#AIS: FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver on how gamblers think

we're really excited to have our next speaker here nate silver is the editor-in-chief of 538. um and he uh uh came to our poker game recently oh nate came to our game come on out nate ran the game over who was the big who's the big loser that night i think wait who is the big loser because nate was the big winner right well i he was the big winner i was basically trying i think 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 the game um this was the largest poker win you've had in your life largest cash game win yeah by

a factor of five two two okay yeah uh well we're happy to donate um you're getting by the way your speaker fee i just canceled it okay um but uh ladies and gentlemen uh nate silver on the mind of a gambler cool [Music] rain [Music] man we open source [Music] i'm really excited to talk to you all today um i'm working on a book about gambling risk and rationality for the term critical thinking to rationality um it's partly involved talking to people about global societal risks so talking to people about the risk of nuclear war which is like not very cheery conversations by the way

but also people who take risk for a living or at the very least manage risk and have real skin in the game they're not just some actuary getting a salary they're they're assessing risk and making big decisions financially mostly based on on that assessment um so i've started out talking to poker players and sports bettors i'm a former poke player myself i still play recreation a lot i'm currently um i think number 301 in the global poker rankings not that i look that up every morning uh but mostly it's the examples of talking to other fantastic poker players and sports bettors about their process and i'm also

talking now more two vcs two founders to hedge fund managers for example um there are a lot of similarities there's a certain type of person that's been talking about today personality traits modes of thinking it even affects maybe their political views a little bit and you see a lot of things in common so i gave you someone's context already this is a work in progress i mean the book is kind of halfway zero percent written about 50 research so things may change i'm evolving and learning and correcting things um but it's fun to write a book it's fun to have great conversations with the

besties and other people and really kind of experience this firsthand so i'm going to start with some things that i think are relatively straightforward and obvious and then get into things that are maybe less so toward the end but one really obvious one is that successful gamblers think probabilistically it's not just a matter of understanding probability but being comfortable with uncertainty being willing to take bets on an uncertain basis that's kind of table sticks for even getting into any field involving risk in poker at least you probably also need a fair amount of mathematical ability there are now these things called

solvers in poker that come up with a game theory optimal strategy for every situation it's a very complex situation it's way too hard to memorize you have to kind of develop a mathematical intuition behind it um but even players with rare exception phil hellmuth might be the one exception actually right but even players who are known as being field players or exploitive players people who rely on tells and psychology and table talk i talked to daniel negroni for example one of the probably five best book players of all time and he told me that about four years ago he realized that these solver kids as he calls them the math quizzes were were

better than him at least at certain forms of poker and he totally remade his game to look at computer solutions to be more studious and mathematical and it's improved his results quite a bit um in the vc field i don't know you if you're necessarily doing as much modeling as i might in an election model for example but at the very least people understand the intuition and the intuition is you need both but i think the intuition is more important than the application number two this one ought to be really obvious um but it needs to be said successful gamblers are highly competitive things that you hear from people over and over again is i want to kind of

prove people wrong i want to outsmart the competition i want to show who's best it's almost more this motivation than financial motivation i think um it's partly a matter of you can't settle for being average as a gambler the average poker player loses money to the house so does the average sport's better so therefore you have to deviate from average in some ways um but kind of one conclusion i've come to talking to people for this book is that human beings are are a competitive species right to get people to get along in society is pretty hard you know one good thing about capitalism is that you have some managed

type of competition democracy is kind of a type of competition and that's probably a better way to kind of challenge these conflicting urges we have um than things that are too centrally planned but certainly people in this room people i talk to are on the high end of the competitive scale successful poker players and sports 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 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 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

percent errors right you really have to squeeze every last drop of expected value or ev out of any situation that you're in this makes people very very very detail-oriented poker players tend to be very studious about their craft they really kind of love poker you can't just get the big things right in poker you have to get the small things right too it's too competitive a field right now this might not be as true by the way of vc the average investment makes money it may not make a above market return but it'll make money which is not true for the average poker hand that you play um by the way casinos too if you talk to

casino executives you might think you walk into a casino and everything that you do is maximize them to make the maximum amount of revenue possible not really right they're pretty good at the big stuff they protect their downside risk a lot um but they're not maximized as much as you think because when you have like a license to make 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 long run you have to be very very detail-oriented number four you see here a a polygram thread about elon actually successful gamblers are contrarian at least to some degree and again i'm kind

of repeating myself a little bit but there's there's no edge if someone if everyone does the same thing in the same way you have to have some angle that you think makes you better than what the market thinks and the market's pretty good so it's a hard thing to manage i think risk takers tend to view themselves as outsiders where they are or not is probably an open question but they think of themselves as thinking differently from the rest of the world potentially this can also make them potentially like a little bit annoying like outside of investing and gambling context right where if you're kind of always the person who says well actually um that can get kind of pushed back in

social settings for example or on twitter but you can't kind of settle for having the average view because the average view doesn't do better than than the market um there is a fine line between being ahead of the curve and a permanent contrarian um in sports betting there's a line that's constantly mispriced then i can just bet that i don't want that market to correct itself i want to keep exploiting that error in pricing right um in vc i mean you might want to find a founder or a sector or a company that's

undervalued by the market but eventually you want that sector to grow you want to attract more talent you want to attract future fundraising rounds so you kind of are more being ahead of the curve by by half a year to a year i think in some ways it's analogous to real estate we're trying to kind of anticipate where the market will be in the future and that's a subtly different skill than being maybe contrarian per se um but related at least number five and again this might be a little bit redundant but successful gamblers take shots and this is very intuitive in vc where you have a field

where you might um might only have a unicorn or decacorn you know one percent of the time attempts at the time of course you have a whole portfolio it may not be that risky in the aggregate but you have to be willing to make decisions under uh under pressure and be somewhat fearless as a result right timing is important you want to be first to market in poker you have a finite amount of time you can spend on a hand in practice um sometimes people take these risks in a calculated way right i talked to um sam beckman fried for the book for 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

would take it some people just kind of more intuitively just kind of want to put skin in the game want to take risks get some excitement or pleasure from it again we're talking about the very extreme tales here too right um the people who are super uber successful maybe are almost taking on more risk than they maybe should you can instead like live a very happy and complacent life as an investment banker or something but people who are true entrepreneurs that think at scale and think and think very very big i should say one challenge of writing the book is that talking only to successful people you risk survivorship

bias right so kind of which people fell along by the wayside if you know unsuccessful investors or gamblers then then send them my way i need to talk to some of them as well number six successful gamblers especially in poker work well with incomplete information um one thing that differentiates kind of people in academia and academia is very useful for basic research and for advancing science and things like that right but like but you don't get months and months and years and years to develop a hypothesis when there's actual money on the line by that time the

people who were faster will already have moved so the skill is kind of knowing what information was available at the time you made the decision i think there is a limit to how useful like an after action review might be if you kind of pretend as though you had perfect hindsight right we can say what would we have done about covid now if we had known all the things we know now about it back in february 2020 and it would be an easier problem to solve but like that's not how the real world works so decision making under uncertainty is i think a understudied and under-appreciate

appreciated topic um you can't be too much of a control freak certainly in a game like poker um you can lose your temper very easily emotional management's a big part of people who are successful in these fields um but you know all the value is in making the hard decisions right um hard because their edge case is hard because you have some information but not others and you're going to get some things wrong but otherwise if it's easy then everyone else is already going to do it there's no excess returns to be made i think related to this is that successful gamblers focus on process much more than results

one thing i found good for the book and refreshing is people if you ask them kind of what makes you tick what's your advantage they're quite thoughtful and deliberate about it they step back and think about what skills do i possess what's the bigger kind of problem that i'm trying to solve um again emotional displacement 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 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 10 000 bucks and then play the next hand as best as you can right or have an investment or many investments that go

sour uh and still be on your kind of best state of mind for making future investments it's pretty hard most people aren't very good at this at all you can't go too far and sometimes make excuses there are lots of different ways to get unlucky in poker or investing um but having that focus on kind of what was my thought process um it seems intuitive people in this audience maybe but it's not intuitive for the average person it differentiates differentiates successful gamblers quite a bit this next slide here you may have seen this video online where there are a bunch of girls bouncing

basketballs and they ask you to count how many times the basketball passed back and forth um and during the video kind of unbeknownst to the watcher a gorilla walks on stage like things change colors weird things happen and the point is to try and say okay well you were so focused on um counting the number of basketballs being passed that you ignored the gorilla in the room so to speak right um i think though that if you're instructed 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 traffic controller and you're trying to like land planes at miami airport and you get a bunch of

text messages from your teenage daughter right you shouldn't be distracted by that you just kind of focus on the task at hand but the point is that people have an amazing ability to vary what they're paying attention to especially in the moment and in pokers is very important because most of the time poker is pretty boring right good players fold uh 70 of their hands for the most part right a lot of decisions are fairly automatic but maybe once an hour or once a day you'll have a decision for tens of thousands of dollars or where you'll be knocked out of the tournament or win the tournament right and so having that kind of um knowing where you focus your attention

is an underrated skill that i think people who are at least in poker are pretty good at 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 schlubby and sloppy and some of them still are but more and more the good players are focusing on physical and mental filness fitness it is like a demanding game it's a little bit demanding physically to kind of keep your composure um and not give away information from your from your mental state and to really concentrate is like actually a lot of work i mean they're kind of famous studies of chess players and now magnus carlson will lose you

know five pounds over the course of a chess match just thinking which might seem ridiculous but like but if you're really playing poker at your a game at your a plus game which you don't achieve very often i often find that when i am able to do that rarely i'm completely wiped out afterward it is a fiscally demanding game but in general kind of being having your ear to the ground looking out for opportunities and being flexible enough to take advantage of those opportunities is an underrated skill set number nine uh successful gamblers apply practiced intuition so um i'm 44. one of the things about becoming middle-aged you start to kind of

uh potentially trust your gut a lot more which can be which can be risky in some ways i think people can in matters that happen only occasionally like a presidential election people think well my gut is that so-and-so will win you don't have enough practice at forecasting elections to really for that to be very useful right we have one election every four years if you're a poker player though you're playing tens of thousands of hands every year if you're a vc you're hearing thousands of pitches every year right um and part of what experience does is kind of take things that were once hard and then become more automatic right i mean you'll hear people say oh i made a

decision very quickly right and i make staff decisions you hear someone give a pitch um and you decide maybe in 30 minutes whether or not to fund them or not you hear examples like that um but that doesn't really reflect the fact that this person has spent years and years and years honing their insight and listening to pitches that that produces value down the line so it's intuition of a sword but it's practiced refined well-calibrated intuition that involves working really hard and and learning right i mean in poker you kind of go through cycles where um where you kind of are grinding and get better at something you feel like you achieve some condition of mastery

then you kind of slip you get complacent maybe you tilt a little bit having the ability to like step back and re-evaluate your game like negroni or someone and say look i have to make some adjustments here maybe i'm doing playing barely ever have but now i learn different flaws that i have right my opponents are getting better too that bottom of this chart here where you re-evaluate and grind back up and expect that you're going to have to keep doing that for your whole life frankly differentiates successful people i think number 10 is one of the more subtle ones i think but successful gamblers are structured thinkers they want to

understand the process behind the outcome again in poker it's too complex a game just to purely learn through memorization and rote skill right you want to understand how things adapt what the underlying kind of curvatures are and everything um heuristics or rules of thumb are are pretty useful right like in poker heuristic might be that you should um call with your medium strength hands right your best hands you raise um your worst hands you fold or check right and then you kind of call with your medium strength hands but they're acceptance of that and heuristics only go so far

um but the kind of flip side of this is like so at this conference there's a lot of talk about investing and gambling but also politics um i do think when you're kind of the highly structured philosophical thinker um that politics is very frustrating right 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 academics who are trying to get on tv and stuff like that right it's a lot of very hypocritical and ad hoc thinking in politics right it's instrumental reasoning toward trying to win an

argument at that moment in that day and so you can see why someone um like elon musk might get very fed up with the kind of hypocritical nature of political discourse that's another conversation we might have in the q a but um but it does lead to some personality clashes i think the last one here which is maybe a little bit counter-intuitive but i've kind of learned i think from observation is that the most successful gamblers don't actually care that much about money um 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

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 bored they tend to quit again this might differentiate the 0.01 or 0.001 percent from like the one percent um certainly you want to manage your money carefully in poker but still when you have people whose net worth fluctuates by the amount that poker players does like poker is basically like you know three states right super rich somewhat rich and dead broke like not a lot in between when that's the nature of your field and you've been in those states for different parts of your life and many good poke players have had

periods where they're broke you tend to recognize the ephemeral nature of success and to celebrate life in the moment a bit more so that's all thank you very much look forward to the q a now ladies and gentlemen nate silver i don't know if there was this in the introduction that you run 538 like does everyone know that the site so like during the election cycle nate does the best job of anyone on earth gathering together polling data and then using statistical models to represent a distribution or a set of expected outcomes and making that known on his site in a way that's super i think informative better than anything else that's out there so thanks for that

now i get really addicted to them leading up to elections i'm like i gotta go in and check what what nate's changed on the site every day and i know a lot of people did then what i observed on twitter which i think speaks to your first point here was a lot of people followed your prediction on uh the trump election right and they're like um nate made a prediction that trump was gonna win but what you said was that there was a 43 chance that trump would win and therefore people assumed he was going to lose and that the nature of a lot of people's understanding of things is very deterministic in binary it's like win or lose as opposed to hey the

future is not binary the future is not deterministic it's there's a set of outcomes that may occur and you can get a better sense of what that set is you make that determination enough times you'll you'll be right most of the time you'll be wrong some of the time do you think most so my question for you based on how i saw people react negatively yeah to your polling which was crazy because it was like dude he gave a really good set of statistical models no people blamed you but my question is like do people have the ability to think probabilistically because you say you need to think probabilistically or is that a minority

of people that can really get themselves there because so many people just want a 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 outcomes which is really the way the world works i mean i think people think probably all the time in real life right if you're like running late for a meeting you have to decide should i speed what's the risk of getting into an accident what's the risk of getting pulled over or things like that i think in um they don't realize they're doing that yeah i mean they don't they don't know they're doing that like i mean i think

part of the answer is that i think politics kind of breaks people's brain right um because like before the 2016 election we got a lot of criticism from like liberals for being too bullish on trump the market price was about 15 we have it 30 right so we are very bullish on trump relative to to other people but like people thought we were like playing with the numbers to try to i don't know effect turnout somehow or or try to cover our asses or things like that and so um so i just don't think that like politics teaches people to think critically and it's like yeah part of that is like they're not thinking probabilistically but it's more like

people just want to see their kind of priors confirmed um what was it like when people blamed you for trump winning 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 pointed to you and basically said you tipped the election like you you it's almost as if like you convinced people to go and like how did you how did you deal with that you just kind of have to say like [ __ ] you and move on with your life i mean i don't like i've been very lucky in my life overall right including that like things that i think are not that remarkable like you know saying oh the polls are gonna be right

usually which they were in 2008 and 2012. like i think we got way too much credit for that but you can't like i mean again we're all poker players here right so it's kind of like if you kind of get your money in really good right and you make a flush or something like it you kind of have to have that attitude about it yeah 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 of an organization now 530 it is owned by abc's maybe senior year um was that before the election that was we were we were espn at the time of 2016 election now we're abc news currently

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 unpopular the answer may be or the distribution of outcomes may be okay so why am i working on this book it's partly because i want to diversify away from just uh first of all i think forecasting elections is an interesting problem but it's not like the most interesting problem right but no i'm not going to spend the rest of my life just like being like the election forecasting guy it's it's um i mean you also face disincentives where like the downside like we got some elections like really right like 2018 midterm we like nail like perfectly

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 primary like we were very bullish on joe biden when people weren't and thought he was going to lose and so you don't get like a lot of credit and you do face like a lot of downside um for being actually wrong or perceived to be wrong um and so yeah i'm not going to spend the rest of my life making election forecast i hope that's part of the portfolio of things that i do but like i'm interested in like a lot of other questions about the world nate what do you think about like social

markets that are defined about social behavior like an election people are going to vote one way or another you then make a prediction and then that changes the way people vote and so like and the same is true in stock markets i was going to ask you about your experience in stock markets because people have an assumption about rate hikes the the market then reacts to the assumption about rate rate hikes then the market tanks and then the fed is like let's change the rate system because the market's tanking how do you think about building probabilistic models that account for social feedback loops where the social decision that's made is driven by the

forecast you make or by the the market making a forecast i think the evidence is that in two-way elections so democrat versus republican that there's no clear effect from and by the way like what we do is is a tradition there's always been horse race media coverage has always been polling going back for many years right um you know we think our version of it is a little bit more grounded and objective um in two way races it's not clear if there's any impact either way where can an effect is when you're having a multiple candidate race right um in 2020 when elizabeth warren started to fall behind bernie sanders in the polls

right if you're a left-wing voter who prefers warren to sanders but sanders to biden right you may kind of switch your vote as a result of the poll that can create momentum mathematically trying to not uh to model like a multi-way election we do it it's very hard it's way more complex in part because of the feedback loops that it introduces for sure and stock markets are the same again i don't know any financial market behavior it is 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 much more than that in the stock market and like oh i don't care i just invest in you know

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 than i would but i think there are there are certainly complexities that involve um feedback loops for sure nate we live in a very polarized world right now we all spend too far too much time on twitter and we're seeing this you know sort of house of mirrors i'm curious how you know the 19 of people who believe in uh you know banning abortion and their impact and their outsized voice versus the far left and their outside voice with you know sort of democratic socialism

um affect your ability to predict what's going to happen in the country because the majority of the country's beliefs sometimes are in stark contrast to uh political things that happen yeah and even on our podcast people want to pit you know um saks and i as being incredible rivals no no you you want to pit yourself just to be clear in fact we agree on almost everything yet it feels like in our society 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 do day to day in your job in predicting what's going to actually happen in reality and maybe you could tell us

based on what you've learned over time are are people as polarized as it seems or is america actually got a majority um consensus on most of the issues that we struggle with well okay i one reason that markets work is because you get feedback in the market right and you adjust your strategy as a result of negative feedback from consumers people voting with their feed um i think one problem with twitter and with kind of the political atmosphere more generally is that both the left and the right are now insulating themselves from from feedback in a lot of ways and if you're someone who kind of like

tries to call bs i mean when you know if there's a 12th character just like having a good [ __ ] detector is kind 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 [ __ ] i can't let that sit there i have to say something about it even though it'll piss off my followers like you really get boundary policed a lot and totally yeah boundary police yes yeah and when feedback accidents are broken then you run into potentially some really dangerous outcomes right like i think i think um both the left and the right have become more authoritarian in certain ways i

think the type of authoritarianism on the right is quite a bit more dangerous in the moment but uh they're both kind of moving away from kind of liberalism in some kind of classical sense in some ways and and i think that has to do with the feedback loops that social media tend to tend to produce that they're very the other thing about social media is like it really really flattens things right one thing that people in silicon valley get right for all their faults and self-servingness in some ways right they kind of get the orders of magnitudes right they understand scale

um and social media and the daily news cycle really collapses that right so some extremely important problem and some trivial nonsense are kind of treated on the same level when one is one thousand times more important than the other and that and that pretty much right in a feed it's one right after the other yeah and you know again i don't know if there are ways to redesign twitter to make that better but like the fact that you're kind of always on right and even before twitter that kind of cable news cycle you have to have like some controversy to talk about and things are completely dropped the next day there's another news event

i mean sometimes it should be maybe actually this thing was terrible but something is like way more important and so we should continue to focus on that and so that's damaging i think is there a way out of this will this pass in your estimation is this you know an intractable problem i'm a little bit um bearish and concerned in the short term yeah uh to be honest can you say more what does that mean i mean there are different types of risks that we face right i mean you know one problem in particular is that if we have a close election next time particularly one that's close where the where the

democrat appears to narrowly win right i mean you're having more and more republican elected officials secretaries of state some of the candidates in pennsylvania for governor for example who kind of believe the election was was stolen in 2020 and like um which wasn't to be clear and like that's a very dangerous 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 know in the 10 range or maybe higher of a severe constitutional crisis in 2024 and maybe 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

government capacity to deal with big problems right um you know i don't necessarily take the standard line about codeword where you say oh we should have done this and that and managed it more top down more but clearly like state capacity seemed to be not so great right as we deal with other existential risks from climate change to ai potentially to nuclear threats um you know a little bit bearish about state capacity to make good decisions in complex situations perfect information yeah you know like being down in um [Music] miami you know or traveling other parts of the world you see like there's more

reason to be optimistic right where um where people at least are excited and dynamic and there's something happening it may not be exactly the right thing but people are are are happy um but no i think i think i don't know i'm usually an optimistic person and i'm a little bit worried about what should we expect then going into the 2020 midterms 202 midterms 122 midterms so the baseline is pretty strong which is that the president's party loses seats the large majority of the time um and given that democrats majorities are so narrow they're pretty big underdogs to keep both the house and the senate um with that said

in senate races in particular individual candidates do matter to some extent and you might have enough off-the-wall gop candidates nominated that would cost them two or three seats potentially and that might be enough to save democrats in the senate the house for the candidates are more anonymous and their more seats in play is a little bit tougher um i do think something like roe v wade is important um democrats talk a lot about republican extremism but a lot of it is theoretical right it's saying well what will happen in 2024 will be this or that this is the kind of rare example of big social change by the

opposition party and that could i think motivate democrats a little bit but but midterm elections are more predictable than presidential elections and the and the base cases that you wind up with um with republican majorities of some magnitude sac tony thoughts on nate's handicapping of the situation and description of the political climate we're in well i mean pretty clearly the republicans are expected to have big pickups uh in this midterm right i mean i agree with you the senate is tougher for the gop because there aren't that many most of the at-risk seats are on the republican side right not the democratic

side yeah i mean there are there also seats like pennsylvania the gp held and could lose potentially but you have like i mean i don't know how technical you want to get um if you have a generic ballot that favors republicans by like two points the democrats can probably keep the senate if it gets to like six points or seven points then then the wall topples and like there's just too many forces going the other way and so yeah so what so where do you where is it right now are you looking at that right now it's two or three however that's among registered voters and doesn't reflect voter enthusiasm

um so typically the challenger party is more motivated to turn out you saw that in states like virginia last year um that gap seems to be closing a little bit um i do think some of the uh anti-abortion legislation right some of the facts the gop kind of is now back on offense on culture wars against lgbt people right um i think potentially is is going to help motivate democrats to turn out right um it wasn't the stuff in virginia where they were talking about oh schools and kind of i mean you always want to like play attack in politics right um and republicans found some effective counter attacks

with respect to educational policy certain attitudes where kind of very left-wing ideas have crept into discussions of education and race and other things right um but now they're like kind of calling like um gay and lesbian people and trans people pedophiles and stuff like that right and that's like surprisingly mainstream discourse and like that's not i don't think politically wise it's also a little bit dangerous in terms of potentially you know triggering violence and things like that um so i don't know i mean neither party can really like help itself i don't think can kind of

being like the worst version of itself right yeah that's interesting but yunkan is an interesting case because one year after biden won that state by 10 yonkin wins that race by two or three so it was 12 point swing yeah in one year um how emblematic is that of how quickly the mood of the country has changed is it like a one-off because janka was a strong candidate against a weak candidate or does it represent you know a much stronger generic republican ballot i think it's it's i mean that's what you might get if you had 50 glen younkins running for for senate right um he clearly

i mean there's usually a pretty big midterm shift but that was a little bigger than normal in virginia um and that reflects the fact that i mean you can like model it out mathematically we have lots of data points we have 35 center races every two years right you can actually see the effect of being more moderate we'll gain you an extra two or three or four points right being less moderate more radical in some cases will lose you two or three or four points and so and so the fact that the gp didn't kind of take that lesson and say we can actually kind of occupy uh the mainstream and have potentially really large majorities

at least in 2022 i mean i think that's kind of kind of disheartening in in some ways and of course trump is still a big figure democrats learnt the lesson of that race either because of course they haven't yeah i don't think anyone's really learning very much nobody says because okay that's right the lesson for democrats would be to tack towards the center as well and uh instead of embracing sort of the the progressive left i mean the democrats are still talking about canceling student debt which is a fringe issue that affects eight to ten percent of the democratic party

without realizing that it actually is because it represents 50 or 60 percent of the working majority of the democratic infrastructure and that's really for sure i mean people are people are people are self-serving and if you don't have good vs detectors then uh you become more self-serving right like clearly like the class of people who are uh high student loan debt are people who are well educated and aren't necessarily making as much money and those described people that are tend to be democrats right it describes people like academics some people in media like i'd be very

democrats used to also be the the workers party for the welders the truckers the construction workers well you should say you should say let's forgive up to ten thousand dollars in debt for public university students undergraduate educations right that really does capture a lot more people who are who are you know truly middle class right half of student loan debt is people going to graduate school um you know i'm not that sympathetic if you went to dartmouth and got a philosophy degree master's master's right um yeah you're on your own school and yeah i got a degree in

nursing and kind of yeah why should an electrician bail out the person getting a master's in philosophy but like this 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 partisan it doesn't seem unreasonable super reasonable but but you know but uh i don't know and again people are are it's also different i think if you needed more financial stimulus then it might make more sense to find some way to do that this is a thing that the president can probably do by executive authority it's a little bit disputed um but no you kind of have i mean both parties are are quite self-serving

um and if you're kind of not listening to critiques or feedback then you can kind of wallow in in in that self-serving i think a little bit more easily all right everybody please thank nate silver thank you we'll let your winners ride rain man david and it said we opened sources to the fans and they've just gone crazy [Music] we should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just it's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release [Music] we need to get mercies [Music] i'm going on [Music]