot about him on the podcast the moment, particularly because of the positions he's taking on Trump, the positions he's taking on Brazil, the position he's taking on UK riots. Yeah, so to start with Elon, it combines people who are extremely analytically minded with people who are extremely competitive, right? Like, Elon can't stand to lose. There's an anecdote about him playing poker where he goes all in hand after hand after hand until he finally wins and then he gets off and huff and says, I finally won after you spent, I'm sure, $100,000 and then quits.

Having lost a lot of times. Having lost a lot, right? The time he wins, he pulls out of the game. Is he any good at poker? He's terrible at poker. Right. Yeah. I'm sure it'd be good if he applied himself.

But Elon's a little bit unusual in that he kind of has this very rigid engineering brain, but still, he's such a risk taker. Although we should always say, if you have $220 billion, you're not really taking that many risks, right? You blow it up. You took a few key to get there. But he kept doubling down every time he had the opportunity and made a lot of good bets. I mean, SpaceX and Tesla and Neurrelink and co-founded Open AI. And it is quite remarkable. I think you have to at this point say this is not just pure random chance.

but the same things, and this kind of comes through very clearly in the Walter Isaacson biography of Elon Musk where the same side of the coin that makes him very successful makes him kind of difficult in certain ways you know, I think gives him often quite poor

political instincts in certain ways. I mean, he used to kind of brand himself as oh, I'm being I'm a moderate, right? You can't say that at that point. He's pretty right wing. You know, I don't say that in a pejorative way. Like, oh, therefore everything else he does is a race, but like plainly he's endorsing somebody ideas that are far to the right of the political center.

Do you think he's one of those business people who's decided that because he's so successful with money and he's so wealthy, that he's entitled to political power without any sense of political accountability? And is he overreaching? I think yes and yes. And I think also, look, I have friends who work for hedge funds who are on Wall Street. I played in venture capitalist poker games. And the one thing the river is pretty good at is actually, or the village rather, is politics, right?

The village is kind of designed to achieve political success. And so the river often has, like, poor instincts for what type of candidates will sell to the American people. J.D. Vance, for example, is a former venture capital guy, although he's also a best-selling author. It's a little bit complicated. But people like Peter Thiel and he almost. Best selling author is Village. In the village. So he's a little bit of a hybrid.

But he's not a natural politician, shall we say. And it's been, I think, a potential liability for Donald Trump so far. Or when Michael Bloomberg ran for president, although I guess with the Boris Johnson model, maybe here, I don't know. But Michael Bloomberg was not very successful as a presidential candidate and won American Samoa, the one caucus and spent a billion dollars, and that was all he won. He won a few of six delegates or something like that. So just develop this a little bit more. Why do you think Musk has endorsed Trump? What does he think is appealing about that?

What's exciting to him about that vision? So on the one hand, there's a way in which is kind of very banal and rational, which is that under Lena Khan, the Federal Trade Commission has cracked down a lot on big tech. The Biden administration has favored shops that are unionized, which Tesla is not. And California, Democrats kind of stand for higher taxes, and he's a rich guy who would rather have lower taxes, right? So on the one hand, if you understand the whole history of, you know, Republican Party in the United States, the business, cream of the crust, magnates have a always been Republican except for this kind of odd exception during the Obama years, I suppose. But I also think people don't understand if they're smart how addictive the grasp of social media can be, even to extremely successful people. And plus, in the river, you're cultivating disagreeableness, right? It's seen as being good to be contrarian, to think for yourself. And I'm not putting scare quotes around that. You know, I mean, those are values that help in Silicon Valley. And combine that with being surrounded by, yes people, you know, when they're kind of trimming Twitter, now X, I guess, down to 15%, 20% of the former staff.

And Elon fires all the people who are not true believers. And it becomes quite hard to get reliable data when everyone in your orbit, you know, stands to profit from you or will get fired if they don't flatter you. And so the combination of being pilled, I guess, the term it is, on social media. And also, I think there's something about like, you know, I've been around Twitter since kind of it existed and following people on social media. I think there's a feeling that if you go from being seen as a liberal to conservative, it feels almost like naughty. You're like, oh, now I can say all these pent up things and I always wanted to say, right? And it's hard to actually be an actual moderate, right, to not kind of go down the rabbit hole.

And I think he's failed at that. Where are your politics? So I would describe myself as kind of a liberal and almost the European sense of the term. So, you know, I'm an American. I believe in free speech. I believe in democracy. I believe in rule of law, that kind of classic enlightenment liberalism, but also, but generous welfare state. I think the world is wealthy enough, at least in the West, to afford

that, I think, to some extent, even if you want risk-taking to give people second and third and fourth chances and a safety net enables actually, you know, more risk-taking net net. You're sounding quite villagey on that. Look, I think the village in the U.S. at least, you know, I think some strains of progressive politics where people talk about, like, equity and not equality, I think it's illiberal. I think that the crackdowns on free speech are illiberal also. So, you know, I don't want to get too much into the whole kind of quote-unquote wokeness thing.

But I think, you know, I believe in... Well, actually, I quite like you to because I don't think we really understand why this has become such a such a thing. And it seems to be a much bigger thing in America maybe than here. So what is this woke debate that's going on in America? I think one thesis I endorse is a notion of kind of elite overproduction, which is that you have all these kind of jobs and media and academia. And actually, these are not growing fields.

necessarily. I mean, here you go to the media and like it seems people are very, very literate in Britain and all these, you know, the Financial Times is a beautiful building. The BBC is a great building, right? In the U.S. apart from the New York Times in particular, the media is struggling for the most part. And so when you have a shrinking pie, people like fight over it more and more. And I think ultimately that wokeness is kind of anti-meritocratic. It doesn't want this competition that it kind of been, in that sense, I believe that it is kind of from a tradition of the left swing, I suppose, but instead of being oriented around class, it's oriented around groups of identities. Do people genuinely feel that they don't have freedom of speech in the United States?

They genuinely feel that? I think there's plenty of freedom of speech in the U.S. I think there are acts of censorship by social media platforms that have proven to be incorrect. For example, it is now debated by the international community what the origins of COVID were. So to censor one side of that debate, I think, was wrong. For a relatively minor scandal, there were. censorship of Hunter Biden, Joe Biden's son and a scandal involving things on his laptop that were censored by Facebook and so forth. But yeah, look, I mean, you see differences where if X is kind of turned off in Brazil or you see the founder of Telegram arrested in France, for example, or you

see in the UK, I mean, I don't follow every detail of every case, but like Americans can't complain too much when it comes to freedom of speech per se. And what we're talking about there is just systems having rules, which kind of we need, don't we? Is that too villagey? America are the rule breakers, right? And it is interesting. I mean, I lived here 25 years ago as a student, and you have seen differences in cultural preferences where 25 years ago per capita, the UK and the US have more or less the same

GDP per capita. Now the US is about 75,000 US dollars per capita, and the UK is around 45,000 US. US dollars, not pounds. That's a big gap. On the other hand, the UK has life expectancy about four years longer than the US. So for some reason in the US, we kind of say, we're going to keep breaking the rule.

I mean, you come here and you kind of see it's a more rules following culture. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, maybe not compared to Europe or something, but compared to the US. And you've seen a connection, you see a connection, didn't you, between American appetite for risk and lower life expectancy. What's that connection? I mean, in some ways, it's very literal, right? It's like

faster cars driving at freeway speeds. and more consumption of opioids and more guns and a more free market health care system. I know the NHS has issues too, but there's more inequality of health care outcomes in the U.S. where before Obamacare, if you lose your health care, you lose their job, rather, you lose your health care.

And there aren't the guard rails that you have. I mean, I kind of literally think of like you go to like the tube and like literally there are the guard rails preventing you from falling over to the tracks. You don't have that on the New York subway. It's kind of buyer beware very much. One of the other things that you've talked about It was a rather interesting. You went to see Sam Bankman-Fried, so he was the, for listeners, just to remind him, he was the great $23 billion young crypto star, who was also absolutely central in creating a lot of the effect of altruist movement. And that connected me, because I was the president of gift directly, which came out of the effect of altruist movement. And you were with him just after the whole thing blew up in an astonishing way. Tell us a little bit of a little bit of

about this cultural icon. What was this man like? What did you see in him? What did he tell you about our civilization and culture? I mean, it felt a little bit like the Wizard of Oz, where by the time I arrive in the Bahamas, it's been a week since they declared bankruptcy. There are only four FTX employees left behind, two of which are SBS parents, and this kind of giant gleaming penthouse in the Bahamas. Although for context, this is actually quite far removed. If you go to the Bahamas ever, you probably go to Nassau, the cruise ships or the casinos. This is the other side of the island. It's a nice facility, but it's isolated and remote.

And yeah, you kind of walk in and Sam is asleep. So his mother has to, like, wake him up, apparently. And he kind of comes down in his FTX shirt, kind of quite, you know, slovenly dressed. And like, it was just a very weird experience. It's this giant echoey penthouse and it's getting dark out by this point, right? And so kind of I'm recording and I'm a journalist. So I'm trying not to alter the mood too much and letting it get darker and dark. and see how his mood changes. But, but yeah, I mean, look, the book is very unsympathetic to Sam,

including the effects he had on effective altruism, which I have complicated feelings about, but I think has its heart in the right place at the very least. But he had gone through this kind of spectacular turn of fortune, which must feel very surreal, where he was like cavorting with Tom Brady and going to the Met Gala and, you know, the fact that everyone vouched for him, and we have the term the bystander effect, where all these credible people are in his orbit, But therefore, no one's actually doing the due diligence on kind of deep flaws with his business enterprise and really his thinking, I think, too. So why did he want to see you? I think the short answer is that he was lonely.

Maybe a slightly longer answer is that he thought, well, at some point we're going to have to face either the court of public opinion or a literal court at some point. And maybe he's trying to audition arguments. And what did you learn about him? Who was this guy? What was he doing? What were his strengths? What were his weaknesses? How did this thing all go wrong?

So he is a self-abitted utilitarian, which doesn't have to be a derogatory term, but it means that he believes that the ends justify the means. Even if that means cheating and stealing, if in the long run you can repossess capital from these crypto people who have deposited money and then go and make a bunch of big bets in the crypto market, then you make more money than you give it to charity, although he also wanted to be influential in politics. So you quickly see how utilitarianism becomes self-justifying and self-rationalizing. But also, I think he's a degenerate gambler. You know, he really likes to make bets and really likes to have action. I spent a year as part of the book betting on NBA games, the basketball league in the U.S. And like you have a lot of adrenaline from like making trades and making bets. He had built a nice, not quite safe, but like a, you know, a crypto exchange, you don't have to actually make bets, right?

you have to have good user interface and customer service and whatnot, and you kind of take fees. And he couldn't abide by the idea that he had $10 billion sitting in a bank account. And all he had to do was change some code on the back end and wire it to his girlfriend's hedge fund. And then he can like make $10 billion worth of bets, which he thought he couldn't lose. That's not quite true. He actually did think he could lose. But he decided that like it's so fun to make bets and the opportunity to become a trillionaire. I mean, he thought I might become the world's first trillionaire. He gave himself a 5 to 10% chance of becoming the American president at some point.

And he was really, really, really willing to gamble on the upside. How do you think you'll be handling jail? Maybe he'll be a bit crafty and entrepreneurial. I suppose I talked to his co-founder at the original Alameda, who was named Tara McCauley. And she said that actually Sam is kind of a person who doesn't enjoy. Self-diagnosis is having an adonia, which means an inability to feel pleasure, right? So most of us might feel, okay, we work hard, but the end of the day, we go and, I don't know what, you know, we're right in our motorcycle or we have sexual relations or we eat and drink or do drugs or whatever other things we enjoy or travel and get the thrills from doing that. And that might motivate us.

Sam seems to not feel those things as much to him. You know, being in like a nice prison might actually be in some ways just fine. There's order and routine. I mean, you know, again, his ex-cofounders told me on the record that he thought maybe going to be. prism wasn't that much worse than his everyday life. Because, you know, people thought, oh, it's Bahamas, it's party central. Like, I think Sam is not somebody who's a big partier, for example. He's about kind of work, and I think he derives his thrills from prating and gambling,

but not from like pleasures of the flesh, so to speak. Tell us a little bit about gambling. I mean, that's another very big feature of every civilization, but also particularly of our culture. And you were a gambler. Tell us about gambling. Tell us about the difference between being professional poker player and somebody who bets on politics. I think all these distinctions are fluid, and one of the more obvious, I suppose,

concedes to the book is that the big successful people and the big failures in Silicon Valley and tech are fundamentally gambling. Now, they're gambling with bets that have a positive, expected value in a long run, which are not if you're playing roulette or something in a casino. But the personality types all across the river are more similar than I expected. You know, look, gambling is also interesting on its own as a cultural phenomenon. You know, almost every culture, probably 90% of culture throughout history of some form of gambling. It was related to divination originally of trying to understand fate and things like that. The fact that different cultures have different forms of gambling, the UK kind of sanitizes a bit, right?

You have like the bookmaker on the corner of the street, right? You have a lot of ads for gambling. But these nice kind of, you know, we kind of in the UK, they kind of civilize vice a little bit. Whereas in the U.S., we celebrate it. We have the biggest casinos in the world, outside of Macau, at least, in Las Vegas. But you couldn't bet on sport until recently. You couldn't until recently outside of New Jersey and Nevada. That's true.

Yeah. So you don't have that embedded in the nationwide culture in the way that we do. But now that you can, of course, Americans go away overboard. It's taken off. We've had multiple betting scandals. Shohei Otani, maybe the best baseball player in the world. His interpreter was a D-Gen gambler who bet $15 million of Shohay's money on non-baseball sports, or so he claims. We had a player suspended for life from the end.

NBA for trying to win player prop best, where you get two and a half rebounds and not three rebounds by faking injuries and things like that. And the proliferation of advertising is, so yeah, in the U.S., we tend to go all out or all in rather on things. But if I'm right, the two biggest betting markets ever in the world have been the last two American presidential elections. And it's getting bigger. And by the way, I should disclose, I consult for a prediction market called polymarket. Right. Which is an online betting site for politics? More or less, yeah. And, you know, there's serious money in this and people are like actually wagering a lot. But again, I would say like, you know, people on Wall Street, because everything is political risk and geopolitical risk, like, you know, Wall Street has been forced to analyze what's the risk of Trump winning again or of Kamala Harris winning and various combinations of Congress and things like that. You know, yeah, I mean, they were worried about the UK election in India and France and all these places too. But like, if everything becomes politics,

The financial markets need to price and political risk, and betting markets are an efficient way to do that. Okay, Nate, Rory, quick break. Hi, everybody. It's Dominic Samaruk here from The Rest is History. Now, some of you may have heard me on your show, The Rest is Politics, when Rory was away, and I was filling in and enjoying Alistair Campbell's tremendous banter. And I'm back to tell you about our new series on The Restis History, which is all about Britain in the 1970s, appeared with a lot of uncanny resemblances to our own. So right now we're living through a moment when oil shocks generated by war in the Middle East are rippling through the world economy,

when Britain feels like it's sunk in a bit of a malaise, people are arguing about Europe, the government has got a few issues with the trade unions, and we have a kind of, I suppose you'd say governing elite, a kind of political class that is really struggling to come to terms with all of these issues and people are asking if Britain is governable at all. So there are a lot of parallels between that Britain

that I'm describing, which is our Britain and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on the rest is history, we'll be looking at these and other issues. We'll be talking about the rise of Margaret Thatcher, obviously a colossal figure in our political life even now,

whether you love her or loathe her. We'll be talking about the very first Brexit referendum of 1975, a subject that I'm sure Rory. and Alistair will have strong opinions about. We'll be talking about the fall of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson and we'll be talking about one of the grimmest moments in Britain's economic history, the moment in 1976 when we had to go cap in hand, as people said at the time,

to the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, for a then record bailout. Now, if that sounds good to you, how could it not sound good to you? Of course it sounds good to you. We have a clip for you to listen to at the end. end of this episode. And if you want to hear more, just search for The Rest is History, wherever you get your podcasts. One of the things we've been talking about a lot recently in conversations is where we think the world is going in 10, 15 years' time, and in particular, the balance between democracies

on the one hand and populism or autocracy on the other. From your point of view, if somebody asked you to make that kind of prediction, sort of 10, 15 year, big picture view on whether the world's going to get more democratic or more autocratic. Is that something you can even make sense of with numbers? What would be your response if somebody asked you to make that kind of prediction? I don't know you can make sense of that with numbers very much. I mean, I suppose the book does a little bit of rumination on kind of where we stand as a society now, and I'm worried for liberal democracy, I suppose. I mean, the concede of technology is that, which I agree with, I'm a techno-optimist, is that for me,

many generations, technology has helped lift human beings out of poverty and extended human lifespans and improved quality of life. And we've even seen been generous enough to expand rights to people who weren't just straight white men, slowly a little bit at a time, not enough, obviously. And it's all kind of gone quite well. But you can make real cases for stagnation in the West. You know, you look at again, at EU or UK GDP and the pie is not growing particularly fast. You look at U.S. lifespans, especially for men. And they have leveled off. You know, the pace of innovation.

Well, things are impressive. I mean, certainly, you know, I rode in a dry-rollous car in San Francisco two weeks ago. And I'm like, okay, we actually are making progress still. This is very futuristic and cool. But in other ways, like the recent round of like technologies, social media is that from a utilitarian standpoint, net positive for society, I think probably not. Mobile phones. I think probably, yes, especially in the developing world, but maybe for like school

children, I think the evidence is like maybe not potentially. And, you know, so although there are things like OZEPIC seems to be a very good pharmaceutical, and MRNA vaccines did a lot of good. So we do see progress, but like it's a little bit more even-handed. And then also I worry about like, you know, even though I'm kind of like University of Chicago, which is kind of a neoliberal economic school, right? That was my undergrad degree. I'm an unapologetic neoliberal, I suppose. However, when you have the wealthiest 10 people in the world getting wealthier by 20% per year, well, I know how compounding interest. works and like that becomes very wealthy indeed, but they're kind of eating the world and

functionally speaking, Elon Musk is almost treated like a quasi-governmental entity, right? You know, the government of Brazil needs a policy, I disagree with by the way, but a policy of like an Elon Musk containment policy in essence. And the British Prime Minister, Rishish Sunak, sits down and it wasn't clear who was the more powerful figure as they sat on stage together. Absolutely, right? And that's probably genuinely debatable whether Rishishishanak or Elon Musk, actually has more power over the fate of the world. And that to me seems, I don't know. I mean, look,

in some ways, liberal democracy has been remarkably resilient and there are reasons for that. But it hasn't been that long, right? I mean, progress has only occurred. If you look at growth in GDP, for example, there was no progress for 95% of human civilization. Then around the time of the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution in the 1770s, roughly, you begin to see a spike in progress that's continuing on ever since. But I don't know that we're not. We're not in necessarily guaranteed that exactly. And with AI in particular, most technologies are disruptive because a fledgling startups are able to found them and disrupt these big bloated enterprises, right? With AI, because the amount of computing power that you need, and it's very much more a

winner-take-all technology. So, you know, meta and Google and Amazon and the Chinese government, OpenAI, Anthropic, right? Those six or seven, basically, are going to gain even more power to the extent AI is more powerful. And that's a change from the traditional paradigm of disruption in Silicon Valley. My final question, two questions in one. Who do you want to win the American election and who is going to win it? I will be voting in New York where my vote doesn't really matter for Kamala Harris. And for me, I'm fairly centrist. To me, the decision is simple, which is that I thought that January 6th was horrifying and disqualifying. If Biden had run, I thought it was for family irresponsible to nominate someone to be present until he was 86.

I would probably have voted for some third party. But I have no disqualifying reason to vote against Kamala Harris. I do have a disqualifying reason for Donald Trump. And so that's how I'll vote. And I'm transparent about that when I make our forecast. Look, if you had an election today, Harris would be favored narrowly. I think on November 5th, which is election day, closer to 50-50. If anything, you know, her momentum has stalled out a little bit in the polls recently.

For this purposes of this broadcast, I'm going to say 50-50. Somebody's got a win, though. Your famous 538, that was called 538 because that's the Electoral College. Somebody's got to take it. You know, when you make a bet, you go to Ladbrokes or Paddy Power or whatever, right? They take a 4% cut, right? I don't think it's worth betting with the 4% cut, basically. I don't think I have enough profit mar.

I think it's close up to 50-50. Partly two, we just had Labor Day in the U.S., so there's kind of like a pause on polling. So we don't have a great measure on where, the race sands now, a week before the first debate, two weeks after the convention, we're kind of looking back in time a little bit. That was good for Kamala, but she's fading a little bit. And so, you know, if you look at her model, it says 55, 45, 45 Trump, actually, so you can abide by that, but that might change in the span of a week, and it probably will change in two weeks time after the debate.

Nate, what are the factors that we tend to miss? So let's say we get this predictions about this forthcoming American election completely wrong. What would be two weeks? or three things that we're likely to have missed that can explain how we screw these judgments or predictions up? Well, it depends on which direction it's wrong, right? You know, if Trump wins by a wider margin than people predicted, I think you might look toward what's happening toward younger, black, Hispanic, and Asian-American voters in the U.S. So for a long time, because of the civil rights era, that African-American voters voted overwhelmingly Democratic in the United States, but those memories are fading

and there is some polling data showing that among younger black voters especially younger black men that they may be more open to voting for Republicans and same for younger Hispanic men. Voting for Republicans or voting for Trump? Is it a Trump thing? Good distinction for Trump.

For Trump maybe more than other Republicans. And what do they see in him? Partly it was when Joe Biden was a candidate that Biden was very alienating I think to younger voters. I mean he comes, he was 81 years old going on 82, would have been 86 by the end of a second term, and comes across that way. I mean, his references are dated.

And remember, like younger voters in the U.S. have not gotten the candidate they want for quite a long time, right? They backed Bernie Sanders in 2012, got Hillary Clinton, back Bernie Sanders in 2016, got Joe Biden, did not have a competitive primary in 2020. And so losing younger voters is a real concern, I think, for Democrats. And also maybe feeling as though, like they were able to take for granted, like the black vote, for example. I mean, if you ask black voters, Hispanic voters, Asian voters, they often say, actually, I'm pretty conservative culturally, but I appreciate the welfare state and I maybe trust the government to do something, some redistribution, predict the working class.

So as Democrats have become more college educated, focusing more on culture war issues, that I think can be alienating to working class voters of color potentially. Do you feel that Cameron Harris's speech at the convention was speaking to them? that. I thought she did something smart at the convention, which is that she was speaking mostly to men. If you look at the rhetoric, it was about the United States is competing with China, and we've got to kick China's butt, right? And she said, our military force is really lethal. It isn't that cool, right? We're really strong and powerful military. An unusual speech for a Democrat, unusual speech for, you know, a female Democrat in particular. And she did not talk about, like, race or gender, unlike Hillary Clinton, who comes out in this white dress and is introduced by her

daughter and, you know, glass ceiling, shattering animations. When she clenches the primary, there's like a glass ceiling literally on the screen that's shattered, right? Kamel Harris did, none of that, did not mention gender or race very much at all. And so I thought it was a smart play to go for the center potentially. Why do you think it's faded a bit since then? I think in part because she had a period of several weeks where Trump seemed very much on his heels and her press coverage was very good. I mean, people have short memories. in the U.S. and the media is impatient. Like, ultimately, people are correct that the media

suffers from some degree of group think, and we have these really long elections. This is, for us, a short election, only five months, but it's not five weeks like you have here. And so the narrative's change and the storylines change. I think they were maybe caught like a little bit flat-footed as far as like they were going off vibes, right?

They were going off momentum and not providing a lot of policy substance. They were very slow, the Harris campaign, to do interviews. I think they got a little bit paranoid, where the Biden campaign was very reluctant to have Biden do media hits because he screwed up half of them. Harris doesn't have that issue. I mean, she might not be the most natural politician in the world, but you're not running an existential risk anytime you go on television with Harris like you were with Biden. And so, you know, she retained a lot of the Biden advisors, which I think it was, I think anyone who worked at the Biden campaign should never work in politics again, basically.

It was one of the worst run campaigns, you know, one of the worst ideas to try to run this man who was clearly too old, right? Like, they should all be banished off to Crete or something, as far as I'm concerned. So you've talked to us about some of the ways in which if Trump won by a bigger margin predicted, that might be because we've underestimated young, male, black, and Hispanic votes. If the Democrats win by more than we're currently anticipate, what might we have missed? I think you might look at enthusiasm. I mean, clearly it's an advantage to have, you know, so Democrats are the people, the political junkies are mostly Democrats now, and political junkies turn out and vote.

So we saw in midterm elections, for example, or we have various special elections, which I guess you call buy elections here or something. You know, Democrats tend to do very well in those. They're raising lots and lots of money. They have booked more advertising in the closing weeks of the campaign. They'll probably have like better data and turnout operations. And so, yeah, I mean, it would kind of be, hey, actually being like the educated party that has really motivated voters is actually quite an advantage potentially. You know, maybe you'd say the pollsters are so terrified. to underrate Trump again that they wind up underrating Harris instead.

That wouldn't be completely shocking, I suppose, from like a psychological standpoint. My final one then, and then back to Alistair, you will be under pressure a lot from companies and individuals who want to think about the next five, ten, ten, twenty years because they need to often make investments in bets, which are five, ten, twenty year investments. How do you give honest advice on that when presumably your mathematical models suggest that it's very difficult to make accurate predictions that far out. I mean, is it not a little bit like predicting the weather five, ten years out? Well, I mean, weather's a good analogy, right, where we can at high fidelity forecast the weather about three days out, right? And somewhat

high fidelity forecast the weather about 10 days out, but like long term weather forecasts are not much better than random. So part of what we're trying to do is where do you have an edge? And often when you have an edge is in short term forecasting. You know, so on election night, a lot of money would be made or lost based on who was able to read the initial data that comes in from certain states or precincts and extract by that on election night to who's going to actually win the electoral college when it's declared a day or two later, right? So that's the kind of thing. Yeah, people don't have a good sense for the degree of difficulty involved in long-term

versus short-term predictions. I said my final question, I just have one last one. You mentioned J.D. Vance, who has sucked up a fair amount of attention since Trump appointed him. First of all, do you think that was a mistake to appoint him? And given we've talked earlier about Pennsylvania, do you think that Harris made a mistake in not appointing Josh Shapiro? Or have you, a bit like Rory, fallen in love with Tim Walsh? I think there are both mistakes.

Look, I think that Trump picked J.D. Vance at a time when he had just been shot, or, well, I guess he was shot, grazed with a bullet, which could have been quite a bit worse if he had turned a different direction. You know, at that moment, I was actually in a poker tournament at Las Vegas, right? I just busted out of the poker tournament and text my friend Maria. I'm out of the tournament. And by the way, someone shot Trump. You should probably turn on the news. But it's a moment who was riding high when it seemed like Democrats were not going to succeed in their effort to push Biden aside. Even I at that point was like, oh, forget the models, right?

This is just divine intervention that Trump is going to win this election. So he picks Vance at a moment when he thinks he can't lose and that he'll therefore cement the MAGA, make America great again legacy for the future. Vance is young and clearly quite bright, right? but, you know, that doesn't sell very well to the average swing voter in Pennsylvania. I think Walls is closer to being a defensible. I think on his own, he'd be a perfectly fine choice, right? I think they were a little bit short-term focused, right?

They wanted to kind of keep the good vibes going. They had a lot of momentum, but it was, you know, but it's July, and you have to continue the momentum until November, and there's going to be something that upsets the apple cart at some point. And so I would just have made the percentage play. Pennsylvania determines the election result about 35, 40% of the time, you have a very popular governor in Pennsylvania who clearly wanted the job, very talented. And yeah, we just have said, let's look toward the long term. And like, in the long term,

momentum, sh momentum, I want that extra point in Pennsylvania come November. Will you personally be putting a bet on the election? If they're both kind of, you basically say it's a toss-up. If it's evens, you'd you back. Either person. Yeah, then I'd just be wasting my money, right? I mean, or you could have a gamble and flip a coin or something. No, on election night, I'll be doing as well as writing for my I think so subscribers I'll be doing some consulting work. I would probably not be betting directly on the outcome, but the people I'm talking to might, and I have no moral problem with that. Well, thanks for all your time. Thank you, Alistair. Thank you, Barry. Thank you very much for coming.

So, Nate Silver, Mr. 538. I mean, obviously, I see him as an extraordinary example of all these different strange strands in American culture, which we kind of touch on glancingly, but right at the heart of his world. And it touches with, as I said, your interest in sport, political betting, politics, Elon Musk, effective altruism, Silicon Valley, quality tax. So I do think he's a really interesting route through. And you can see his personality is obviously very, very, in a sense, mathematical, risk-based, quantitative. He shares a lot in common with, I guess, the mindset.

of the sort of Peter Thiel's or... But he's not of them. But he's not of them. No, he's not of them ideologically at all. I think I got it wrong, didn't know, because it was 2008. He got 49 out of 50, 2012, 50 out of 50 the state. It's 2020, 408 out of 50. But 2016, I'm not having that.

No, he said, no, I wasn't wrong. No, wasn't wrong. What he means by that is that... He was less wrong than other people. No, no, he won on the betting, I guess. Yeah. But no, if you were saying 71% chance, if I read that rightly, he's basically saying Hillary's winning.

Yeah. Right. Just for the historical record, Hillary, alas, did not win. And it is quite amazing if you think, but I can remember at the time this hype that there was around him because he was the one guy who successfully predicted the election. But most elections, you know, he admitted, didn't he that, you know, Alabama and California, it's not a difficult call. Yeah. And I thought he was quite, you know, are there really 10 states in play? Well, he said something pretty marginal. Yeah. You were good on pushing him on Pennsylvania. I remember, though, I mean, I don't know if it would like me, you sat up through that. night of 2016 and there was a New York Times tracker. And given that Nate was central to the New York Times team and to what extent he helped design that tracker, but there was this awful thing where they had the probability of Hillary Clinton winning. Oh, they kept going. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean,

sort of started the 90s, I remember 95% chance. Hello, just through the light, it was going downed and Trump was going up. I remember that now. And presumably this is one of the reasons why you're a bit skeptical about polling. I mean, you know, obviously a lot of polls has listened to it to get very angry with us saying this. But again, the truth of matter is people basically got 2016 wrong. They got the Brexit vote wrong. They got the 2017 British election wrong. Well, it's not that they got them wrong necessarily because they presumably were recording accurately what people were saying. But I think the other thing in American, I talked to another pollster out in Chicago, he was saying that a lot of their polling, they don't even check whether people

are registered. So, like, you know, you can ask people how they're going to vote, who, I'm I'm going to vote because they don't have a vote. So yesterday, Fiona sort of said, oh, God, have you seen this poll in America? And it was like Harris is down a bit and why have you. But it's like a nationwide poll. It's, I mean, they're utterly pointless. One, it's a vast country. Two, that does not speak to the outcome. What it does say is, you know, you'd rather, if you're the Democrat, you want her to have a reasonably sized lead because you're going to need that to carry the electoral college. I far rather that there was every week a decent poll in Michigan and decent poll in Wisconsin, a decent call in Pennsylvania, et cetera.

Well, let's maybe finish on what I thought the kind of killer point that you made at the end was, which is this question of whether if it goes wrong, people are going to come back to, you should have gone with Josh Shapiro, and that the Walsh's decision is a weird luxury, a governor of a state that doesn't really matter in this election that's voted against the Republicans every election since Nixon in the early 70s, my whole lifetime. It's voted Democrat. I mean, I don't know. I'm jury out on whether it makes that much.

difference who the vice president, Canada is. I think you may be right actually because I have a sort of in the back of my mind when Gore was vice present. He didn't manage to carry his own state. I don't think he carried Tennessee. I think there's so much focus on it. I think he might be right that Trump didn't really care about who was his running mate and he just, all those Peter Thiel people were saying, you must take vans, you must take vans, you must take vans, you must take vans, and he took vans. I think he probably is regretting it. Anthony Scaramuchy's convinced that he's regretting it. Whereas I think that, you know, we were both in Chicago. If you're thinking about the people that have to be won over,

we both saw Shapiro's speech and Tim Walts's speech. And everything you saw about Tim Walts at that convention, there's been a couple of hiccups since, but everything you saw was like you'd have said he was the person who was going to appeal more to more people. The most astonishing communicative. So anyway, maybe he's right. The thing we know is, whatever the result,

it will be more complicated than one fact. Also, it's interesting that he said that Trump, January 6th, disqualifies him from ever even thinking that he could vote for him. I mean, why aren't there more people like that? I'd have thought there'd be millions of people like that, but you don't meet many of them who say it as clearly as he did. No, it's weird that that isn't. And I suspect he was going to vote Democrat anyway. Good. Thank you.

On was it upwards.