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we're really excited to have our next speaker here nate silver is the editor-in-chief of 538.
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um and he uh uh came to our poker game recently oh nate came to our game come on out nate
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ran the game over who was the big who's the big loser that night i think wait who is the big loser
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because nate was the big winner right well i he was the big winner i was basically trying i think
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i think i donated a little bit to uh nate silver's new uh model y i think you got the model s coming to
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the game um this was the largest poker win you've had in your life largest cash game win yeah by
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a factor of five two two okay yeah uh well we're happy to donate um you're getting by the way your
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speaker fee i just canceled it okay um but uh ladies and gentlemen uh nate silver on the mind of a gambler cool
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[Music] rain [Music] man we open source [Music] i'm really excited to talk to you all
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today um i'm working on a book about gambling risk and rationality for the term critical thinking to
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rationality um it's partly involved talking to people about global societal risks so talking
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to people about the risk of nuclear war which is like not very cheery conversations by the way
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but also people who take risk for a living or at the very least manage risk and have real skin in the game they're
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not just some actuary getting a salary they're they're assessing risk and making big decisions financially mostly
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based on on that assessment um so i've started out talking to poker players and sports bettors i'm a former
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poke player myself i still play recreation a lot i'm currently um i think number 301 in the global poker
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rankings not that i look that up every morning uh but mostly it's the examples of talking
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to other fantastic poker players and sports bettors about their process and i'm also
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talking now more two vcs two founders to hedge fund managers for example um there are a lot of similarities there's
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a certain type of person that's been talking about today personality traits modes of thinking it
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even affects maybe their political views a little bit and you see a lot of things
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in common so i gave you someone's context already this is a work in progress i mean the
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book is kind of halfway zero percent written about 50 research so things may change i'm evolving and
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learning and correcting things um but it's fun to write a book it's fun to have great conversations with the
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besties and other people and really kind of experience this firsthand so i'm going to start with some things that i
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think are relatively straightforward and obvious and then get into things that are maybe less so toward the end but one
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really obvious one is that successful gamblers think probabilistically it's not just a matter of understanding
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probability but being comfortable with uncertainty being willing to take bets on an uncertain
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basis that's kind of table sticks for even getting into any field involving risk
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in poker at least you probably also need a fair amount of mathematical ability there are now these things called
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solvers in poker that come up with a game theory optimal strategy for every situation
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it's a very complex situation it's way too hard to memorize you have to kind of develop a mathematical intuition behind
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it um but even players with rare exception phil hellmuth might be the one exception actually right
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but even players who are known as being field players or exploitive players people who rely on tells and psychology
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and table talk i talked to daniel negroni for example one of the probably five best book players of all time and
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he told me that about four years ago he realized that these solver kids as he calls them the math quizzes were were
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better than him at least at certain forms of poker and he totally remade his game to look at computer solutions to be
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more studious and mathematical and it's improved his results quite a bit um in the vc field i don't know you if
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you're necessarily doing as much modeling as i might in an election model for example but at the very least people
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understand the intuition and the intuition is you need both but i think the intuition
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is more important than the application number two this one ought to be really obvious um but it needs to be said
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successful gamblers are highly competitive things that you hear from people over and over again is i want to kind of
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prove people wrong i want to outsmart the competition i want to show who's best it's almost
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more this motivation than financial motivation i think um it's partly a matter of you can't
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settle for being average as a gambler the average poker player loses money to the house so does the average sport's
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better so therefore you have to deviate from average in some ways um but kind of one conclusion i've come to
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talking to people for this book is that human beings are are a competitive species right to get
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people to get along in society is pretty hard you know one good thing about capitalism is that you have some managed
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type of competition democracy is kind of a type of competition and that's probably a better way to kind of
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challenge these conflicting urges we have um than things that are too centrally planned but certainly people
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in this room people i talk to are on the high end of the competitive scale successful poker players and sports
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bettors have to care a lot about small edges it's the nature of placing bets in a field where you lose money on average
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so a very good sports bettor might win 55 or so percent of his or her bets um you have to win 52 and a half percent to
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make up for the house cut for the rake or the vig as different names um that means you can't afford to make one
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percent errors right you really have to squeeze every last drop of expected value or ev out of any situation that
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you're in this makes people very very very detail-oriented poker players tend to be
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very studious about their craft they really kind of love poker you can't just get the big things right in poker you
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have to get the small things right too it's too competitive a field right now this might not be as true by the way
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of vc the average investment makes money it may not make a above market return but
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it'll make money which is not true for the average poker hand that you play um by the way casinos too if you talk to
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casino executives you might think you walk into a casino and everything that you do is maximize them to make the
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maximum amount of revenue possible not really right they're pretty good at the big stuff they protect their
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downside risk a lot um but they're not maximized as much as you think because when you have like a license to make
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money you don't have to get the small stuff right um but in poker where only 10 of players probably make money in the
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long run you have to be very very detail-oriented number four you see here a a polygram
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thread about elon actually successful gamblers are contrarian at least to some degree and again i'm kind
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of repeating myself a little bit but there's there's no edge if someone if everyone does the same thing in the same
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way you have to have some angle that you think makes you better than what the market thinks and the market's pretty
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good so it's a hard thing to manage i think risk takers tend to view themselves as outsiders where they are
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or not is probably an open question but they think of themselves as thinking differently from the rest of the world
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potentially this can also make them potentially like a little bit annoying like outside of investing and gambling
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context right where if you're kind of always the person who says well actually um that can get kind of pushed back in
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social settings for example or on twitter but you can't kind of settle for having
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the average view because the average view doesn't do better than than the market
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um there is a fine line between being ahead of the curve and a permanent contrarian um
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in sports betting there's a line that's constantly mispriced then i can just bet
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that i don't want that market to correct itself i want to keep exploiting that error in pricing right
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um in vc i mean you might want to find a founder or a sector or a company that's
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undervalued by the market but eventually you want that sector to grow you want to attract
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more talent you want to attract future fundraising rounds so you kind of are more being
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ahead of the curve by by half a year to a year i think in some ways it's analogous to
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real estate we're trying to kind of anticipate where the market will be in the future and that's a subtly different
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skill than being maybe contrarian per se um but related at least number five and again this might be a
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little bit redundant but successful gamblers take shots and this is very intuitive in vc where you have a field
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where you might um might only have a unicorn or decacorn you know one percent of the time attempts at the time of
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course you have a whole portfolio it may not be that risky in the aggregate but you have to be willing to make
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decisions under uh under pressure and be somewhat fearless as a result right timing is important you want to be first
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to market in poker you have a finite amount of time you can spend on a hand in practice
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um sometimes people take these risks in a calculated way right i talked to um sam beckman fried for the book for
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example and he's like yeah i knew this would have like a only a 50 chance of succeeding but the payoff was so high i
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would take it some people just kind of more intuitively just kind of want to put skin in the game want to take risks
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get some excitement or pleasure from it again we're talking about the very extreme
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tales here too right um the people who are super uber successful maybe are almost taking on more risk than they
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maybe should you can instead like live a very happy and complacent life as an investment banker or something but
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people who are true entrepreneurs that think at scale and think and think very very big
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i should say one challenge of writing the book is that talking only to successful people you risk survivorship
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bias right so kind of which people fell along by the wayside if you know unsuccessful
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investors or gamblers then then send them my way i need to talk to some of them as well
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number six successful gamblers especially in poker work well with incomplete information
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um one thing that differentiates kind of people in academia and academia is very
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useful for basic research and for advancing science and things like that right but like but you don't get months
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and months and years and years to develop a hypothesis when there's actual money on the line by that time the
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people who were faster will already have moved so the skill is kind of knowing what
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information was available at the time you made the decision i think there is a limit to how
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useful like an after action review might be if you kind of pretend as though you
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had perfect hindsight right we can say what would we have done about covid now if we had known all the things we know
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now about it back in february 2020 and it would be an easier problem to solve but like that's not how the real world
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works so decision making under uncertainty is i think a understudied and under-appreciate
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appreciated topic um you can't be too much of a control freak certainly in a game like poker um you
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can lose your temper very easily emotional management's a big part of people who are successful in these
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fields um but you know all the value is in making the hard decisions right um hard because
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their edge case is hard because you have some information but not others and you're going to get some things
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wrong but otherwise if it's easy then everyone else is already going to do it there's no excess returns to be made
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i think related to this is that successful gamblers focus on process much more than results
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one thing i found good for the book and refreshing is people if you ask them kind of what
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makes you tick what's your advantage they're quite thoughtful and deliberate about it they step back and think about
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what skills do i possess what's the bigger kind of problem that i'm trying to solve um again emotional displacement
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is a big part of this uh i'm not saying that you're supposed to be totally emotionless i mean emotion can help to
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guide intuition we'll talk about in a bit um but it does mean you have to be willing to like lose poker hand lose 10
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000 bucks and then play the next hand as best as you can right or have an investment or many investments that go
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sour uh and still be on your kind of best state of mind for making future investments
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it's pretty hard most people aren't very good at this at all you can't go too far and sometimes make
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excuses there are lots of different ways to get unlucky in poker or investing um
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but having that focus on kind of what was my thought process um it seems intuitive people in this audience maybe
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but it's not intuitive for the average person it differentiates differentiates successful gamblers quite a bit
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this next slide here you may have seen this video online where there are a bunch of girls bouncing
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basketballs and they ask you to count how many times the basketball passed back and forth um and during the video
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kind of unbeknownst to the watcher a gorilla walks on stage like things change colors weird things happen
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and the point is to try and say okay well you were so focused on um counting the number of basketballs being passed
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that you ignored the gorilla in the room so to speak right um i think though that if you're instructed
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to count the number of passes that is actually a sign of intelligence that you do focus on that right if you're an air
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traffic controller and you're trying to like land planes at miami airport and you get a bunch of
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text messages from your teenage daughter right you shouldn't be distracted by that you just kind of focus on the task
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at hand but the point is that people have an amazing ability to vary what they're paying attention to
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especially in the moment and in pokers is very important because most of the time poker is pretty boring
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right good players fold uh 70 of their hands for the most part right a lot of decisions are fairly automatic but maybe
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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
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of the tournament or win the tournament right and so having that kind of um knowing where you focus your attention
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is an underrated skill that i think people who are at least in poker are pretty good at
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um by the way one thing i've noticed is that you used to kind of think of poker players as being kind of quite
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schlubby and sloppy and some of them still are but more and more the good players are focusing on physical and
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mental filness fitness it is like a demanding game it's a little bit demanding physically to kind of keep
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your composure um and not give away information from your from your mental state and to really concentrate is like
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actually a lot of work i mean they're kind of famous studies of chess players and now magnus carlson will lose you
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know five pounds over the course of a chess match just thinking which might seem ridiculous but like but if you're
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really playing poker at your a game at your a plus game which you don't achieve very often i
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often find that when i am able to do that rarely i'm completely wiped out afterward it is a fiscally demanding
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game but in general kind of being having your ear to the ground looking out for opportunities and being flexible enough
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to take advantage of those opportunities is an underrated skill set number nine uh successful gamblers apply
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practiced intuition so um i'm 44. one of the things about becoming middle-aged you start to kind of
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uh potentially trust your gut a lot more which can be which can be risky in some ways i think people can in
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matters that happen only occasionally like a presidential election people think well my gut is that so-and-so will
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win you don't have enough practice at forecasting elections to really for that to be very useful right we have one
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election every four years if you're a poker player though you're playing tens of thousands of hands every
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year if you're a vc you're hearing thousands of pitches every year right um and part of what experience does is kind
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of take things that were once hard and then become more automatic right i mean you'll hear people say oh i made a
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decision very quickly right and i make staff decisions you hear someone give a pitch um and you decide maybe in
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30 minutes whether or not to fund them or not you hear examples like that um but that doesn't really reflect the fact
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that this person has spent years and years and years honing their insight and listening to pitches that that produces
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value down the line so it's intuition of a sword but it's practiced refined well-calibrated intuition that involves
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working really hard and and learning right i mean in poker you kind of go through cycles where um
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where you kind of are grinding and get better at something you feel like you achieve some condition of mastery
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then you kind of slip you get complacent maybe you tilt a little bit having the ability to like step back and
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re-evaluate your game like negroni or someone and say look i have to make some adjustments here
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maybe i'm doing playing barely ever have but now i learn different flaws that i have right my opponents are getting
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better too that bottom of this chart here where you re-evaluate and grind back up and expect
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that you're going to have to keep doing that for your whole life frankly differentiates successful people i think
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number 10 is one of the more subtle ones i think but successful gamblers are structured thinkers they want to
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understand the process behind the outcome again in poker it's too complex a game
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just to purely learn through memorization and rote skill right you want to understand how things adapt what the
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underlying kind of curvatures are and everything um heuristics or rules of thumb are are
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pretty useful right like in poker heuristic might be that you should um call with your medium strength hands
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right your best hands you raise um your worst hands you fold or check right and then you kind of call with
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your medium strength hands but they're acceptance of that and heuristics only go so far
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um but the kind of flip side of this is like so at this conference there's a lot
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of talk about investing and gambling but also politics um i do think when you're kind of the
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highly structured philosophical thinker um that politics is very frustrating right
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people in the other world i work in which is like you know i run a website i talk to people in politics talk to
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academics who are trying to get on tv and stuff like that right it's a lot of very hypocritical and ad
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hoc thinking in politics right it's instrumental reasoning toward trying to win an
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argument at that moment in that day and so you can see why someone um like elon musk might get very
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fed up with the kind of hypocritical nature of political discourse that's another
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conversation we might have in the q a but um but it does lead to some personality clashes i think
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the last one here which is maybe a little bit counter-intuitive but i've kind of learned i think from observation
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is that the most successful gamblers don't actually care that much about money um
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you know they tend to be for the most part very generous they're always going to pick up the tab they're going to
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spend a lot on good wine and things like that right um they're in it really for the love of the game and when they get
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bored they tend to quit again this might differentiate the 0.01 or 0.001 percent from like the one
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percent um certainly you want to manage your money carefully in poker but still when you have people whose net worth
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fluctuates by the amount that poker players does like poker is basically like you know three states right super
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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
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those states for different parts of your life and many good poke players have had
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periods where they're broke you tend to recognize the ephemeral nature of success and to celebrate life in the
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moment a bit more so that's all thank you very much look forward to the q a now ladies and gentlemen nate silver i don't
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know if there was this in the introduction that you run 538 like does everyone know that the site
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so like during the election cycle nate does the best job of anyone on earth gathering together polling data
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and then using statistical models to represent a distribution or a set of expected outcomes and making that known
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on his site in a way that's super i think informative better than anything else that's out there so thanks for that
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now i get really addicted to them leading up to elections i'm like i gotta go in and check what what nate's changed
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on the site every day and i know a lot of people did then what i observed on twitter which i
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think speaks to your first point here was a lot of people followed your prediction on uh the trump election
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right and they're like um nate made a prediction that trump was gonna win but what you said was that
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there was a 43 chance that trump would win and therefore people assumed he was going to lose and that the nature of a
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lot of people's understanding of things is very deterministic in binary it's like win or lose as opposed to hey the
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future is not binary the future is not deterministic it's there's a set of outcomes that may
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occur and you can get a better sense of what that set is you make that determination enough times you'll you'll
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be right most of the time you'll be wrong some of the time do you think most so my question for you
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based on how i saw people react negatively yeah to your polling which was crazy because it was like dude he
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gave a really good set of statistical models no people blamed you but my question is like do people have
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the ability to think probabilistically because you say you need to think probabilistically or is that a minority
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of people that can really get themselves there because so many people just want a
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yes or no answer they want to say this is the future this isn't they don't want to think about a distribution of
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outcomes which is really the way the world works i mean i think people think probably all the time in real life right
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if you're like running late for a meeting you have to decide should i speed what's the risk of
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getting into an accident what's the risk of getting pulled over or things like that i think in um they don't realize
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they're doing that yeah i mean they don't they don't know they're doing that like i mean i think
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part of the answer is that i think politics kind of breaks people's brain right um because like
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before the 2016 election we got a lot of criticism from like liberals for being too bullish on trump the market price
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was about 15 we have it 30 right so we are very bullish on trump relative to to other people but like
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people thought we were like playing with the numbers to try to i don't know effect turnout somehow or or try to
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cover our asses or things like that and so um so i just don't think that like politics teaches people to think
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critically and it's like yeah part of that is like they're not thinking probabilistically but it's more like
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people just want to see their kind of priors confirmed um what was it like when people blamed you for trump winning
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yeah there was a lot of that right yeah yeah i mean and why did you pick trump as president they literally i think they
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pointed to you and basically said you tipped the election like you you it's almost as if like you convinced people
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to go and like how did you how did you deal with that you just kind of have to say like [ __ ]
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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
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like things that i think are not that remarkable like you know saying oh the polls are gonna be right
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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
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mean again we're all poker players here right so it's kind of like if you kind of get your money in
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really good right and you make a flush or something like it you kind of have to have that attitude about it yeah
00:22:52
so you were able to just basically shut it out and say this and and what about just the fact that like you live inside
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of an organization now 530 it is owned by abc's maybe senior year um was that before the election
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that was we were we were espn at the time of 2016 election now we're abc news currently
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and so does that change sort of like um like how do you make sure that you can actually just do your job no matter how
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unpopular the answer may be or the distribution of outcomes may be okay so why am i working on this book
00:23:25
it's partly because i want to diversify away from just uh first of all i think forecasting elections is an interesting
00:23:32
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
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like being like the election forecasting guy it's it's um i mean you also face disincentives where
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like the downside like we got some elections like really right like 2018 midterm we like nail like perfectly
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about as good as you could right and people are like oh that's nice right um if you get kind of like the 2020
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primary like we were very bullish on joe biden when people weren't and thought he
00:24:00
was going to lose and so you don't get like a lot of credit and you do face like a lot of
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downside um for being actually wrong or perceived to be wrong um and so yeah i'm not going to spend the
00:24:12
rest of my life making election forecast i hope that's part of the portfolio of things that i do but
00:24:17
like i'm interested in like a lot of other questions about the world nate what do you think about like social
00:24:22
markets that are defined about social behavior like an election people are going to vote one way or another you
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then make a prediction and then that changes the way people vote and so like and the same is true in stock markets i
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was going to ask you about your experience in stock markets because people have an assumption about rate
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hikes the the market then reacts to the assumption about rate rate hikes then the market tanks and then the fed is
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like let's change the rate system because the market's tanking how do you think about building
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probabilistic models that account for social feedback loops where the social decision that's made is driven by the
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forecast you make or by the the market making a forecast i think the evidence is that in two-way elections so democrat
00:25:02
versus republican that there's no clear effect from and by the way like what we do is
00:25:07
is a tradition there's always been horse race media coverage has always been polling going back for many years right
00:25:12
um you know we think our version of it is a little bit more grounded and objective um in two way
00:25:18
races it's not clear if there's any impact either way where can an effect is when you're having a multiple candidate
00:25:23
race right um in 2020 when elizabeth warren started to fall behind bernie sanders in the polls
00:25:30
right if you're a left-wing voter who prefers warren to sanders but sanders to biden right you
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may kind of switch your vote as a result of the poll that can create momentum mathematically trying to not uh to model
00:25:43
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
00:25:49
introduces for sure and stock markets are the same again i don't know any financial market behavior it is
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funny by the way that like if i like lose a thousand bucks at poker i'd be like furious right but like i lose like
00:26:00
much more than that in the stock market and like oh i don't care i just invest in you know
00:26:05
uh low fee like mutual funds and stuff like that i mean for sure i mean it's um i don't know you guys would know more
00:26:11
than i would but i think there are there are certainly complexities that involve
00:26:15
um feedback loops for sure nate we live in a very polarized world right now we all
00:26:20
spend too far too much time on twitter and we're seeing this you know sort of house of mirrors i'm curious how
00:26:28
you know the 19 of people who believe in uh you know banning abortion and their impact
00:26:37
and their outsized voice versus the far left and their outside voice with you know sort of democratic socialism
00:26:44
um affect your ability to predict what's going to happen in the country because the majority of the country's beliefs
00:26:50
sometimes are in stark contrast to uh political things that happen yeah and even on our podcast people want to pit
00:26:59
you know um saks and i as being incredible rivals no no you you want to pit yourself
00:27:06
just to be clear in fact we agree on almost everything yet it feels like in our society
00:27:12
you know they want to push us to to pick very binary belief systems and i i'm just curious how that impacts what you
00:27:20
do day to day in your job in predicting what's going to actually happen in reality and maybe you could tell us
00:27:26
based on what you've learned over time are are people as polarized as it seems or is america actually got a
00:27:34
majority um consensus on most of the issues that we struggle with well okay i one reason that markets work
00:27:43
is because you get feedback in the market right and you adjust your strategy as a result of negative
00:27:48
feedback from consumers people voting with their feed um i think one problem with twitter and
00:27:53
with kind of the political atmosphere more generally is that both the left and the right are now
00:27:58
insulating themselves from from feedback in a lot of ways and if you're someone who kind of like
00:28:03
tries to call bs i mean when you know if there's a 12th character just like having a good [ __ ] detector is kind
00:28:08
of an implicit theme of people who are successful gamblers right and if you're like someone who's like i that's kind of
00:28:13
[ __ ] i can't let that sit there i have to say something about it even though it'll piss off my followers like
00:28:18
you really get boundary policed a lot and totally yeah boundary police yes yeah and when feedback accidents are
00:28:25
broken then you run into potentially some really dangerous outcomes right like i think i
00:28:29
think um both the left and the right have become more authoritarian in certain ways i
00:28:34
think the type of authoritarianism on the right is quite a bit more dangerous in the moment
00:28:39
but uh they're both kind of moving away from kind of liberalism in some kind of classical sense in some ways and and i
00:28:46
think that has to do with the feedback loops that social media tend to tend to produce that they're
00:28:51
very the other thing about social media is like it really really flattens things
00:28:54
right one thing that people in silicon valley get right for all their faults and self-servingness in
00:29:01
some ways right they kind of get the orders of magnitudes right they understand scale
00:29:06
um and social media and the daily news cycle really collapses that right so some extremely important problem and
00:29:14
some trivial nonsense are kind of treated on the same level when one is one thousand times more important than
00:29:20
the other and that and that pretty much right in a feed it's one right after the
00:29:23
other yeah and you know again i don't know if there are ways to redesign twitter to make that better but like the
00:29:27
fact that you're kind of always on right and even before twitter that kind of cable news cycle you have
00:29:32
to have like some controversy to talk about and things are completely dropped the next day there's another news event
00:29:38
i mean sometimes it should be maybe actually this thing was terrible but something is like way more important and
00:29:42
so we should continue to focus on that and so that's damaging i think is there a way out of this
00:29:47
will this pass in your estimation is this you know an intractable problem i'm a little bit um
00:29:56
bearish and concerned in the short term yeah uh to be honest can you say more what does that mean
00:30:04
i mean there are different types of risks that we face right i mean you know one problem in particular is that if we
00:30:10
have a close election next time particularly one that's close where the where the
00:30:14
democrat appears to narrowly win right i mean you're having more and more republican elected officials secretaries
00:30:19
of state some of the candidates in pennsylvania for governor for example who kind of believe the election was
00:30:24
was stolen in 2020 and like um which wasn't to be clear and like that's a very dangerous
00:30:30
argument to have it may not resolve itself in the end of democracy but like that's like a you know a risk that's you
00:30:37
know in the 10 range or maybe higher of a severe constitutional crisis in 2024 and maybe
00:30:43
repeated that in 2028 and so forth and so i mean that's the i think the most immediate threat um but also kind of
00:30:50
government capacity to deal with big problems right um you know i don't necessarily take the
00:30:56
standard line about codeword where you say oh we should have done this and that and managed it more top down more but
00:31:01
clearly like state capacity seemed to be not so great right as we deal with other
00:31:06
existential risks from climate change to ai potentially to nuclear threats um you know a little bit bearish about
00:31:14
state capacity to make good decisions in complex situations perfect information yeah you know like
00:31:21
being down in um [Music] miami you know or traveling other parts of the world you see like there's more
00:31:27
reason to be optimistic right where um where people at least are excited and dynamic and there's something happening
00:31:33
it may not be exactly the right thing but people are are are happy um but no i think i think i
00:31:40
don't know i'm usually an optimistic person and i'm a little bit worried about what should we expect then going into
00:31:45
the 2020 midterms 202 midterms 122 midterms so the baseline is pretty strong which is that
00:31:51
the president's party loses seats the large majority of the time um and given that democrats majorities are
00:31:57
so narrow they're pretty big underdogs to keep both the house and the senate um with that said
00:32:04
in senate races in particular individual candidates do matter to some extent and
00:32:08
you might have enough off-the-wall gop candidates nominated that would cost them two or three seats potentially
00:32:16
and that might be enough to save democrats in the senate the house for the candidates are more anonymous
00:32:22
and their more seats in play is a little bit tougher um i do think something like roe v wade
00:32:27
is important um democrats talk a lot about republican extremism but a lot of it is theoretical right it's saying well
00:32:33
what will happen in 2024 will be this or that this is the kind of rare example of big social change by the
00:32:39
opposition party and that could i think motivate democrats a little bit but but midterm
00:32:45
elections are more predictable than presidential elections and the and the base cases that you wind up with um
00:32:51
with republican majorities of some magnitude sac tony thoughts on nate's handicapping of the situation and
00:32:59
description of the political climate we're in well i mean pretty clearly the republicans are expected to have big
00:33:06
pickups uh in this midterm right i mean i agree with you the senate is tougher for the gop because
00:33:12
there aren't that many most of the at-risk seats are on the republican side right not the democratic
00:33:18
side yeah i mean there are there also seats like pennsylvania the gp held and could lose potentially but you
00:33:23
have like i mean i don't know how technical you want to get um if you have a generic ballot that favors
00:33:30
republicans by like two points the democrats can probably keep the senate if it gets to like six points or seven
00:33:35
points then then the wall topples and like there's just too many forces going the other way
00:33:41
and so yeah so what so where do you where is it right now are you looking at that
00:33:46
right now it's two or three however that's among registered voters and doesn't reflect voter enthusiasm
00:33:52
um so typically the challenger party is more motivated to turn out you saw that in
00:33:58
states like virginia last year um that gap seems to be closing a little bit um i do think some of the uh
00:34:09
anti-abortion legislation right some of the facts the gop kind of is now back on offense on culture wars against
00:34:17
lgbt people right um i think potentially is is going to help motivate democrats to turn
00:34:25
out right um it wasn't the stuff in virginia where they were talking about oh schools and kind of i mean you always
00:34:31
want to like play attack in politics right um and republicans found some effective counter attacks
00:34:38
with respect to educational policy certain attitudes where kind of very left-wing ideas have crept into
00:34:44
discussions of education and race and other things right um but now they're like kind of calling like
00:34:50
um gay and lesbian people and trans people pedophiles and stuff like that right and
00:34:54
that's like surprisingly mainstream discourse and like that's not i don't think politically wise it's also a little bit
00:34:59
dangerous in terms of potentially you know triggering violence and things like that um
00:35:05
so i don't know i mean neither party can really like help itself i don't think can kind of
00:35:10
being like the worst version of itself right yeah that's interesting but yunkan is an interesting case because one year
00:35:19
after biden won that state by 10 yonkin wins that race by two or three so it was
00:35:26
12 point swing yeah in one year um how emblematic is that of how quickly the mood of the country has changed is it
00:35:36
like a one-off because janka was a strong candidate against a weak candidate or does it represent
00:35:42
you know a much stronger generic republican ballot i think it's it's i mean that's what you
00:35:47
might get if you had 50 glen younkins running for for senate right um he clearly
00:35:53
i mean there's usually a pretty big midterm shift but that was a little bigger than normal in virginia um and that
00:35:59
reflects the fact that i mean you can like model it out mathematically we have lots of data points we have 35 center
00:36:04
races every two years right you can actually see the effect of being more moderate we'll gain you an extra
00:36:09
two or three or four points right being less moderate more radical in some cases will
00:36:15
lose you two or three or four points and so and so the fact that the gp didn't kind of take
00:36:19
that lesson and say we can actually kind of occupy uh the mainstream and have potentially really large majorities
00:36:28
at least in 2022 i mean i think that's kind of kind of disheartening in in some ways
00:36:34
and of course trump is still a big figure democrats learnt the lesson of that race
00:36:38
either because of course they haven't yeah i don't think anyone's really learning
00:36:42
very much nobody says because okay that's right the lesson for democrats would be to tack towards the
00:36:48
center as well and uh instead of embracing sort of the the progressive left i mean the democrats are still talking
00:36:55
about canceling student debt which is a fringe issue that affects eight to ten percent of the democratic party
00:37:01
without realizing that it actually is because it represents 50 or 60 percent of the working majority of the
00:37:07
democratic infrastructure and that's really for sure i mean people are people are
00:37:11
people are self-serving and if you don't have good vs detectors then uh you become more self-serving right
00:37:17
like clearly like the class of people who are uh high student loan debt are people who are well educated and
00:37:25
aren't necessarily making as much money and those described people that are tend
00:37:30
to be democrats right it describes people like academics some people in media like i'd be very
00:37:35
democrats used to also be the the workers party for the welders the truckers the construction workers well
00:37:41
you should say you should say let's forgive up to ten thousand dollars in debt for
00:37:46
public university students undergraduate educations right that really does capture a lot more people
00:37:53
who are who are you know truly middle class right half of student loan debt is people going to graduate school
00:38:00
um you know i'm not that sympathetic if you went to dartmouth and got a philosophy
00:38:05
degree master's master's right um yeah you're on your own school and yeah i got a degree in
00:38:12
nursing and kind of yeah why should an electrician bail out the person getting a master's in philosophy but like this
00:38:17
is kind of a matter of like the i mean that's we that's a reasonable thing to say yeah it doesn't seem
00:38:24
partisan it doesn't seem unreasonable super reasonable but but you know but uh i don't know and again people are are
00:38:30
it's also different i think if you needed more financial stimulus then it might make more sense to find some way
00:38:35
to do that this is a thing that the president can probably do by executive authority it's a little bit
00:38:40
disputed um but no you kind of have i mean both parties are are quite self-serving
00:38:47
um and if you're kind of not listening to critiques or feedback then you can kind of wallow in in
00:38:53
in that self-serving i think a little bit more easily all right everybody please thank nate silver thank you
00:39:03
we'll let your winners ride rain man david and it said we opened sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy
00:39:20
[Music] we should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're
00:39:37
all just it's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release [Music]
00:39:47
we need to get mercies [Music] i'm going on [Music]