Nate Silver on Kamala Harris’s Chances and the Mistakes of the ‘Indigo Blob’

Risk has been on my mind this year. For Democrats, the question of whether Joe Biden should drop out was really a question about risk – the risk of keeping him on the ticket versus the risk of the unknown. And it’s hard to think through those kinds of questions when you have incomplete information and so much you can’t predict. After all, few election models forecast that Kamala Harris would have the kind of momentum we’ve seen the last few weeks. Nate Silver’s new book, “On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything,” is all about thinking through risk, and the people who do it professionally, from gamblers to venture capitalists. (Silver is a poker player himself.) And so I wanted to talk to him about how that kind of thinking could help in our politics – and its limits. We discuss how Harris is performing in Silver’s election model; what he means when he talks about “the village” and “the river”; what Silver observed profiling Peter Thiel and Sam Bankman-Fried, two notorious risk-takers, for the book; the trade-offs of Harris’s decision to choose Tim Walz over Josh Shapiro as a running mate; and more. This episode contains strong language. Mentioned: The Contrarian by Max Chafkin “Nancy Pelosi on Joe Biden, Tim Walz and Donald Trump” by The Ezra Klein Show Book Recommendations: The Hour Between Dog and Wolf by John Coates The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes Addiction by Design by Natasha Dow Schüll Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Michelle Harris, Elias Isquith and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Ezra Klein?

  From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:22Ezra Klein?

  Nate Silver came to fame in American politics for election forecasting. He built models that were pretty damn successful at predicting American politics. 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, partially because he's been writing a book about risk. The 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 venture capital. 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.

• 1:07Ezra Klein?

  So I wanted to have him on 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, [email protected].

• 1:25Ezra Klein?

  Nate Silver, welcome to the show.

• 1:26Nate Silver?

  Thank you, Ezra. Happy to be here.

• 1:29Ezra Klein?

  So last I looked, your model is Harris winning the election at around 52%. It might be a little different today. But this has been an unusual election. So how much stock do you put in your model right now?

• 1:42Nate Silver?

  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 poll 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 Kamala Harris kind of stomped on Donald Trump's news cycle. So maybe that'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

• 2:23Nate Silver?

  kind of know what the baseline is here. 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. So can she win by three or four? Well, if you win by three or four, then you win the electoral college in most instances.

• 2:39Ezra Klein?

  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 a 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.

• 3:00Nate Silver?

  When a candidate's a hypothetical candidate, you have to treat that polling very carefully. People are, I think it's a weird thing to ask, you know, what if Gavin Newsom 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 minutes of Biden announcing he was going to step down. And so that suggested that maybe she did have more support in the party than she let on. And also, you know, I think the Biden people may have been in somewhat bad faith, maybe not consciously, but I'm not sure they weren't trying to undermine her because the obvious thing to

• 3:43Nate Silver?

  do would be to have this qualified, if not always that politically adept, much, much younger vice president take over for you when you're about to be 82. But they gave her the border, they gave her voting rights, which is kind of the one major domestic policy area where they got very little done. So I don't think they gave her a very good hand to play. But meanwhile, she's getting a lot of reps and giving speeches and building connections and, and played the game really well. I have a lot of respect for that.

• 4:07Ezra Klein?

  Well, the key thing I think is that Biden had a huge amount of influence over how the party viewed her in both directions. So there was a long period, I would say. When the quiet signals out of Biden world were, this isn't going well.

• 4:21Nate Silver?

  Yeah.

• 4:22Ezra Klein?

  And when there was pressure to push Biden off the ticket, the signals got louder. 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 so in both directions, Biden had and 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.

• 5:06Ezra Klein?

  The Democratic Party believed him. And by the way, 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 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. The party came together and chose a leader through endorsements from elected officials. Like, that's functionally what happened.

• 5:35Nate Silver?

  Yeah, it felt very British. It felt like the middle of trust kind of thing or something, right? Where, yeah, there's a loss of confidence. Those are fascinating dynamics to study.

• 5:45Nate Silver?

  But yeah, it's interesting to kind of have like the inside view versus like the outside view. And, you know, again, I come in a position where I'm more skeptical about the competence of people who work in politics. Even if I like the candidates, they endorse, right? I mean, I plan to plan to vote for Kamala 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.

• 6:10Nate Silver?

  Skeptical view, and I think even the rationales they state out loud are sometimes, maybe the rationales they believe or not, but I, 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 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.

• 6:34Ezra Klein?

  Well, let's talk about that skepticism. You, you and I have known each other a, a long time. We're, we're old school bloggers. And my read of you is that somewhat over the 2016 election, then specifically over the pandemic.

• 6:49Nate Silver?

  Yeah.

• 6:50Ezra Klein?

  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 your group, your coalition, your, your tribe. But there's been a, a kind of an alienation for you. Is that a fair read?

• 7:08Nate Silver?

  Yeah, I'd say it's kind of, number one, like the 2016 aftermath, I thought a lot of the kind of liberal and centrist news media kind of were in denial about their own role in the but her emails stuff, right? And then picked scapegoats for Trump's victory that were not the real reasons that he won. 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 an order of magnitude more importance than it probably objectively had. 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

• 7:51Nate Silver?

  the polls actually showed a pretty close race. I mean, we had Trump with a 30% chance. And it was kind of the conventional wisdom that assumed that he was dead in the water, right? So the ability to kind of conveniently. Lie a little bit or kind of manipulate facts and spin facts. I mean, that was part one. Part two was the pandemic, absolutely. And, you know, orange man bad, I think, was often the reason that people believed a lot of what they believed. Because in some ways, the move to shut down society in some ways kind of went against the values of traditional liberalism. There's a transfer of welfare from 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 millions and millions and millions of

• 8:36Nate Silver?

  schoolkids around the country. And essential workers are still putting themselves at risk that you'd 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. And then third, which is the Biden stuff.

• 8:56Ezra Klein?

  Well, it seemed to me it happened for you before the Biden stuff. And you were crosswise with a lot of liberals on Twitter. I came back to Twitter for three weeks during the height of Biden mania to try to be sort of in touch with that sentiment and mostly stay away from it. But Twitter is a place that groups that exist outside the online hothouse purify inside the online hothouse. 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, then inside Twitter. And my sense was that you ended up in a lot of fights with liberals who had

• 9:38Ezra Klein?

  a much lower risk tolerance than you did. And between that and what was, I believe, under our criticism of the 2016 model, which got the election much more right than most did, that you began to see habits of, you call it the village.

• 9:53Nate Silver?

  Yeah, and that's been a term that's been used by other, right, but the village is like basically media, politics, government, progressive.

• 9:59Ezra Klein?

  The establishment.

• 10:00Nate Silver?

  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.

• 10:07Ezra Klein?

  Maybe a different Republican White House.

• 10:08Nate Silver?

  Yeah.

• 10:09Ezra Klein?

  Right. George W. Bush was part of the village.

• 10:10Nate Silver?

  Absolutely.

• 10:11Ezra Klein?

  Maybe Donald Trump wasn't.

• 10:12Nate Silver?

  Absolutely.

• 10:13Ezra Klein?

  You've also called it sort of the Indigo Blob in different ways, that you began to see it as a set of aligned cognitive tendencies.

• 10:22Ezra Klein?

  That you disagreed with. What were they?

• 10:26Nate Silver?

  So one of them is the failure to do what I call decoupling. It's not my term, right? Decoupling is the act of separating an issue from the context. So the example I give in the book is that if you're able to say, "I abhor 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.

• 10:51Ezra Klein?

  I abhor their treatment of chickens. I have a strong, direct take on Chick-fil-A. I don't like how they treat chickens.

• 10:57Nate Silver?

  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? That tendency goes against kind of the tendency on the progressive left 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. It 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 Indigo Blob because it's a fusion of purple and blue. There's not a clear separation between the nonpartisan centrist media

• 11:40Nate Silver?

  and the left-leaning progressive media that's kind of rooting for Democrats. Different parts of the New York Times have both those functions in place. And, you know, as someone who's kind of more on the nonpartisan side, you know, even though, again, I would prefer to see Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, I think people are exploiting the trust that institutions have earned for political gain. And so I say that, and particularly in the kind of pre-Elon pandemic era Twitter days, I mean, the pylons were kind of insane 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 stomachs 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

• 12:26Nate Silver?

  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 afoul of these, this group of people.

• 12:36Ezra Klein?

  Let me ask you about the definition of decoupling there, because I think decoupling is interesting and I've found the examples you pick also interesting but contestable.

• 12:44Nate Silver?

  Yeah.

• 12:44Ezra Klein?

  So in the Chick-fil-A example, 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 question of decoupling art and artist, which I'm more on the side of decoupling, but also has, those both strike me as versions of activism. 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.

• 13:26Ezra Klein?

  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 in the pandemic was the same public health voices who were at one point saying you had to be so careful even outside oftentimes, were then pro-joining the George Floyd protests, which a lot of people found very upsetting. What people were looking to the public health world for right then was not their views on protests, but their views on distancing. And that felt like it coupled things in a way that undermined one to achieve another.

• 14:02Nate Silver?

  And they framed it in like, oh, this is good for public health reasons, right? If they had said, look, I'm a big believer in racial equity. There is a little bit of risk here, but outside, wear a mask and probably not a huge problem. I mean, that would be honest, right?

• 14:15Ezra Klein?

  Which ended up being true, too.

• 14:16Nate Silver?

  Yeah. But instead, it was like in the name of public health, right? But 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 how powerful the human mind is at confirmation bias and how powerful a drug political partisanship is and how smart people are maybe better rationalizers 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?

• 14:48Ezra Klein?

  My first book was on polarization. And what I understand he's doing in the book in part is making an interesting cut in society between people with different forms of both risk tolerance and thinking about risk. And you wrote something that caught my eye where you say, quote, "COVID made those risk preferences public, worn 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." Tell me about both sides of that, the way that it made risk tolerance visible, but then your view that since then, risk tolerance is becoming a deeper cleavage in society.

• 15:28Nate Silver?

  I mean, on the one hand, there are lots of signs that risk tolerance is going down, right? Among young people in particular, they're smoking less, drinking less, doing fewer drugs, having less sex, 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 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 betting and things like that. You have the CEO of OpenAI saying, yeah, this might destroy the universe, but it's worth it. It's a gamble to take,

• 16:09Nate Silver?

  right? You have FTX and all this stuff. And so the first trip I made after COVID was to a casino in Florida, which is every bit the shit 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 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 averse, right? I mean, I think the pandemic also revealed that there's like a lot of differences in introversion versus extroversion, right? I just can't deal with being cooped up inside all day, right? This doesn't work for me at all. But I think some

• 16:53Nate Silver?

  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 desire for human companionship and things like that, too.

• 17:27Ezra Klein?

  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.

• 17:35Nate Silver?

  Yeah.

• 17:35Ezra Klein?

  One of them is Peter Thiel.

• 17:37Nate Silver?

  Yeah.

• 17:37Ezra Klein?

  What were your impressions of Peter Thiel? What did you learn spending time with him?

• 17:41Nate Silver?

  The first impression is that he's a weird dude. I interviewed him by phone and the first question I asked him, he took half an hour to answer, so he's very thoughtful. And the question was, what I thought was kind of a softball question. It's like, if you ran the world 1,000 times or 10,000 times, how often do 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 ask, do you think you got lucky? Which in Thiel'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 Michael Moritz at Sequoia Capital 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 totaled the car. They could easily have been killed.

• 18:23Nate Silver?

  And instead, they actually hitchhiked to this meeting and save what was then called Colfinity. It was like the future of PayPal, right? And so this twist of fate, twist of good fortune, kind of helped Peter Thiel out, right? But most people understand, like-

• 18:37Ezra Klein?

  Wait, how did it help him out? I mean, he didn't die with his car.

• 18:39Nate Silver?

  Well, he didn't die. So he avoided, 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 Thiel are not a part of it, if there's a car going the wrong way on the other side of the road. So most people, when you ask that question, I asked 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 Thiel objected to the question. He said, you know, well, 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 preter the world by exactly this amount? And, but, you know, I think he kind of believes in like, in predestiny, a little bit.

• 19:23Ezra Klein?

  As a spiritual thing or as a matter of classical physics?

• 19:27Nate Silver?

  There's a good book by, I think Max Chafkin was the journalist, or Chafkin, I don't know how you say his last name, about Peter Thiel called The Contrarian, which is convincing that Thiel 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? I do think some of these people kind of pinch themselves and wonder if they have been one of the chosen ones in some ways, or been blessed in some ways, or maybe the nerdy version of I think they're living in a simulation of some kind.

• 20:01Ezra Klein?

  So I used to interview Thiel, 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 the ones who are heavily behind or out online, sort of pushing a kind of what I would think of as like VC ideology that leans now right and is important. Talking to him was always interesting because over the course of conversation, he would offer like 15 or 20 ideas. I would call them more thought experiments than analytical arguments. They were not empirically backed typically.

• 20:41Ezra Klein?

  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 Thiel, 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.

• 21:23Ezra Klein?

  Whereas like if you think about media, media is oriented towards being 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 entirety of like American institutions. But it's a very different way of thinking about risk. It's like you want big payouts, not a high betting average.

• 21:43Nate Silver?

  And that's because this is core to the VC mindset. The two things that you hear from every VC, one is the importance of the longer time horizons, you're making investments that might not pay off for 10 or 15 years. But number two, even more important, Is the asymmetric ability to bet on upside. 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 Sergey Brin 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 1X your money, but you can make 1,000X 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.

• 22:28Nate Silver?

  And I think there's a tendency for like, a certain type of smart person to provoke, to kind of troll a little bit. I mean, I think he's like that a little bit. And this is also partly the thing on Twitter, right? Like, I kind of use Twitter sometimes as like a sketchpad for kind of slightly irrelevant, half trollish ideas that might later turn into newsletter posts or something like that, or might be developed further and kind of probing around and kind of seeing what things land and what don't. Like, kind of like a stand-up 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 so, but we've already talked about Twitter. But yeah.

• 23:07Ezra Klein?

  Well, you can never talk about it enough, particularly with these people. The one thing I will say on that, and I think this is true for virtually everybody I know who has been on that platform for a long period of time, is they will tell you that I have this persona on Twitter.

• 23:23Nate Silver?

  Yeah.

• 23:23Ezra Klein?

  Right? Twitter's not real life. I mean, I use it to provoke. I'm having fun. I'm shitposting. I'm trolling. And people over time, if they spend a lot of time there, become more like who they are there. That is true for Mark Andreessen, another person who you profile and talk up to in the book. It's true for lots of people in politics I know. Ted Cruz has become his Twitter persona. It happened in Democratic politics, I think in 2020. Different campaigns became more like their Twitter incarnations than like, that person had been in politics before. 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.

• 24:08Ezra Klein?

  But actually, who you end up surrounding yourself, even online. You become them. It's very, very hard to maintain that kind of separation.

• 24:15Nate Silver?

  Yeah, I mean, clearly, you know, Elon Musk maintained a stance 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.

• 24:22Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, and I'm just having fun. I'm hosting funny things. He's his Twitter persona now. You spent some time with Sam Bankman Fried.

• 24:29Nate Silver?

  Yeah.

• 24:30Ezra Klein?

  Tell me what you learned from him or learned about him.

• 24:33Nate Silver?

  I think Sam is kind of insane, 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 is like fled the island. I think Sam is somebody who has to be owned by the river. 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?

• 25:18Nate Silver?

  FTX was trying to figure out how to get into sports betting legally and things like that. And so he is kind of everywhere. And of course, most of all, with the effective altruists. In the kind of the original time 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 cure malaria or something in Africa. But, you know, I think there are a couple of things. One is that I think people were overly impressed by SBF, partly because he was able to manipulate his self-image, right? I mean, he's like, obviously natural, like the not the most

• 26:00Nate Silver?

  conventionally normal guy, right? But like, he was very aware that 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 and 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 mind and devotion and he's a little weird, but you want variance, variance, variance. Sleeps on a beanbag, 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 SBF and he's kind of playing that character and then kind of forgets what his ever inner core values at whatever they were

• 26:42Nate Silver?

  might have been. But he is not a very competent manager of risk. 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 wound up losing by 15 points, right? Because to spend $8 million in a congressional primary is kind of insane if you're not like a New York media market or something. So the candidate would go to people's houses and be like, hey, I'm Carrick Flynn, I'm a candidate for the Oregon primary. And they're like, oh, I have your literature. And like bring out like a stack of like 20 flyers that SPF's super PAC had sent on behalf of Carrick Flynn and made him look like a weird freak backed by this mysterious crypto billionaire. So he had a tendency, and this is based on testimony

• 27:27Nate Silver?

  from both in the court case and an interview with Tara McCauley, I think is her name, who was his original co-founder at Alameda. He had the kind of often good initial instincts and like being a good estimator is an important skill in my world. 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 all these Oxford philosophers, he's effective altruists and he's on stage with Bill Clinton 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, there's a little contradiction

• 28:11Nate Silver?

  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 and P 500 index funds or things like that. So like, well, the market judgment is that SBF is a credible actor and how would I trust my own judgment over the market judgment a little bit? And there was too much deference toward that and too much actually group think about SBF because the problems were evident. The whole way. I mean, he told Tyler Cowen that if he could flip a coin to double the 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 repeatedly.

• 28:49Ezra Klein?

  But that was very important to the way people understood him. I remember seeing that Tyler Cowen interview and thinking, that's nuts. 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. I would call it like faux Bayesian reasoning.

• 29:21Nate Silver?

  Yeah.

• 29:21Ezra Klein?

  Where they're given some probability, but they have no reason to base 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. SBF was known for always talking in terms of expected value, which is very appealing to the kinds of people you're describing, maybe the kind of person even that you are. I worried about this a lot with Effective Altruists for a while, which is a group I have a lot more sympathy for than most people now have. But there can be 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? This worries me about models too. I'm curious how you think about it, because I often find that people

• 30:06Ezra Klein?

  talk in terms of probabilities, but people hear them in terms of certainties. That somehow talking in terms of probabilities makes people more willing to believe you without actually being skeptical or attaching a failure risk to you.

• 30:20Nate Silver?

  Yeah, I mean, there's two things here. One is just, there is like a kind of jargon. I mean, in some ways, I liken being from the river to like being from like the south of the United States or something, right? Where there are just a lot of shared cultural norms and unspoken discursive tendencies, right? Like last night, I took it to the Yankees game with my friend. I'm like, you know, the game's 70% to be rained out. Let's just get a drink instead. And it was rained out. And like, where's 70% come from? I didn't look at it, you know, just looking at the weather seems kind of bad. It wasn't some precise model. I think sometimes things like that should be kind of seen in like... Comic Sans font, right?

• 30:52Ezra Klein?

  Uh huh.

• 30:53Nate Silver?

  Look, probability by definition is a number between zero and 100, right? So that's kind of in Comic Sans, 70%. But like the fact that I'd say that and then, ah, it's probably going to arrange, get a drink, say 70%, it's just the way we communicate, I think, in the river. 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 an 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, what's a Kamala Harris coconut tree quote? Like, a model does not fall from a coconut tree, right?

• 31:27Ezra Klein?

  It exists in the context of all that came before it.

• 31:29Nate Silver?

  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 that's a lesson that people, I think, have a lot of trouble learning.

• 31:46Ezra Klein?

  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, J.D. Vance now seems to have about as much negative value as we've seen from a recent vice president. I'm not saying Peter Teal is the only reason Vance got chosen for the ticket, but he is one of the key reasons Vance is in politics. Before now, you would have said J.D. Vance was Peter Teal's political bet that paid off best.

• 32:12Nate Silver?

  Yeah.

• 32:13Ezra Klein?

  And now it might be his political bet that pays off worst. You mentioned Bankman Freed's political 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? As somebody who straddles those worlds, what is not in their models?

• 32:40Nate Silver?

  So 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 can be epistemic trespassers, but they are 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 initial 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. And so you're surrounded by people that are inclined to agree with you, right? And you kind of see enemies on the other side.

• 33:23Nate Silver?

  And also, I think Peter was interesting too, in that 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, people like Peter Thiel thought that 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 X, Y, or Z. But no, I mean, these guys often are pretty dumb about politics, right? And like, you know, it's the same, the guys in the hedge fund poker game that I play sometimes, the guys are like, I think Gavin Newsom is going to replace Joe Biden on the ticket.

• 34:08Nate Silver?

  And it's like, you actually were kind of right about part of this, but like, why Gavin Newsom? What is the evatuation with Gavin Newsom?

• 34:13Ezra Klein?

  I heard so many versions of that. I thought it was so crazy.

• 34:16Nate Silver?

  Yeah.

• 34:17Ezra Klein?

  But, you know, it's funny, I would say what they've often missed in Thiel's particular on this is how human beings react to different human beings. So JD Vance, for instance, wildly underperforms in the Ohio Senate race. And Vance's problem right now, he's pushed onto the ticket by, as best we can tell, people like Steve Bannon, Don Trump Jr., Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk. So the very online, very reactionary pill, the 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.

• 35:00Ezra Klein?

  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 these kinds of folks. When they look at the world too much in numbers, the intangibles begin to dissolve for them.

• 35:15Nate Silver?

  Although I think some of these tangibles aren't so intangible, right? Where, yeah, you can look at J.D. 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 years, for example. You know, but the V C guys are like, oh, J.D. Vance is kind of one of us, right? And he probably is like smarter than the average V P or something. But like, that appeal has been demonstrated not to work very, I mean, you saw it with, with Blake Masters, for example, right? It works every now and then. I guess, you know, Rick Scott had a background, and I don't know what exactly, but like-

• 35:51Ezra Klein?

  Medicare fraud.

• 35:52Nate Silver?

  Okay, yeah.

• 35:53Ezra Klein?

  The guy, the guy ran a health company that was convicted of the single largest Medicare fraud at that point in history.

• 36:01Nate Silver?

  What I tell my V C friends is if you have a rich guy, just have him buy a basketball team or something, right? He's not going to come across very well to the average voter. And I think they don't, they don't understand that. But look, in some ways, I mean, these V Cs are obviously incredibly deeply flawed people, right? And so like, why do they succeed despite that? 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 enough of 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 vainglorious assholes, half of them, right? They're interesting people, too. I mean, they're very interesting.

• 36:45Nate Silver?

  I think, and they, I'm happy that the book is able to present, I think, a complete journalistic portrait 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 making money.

• 37:24Ezra Klein?

  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 head-to-head polls. More than that, there's 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 meme-able 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. So what was missed here? What wasn't in the Harris model that should have been?

• 37:59Nate Silver?

  Yeah, maybe you really can meme your way to victory. 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 are ready for like a vibe shift, right? I think people in politics 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 Republicans can say about Kamala Harris is, oh, she laughs a lot. Like, maybe it kind of suits the mood a little bit after so many years of doom and gloom. So maybe it was just spontaneous and lucky. I mean, it's also the case, maybe when Kamala Harris was a candidate for the nomination

• 38:43Nate Silver?

  in 2019, I had these tiers and the top tier was Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. And the line was always, okay, well, I got one of those right and one of those about as wrong as possible. But she was seen as this rising, up-and-coming political talent and maybe the combination of kind of misaligned strategy in 2019 and then not being marketed well by the White House. And we debated before what the reasons for that are. Maybe, maybe that was the underperformance and the rising star that people thought she was is kind of the real Kamala Harris after all.

• 39:15Ezra Klein?

  So Harris ended up choosing Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, as her VP pick. You made a case that it should have been Josh Shapiro. Tell me why.

• 39:23Nate Silver?

  Pennsylvania, number one, there's 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 a reasonably big upgrade. And the fact that he has demonstrated his popularity with this very diverse state, that's kind of a microcosm of the US as a whole, right, in Pennsylvania, you have the Northeast, you have the Midwest, and even you have a little bit of the South creeping

• 40:08Nate Silver?

  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, and you know, that's pretty powerful information to work with. I happen to think that Tim Walz is an above average pick, you know, better than most, better than JD Vance, not a particularly high bar, but better than a lot of the recent picks, I mean, you know, I think he's kind of memeable as America's goofy dad kind of way, and he had a pretty moderate track record in Congress, and again, my premise is that generally speaking, moderation wins, a lot of people disagree with that,

• 40:50Nate Silver?

  but I think the empirical evidence is strong there, more progressive governance, of course, in Minnesota, but I think it was a somewhat risk a risk decision. Now, if you read-

• 40:59Ezra Klein?

  Why do you say that? I found this argument you've made very weird. So, I think it's a very good chance, I always told people on the VP pick, my head says Shapiro and my heart says Walz.

• 41:07Nate Silver?

  Yeah.

• 41:08Ezra Klein?

  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 is some intangible charisma to Walls that has made him, developed him overnight,

• 41:50Ezra Klein?

  this huge online fan base, that the cautious candidate, the one listening to the consultants, the one reading Nate Silver polls, that candidate goes for Shapiro. Walls is something else. Why did you say that you understood Walls as risk averse?

• 42:02Nate Silver?

  Because I think they were worried about news cycles where the left got mad and/or the Gaza issue was elevated and/or you had protests at the convention in Chicago in a couple of weeks. I think they were worried about that and maybe kind of undermining what is clearly good vibes right now and maybe overrating. I mean, maybe I just think it's a lower expected value decision, right? I mean, what gives Kamala Harris a higher chance of winning the Electoral College in November?

• 42:27Ezra Klein?

  I think one of the questions I've been reflecting on, because I often think about where do I disagree with writers I otherwise agree with? And I think I'm typically pretty aligned with you on a bunch of things, or, you know, Iglesias or John Chait or some others. But a lot of you have really gotten in to a view that I think takes the median voter theorem almost too seriously, that it's like as if politics is unidimensional and how close you are to ideologically the median voter is what decides elections, which 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

• 43:12Ezra Klein?

  media, for what is happening on cable news. And you could often sort of back out explanations here and there, but I, for instance, think the sort of 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, one of the questions Shapiro and Walz 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?

• 43:51Nate Silver?

  Yeah, that's interesting.

• 43:52Ezra Klein?

  Which is like a kind of like not necessarily the the visual you want. Maybe it is, 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 feeling of enthusiasm, like, how do you think about that as somebody who builds models and handicaps politics?

• 44:17Nate Silver?

  I mean, look, so if you're literally building a congressional model, there's a model that forecasts about 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 Manchin, then you tend to overperform in your congressional race, right? Now, that's but also one of eight factors. And even when you have all eight factors, there's still quite a bit of uncertainty in the race. So to me, it's like, this is something where for the use of looking at larger data sets, you can come up with counter examples of John Tester is pretty progressive, actually,

• 44:58Nate Silver?

  and somehow manages to get reelected in Montana with this kind of maybe Tim Walz like folksy personality or something.

• 45:05Ezra Klein?

  Sherrod Brown, sort of similar to that.

• 45:07Nate Silver?

  Also pretty progressive, but like, if you take all the data from every congressional race, then then it becomes clear in the aggregate, right? And I'd also say like, if we could get progressives.

• 45:19Nate Silver?

  To the point where they said, yes, the median voter theorem is mostly true, but sometimes outweighed by other factors. Instead of thinking, oh, you win elections by winning the base, right? I mean, that might have kind of narrowly been true.

• 45:32Ezra Klein?

  Wait, you're turning this around on progressives because I'm asking it of you, right? I agree that progressives should take the median voter theorem more seriously, but I am 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 I've seen people do and say, look, he is more like the median voter on certain things like immigration, et cetera, or at least he was perceived as more moderate than Hillary Clinton. And like, that's why he won. I think that is an undertold 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.

• 46:15Ezra Klein?

  Like, there's a reason that Trump had Dana White from the UFC and Hulk Hogan on his night of 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 is the election should be about Donald Trump. Donald Trump's view is 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. And so I guess this is what I'm getting at, that one thing that I worry about in some of this thinking among people I like is that attention is important. Candidates have different theories of it, but I don't know that we know how to think about it as rigorously as I wish we did.

• 46:59Nate Silver?

  Look, I agree 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 sprint and not a marathon, then maybe you never reach the long run. It seems possible, like this is a, if I had to argue against myself and say why Walls is a good pick, right? I'd say, usually I'd say, don't worry about momentum over the next two weeks 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 memified 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 kind of explicitly partisan.

• 47:43Nate Silver?

  Like, they may be able to sprint. To a narrow electoral college victory without having this skeptical news cycle. So that'd be an argument for Walz, I think.

• 47:52Ezra Klein?

  The one of the reasons on my mind is not actually Walz. And as I said before, I do, because I do want to say this, I'm not sure who she should have picked as VP. Like, I actually have very conflicted views on this, although I really, really enjoy Tim Walz and really enjoyed interviewing him 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 staffed by many of the same people, particularly in the first two weeks. And yet, the campaign's tenor has completely changed. 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?

• 48:37Speaker 02

  And I gotta tell you, I can't wait to debate the guy.

• 48:42Ezra Klein?

  That Tim Walz actually made a JD Vance couch joke in his introducing himself as her vice presidential pick's speech.

• 48:53Speaker 02

  That is, if he's willing to get off the couch and show up.

• 49:02Ezra Klein?

  Let's put it this way, that is not something the Joe Biden campaign was going to do. They want people to talk about them. They want to court 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 had two weeks ago.

• 49:27Nate Silver?

  This is why, this is why we rely on you for like, how much these people overlap. Like, that's not something I really.

• 49:32Ezra Klein?

  They overlap tremendously.

• 49:33Nate Silver?

  Yeah.

• 49:34Ezra Klein?

  I mean, it's not the exact same people. McDonnell 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 a month ago.

• 49:44Nate Silver?

  It is interesting that Joe Biden, based on the polling. We're probably even better off in an election with low turnout, right? The one thing that might have saved him is if you get that special election midterm election, lower turnout, where people aren't very happy about it, but they go to the polls and vote for Biden and the Trump people don't bother to show up. Because unlike in the past, the marginal voters have been more likely to vote for Trump 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, those are also some of the more marginal voters. And so now, all of a sudden, she probably doesn't mind as much higher turnout, which

• 50:28Nate Silver?

  is 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 where you want turnout to be on November 5th.

• 50:39Ezra Klein?

  Tim Alberta in The Atlantic had a great piece on the way that Trump campaign was thinking about the race that came out right around the time of the debate or right after the debate. And they felt they had Nevada, North Carolina, and Georgia completely locked up and that this was really like a race in three, maybe four states. My understanding is Harris and her team think they have reexpanded the map. 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?

• 51:18Nate Silver?

  I think that's right. Because again, look at the voters that Biden was falling off with. Nevada, people don't remember, they think of it as kind of libertarian, old miners, right? No, Nevada is extremely diverse and it's like working class voters of color. Big falloff constituency for Biden. Georgia, you have tons of young professionals and tons of great colleges and universities and of course, tons of black voters, the same groups that he's declining from a little bit. North Carolina has been interestingly kind of close in the polls. Arizona is the one that doesn't seem to have moved quite as much, there was one poll yesterday with Harris I had there. But that's right. I mean, I think the map has expanded and it's obviously plausible again now that she would win Georgia, especially with the Brian Kemp stuff not helping Trump one bit. I mean, at the moment...

• 52:02Nate Silver?

  I was playing in a poker tournament, very on brand, right? At a moment when Trump gets shot and has the iconic photo, which, you know, I'm not a Trump fan, but you kind of have to admire that, I think, a little bit. I think a lot of people seem like, oh, he's just gonna win the election, right? Just, I mean, with Biden already and, and he's not gonna lose after this. They try to shoot him and he has this great photo opportunity, right? It seems like he's at a high watermark and then he picks J D Vance. And I think got a little arrogant. And because his initial instinct apparently was not to pick necessarily J D Vance. 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 gonna go home and cash out my winnings. Maybe I'll have a nice little whiskey at the bar or something, right?

• 52:45Nate Silver?

  And this, this is gonna be, I'll text my friends about how well my session ran. And 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.

• 52:52Ezra Klein?

  What is tilt?

• 52:53Nate Silver?

  Tilt is playing emotionally, particularly in poker or other forms of gambling. It's often sparked 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 winner's tilt too, where maybe this is what Trump had in picking J D 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. And he's lost a popular vote twice.

• 53:26Ezra Klein?

  Trump feels very on tilt to me. I mean, when you think about him, for Donald Trump, he had been pretty on his message. 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 Burgum. He seemed to be enjoying this idea that 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. 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 fall in the polls.

• 54:12Ezra Klein?

  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 Kamala Harris was black, the Trump who is just trying out attack lines, trying to find something that will work, no matter what 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.

• 54:40Nate Silver?

  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 a personality cult. I mean, they can be. There was maybe a personality cult around Obama or Bill Clinton or things like that, right? But there wasn't one around Joe Biden. He was kind of always a 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 in a way the GOP is not, and they extrapolated from their views to how Democrats would behave and underestimated the smart decision that the party was capable of making.

• 55:25Ezra Klein?

  I talked to Republicans about this, about why they weren't more prepared. 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 knee to Donald Trump and is now years and years into not being able to convince Donald Trump of functionally anything, it might shift your sense of how people in power, particularly at 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 praise because, and I think you see this in how Republicans were thinking, leaders just often don't do this. They, the kind of personality that gets you to that point is not the kind of

• 56:07Ezra Klein?

  personality that leaves power gracefully. It's why when people are talking about dictators, there's endlessly this talk of how to create golden parachutes 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 feeling like you're the main character of global life, right, but he become the American president, you sort of were the main character of global life for a while. That does something to you. Those people don't give it up easily.

• 56:35Nate Silver?

  No, and if you look at the history of before there was whichever amendment it was, 20 something amendment.

• 56:39Ezra Klein?

  22nd.

• 56:40Nate Silver?

  That prevents you from running for more than two terms. It was pretty routine for candidates to tease the, and Woodrow Wilson had a stroke and wanted a third term. Harry Truman had like a 32% approval rating and wanted a, a third term, second full term. Old men are often pretty stubborn and, and 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. Maybe we should go back to giving a larger role to super delegates, for example.

• 57:12Ezra Klein?

  I want to end on a part of your book I found really interesting, which is about the physical experience of risk in gambling, but in other things. 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 it on this podcast or times when a question is physically uncomfortable for me to, to ask another person. Tell me a bit about how you think about this relationship

• 57:50Ezra Klein?

  between the body and the ability to act under pressure, to make intuitive decisions in moments of very high stress.

• 58:00Nate Silver?

  So, you know, human beings have tens of thousands of years of evolutionary pressure, which is inclined to respond in a heightened way to moments that are high stakes, that are high stress moments. 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 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 be like LOL, almost got shot, haha. 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.

• 58:43Nate Silver?

  It's like, oh my God, it could've gone really, really badly, right? Public speaking also triggers this for people because objectively, it's a pretty high stakes thing. 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 suppress 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, that has discernible effects. 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. 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 ballfers, or hockey goalies, whatever else.

• 59:26Nate Silver?

  Learning to master that and relish that is a very, is a very powerful skill. Cause you are experiencing physical stress whether you want to or not.

• 59:34Ezra Klein?

  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?

• 59:43Nate Silver?

  I think it's actually quite learnable. It's a little bit like 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? And kind of maybe like tone it up or tone it down a little bit. So 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 anyone's losing their shit, if you can do your basic ABC blocking and tackling, then you're ahead of 95% of people.

• 1:00:26Nate Silver?

  And keeping bandwidth free for dealing with emergency situations like that will take you very far.

• 1:00:30Ezra Klein?

  It's funny because that feels to me like a very important question that is hard to test in politics. People have to make Profound decisions under incredibly high stress. And we have simulacrum of it, right? The debate, in a way, is a simulacrum of that. Very, very high stress. Speeches on teleprompters are not very good analogies for that. But this question of how good is a person at that moment? How do you evaluate that?

• 1:00:54Nate Silver?

  I mean, Trump, after getting shot, kind of performed very well. And I think, again, the Harris moment of leaping right into action to secure the nomination also has to be seen as very good performance under stress, right? So, and Biden's failure under stress. I mean, he went to 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 seizing the nomination in 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.

• 1:01:27Ezra Klein?

  I was just reading Nancy Pelosi's new book before I was reading yours, because I just had her on the show. And she talks about how, 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 is you have to act fast, because every moment you don't act, your options are diminishing. And I 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 in public to take the pressure of that in ways very few people were.

• 1:02:12Ezra Klein?

  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 this sort of intuitive capability to know when to move. And 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.

• 1:02:37Nate Silver?

  Yeah, so is gut instinct overrated or underrated? Well, it depends on how much experience you have, right? Poker players have, because 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, the best poker players can have uncannily 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 in running this book, more live poker than I had in the past, and like, you develop a sixth sense. Not all the time. It helps if you're well rested. But you develop a sixth sense for whether someone has like a strong hand or something like they're glowing green or something almost sometimes. And you can test it because you can say, I know

• 1:03:22Nate Silver?

  that I'm supposed to fold this hand here. It's a little bit too weak 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'd think, right? More often than you need to be to make that call correct, based on the odds 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 how the coalition is moving, I mean, that's something where intuition probably plays a 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, maybe they could have run out the clock, potentially. And, you know,

• 1:03:56Ezra Klein?

  Oh, they a hundred percent 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 telling me, this is done. It's a fait accompli. 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's out. Nancy Pelosi goes on Morning Joe two days later and says, we're really looking forward to him making a decision. And I asked her about it. And I said, what was happening? I mean, he just sent that letter. And she said, Yeah, but that was just a letter. Like she said, that didn't sound like him to me. I'm like, Oh, you read a bluff.

• 1:04:31Nate Silver?

  So I think Nancy Pelosi might be pretty good at poker.

• 1:04:34Ezra Klein?

  Good place to end. Always a fun question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:04:38Nate Silver?

  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 became a derivatives trader, I think for Deutsche Bank in New York, and found out that the traders that he studied were really weird. 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, test the testosterone of like an options trader, or a guy who works at a hedge fund, and see how it varies from day to day and correlates with performance. 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.

• 1:05:22Nate Silver?

  Number two, in a totally different direction, The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. 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 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 by Natasha Scholl. And Natasha is an MIU anthropologist who studied Las Vegas as, like, her thesis, basically. She did, like, a lot of reporting 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 society.

• 1:06:11Ezra Klein?

  Nate Silver, thank you very much.

• 1:06:12Nate Silver?

  Thank you, Ezra.

• 1:06:21Ezra Klein?

  This episode of the Ezra Klein Show was produced by Roland Hoop. Fact checking by Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Michelle Harris, Elias Isquith, and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Christina Sami-Louski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser, and special thanks to Sonia Herrero.