Nate Silver on How Kamala Harris Changed the Odds

Nate silver came to Fame in American politics for election forecasting he built models that were pretty damn successful at predicting American politics Nate silver is the founder of 538.com a polling website that correctly predicted the winner of 49 of the 50 states in the last presidential election election Oracle ESPN's Nate silver he predicted every state in the last presidential election and once again Nate silver completely nailed it the guy's amazing but before silver was in politics he was a poker player and after getting into politics he went back to being a poker player he's been running through poker championships and out there on tables Savage Savage Bluff by silver oh my God partially because he's been writing a book about risk book is called on the edge the art of risking everything and it applies the Frameworks of I'd say The Gambler maybe you say the poker player to politics to AI to to venture capital uh Nate the way he thinks about politics I find very useful I find that he thinks more clearly about risk and probabilities than a lot of people do and maybe more people should follow so I want to have Aman to talk about how that thinking has guided him over the past year and how he's thinking about it in the election going forward as always my email as reclin show NY times.com Nate silver welcome to the show thank you Ezra I happy to be here uh last I looked uh your model has Harris winning the election at around 52% it might be you know mildly different today but this has been an unusual election so how much stock do you put in your model right now I think the model is balancing these different factors pretty well I mean there are some things you could argue are favorable to Harris one of which is that for the past few weeks we've been in what the model thinks is supposed to be the convention bounce period for Republicans where typically you pull pretty well after your convention there's the Afterglow of the new nomination and things like that the Afterglow of the VP pick often too and K Harris kind of stomped on Donald Trump's news cycle so maybe that's maybe it's an overly favorable assumption for Harris there's also in polls what's known as nonpartisan response bias so when voters get more enthusiastic you'd rather have that than not as a candidate but it also means that they sometimes are more likely to respond to polls at the same time her momentum has been pretty good which usually I dismiss but we don't really kind of know what the Baseline is here right you know Hillary Clinton who was I think kind of a terrible candidate won the popular vote by two points is she a little bit better than Hillary Clinton probably right um so can she win by three or four well if you win by three or four then you win the electoral college in most in most instances I don't think many people expected if you did I'd like to know it the turnaround in her numbers we have seen since she's become the presumptive nominee she's gone to net favorables which I would not have bet a ton of money on at this speed at least people were looking at a lot of data on Harris and assuming that that data was solid that data was not solid when a candidate's a hypothetical candidate you have to treat that polling very carefully people are are think it's a weird thing to ask you know what if gav new some ran against Trump it's not the same thing as when you actually have the candidate in front of you and have the advertisements and have the news articles and everything else to actually evaluate I mean I think this is like on the higher side for like a jump in favorables but you know she was amazingly well organized at getting the entire establishment behind her within like literally minutes of Biden announcing that he was going to step down and so that suggested that maybe she did have more support in the party than she L on and also you know I don't I think that Biden people may have been in somewhat bad faith maybe not consciously but I I'm I'm not sure they weren't trying to undermine her because the obvious thing to do would be to have this qualified if not always that politically Adept you know much much younger vice president take over for you when you're about to be too and but they gave her the Border they gave her um voting rights which is kind of the one major domestic policy area where they got very little done um so I don't think they gave her a very good hand to play but meanwhile she's getting a lot of reps in giving speeches and building connections and and play the game really well I I have a lot of respect for that well well the key thing I think is that Biden had a huge amount of influence over how the party viewed her in both directions there was a long period I would say when the quiet signals out of Biden world were this isn't going well yeah and when there was pressure to push Biden off the ticket the signals got louder um Harris cannot do this if you get rid of him you're going to get her you're going to lose but then the thing you saw happen is a moment Biden actually stepped aside and fully endorsed her that was a signal so powerful that it functionally won the potential primary for Harris instantly right nobody was going to go against Joe Biden in that moment and and so in both directions Biden had and the the team around him a lot of influence when implicitly Biden World told the Democratic party Harris can't do it the Democratic party believed them and then when explicitly Biden himself told the Democratic Party in the world Harris could do it the Democratic party believed him and by the way from what I could tell it seems he was right and I don't blame Biden I think for things that happened earlier in the administration that was a lot of Staff talking and to be fair it was based on some things there were problems in her office there were reasons to be to be skeptical but he and they had tremendous power in a way this was not to me like a mini primary this was a parliamentary process right the the party came together and chose a leader through endorsements from elected officials like that's functionally what happened it felt very British it felt like trust kind of thing or something right where yeah um there's a loss of confidence those are fascinating Dynamics to study but yeah it's interesting to kind of have like the inside view versus like the outside view a little bit and you know again um we talked about this in the book a little bit but I come in a position where I'm more skeptical about the competence of people who work in politics right even if I like the candidates they they endorse right I mean I plan to plan to vote for KL Harris I would not have voted for Joe Biden by the way I think it was deeply irresponsible to nominate him and I would have voted libertarian or something but I have a more skeptical View and I think even the rationals they State out loud are sometimes maybe the rationals they believe or not but you know I I think human behavior is pretty strategic when you understand people's incentives and kind of information set and things like that and and I I think it was in Biden's narrow self-interest to make Harris look weaker and I think that kind of plays a role at all sorts of subconscious margins in terms of how she was treated let's talk about that skepticism you and I have known each other a long time we're we're old school bloggers and my read of view is that somewhat over the 2016 election then specifically over the pic yeah and your experience I think with online liberalism in the pandemic you became much more disillusioned with the people who once felt to you like you're group your Coalition your your tribe there's been a a kind of an alienation for you is that a fair read yeah I'd say it's three things right number one like the 2016 aftermath um I thought a lot of the kind of liberal and Centrist news media kind of were in denial about their own role in uh in the but her email stuff right and then picked scapegoats for Trump's victory that were not the real reasons that he won right um you know Russian bot Farms have approximately nothing to do with why Donald Trump won the 2016 election and I think it was like and the Russia stuff in general I think was treated with the order of magnitud more importance than it probably objectively had right um and like blaming Facebook and kind of the tech industry for that you know but I thought that was irresponsible and also kind of the discussion over the polls in 2016 where I think there was kind of some revisionist history where the polls actually showed a pretty close race I mean we had Trump with a 30% chance and it was kind of the convention of wisdom that um that assume that he was uh dead in the water right um so the ability to kind of conveniently lie a little bit or kind of manipulate facts and spin facts I mean that was that was part one um part two was the pandemic absolutely and you know orange man bad I think was often the reason that um people believed a lot of what they believed um because in some ways the move to shut down Society in some ways kind of went against the values of traditional liberalism right there's a transfer of welfare from uh younger people and people who are not able to work from home to wealthy suburbanites and older people who you're protecting their health but you're undermining the education of you know millions and millions and millions of school kids around the country and essential workers are still putting themselves at risk that you deem unacceptable for people who are you know able to work with laptops to take so I thought it was very self-serving and I thought kind of expertise was co-opted and corrupted by political partisans right and then third which was the Biden stuff well I it it seemed to me it happened for you before the Biden stuff yeah I mean and you were crosswise with a lot of liberals on Twitter I mean I I came back to Twitter for three weeks during the height of by the Mania to to try to be sort of in touch with that sentiment and and mostly stay uh away from it but Twitter is a place that groups that exist outside the online Hot House purify inside the online hot house so there's the Public Health Community sort of outside Twitter and then there's how it acts inside Twitter political scientists outside Twitter and then inside Twitter Republicans outside Twitter than inside Twitter and and my sense was that you ended up in a lot of fights with liberals who had a much lower risk tolerance than you did and between that and what was I believe unfair criticism of the the 2016 model which got the election much more right than than most did that it's sort of you began to see habits of you call it the village the village is your sort of term for yeah and that's been in terms of been used by other right but the village is like basically um basically uh media politics go government Progressive establishment The Establishment the New York Times Harvard University the regime yeah a democratic White House maybe not a republican white house but that's a more complicated kind of edge case maybe a different Republican White House yeah right George W Bush was part of the village maybe Donald Trump wasn't absolutely I I think it's you've also called it sort of the Indigo blob in different ways that you began to see it as a a kind of a set of aligned cognitive tendencies that you you disagreed with what were they um so one of them is the failure to do what I call decoupling it's not my term right um decoupling is the act of separating an issue from the context so uh the example I give in the book is that um if you're able to say uh I abore the Chick-fil-A's CEO's position on gay marriage I don't know if it's changed or not but he was anti-gay marriage at least for some period of time but they make a really delicious chicken sandwich like that's decoupling um I have their treatment of chickens I I have a strong direct take on Chick-fil-A I don't like how they treat chickens okay or you can say or any separate out you know Michael Jackson Woody Allen separate the art from the artist kind of thing right um you know that tendency uh goes against kind of the tendency on the Progressive left uh to care a lot about the identity of the speaker in terms of the racial or gender identity and in terms of their credentials right in this other world that I call the river the kind of gambling risk-taking world then all that matters is that you're right the the river is your name for the community of people people who are who think about risk roughly the way you do and are willing to to make big bets willing to accept loss right the r the river is your it's your world of gamblers at all levels of society capital and lowercase G gambling right so hedge fund vure capitalist yeah and then you get kind of the more downwater stuff where it's like crypto and and mem stocks and things like that doesn't matter who you are it matters that you're right and you're able to prove it or bet on it in some way and that's very against I think the kind of credentialism that you have within kind of the progressive Democratic left which I also call the Indo blah because it's a fusion of purple and blue right there's not a clear separation between the nonpartisan Centrist media um and the left leaning Progressive media that's kind of rooting for Democrats right different parts of the New York Times have both those functions in place and you know a someone who's kind of more on the nonpartisan side um you know even though again I would prefer to see KL Harris and Donald Trump you know I think people are exploiting the trust that institutions have earned for political gain and particularly in the kind of pre Elon pandemic era Twitter days I mean the pylons were kind of insane and like and like 98% of people don't have the tolerance for that but but I don't really care because these people are not my friends right and I have like a good life outside of Twitter and because you know the some and even like if you run a newsletter being a little polarizing is is okay right if I have 10 random people yelling at me on Twitter and 10 people sign up to be paid subscribers to Silver bulletin then I come out like way ahead in that deal and so I think I couldn't do my job without running a foul of of these this group of people let me ask you about the definition of decoupling there because I think decoupling is interesting and I found the examples you pick also interesting but contestable yeah so in the in the Chick-fil-A example uh I'm like a between a vegetarian and a vegan these days so I got my own issues with Chick-fil-A but was not a Believer necessarily in boycotting it if you didn't have my issues but I understood it as more like a boycott that theory right you don't want to give money to something that's going to work against your interests the the question of decoupling art and artists which I'm more on the side of decoupling but also has a dimension of th those both strike me as versions of activism right what you want to do what what people who hold those positions are trying to do is affect change in the world by applying consequences to beliefs and maybe you don't want that right or you don't agree that the beliefs they are trying to affect should have those consequences on them but it's kind of different than the idea of things are being pressed together that don't go together right I think an interesting sort of decoupling issue that happened during the pandemic was the same Public Health voices who were saying who were at one point saying you had to be so careful even outside often times were then Pro joining the George Floyd protests which a lot of people found um very upsetting what people were looking to the public health world for right then was not their views on uh protests but their views on distancing and and that felt like it coupled things in a way that uh undermined one to to achieve another well and and they framed it in like oh this is good for public health reasons right if they had said look uh I'm a big believer in racial Equity there is a little bit of risk here but outside wear a mask I'm probably not a huge problem I mean that would be honest right which ended up being true too yeah um but instead it was like in the name of Public Health right I I think people don't do enough thinking about thinking right and don't read enough of like the literature on like cognitive biases I mean ironically this is kind of like the expert literature on like um how powerful the human mind is at confirmation bias and how powerful a drug political partisanship is and how um how smart people are maybe better rationalizers in in certain respects I mean a lot of irrational traits are like rational on some halfway approximate different version of the universe you know what I mean my first book was on polarization yeah and what I understand you doing in the book in part is making an interesting cut in society between people with different forms of both risk tolerance and and thinking about risk and you read something that that caught my eye where you say quote Co made those risk preferences public waren on our proverbial sleeves and our literal faces and you go on to say quote people are becoming more bifurcated in their risk tolerance and this affects everything from who we hang out with to how we vote yeah tell me about both sides of that the the way that it made risk tolerance visible but then your view that since then risk tolerance is becoming a deeper cleavage in society I mean on the one hand there are lots of signs that risk tolerance is going down right um among young people in particular they're smoking less um drinking less doing fewer drugs having less sex um a different type of risk tolerance they are less willing to defend Free Speech Norms if it potentially would cause injury to someone right that's kind of a you know free speech is kind of a pro- risk kind of take in some ways um because speech can cause effects of course on the other hand you have this boom and bust and various booms and busts in crypto you have Las Vegas bringing in record Revenue you have record Revenue in sports spending and things like that um you have the CEO of open AI saying yeah this might destroy the universe but it's worth it it's good gamble to take right you have FTX and all this stuff and so um you know and like the first trip I made after Co was to a casino in Florida which is every bit of the [ __ ] show that you think it might be and the tournament Drew record numbers of poker players and so it just seems to me like we are in a world now where um institutions are less trusted and some people respond to that by saying okay I make my own rules now and this is great and I have lots of agency and some respond by kind of withdrawing into an online world or maybe kind of Clinging On to beliefs and experts that have lost their credibility and or just by becoming more risk givers right I mean I think the pandemic also revealed that there's like a lot of differences in um introver versus extroversion right I just can't deal with being cooped up inside all day right this doesn't work for me at all um but I think some people kind of secretly like the idea that like okay there's no more fomo I can kind of be cozy all day and that's fine there's you know differences in in desire for human companionship and things like that too let's talk about a couple of those people uh one of the things that's kind of fun about the book is you spend time with people whose approach to risk you find sophisticated and interesting yeah um one of them is Peter teal yeah what were your impressions of Peter teal what did you learn spending time with him um the first impression is that he's a weird dude uh I interviewed him by by phone and the first question I asked him he took half an hour to answer so he's very thoughtful um and the question was what I thought was kind of a softball question it's like if you ran the world a thousand times or 10,000 times how often you think you'd wind up in a situation like the one that you're in and it was kind of like a nerdy way to do you think you got lucky which in Teal's case is interesting I mean there's an anecdote in the book about this famous or inFAMOUS car trip he took with Elon Musk they were going to pitch um Michael morit at seoa Capital um and Elon had a new McLaren F1 and was going way too fast and spun out of control on the middle of whichever you know Sand Hill Road or whatever and they and they toted the car they could easily have been killed and instead they actually hitchhike to this meeting and save um what was then called cofinity was like the future of the PayPal right and so this Twist of faith Twist of Good Fortune kind of helped Peter teal out right um but most people understand like how did it help him out I mean he didn't die well he didn't die so he avoid yeah he avoided dying I guess I'd say so maybe probably you know the expectation was not that he'd die but the point is still that like you can easily have a world in which you know Elon Musk and Peter teal are not a part of it if if there's a car going the wrong way on the other side of the of the road right um so most people when you ask that question I ask like Mark Cuban for example they give the politically correct response which is oh of course I've been very lucky and I'm a talented person but of course it's a one in a million thing right and teal objected to the question he he said you know well if if it's predetermined then the odds are 100% right and if the world's not predetermined then the odds are probably approximately zero but it doesn't really make sense like how can you perturb the world by exactly this amount and but you know I think he kind of believes in like in predestiny a little bit and a spiritual thing or is a matter of classical physics there's a good B by I think Max chafkin was the journalist chafkin I don't know how you say his last name um um about Peter teal called the contrarian which is convincing that teal is like actually quite conservative more than libertarian and probably quite religious but I also think that if you kind of like are one of these people that I mean just the amounts of wealth and success and power that Silicon Valley has right um I do think some of these people kind of pinch themselves and wonder and wonder if they have been one of the chosen ones in some ways or been blessed in some ways or maybe the ndy version of I think they're living in a simulation of some kind like what odds would you give yourself that like that actually makes sense that you're the protagonist of the story it must be must be kind of weird right so I used to interview teal uh not super regularly but every so often my impression of him which has been my impression of a lot of the I would call them the ideologist VCS which is not all VCS but but the ones who are heavily behind or out online sort of pushing a kind of what what I would think of as like VC ideology that you know leans now right talking him was always interesting because over the course of conversation he would offer like 15 or 20 ideas M I would call them more thought experiments than analytical arguments they were not empirically backed typically and you would leave and be like 13 of those seem genuinely ridiculous to me two of them might be very importantly right I'm not 100% sure which are the two and which are the 13 and Peter teal I think is very he is a sort of template of the VC mind and a lot of VCS try to be him and he's been very successful I mean he is a guy who's backed a number of very important companies found a number of very important Founders right he is able to do something there but it is oriented towards being right in important and counterintuitive ways like three out of 20 times and doesn't care about being wrong 17 out of 20 times whereas like if you think about media media is oriented towards being like right 17 out of 20 times and the three that it gets wrong are going to be really big because they're going to be correlated across the entire you know the entirety of like American institutions but it's a very different way of thinking about risk it's uh it's like you want big payouts yep not a high betting average and that's because this is core to the VC mindset right the two things that you hear from every VC one is the importance of the longer time Horizons making Investments That might not pay off for 10 or 15 years um but number two even more important is the asymmetric ability to bet on upside right they are all terrified because they all had an experience early in their career where Mark Zuckerberg walked through their door or Larry Page or serg bin walked through their door right and they didn't give them funding and then they wound up missing on an investment that paid out at 100x or 1,000x or 10,000x and so if you can only lose One X your money but you can make a,x if you have a successful company then that changes your mindset about everything and you want to avoid false negatives you want to avoid missed opportunities um and I think there's a tendency for like a certain type of smart person to to provoke to kind of troll a little bit I mean I think he's like that a little bit this is also partly um the thing on Twitter right like I kind of use Twitter sometimes as like a a sketch pad a little bit right um for kind of slightly irreverent half trollish ideas that might later turn into newsletter posts or or something like that or might be developed further and kind of probing around and kind of seeing what things land and and what don't like kind of like a standup mic night right at a comedy show or something and like I think that's how Twitter is meant to be used but like other people use it for like enforcing consensus and and so but we've already talked about Twitter but yeah um well you can you can never talk about it enough particularly with these people um the the one thing I will say on that and I think this is true for virtually everybody I know who been on that platform for a long period of time is they will tell you that I have this Persona on Twitter yeah right Twitter's not real life I mean I used it to provoke I'm having fun I'm [ __ ] posting I'm trolling and people over time if they spend a lot of time there become more like who they are there right that is true for Mark andr another person who you profile and talk up to in the book it's true for lots of people in politics I know right Ted Cruz has become his Twitter persona than he you know once it happened in Democratic politics I think in 2020 uh different campaigns became more like their Twitter incarnations than like that person had been in politics before there's a and I think it has to do with social dynamics because over time the people you get praise from become more persuasive and credible to you the people who begin to hate you you sort of repel from people I think always think they can be playful in their social dynamics but but actually who you end up surrounding yourself even online you become them it's very very hard to maintain that kind of Separation I mean clearly you know Elon Musk maintained a stand for a while that oh I'm just kind of a Libertarian moderate like no he's kind of like a you know right pilled yeah and I'm just having fun I'm I'm posting funny things he's he's his Twitter Persona now you spent some time with Sam bankman freed yeah tell me what you learned from him or learned about him um I think Sam is kind of insane um and I'm not very sympathetic to him I mean I'm sympathetic in the sense that like this is this very dramatic reversal of Fortune where he's kind of literally emerging and on top of the whole world and like shooting commercials with Tom Brady and it kind of all collapses and he becomes very abandoned overnight so he's kind of reaching out to a couple of journalists to have conversations because he has like you know basically no friends left on in the Bahamas anymore and like his parents are there and like two of his employees are there but everyone else has like fled the island Sam is somebody who has to be owned by the river but you know he's unabashedly a part of that world I mean he had his tentacles in every part of that world he was active in Democratic and actually under the radar Republican political donations right he was trying to figure out how to get into sports betting legally and things like that and so he is kind of everywhere and and and of course most of all with the effect of altruists in the kind of the original plan for the book there was like this awkward transition between the chapter on crypto and the chapter on effective altruism right I'm like how do I kind of have a natural transition and then SBF is very important in both worlds and it's a very strange connection that somehow crypto profits are funding like these people who want to like you know cure malaria or something in in Africa um but I you know I think there are a couple of things one is that I think people were overly impressed by SPF partly because he was able to manipulate his self-image right I mean he's like not the most you know conventionally normal guy right but like he was very aware that Founders the founder algorithm the VC algorithm is like oh we can't you know weirdness is good for VCS right the fact that SBF would play video games in investor pitch meetings or things like that right or dress down or have a fidget spinner they're like oh you know he's a little bit on the Spectrum and that's actually probably good for a Founder because you want the single-minded devotion and he's a little weird but you want variance variance Varian sleeps on a bean bag right there's a there's a real Mythos around him right which is kind of carefully constructed he's kind of inhabiting a character which is inspired by some inner SPF and he's kind of playing that character and then kind of forgets what has ever inner core Valu that whatever they were might have been but he is not a very competent manager of risk um he invested all this money in this Democratic primary for a candidate named Carrick Flynn in Oregon's I forget which sixth or seventh District maybe eighth district and the candidate had been ahead in the polls by 15 points and end up losing by 15 points right because uh to spend $8 million in a congressional primary is kind of insane if you're not like the New York media Market or something so the candidate would go to people's houses and they like hey I'm Carrick Flynn I'm in a candidate for the Oregan primary and they're like oh I have your literature and like bring out like a stack of like 20 Flyers that spf's you know uh super pack had sent on behalf of trick Flynn and made him look like a weird freak backed by this mysterious you know crypto billionaire so yeah I I I he had a tendency and this is based on testimony from um both in the court case and interv with uh Tera mcau I think his her name who was his original co-founder at Alam he had the kind of often good instincts and like being a good estimator is an important skill in my world um but then we kind of double down on that a lot and rationalize things a lot and there was also a bystander effect problem where so many people vouched for him oh Sequoia capital and um oh these Oxford philosophers he's effective altruist and he's on stage with Bill Clinton or whatever right and and he's invited to the Met Gala and Tom Brady is shooting commercials with him so like what could possibly be wrong with this guy I mean maybe he seems a little bit weird to me but all these other people are kind of in his corner and like but like no one was doing the due diligence and he kind of figured out that like despite um there's little contradiction in the river where on the one hand we tend to think of ourselves as being contrarian on the other hand we're pretty big fans of markets because we know that it's kind of hard to beat the Las Vegas point spread or it's hard to beat the S&P 500 index funds or things like that so like well the market judgment is that s SPF is a credible actor and how would I trust my own judgment over the market judgment a little bit and there was too much difference toward that and too much actually group think about SPF because the problems were evident the whole way I mean he told Tyler Cowen that if he could flip a coin to double amount of utility in the world plus one Epsilon or something but there's a 50-50 chance of blowing the world up that he would take the coin flip and and repeatedly and so you're actually getting Two Earths but you're risking a 49% chance of it all disappearing um so and again I I feel compelled to say like caveat here of like you know how'd you really know that's what's happening blah blah blah whatever put that aside the hypothetical the pure hypothetical um uh yeah yeah and then you keep on playing the game so what's the chance we're left with anything don't I just St Petersburg Paradox you into non-existence well not necessarily maybe St Petersburg Paradox into an enormously valuable existence that's the other option I remember seeing that Tyler cow in interview and thinking that's nuts but but I think it gets at a kind of nuts that there is a bias towards in the world you're describing there is an aesthetic around talking in probabilities right there's an ability to think in probabilities and there's an aesthetic around probabilities right people attaching I would often say almost random probabilities to things I see this a lot in Silicon Valley you know people who I I I would call it like faux basian reasoning yeah where they're given some probability but they have no reason to base the the probability right 50% of this and it makes you sound much more precise it makes you sound like you know what you're talking about UHF was known for always talking in terms of expected value which is very appealing to to the kinds of people you're describing maybe the the kind of person even that you are and people who know how to talk like that get through a lot of filters because you sort of assume if they're if they've converted everything into probabilities and they're great at math and you know he worked at Jane Street I worried about this a lot with effective altruist for a while which is a group I have a lot more sympathy for than most people now have um but they this tendency I think to fetishize a certain form of discourse it's like the first people into that form of discourse are doing something valuable and then after that I think it can become a kind of costume of sloppy thinking right yeah this worries me about models too I'm curious how you think about it because I often find that people talk in terms of probabilities but people hear them in terms of certainties that someh talking in terms of probabilities makes people more willing to believe you without actually being skeptical or attaching a failure risk to you yeah I mean there there's two things here one is just there is like a kind of jargon I mean in some ways I like in like being from the river like being from like the south of the United States or something right where there just a lot of shared cultural norms and unspoken discursive Tendencies right it's just the way we communicate I think in the river um but also like it's really easy to build bad models even in narrow problems like I want to forecast the NFL or something or build election model it's easy to build bad models and on these open-ended problems it's really easy to fall in love with the incomplete model of the world and then forget that you know um what's the Kamera coconut tree quote like a model does not fall from a coconut tree right exists EX in the context of all that came before it yeah so like a model is supposed to describe something in the real world and if you lose sight of the real world and it fails to describe the real world then it's the model's fault and your fault for building the model and not the real world's fault and and and that's the lesson that people I think have a lot of trouble learning bankman freed is in prison teal might in some ways be responsible for destroying the Republican ticket this year I mean in a close election JD Vance now seems to have about as much negative value as we've seen from a recent vice president I'm not saying Peter T is the only reason Vance got chosen for the ticket but he is one of the key reasons Vance is in politics he's before now you would have said JD Vance was Peter Teal's political bet that paid off best yeah now it might be his political bet that pays off worst um you mentioned bankman Freed's political uh donations which were kind of disastrous in a direct way sometimes also ended up taking a lot of other people down over time if these guys are so good at making bets or seem to be so good at making bets what are they missing in politics is somebody who straddles those worlds what is not in their models so both these groups both the river and the village are groups of Elites and I think ironically like both groups critiques of one another are kind of true right I mean they kind of kind of can be epistemic trespassers um but they're not very data driven when it comes to politics right and you know part of it too is that like if you're a VC and you're evaluating a lot of pitches and a lot of opportunities right you have kind of very quick twitch reflexes for saying okay something about this founder seems smart let's investigate further Let's do an inial seed round of investing right but it's like thin slicing and not necessarily for this part of the river the VC part of the river not necessarily more profound analytical takes on things right um and so you're surrounded by people that are inclined to agree with you right you kind of see enemies on the other side he thought maybe that like people had some deeper intuitive sense in 2016 that something was wrong with Hillary Clinton even though she was ahead in the polls and to his credit he did back Trump at a time when that seemed like a big risk to take it seemed like it was probably going to be the wrong bet and it seemed like he was losing a lot of credibility and now it turns out that he was kind of ahead of the curve you know Peter like Peter teal people like Peter teal thought that um The Village had been discredited by 2016 and other things right you can't really trust the polls and they said Trump would never do XY or Z but no I mean these guys often are pretty dumb about politics right and like you know I it's the same um you know the guys in the Hedge fun poker game that I play sometimes to the guys that like I think Gavin Newsome's going to replace um Joe Biden on the ticket and it's like you actually were kind of right about part of this but like why' you why Gavin Nome what is the evacuation with so many versions of that I thought it was so crazy yeah but you know it's funny I I would say what they've often missed in teals particular on this is how human beings react to to different human beings so so JD Vance for instance wildly underperforms in the Ohio Senate race I mean you know and Vance's problem right now he's pushed onto the ticket by as best we can tell people like Steve Bannon Trump Jr tuer Carlson Elon Musk so the very online very reactionary pilled people around Trump and what is missed about him is he's kind of off-putting he doesn't talk to other people in a way they would like to be spoken to he's able to make even popular ideas like a child tax credit sound completely bizarre when he talks about them in terms of punishing childless adults that there is something here I think when people look at the world and I've seen this in a lot of different dimensions of of these kinds of of folks when they look at the world too much in numbers the the intangibles begin to dissolve for them although I think some of these tangibles aren't so intangible right where um you know yeah you can look at JD Vance's margins in Ohio you can look at historically candidates who don't have experience getting elected to some lower office and then ascending the ranks underperform it's been a factor in our Congressional midterm models for for years for example but look in some ways I mean these VCS are obviously incredibly deeply flawed people right and so like why do they succeed despite that um I think because the idea of having a longer time Horizon number one and being willing to make these plus expected value positive expected value high risk but very very very high upside bets and Gathering a portfolio of them repeatedly and making more enough these bets that you effectively do hedge your risk right like those two ideas are so good that it makes up for the fact these guys often have terrible judgment and are kind of Vang glorious [ __ ] half of them right they're interesting people too I mean they're very interesting I think and they I'm happy that the book is able to present I think a complete journalistic portrait of of some of them but they have lots and lots of flaws and it's made up for by the fact that this is kind of a magic formula for for making money let me get us back to the election so we mentioned before Harris's approval ratings have gone from significantly underwater to net favorable very very fast she's now leading in in head-to-head polls more than that there's a a a real deep whatever Republicans have convinced themselves to the contrary organic enthusiasm that has Unleashed itself around her she turns out to be very meable in a way I'm not sure people quite predicted I know most Democrats didn't predict this I don't think you predicted it um so what was missed here what what wasn't in the Harris model that should have been yeah maybe you really can meme your way to Victory I I don't know I wouldn't necessarily have thought that I mean there's something about how it's off Trend a little bit and it's kind of unexpected a little bit and there's something about that that I think I think people were ready for like a Vibe shift right I think people in politics um neglect just how annoying the pedantic dramatic no fun tone of politics was and the having to be like serious all the time and if the worst rep can say about KL Harris oh she laughs a lot like maybe it kind of Suits the mood a little bit after after so many years of of Doom and Gloom so maybe it was just spontaneous and lucky I mean it's also the case maybe you know when kaml Harris was a candidate for the nomination in 2019 I had these tiers and the top tier was Joe Biden and KLA Harris and the line was always okay I got one of those right and one of those about as wrong as possible but she was seen as this Rising upand cominging political talent and maybe the combination of kind of misaligned strategy in 2019 and then you know not being marketed well by the White House and we debated before what the reasons for that are maybe that was the underperformance and the rising star that people thought she was was kind of the real KL Harris after all so Harris ended up choosing Tim Walls the governor of Minnesota as her VP pick you you made a case that it should have been Josh Shapiro tell me why uh Pennsylvania number one there's uh about a 4% chance that in our model that Harris will lose the election because of Pennsylvania right where she wins the other Midwestern swing States but she's 19 votes or fewer electoral votes fewer because of Pennsylvania and if you're a probabilist and like a 4% chance because campaigns often don't make a difference right if we go into a recession in the third quarter then Harris will probably lose through no fault of her own right but in the worlds where campaign strategy can make a difference then the VP being from Pennsylvania is is a reasonably big upgrade and the fact that you know he has demonstrated his popularity with this very diverse State that's kind of a microcosm of the US a whole right in Pennsylvania you have you know you have the Northeast you have the Midwest and even you have a little bit of the South creeping in in the Appalachian part of the state you have the suburbs you have rural areas and you have one of the biggest cities in the United States right you have a big African-American vote you have lots of famous colleges and things like that you have everything there and he's 15 points above water approval wise um and you know that's pretty powerful uh information to work with I happen to think that Tim Walls is an above average pick um you know better than most better than JD Vance not a not a particularly High bar um but better than a lot of the recent picks I mean um you know I think he's kind of memeable as America's goofy dad kind of way and and he had a pretty moderate track record in Congress and again my premise is that generally speaking moderation wins a lot of people disree with that but I think the empirical evidence is strong there um you know more Progressive governance of course in Minnesota um but I think it was a somewhat risk averse decision now if you read why do you say that I I found this argument you've made very weird so I think there's a very good chance I always told people on the VP pick my head says Shapiro and my heart says walls yeah I think that because I am a cautious person worried about if I were running for president worried about losing Pennsylvania I would have found it very hard not to pick Shapiro because if you don't pick Shapiro and you end up in a we lost Pennsylvania scenario everybody's going to blame you for blowing the decision that could have won you Pennsylvania right in terms of the expected value both like on the front end and the back end I understood walls as a choice on Vibes this sort of energy this momentum she has created he was sort of able to upend and remake all Democratic messaging in a single Morning Joe appearance there's some intangible Charisma to walls that has made him like developed him overnight this huge online fan base that the cautious candidate the one listening to the Consultants the one reading Nate silver Poes that candidate goes with Shapiro walls is something else why did you say that that you understood walls as risk averse um because I think they were worried about new Cycles where the left got mad and or the Gaza issue was elevated and or you had protest at the convention in Chicago in a couple of weeks I think they were worried about about that and maybe kind of undermining what is clearly Good Vibes right now and maybe overrating I mean maybe it's not maybe I think it's a lower expected value decision right what gives K Harris a higher chance of winning the Electoral College in in November I think one of the questions I've been reflecting on because I often think about where do I disagree with writers I otherwi wise agree with and I think I'm typically pretty aligned with you on a bunch of things or you know glacius or you know John Jade or some others but a lot of you have really gotten in to a view that I think takes a medium median voter theorem almost too seriously that it's like as if politics is UN unidimensional and how close you are to ideologically the median voter is what decides elections which I I do think moderation has an effect in I mean we see this in the political science research but it doesn't have a lot of room in that model for energy for enthusiasm for the mediation of politics right the thing that happens in between the candidate and the public for what is happening on social media for what is happening on on cable news and you could often sort of back out explanations here and there but I for instance think the the sort of like in retrospect explanation that what led Obama to victory was careful moderation one of the things he did was moderate on some issues like gay marriage another thing he did was unleash astonishing levels of enthusiasm in the electorate for reasons orthogonal in many ways to his policy positions and so I'm curious how you think about that because to me the one of the questions Shapiro and walls raised Shapiro and Harris sort of are a lot like each other I think they they sort of come off as like the two smartest members of the law review right which is like a kind of like not necessarily the the visual you want um maybe it is but but might not be and that there is something here that is I guess people call it Vibes now I feel like it's a little dismissive but how you play out in earned media in social media how much people want to talk about you that that that that feeling of enthusiasm like how do you think about that to somebody who builds models and and handicaps politics I mean look so if you're literally building a congressional model um there's a model that forecasts the vote based on fundamentals which means not the polls if you don't have polling for example based on whatever it is you know seven or eight factors and and one of those factors if you're incumbent is how often do you vote with your party and the more often You Buck your party actually the more often like Susan Collins or Joe Mansion than you tend to overperform in your Congressional race right now that's but also one of eight factors right and even when you have all eight factors there's still quite a bit of uncertainty in the rise so to me it's like this is something where if you're used to looking at larger data sets you can come up with counter examples of John tester is pretty Progressive actually and somehow manages to get reelected in Montana with this kind of maybe Tim Walls like folky personality or something so Brown sort of simar to that also pretty Progressive but like if you take all the data from every Congressional race since 1990 then it becomes clear in the aggregate right and I'd also say like if we could get progressives to the point where I don't know who we is in the sentence because I'm not sure identify as Progressive liberal but not Progressive I'd say um if we could get them to the point where they said said um yes the media and voter theorem is mostly true but sometimes outweigh by other factors um but yeah so to get them to that point instead of thinking oh you win elections by winning The Bays right I mean that might have kind of narrowly been true in an ear you're turning this around on progressives because I'm asking it of you right I I agree that progressives should take the media and voter theor more seriously but but I'm asking you whether energy enthusiasm media right I just think attention in politics is under theorized I think if you look at Donald Trump and you do a thing that that I've seen people do and say look he is more like the median voter on certain things like immigration Etc or at least he was perceived as more moderate than Hillary Clinton and like that's why he won I think that is an under told story about Donald Trump that is somewhat true I think that missing the Showmanship of Donald Trump the entertainment value the energy he unlocks in people like there's a reason that Trump had Dana White from the UFC and Hulk Hogan on his night of the the RNC so in 2020 Joe Biden's view is that the election should be about Donald Trump and Donald Trump's view is that the election should be about Donald Trump and like that was a theory of attention they both agreed on and it worked out for Joe Biden in 2024 Joe Biden's view as the election should be about Donald Trump Donald Trump's view as the election should probably be about Donald Trump and that was a bad theory of attention Biden had no way of shifting a narrative that wasn't any good for him yeah and so I guess this is what I'm getting at that one thing that that I worry about in in some of this thinking among people I I like is that attention is attention ISM important candids have different theories of it but um but I don't know that we know how to think about it as rigorously as I wish we did I look I agree I mean again with Harris I mean you have to like maybe you do have to revise your views a little bit I think also maybe in a campaign that's like a um a Sprint and not a marathon MH then maybe you never reach the long run it seems possible usually I'd say don't wor about momentum over the next two weeks um because inevitably you're going to have a bad news cycle later on it's just how the media works and it's how elections work right it is possible they can just Sprint their way to like a memeified victory in this shortened modified campaign that they have a good convention and that she wins whenever the debate is held right and then you're in October and everyone's crazy and and kind of explicitly partisan like they may be able to Sprint to a narrow Electoral College Victory without having this skeptical news cycle so that be argument for walls I think there there's one of the reasons it's on my mind is not actually walls and and as I said before because I do want to say this I'm not sure who she should have picked his VP like I actually have very conflicted views on this although I really really enjoy Tim Walls and really enjoyed interviewing him and and think he's a pretty unusual political talent but I think you could say the same about Josh Shapiro in different ways and Pennsylvania is a very big state but I've been interested in the shift in like you have a campaign stuffed by many of the same people particularly in the first two weeks and yet the campaign's tenor has completely changed right the the the tone of press releases is now they are trying to get you to talk about them and doing that by courting controversy by being kind of mean in a way Democrats have not been mean in a long time right that Tim Walls actually made a JD Vance couch joke in his introducing himself as her vice presidential pick speech let's put it this way that is not something the Joe Biden campaign was going to do right they want people to talk about them they want to court kind of controversy outrage they want attention but I think the reason it's all on my mind is what I am seeing in them is a radically different relationship to attention than the campaign that the same people were running two weeks ago this is why this is why I rely on you for like how much these people overlap like that's something I really they overlap tremendously yeah I mean it's not the exact same people Mike donalan isn't running things anymore but but there's enough of the same people here that you're not dealing with like nobody knew how to write these press releases it is a month ago it is interesting that Joe Biden based on the polling um would probably been better off an election with low turnout right the one thing that might have saved him is if um you get that special election midterm election lower turnout um where people aren't very happy about it but they go to the polls vote for Biden and the Trump people don't bother to show up right um because unlike in the past the marginal voters have been more likely to vote for for Trump than for than for Biden right and so maybe by having a really boring campaign it kind of suited their interests with Harris who is bringing back some of the younger voters and some of the voters of color that had defected to Kennedy or defected to Trump or defected to sitting out the election um those are also some of the more marginal voters and so now all of a sudden she probably doesn't as much higher turnout when she's going to get you know young Latina women to vote for her or young black men to vote for her when they might not have voted for Biden and so it kind of matches the incentives of of where you want to turn out to be on November 5th Tim Alberta in the Atlantic had a great piece on the way the Trump campaign was thinking about the race that came out very right around the time of the debate or right after the debate and they felt they had Nevada North Carolina uh completely locked up and Georgia and that this is really like a race in three maybe four states yeah my understanding is Harris and her team think they have re-expanded the map right they think that Nevada Arizona Georgia are for sure back in play they think that North Carolina might be back in play do you think that's true do you think the map has gotten bigger I I think that's right because again look at the voters that Biden was falling off with right Nevada people don't remember they think of as kind of libertarian old miners right no Nevada is extremely diverse and it's like workingclass voters of color right big falloff constituency for Biden Georgia you have tons of young professionals and tons of uh great colleges and universities and of course tons of black voters right the same groups that he's declining from a little bit North Carolina has been interestingly kind of close in the polls um Arizona is the one that doesn't seem to have moved quite as much there was one poll yesterday with with Harris ahead there but that's right I mean I think the map has expanded and it's it's obviously plausible again now that she would win Georgia especially with the Brian Kemp stuff not not helping Trump one bit I mean at the moment was playing in a poker tournament very unbrand right at a moment when Trump gets shot right and has the iconic photo which you know I'm not a trump fan but I you kind of have to admire that I think a little bit I think I'm like just I think a lot of people seem like oh he's just going to win the election right just I mean with Biden already and and he's not going to lose after this they try to shoot him and he has this great photo opportunity right and then it seems like he's at a high Watermark and then he picks picks JD Vance um and I think got a little arrogant and and because his initial Instinct apparently was not to pick necessarily JD Vance and kind of talked out of it by his sons and I don't know what influence Peter t or whatever had or like the you know but the VC guys are like oh JD Vance is kind of one of us right and he probably is like smarter than the average VP or something but like that that appeal has been demonstrated not to work very I mean you saw it with with Blake Masters for example right the it works every now and then I guess you know Rick Scott had a background and I don't know what exactly but like Medicare fraud okay yeah but for the most part like these the guy the guy ran uh Health company that was convicted of the single largest Medicare fraud at that point in history um what I tell my VC friends is if you have a rich guy just have him by a basketball team or something right he's not going to come across very well to to the average voter and I think they don't they don't understand that and and then you know again in a poker tournament or a poker home cash game when you go from having a big stack and you're kind of like oh this is so nice man I'm going to go home and cash out my winnings maybe I'll have a nice little whiskey at the bar or something right and this is going to be I'll text my friends about how well my session ran and then you lose a big pot then you lose another big pot and then you go on tilt and before long you have no chips left what is tilt tilt is playing emotionally particularly in poker or other forms of gambling um it's often sparked by um by a bad beat meaning that you got unlucky or it can be sparked by getting bluffed and getting mad at your opponent or bad luck or sometimes you can actually have what's called winners tilt too where maybe this is what Trump had in picking JD Vance you have a bunch of things that are going really well I mean this election was going about as well as it could for for Donald Trump he's not a popular guy yet he had moved ahead in some of the national polls by four or five points it's like pretty hard to do I he's lost a popular vote twice shs very on tilt to me I mean when you think about him for Donald Trump he had been pretty on his message right he was talking a lot about immigration he was talking a lot about inflation he was letting it be known that he was thinking about picking Doug bergham he seemed to be enjoying this idea that he was you know people were longing for a stability they now associated with his presidency rightly or wrongly they wanted the lower prices back you know they don't like the war in Gaza they don't like the war in Ukraine right maybe Trump is a strong man who can bring it back and he was kind of playing into that and since the Harris switch and him beginning to to fall on the polls you you feel this old Trump returning the Trump who goes to Georgia and begins yelling at the governor the Republican governor of Georgia the Trump that goes to the National Association of black journalists and begins talking about how nobody knew KLA Harris was black the the the Trump who you know is just trying out a attack lines trying to find something that will work no matter what the the kind of cost might be I mean your description of him playing emotionally he's not listening to anybody right now he's flailing and the fact that according to the reporting I mean that they weren't prepared for the eventuality when Joe Biden dropped out was kind of inexcusable I mean if you looked at prediction markets it was immediately a live consideration after the debate I think they overestimated the degree to which Democrats are personality called I mean they can be there was maybe personality Cults around Obama or Bill Clinton or things like that right but there wasn't one around Joe Biden he was kind of always the candidate of the party and it was not in the party's interest any longer to have him as their nominee and so the Democratic party is capable and Powerful um and in a way the GOP is not and they extrapolated from their views to how Democrats would behave and underestimated um you know the smart decision that the party was capable of making I talked to Republicans about this about why they weren't more prepared and and one thing I heard from them is they just didn't think Biden was going to step aside I mean if you're a party that has completely bent the need to Donald Trump and is now years and years into not being able to convince Donald Trump of functionally anything you you might it might shift your sense of how people in power particularly the Apex of power act it's one reason this is a place where you and I have been a little bit different I've been more on the side of Joe Biden did something difficult that deserves pray because and I think you see this in in how Republicans were thinking leaders just often don't do this they the the kind of personality that gets you to that point is not the kind of personality that leaves power gracefully it's why when people are talking about dictators who endlessly this talk of how to create golden parachutes for for dictators you're dealing with a kind of human being that has told a story about their own essentialness seeing going back to your point about Elon Musk and and feeling like you're the main character of you know of global life right you've become the American president you sort of were the main character of of global life for for for a while that does something to you those people don't give it up easily uh no and if you look at the history of before there was whichever Amendment it was 20 something Amendment 22nd that prevents you from running for more than two terms um it was pretty routine for candidates to tease the I mean wood Wilson had a stroke and wanted a third term um Harry Truman had like a 3 % aival rating and wanted a a third term second full term right you know old men are often pretty stubborn and and you know I mean I think the most interesting thing is that if Harris wins or maybe comes close but mostly if she wins right what that will say about the primary system right maybe we should go back to giving a larger role to superdelegates for example I want to end on a part of your book I found really interesting which is about the physical experience of risk yeah in in gambling but in other things uh you talk about pain tolerance you talk about how the body feels when you're you know behind on a hand and you're losing your your chips you've talked about being on tilt but I see it in in politics too I mean there is a physical question that comes into the decisions you make I see on this podcast there times when an a question is physically uncomfortable for me to to ask another person tell me a bit about how you think about about this relationship between uh like the like the body and the ability to act under pressure to make intuitive decisions in moments of very high stress so you know human beings have tens of thousands of years of evolutionary pressure um which is uh uh inclined to respond in a heightened way to moments that are high stakes that are high stress moments um if you've ever been in a situation where you saw someone's life in danger or your own life was in danger you know I was in LA in January and there was an armed robbery outside the place where I was trying to get just a cup of uh coffee and time kind of slows down a little bit in situations like that and you don't realize how stressed out you are until like I texted my partner and me like LOL almost got shot ha and I was kind of like oh yeah I'm too cool for school and then like an hour later I'm like getting some tacos or something and I like almost like break down it's like oh my God it could have gone really really badly public speaking also triggers this for people because objectively it's a pretty high stakes thing your body knows if you're playing a $1 $2 poker game and it's nothing for you your body will know when you're playing a $100 $200 game where it really matters you will just know you'll experience that stress even if you supress it consciously it will still affect the way that you're literally kind of ingesting your five senses so if your heart rate goes up um that has discernable effects um but actually your body's providing you with kind of more information you're taking in more in these kind of short bursts of time you know people who can master that zone and I use the term Zone intentionally because it's very related to like being in the zone like Michael Jordan used to talk about or golfers or or hockey goalies whatever else learning to master that and relish that is a very is a very powerful skill because you are experiencing physical stress whether you want to or not how much is that in your view and your experience learnable and how much of it is a kind of natural physical intelligence some people have and some people don't I think it's actually quite learnable it's a little bit like um you know if you've been on mushrooms before then you kind of learn like oh this is the part of the brain that is this is the things that look a little funny when you're on mushrooms right you can kind of maybe like Tone It Up or tone it down a little bit so it's it's very much like that right I mean it's terrifying the first time it happens but when you start to recognize it and you kind of make a conscious effort to slow down a little bit right and kind of take your time and try to like execute the basics it's not as much about like trying to be a hero it's about trying to execute the basics because everyone if whenever's losing their [ __ ] if you can do your basic ABC blocking and tackling then you're ahead of 95% of people and keeping bandwidth free for dealing with emergency situations like that will take you very far it's funny because that feels to me like a very important question that is hard to test in politics yeah people have to make profound decisions under incredibly high stress and we have simulacrums of it right the debate in a way is a simulacrum of that very very high stress uh speeches on teleprompters are not very good uh analogies for that but this question of how good is a person at that moment uh I mean how do you evaluate that I mean Trump after getting shot kind of performed very well and I think you know again the Harris moment of Leaping right into action to secure the nomination also has to be seen is very good performance under stress right so and and Biden's failure under stress I mean he went to some type of some kind of spiral of some kind or another physical or mental or whatever else so those kind of three pivotal moments the assassination the debate and then Harris season the nomination and record time speak to the difference in performance and that's why the two of them Harris and Trump are still candidates for the presidency and Biden is not I was just reading Nancy P's new book before I was reading yours because I just had her on the show and she talks about how a above all she says that what a speaker of the house needs is intuition they need to be able to act and she says that the key thing you have to act fast because every moment you don't act your options are diminishing and end up thinking then when reading your book of it because what she was describing is quite I think for her physical like something in her knows how to act and is unafraid to act in those moments the thing that was crucial about her I think in this process inside the Democratic party of getting Biden out is she was willing to act to act in public to take the pressure of that in ways very few people were and somebody had to be doing that in public to create space for others to be considering it in private but you look at her career and she has a sort of intuitive capability to know when to move and there's some there's something in it that I don't think she can explain how she does it but it makes her a fascinating leader people believe that she will act and she will act because something in her knows when to act and she's unafraid yeah so is gut instinct overrated or underrated well it depends on how much experience you have right poker players have cuz now poker is actually kind of a solved game there are computer solvers they're called that spit out this very complicated solution to Poker hard to execute in practice but you know it's technically speaking a solved game however you know the best poker players can have uncan good instincts based on reading physical tells just the kind of vibe someone gives off and if you know I played a lot of Poker running this book more live poker than I had in the past and like you develop a a sixth sense not all the time it helps if you're well rested but you develop a six sense for whether someone has like a strong hand or something like they're glowing green or something almost sometimes um and you can test it because you can say I know that I'm supposed to fold this hand here it's a little bit too weak to to call against a bluff but I just have a sense that he's bluffing and lo and behold you're right more often than you think think right more often than you need to be to make that call correct based on the odds that you're getting from the pot so if Nancy Pelosi has you know decades and Decades of experience in politics and kind of reading the moves of of how the Coalition is moving I mean that's something where intuition probably plays a pretty good pretty good role and also the fact that being willing to work with incomplete information I mean I don't know how much longer Biden could have you know maybe they could have run out the clock potentially and you know when oh they 100% could have that day when he sent that letter to Congressional Democrats and said I'm not leaving this conversation is over stop trying to overturn the will of the primary voters I was getting Congressional Democrats tell me this is done it's a fate of comple he's quelled the Rebellion it looked to me like he had I was talking to other people they said you know 10% shot he out Nancy blissy goes on Morning Joe two days later says we're really looking forward to him making a decision and I asked her about it and I said what was happen I mean he just sent that letter and she said yeah but that was just a letter yeah I didn't accept the letter as anything but a letter I mean and another there are some people who were unhappy with the letter let me say some said that some people were unhappy with the letter I'll put it in somebody else's mouth because it was a I don't even know it didn't sound like Joe Biden to me I'm like oh you read a bluff um so I think Nancy p might be pretty good at poker good place to end always our final question what are three books You' recommend to the audience um so one book is pertinent to the discussion that we had a moment ago which is called the hour between dog and wolf it's written by John coats who was an academic Economist who then um became a derivatives Trader I think for Deutsche Bank in New York and found out that the traders that he studied were really weird right like these Traders would have strange physical and mental stress responses to the market rising or falling and he was so fascinated by it that he went back and became a neuroscientist and like basically did studies of Traders so you you know you read uh test the testosterone of like a options Trader or a guy who works a hedge fund and see how it varies from day to day and correlates with performance so so yeah so he studies the physical responses of Risk Takers and the book is called the hour between dog and wolf so that's one recommendation number two in a totally different direction um the making of the atomic bomb by Richard rhods we didn't talk as much about some of the AI stuff today but at the end of the book there's a pretty long elaborate comparison between the Manhattan Project and the building of these large language models that some people think um could be potentially very dangerous and you know nuclear weapons are I think a pivot point in human history and this book is kind of the best history of that the third is called addiction by Design um by Natasha schul and Natasha is an Miu Anthropologist who studied Las Vegas as like her thesis basically she did like a lot of reporting um just about the properties of slot machines and how addictive they are and about the kind of casino gambling industry in general and of course she draws metaphors between that and the rest of uh Society Nate silver thank you very much thank you Ezra n [Music]