The Hidden Factors Influencing The Election - Nate Silver

Nate Silver is a statistician, writer of Silver Bulletin, and Founder of FiveThirtyEight. No one truly knows who will win an election, but if anyone does, it's Nate. He is the man behind the most accurate, sophisticated polling data assessments in America and has an insight into modern culture like no one else. Expect to learn why this election cycle differs from other ones, just how complex election prediction models are, what the most important topics of this election are, whether there is ever a chance for a 3rd party option to become president, the role of the media in determining who wins and much more… - 00:00 How Nate Mastered Sports Betting 04:01 Models Used to Predict Elections 08:03 The Way People Vote Today 11:02 Why Kamala Harris Isn’t Appearing on Podcasts 14:54 Do Debates Change People’s Minds? 17:22 The Impact of Running Mates 23:53 Have the Assassination Attempts Impacted the Election? 30:16 The States That Decide the Election 32:50 Likelihood of a Third-Party Candidate Being Elected 37:39 The Power of ‘the Village & the River’ 44:48 Nate’s Experiences With Sam Bankman-Fried 49:24 Why Crypto Investors Are More Likely to Be Scammed 56:29 Psychology of High Risk-Takers 1:01:54 The Price You Pay to Be Nate Silver 1:04:30 Nate’s Core Values 1:10:13 Where to Find Nate - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  What is this period of the cycle like for you?

• 0:04Speaker 01

  It's pretty insane. I mean, I liken it to if you're like running some lobster stand in Maine, then in August, you're going to be really busy day and night. That's kind of your, your busy season. I mean, I try to stay relatively grounded. It's not my first rodeo covering an election campaign, not my first involving Trump.

• 0:21Chris Williamson?

  Oh, I meant, I meant Shohei Ohtani's current run for the Dodgers. We can talk politics if you like.

• 0:26Speaker 01

  Okay, perfect. No, all this crazy stuff's happening in 50 50 and like, but no, I try to, I try to watch a little baseball and football and basketball and all that stuff and, and stay sane. But definitely, I mean, the compression of events we had in the summer with Biden dropping out and then the assassination attempt and then the conventions will maybe never be replicated in American political history again.

• 0:49Chris Williamson?

  I was, how much of an outlier is that, do you think, to have the, the speed of news and incidents occurring so quickly?

• 0:55Speaker 01

  I mean, let's keep in mind that like two, a lot of elections are crazy now, right? We had the recount in 2000. We had the pandemic in 2020. But yeah, nothing, nothing quite like that, I don't think.

• 1:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. I heard that you've been limited on sports betting websites, but maybe it's something in the teens, 15 different sports betting pages have stopped you from playing the game?

• 1:15Speaker 01

  More like five or six. Yeah, there are like, there are nine or 10 legal ones in New York, and I only have a clean bill of health at like two and a half of them.

• 1:22Chris Williamson?

  How do, I'm a, a Brit, which means that sort of sports betting is in our blood. There's the high street sports betting shops that you can go into and bet on horse races and everything else. How do American sports betting organizations ensure that the house doesn't lose?

• 1:39Speaker 01

  Well, that's by, they do it by banning players who are perceived winning players or not banning, they'll, they'll say they're limiting players, right? So at DraftKings, if I want to bet on a random NBA game, it might only let me bet. Eighty bucks or something, whereas my friend who's considered a degener, degenerate gambler, or the term whale is sometimes used, he's allowed to bet $25,000 in a random NBA game. And the reason is because DraftKings thinks I have the hallmarks of a winning better. Whether they're actually winning better or not, they don't care, they don't want to take that risk. So if, for example, that you bet early, the lines are easier to be early than late when everybody has weighed in. If you're giving big action on games that aren't very

• 2:22Speaker 01

  popular, right? I don't know if you're an NBA fan, but like, if you're betting like the Charlotte Hornets or Washington Wizards game, then that's a sign that you're, you're trying to actually win and you're a sharp and not a degener.

• 2:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  And so different sites have different levels of tolerance for this. The old model used to be that, hey, let's say I'm a reasonably sharp better. When I bet and you're the house, I'm giving you information, right? It's saying, okay, I have this model and it's trustworthy and therefore, yeah, you have to give me a winning bet, but now you can update your line and therefore you'll be sharper for when the recreational money pours in. But they've now moved away from that model toward saying they don't want action from perceived winners.

• 3:05Chris Williamson?

  It's the most stark reminder, I think, that betting is not a fair game that's supposed to give you a crack at winning money. It's rigged, as rigged as it can be. And in the games where it isn't rigged and there isn't a house edge, where education or insight or whatever can actually beat, in some ways, the odds need to be stacked, the scale needs to be pressed in one form or another again.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, you know, rigged is a certain term of art. You know, it's not rigged in the sense that if you go and play in Las Vegas, the games are scrupulously fair, according to the rules of the state of Nevada. They just have a negative expected value for you. When you play slots, every dollar you put in a slot machine, the house keeps about 10 cents out of that. And if you're pressing a slot machine hundreds of times in an hour, then that really starts to add up.

• 3:58Chris Williamson?

  Spoken like a true statistician. So you try to predict what's going to happen in elections. Just how complex are the models that you use behind the scenes now?

• 4:10Speaker 01

  They are somewhat complex, not so much because they account for all these different factors. I mean, it's basically just the polls and the economy. But because the way that we vote in this country is unusual. We have an electoral college. So you have 50 states voting and figuring out how they all tie in together is challenging, right? So certain maps make more sense. If Michigan votes for Trump, like in 2016, then Wisconsin probably comes along with it. They're similar states. Arizona and Nevada might vote together, things like that. If Texas were to turn blue, another southern state like Florida or Arizona might also. So figuring out all the correlations in the model is actually somewhat complicated.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  And there's things like when there's a shift in the polls, how aggressive should a polling average be about adjusting for it? So it's not, there is real art and science in this, I guess I'd say.

• 5:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Is it, what is it behind the scenes? Is it just one huge fuck off Excel spreadsheet? Like, what is it?

• 5:10Speaker 01

  It's not Excel. It's in a programming language called Stata or Stata. People say it differently. Yeah, it's about 5,000 words of code.

• 5:18Chris Williamson?

  Okay, interesting. Okay, so what is different about this election compared to past elections? And how has the model had to change to account for that?

• 5:29Speaker 01

  So in some ways, it's not that different. This is the third election in a row with Donald Trump as a Republican nominee. So far, he's one for one, or one for two, rather, one and one, one win, one loss. You know, so from my naive perspective, you might say, okay, well, the odds are probably about 50/50 again. And, and that's probably what we're getting. I mean, so it's not that the model changes so much as that the conditions change. One thing that we saw in 2016, obviously, is that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote that year and lost the electoral college. That is probably a persistent problem for Democrats in a world where they turn out the college educated coalition in California, New York, places like that, places where they wind up having a lot of wasted votes. So the GOP,

• 6:13Speaker 01

  more populist coalition is more efficient. So, so therefore, you bet on Harris to win the popular vote, as Democrats usually do, but the electoral college is about 50/50.

• 6:22Chris Williamson?

  Wow. It's kind of a running meme that nobody knows anyone who's answered a political poll and yet the entire country seems to sort of hang on this kind of data. What's going on here? Do you need to control for the kind of people who pick up unknown phone calls? Do you decide on who to sample? Like, do people sign up to get polled? Do they pick up less calls than 10 years ago? This whole sort of concept seems quite archaic, given to how much weight we give to it, which leads me to believe that we either shouldn't be giving so weight to it, or there is a large misunderstanding about how it actually works.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  No, I don't think you're misunderstanding. I mean, so, look, in principle, if you poll 800 people, because of the magic of statistics, that can give you, with a margin of error, a good indication of how the whole country would vote. The problem that what you're getting, as you're getting at, is that a lot of people are not equally likely to respond to phone calls. If you just call people on landlines, like, you'll get a lot of old white women picking up and not many other people. Women tend to answer the phone from strangers more than men do, and older people more than younger people. So, most calls now are either done on the internet, or, excuse me, are done to cellphones, or pollsters have gone to various online methods. But it's harder. In the golden age, you could, like, literally ring someone's phone up, be like, "I'm from the Gallup agency. I'd

• 7:39Speaker 01

  like to survey the next, the woman with the next birthday in the household." And actually, people would answer calls from strangers. I'm like, "This is not really a thing anymore." And so, yeah, the people that respond to polls are weird. And, well, it's kind of a weird thing to do. And you have to make some sausage out of that minced meat, basically.

• 8:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I understand. What is the truth behind most people are just protest voting now? That it's not a vote for love of one party, it's a vote of hate for the other?

• 8:13Speaker 01

  I think there's a lot of that. There's a lot of negative polarization. You know, politics in the United States operates a lot on grievance and grievance goes a long way. Yeah, you're not, you're not telling people they're going to fulfill their wildest dreams so much as saying the other guy is too scary and so it's a moral imperative.

• 8:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the other guy is going to fulfill your nightmares, not that we're going to get the solution.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 8:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, it's very, what's the implication for that around messaging, do you think? Like, what's downstream from that?

• 8:43Speaker 01

  I mean, the parties are a little bit different in the sense that like Democrats, I think, tend to, if you look at the big five personality traits, right, they're sorted a little bit by party. So Democrats are higher on neuroticism or negative emotionality. And so a lot of themes in their commercials are trying to touch on people's anxieties and say, hey, remember what happened in 2016 where you thought we were going to win and Hillary lost. Whereas the GOP is more, is low on openness to experience. So they might touch more on anti-immigration or hey, change is scary. You can't trust Kamala Harris. And so, so both campaign messages fit the party's respective personality types.

• 9:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What are the most important battleground topics this year? Which issues do different cohorts of voters care about the most?

• 9:33Speaker 01

  For Democrats, the single best issue is probably abortion. You know, a lot of moderate voters, especially younger women, did not approve the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade a couple of years ago. And for the GOP, immigration is almost undoubtedly their best issue. They aren't necessarily always talking about it in the most elevated ways necessarily, but people are concerned about, about the influx of immigrants at the United States.

• 10:03Chris Williamson?

  So, you know, we're talking about you, a very sophisticated, highly credentialed, very smart statistician, but largely just some bloke, right, that's sort of out there in the ether, doing this thing and writing a great Substack and also a fantastic new book. How much or how sophisticated are the parties individually with can they do what you do or are they downstream from you they've subscribed to silver bulletin as well and just like hoping for the best?

• 10:33Speaker 01

  No, look, I'm sure they're doing their own modeling. Um, you know, in sports, you have this kind of Moneyball story of where, um, where for a long time in sports, you had outside authors using statistics and things like that. Um, and the insiders were very vibes and feel driven. Um, in politics is kind of the opposite. The, the media is very vibes driven and the campaigns are more data driven. So I'm, I'm sure they have versions of what I do that are, are probably pretty similar.

• 11:02Chris Williamson?

  So you mentioned there about, uh, Gen Z, uh, young women, especially Trump is on every podcast, every long form interview that he can. Kamala Harris isn't doing any of this despite being sort of the queen of Gen Z. Why? What do you think's going on there?

• 11:21Speaker 01

  I think because she's getting bad advice. Um, so she inherited a lot of the people that, um, that ran the Biden campaign. Uh, and Biden, because of his age and inconsistent, shall we say, performance with improper public speaking, they became, I think paranoid about the press. And I think, I think it's stubborn and stupid. Um, you know, look, because of the electoral college, she has to win a majority of the popular vote, right? She's got to get to 51, Trump's got to get to 49. And, and if you're at 49 now and you want to get to 51, then every, every marginal vote matters.

• 11:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think I'd seen you tweet that, uh, basically the Democratic campaign has PTSD from the Biden performance. And, uh, that's being rolled forward into a candidate that's very different.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, we all get into our filter bubbles and, and you have a lot of Democrats who believe that, um, oh, the mainstream media is biased against, against Democrats. And I just do not, I work in the mainstream media. I just do not believe that's objectively accurate. Right? I think, I think they have different conflicting incentives and the media makes different types of mistakes. But like, you know, if you're a Democrat who thinks the New York Times is biased against Democrats, then I'm not sure what to tell you.

• 12:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's very interesting. You know, it looks like it is an actual coin toss at the moment going into November. I've heard you say it is sort of 50 50. I imagine the least exciting of all of the sort of statistical predictions that you could make. But I wonder how much of an influence mainstream media has. And given that we're talking about things being a toss up when it comes to November, but that there is such a bias in mainstream media toward the democratic talking points. How different would things be if we had an equally represented mainstream media?

• 13:19Speaker 01

  It's a great question and a complicated question. And by the way, I'd be happy if it's 50 50. If it's 50 50, then then the stakes are much lower for me personally. I guess I'm a question.

• 13:28Chris Williamson?

  Because you've got equal chance of right. I understand.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  You're gonna be wrong half the time either. So it's a great question. For one thing, like, I think the mainstream media, the New York Times, the NBC, ABC, CBS News is on balance center left, right? That it does frame certain issues, especially on culture war stuff toward a more progressive worldview, you know, toward a more pro democratic worldview. You do, however, have some powerful counterweights. You have Fox News. You have Twitter, where there's still a lot of liberal journalists, including me on Twitter, but but the discourse has moved to the right. You know, you have things like TikTok potentially and Facebook. You know, and also you have a lot of Republicans who are Republicans because they don't trust

• 14:16Speaker 01

  the mainstream media, because they lost trust during COVID or during the financial crisis or whatever else. So yeah, I'm not sure it helps Democrats to have to have the media. I mean, I don't think it's in their pocket either. I think it's complicated. But I'm not sure it's so, you know, people also are skeptical, right? There's this political operatives think that, oh, you just say something and people believe it. And like, belief is a complicated thing. You know, most of the time, people are reluctant to change their mind and pretty stubborn. And so it's like, not just because they hear something or read something the first time, do they necessarily change their mind?

• 14:54Chris Williamson?

  Talking about that, what is the legitimacy of saying that debates change people's minds? It seems to me that they don't impact the polls immediately as much as people might think, and it generates a lot of headlines, but then it doesn't move stuff. But then, does it actually eventually? So what's the truth when it comes to that?

• 15:12Speaker 01

  Um, so, um, we're in an environment where moving the polls by a single point can matter a lot, right? Kamala Harris gained about a point after that first debate, or actually the second debate, her first, second total, a point. I mean, the last two elections came down to a point, basically. And so, yeah, we're talking about like, trying to find those 3% of voters who are still undecided, or the 3% who are considering both candidates. Um, it's so efficient that like, it's going to come down probably to a few tens of thousands of votes in the, in the, in the same states over and over again. So can you find just that, you know? And this gets back to the question of like, you know, why wouldn't you want to do more media if you're Harris? Because you, it's, it's really a matter of, of winning the vote on the, on the margin.

• 15:58Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, but still, just to sort of linger on that point, why aren't debates more persuasive? Apart from when you have a sort of sepuku self-immolation that occurs cognitively?

• 16:13Speaker 01

  Um, because people have thought about this question for a long time. I mean, look, um, in England, they have these so-called snap elections that can start and finish in a period of five weeks. Um, in the US, our elections last for basically two years. Uh, and Trump has been running for president, or been president continuously since 2015. Um, so people don't need that much more information. I guess the kind of flip question is like, you know, how are people still undecided? Is the opposite question for that.

• 16:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. How many people say that they are? How many people say, I'm not sure?

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Only about three or 4% now, which is historically low. It's often higher than that at this point in the campaign.

• 17:00Chris Williamson?

  Wow. Okay. Getting into the constitution of the the different sides was not picking Josh Shapiro a mistake?

• 17:09Speaker 01

  I think if you're playing the percentages, it's probably a mistake. Just because Pennsylvania winds up being the most important state in our model about a third of the time. You know, there is a state where Harris has gotten some better polling lately. She's maybe ahead by a point or two. But yeah, and to explicitly signal that you're playing for the center. This is one of the cliches that I think has gotten underrated, actually. But it used to be seen as, hey, you want to win independents, you want to play to the middle. I think that's still actually correct if you look at the long term, that that the candidate who is seen as more moderate. I mean, this is why Harris, for example, is trying to moderate, or if you prefer flip flopping on issues like fracking or policing,

• 17:50Speaker 01

  or now taking a much harder line on the border and things like that, is she recognizes that that elections are usually won in the center. Whereas Trump, maybe he doesn't agree with that. I mean, although although Trump is also on particular issues on abortion, Trump has tried to moderate. Everything else, not really.

• 18:08Chris Williamson?

  That's been an interesting change. And you're right there that I think

• 18:13Chris Williamson?

  people on the right accuse Kamala Harris of flip flopping or not holding to her principles or not having any principles in the first place, or hypocrisy or whatever, for holding quite different opinions to those that they have video footage of from a few years ago. I don't know if the same criticisms are being leveled at Trump and JD Vance for a what seems to be moved toward the middle with regards to abortion, given how important it is.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  Well, and JD Vance was formerly anti-Trump, an anti-Trump intellectual. So he's flip flopped too. I mean, you know, Trump has always been someone willing to say a lot of different things, depending on who the audience is in front of him. But yeah, look, it's It's a legitimate concern that that we're a little bit less sure what we'd be getting with Harris, in my view. You know, I mean, the funny thing is the fact that we have a sitting president who's 81, is he 81 or 82 now, 81 years old, and by his own advisers' admission, like only has like four to six good hours a day, right? And the fact that the country is running well, depends on who you asked, I guess, but the fact that these decisions are being made anyway,

• 19:24Speaker 01

  it's it's a little bit interesting. But no, I think I think there are legitimate questions about like whether Harris is the more pragmatic version we've seen this year, or the more progressive version that we saw in 2019 in the primaries.

• 19:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's a really interesting question, this sort of a when does hypocrisy, when does saying what needs to be said in order to win the vote discourage or degrade faith that you are anything? Because it seems, you know, you mentioned before, was not picking Josh Shapiro a mistake? Well, if we're going to go by the numbers, if we're just looking to improve the chances in Pennsylvania, then perhaps that's the case. But that's not actually really what you're supposed to be picking somebody for. It's for their capacity to be able to run the country and help you run the country when you hopefully get into power. So there is this sort of weird balancing game in terms of optics, in terms of what you're talking about, in terms of the promises that you're making to people on the campaign trail. Can we deliver on them when we get into office? And then what what what does

• 20:22Chris Williamson?

  this mean for me and my sort of overall arc? So yeah, I think blowing with the wind, it seems like the public has quite a strong tolerance for politicians that flip flop left and right.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  Look, in some ways, it's representative democracy. And so like, I don't necessarily mind if a politician is instrumental in trying to trying to affect public popularity into into different laws and things like that. So I'm probably like, less bothered by that than the average person. I think I'd rather have that we get closer to direct democracy than to have a bunch of ideologues, I suppose. But if you don't know what you're getting, then that can be a challenge.

• 21:06Chris Williamson?

  That, uh, holding those two things, um, in the same reality, the cognitive superposition is fascinating to me. So people that are able to say, well, it doesn't actually matter who gets into power because ultimately it's run, there's this whole big team of people and they don't actually do all that much in the first. And then also saying, well, if my person doesn't get into power, this is the end of the world. And it's this, uh, it sort of seems to move between the two, uh, sometimes on the internet.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, look, I mean, I think, I think most people are not sitting down and working in a spreadsheet to calculate who they think will be the best party for their country or even for their lives necessarily. Um, I think they feel like either some parties they feel excluded and some parties that feel part of the coalition, right? Um, you know, one, I think, problem that the left had during, um, the kind of COVID summer is that, you know, you were seen as very like the wrong type of person if you weren't wearing your mask, if you're going out to restaurants, or if you were, you know, not vaccinated and things like that. And we can debate whether those are good policies or not. I'm pro vaccine myself. Um, but, uh, but they were saying, hey, you're not part

• 22:17Speaker 01

  of our, our little circle anymore. Um, so I think somehow, sometimes Trump, despite having many problems of his own, being very unappealing to many people, younger people especially, um, he is at least trying to like expand the circle a little bit. When he goes on these different podcasts or goes to communities that Republicans typically don't go to, um, you know, he's trying to expand that circle.

• 22:42Chris Williamson?

  What about picking JD Vance? Do you think that was a mistake?

• 22:46Speaker 01

  I think it was a mistake if you read the reporting on, on why the pick was made. Um, so for one thing, he, uh, Trump was influenced by, um, by the advice of his sons, apparently, Don and, and Eric Jr. Um, and they made this pick at a time when it looked like Trump was just gonna win. Um, so this had been while Biden was still running and way behind in the polls and also just after there had been the assassination attempt against Trump in Pennsylvania. Uh, so the calculation was that, well, we're gonna win. So let's get a big, uh, young, smart guy who can extend Trump's legacy for many years to come. Um, and I think it was a mistake. He, he is in the polls. Negative favorability ratings, he's net underwater in those categories. I think

• 23:31Speaker 01

  somebody who had, you know, more than two years of experience in the Senate might have sold better to the public.

• 23:37Chris Williamson?

  Who would have been a better pick, in your opinion?

• 23:40Speaker 01

  I mean, the boring answers are, you know, Marco Rubio or Nikki Haley or things like that. You know, there could have been people who are more explicitly moderate, but a more kind of establishment Republican.

• 23:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What was the result of Trump being shot at once and in the vicinity of a guy that wanted to shoot at him a second time? What's that done? Because I'm very surprised. I would have thought when that happened, Biden, Kamala, whatever it is, slam dunk. This guy's taken a bullet for democracy or for the country or whatever you want to call it. I would have just thought, wow, game over.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's hard to know because all these different things were happening at once, right? This is also in the period when Joe Biden's campaign is imploding. You have Republican National Convention, you have the Vance pick. You know, by the time Biden left, Trump was ahead by four points in the popular vote, which is actually, actually quite a lot, given that Trump has lost a popular vote twice before. So I think there was some impact. But yeah, you're right. I mean, and, you know, and the assassinations have kind of fallen off the map a little bit. They haven't gotten a ton of media coverage. I mean, this is why when I hear my liberal friends complaining about kind of the media, I'm like, I don't know. You know, another thing that hasn't gotten much coverage lately

• 24:58Speaker 01

  is, is again, is Joe Biden's performance or fitness for office. It's not just an election story. It's also a governance story and things like that. He's making high level decisions. So yeah, I, you know, the polls did move some, but again, if 95% of people are locked in, then they're only going to move so much.

• 25:18Chris Williamson?

  Does it kind of show that there's such a recency bias now on the internet? 24 hours is basically the longest memory that anyone, if it's older than the duration of an Instagram story, we can't recall what happened. And if you supplant a Trump assassination with a Kamala brat goal.

• 25:40Chris Williamson?

  Cat eating Haitian summer. Before you know it, the memes have just kept memeing and now we're on to something new.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, I mean, it's hard to sustain any momentum in politics for that reason, that these events might have a duration of a week or two. Some of that, by the way, is potentially biases in who answers the polls, that when a party is having like an upcycle, then their voters get more excited and are more likely to respond to surveys. And pollsters, you know, try, but aren't always successful in trying to avoid that response bias in polls.

• 26:10Chris Williamson?

  Oh, there's like a desirability effect. Oh, my side's winning. I'm gonna talk more.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you know, if, I'll put it like this, right? If you're talking to a poker player and that poker player had a winning night, they're much more likely on the car ride home to talk about the glory of the big bluff they made, or making a full house, or whatever else.

• 26:30Chris Williamson?

  How masterful was the pivot to Kamala Harris? Because before it happened, I think everybody was up in the air. This woman's kind of unknown. She was a bit of a meme. Everyone was sort of laughing at the silly laugh, and she hadn't done anything. She was the most invisible vice president. And then, in retrospect, it seems like, oh my god, absolute slam dunk. Why wouldn't they have done this sooner?

• 26:50Speaker 01

  So she's been a much more capable politician than than I would have thought. I mean, partly, though, is that, you know, there are some natural politicians, but most politicians are not naturals. If you look at kind of like the great politicians of our era, Barack Obama lost his first race for Congress. Bill Clinton was almost laughed off the stage at his first Democratic National Convention where he gave a keynote speech. So like, Harris going all around the world for four years, giving speeches and rubber chicken dinners and whatnot. I think she got a lot better at the art of retail politics. She also was not running, I mean, 2019 was a strange time for Democrats when she ran in the primary. This is kind of like

• 27:33Speaker 01

  during the peak of what is sometimes called wokeness. Everyone was running way to the left. They thought Bernie Sanders had proven that was the way to beat the establishment. And so I think she was ill-served by that, by that period. She was not known as being so necessarily so progressive, for example, as a DA in San Francisco. But she got very carried away with with moving to the left.

• 27:56Chris Williamson?

  What do you think? Of the impact of this discussion around wokeness and it's sort of capturing of both the left and the right as signal, counter-signal, reaction, proaction. How's that sort of changed the landscape?

• 28:12Speaker 01

  Look, I, I think it's very unappealing messaging, just from the standpoint of like, if you were to try to survey it, um, you know, messaging that makes people feel guilty for, uh, for their race or their other identity characteristics is messaging that tends to exclude people from your coalition. Um, but I also think there were always like a lot of people on the center and on the left who were never really on board with wokeness and just felt like they couldn't say anything about it until maybe a couple of years ago. Um, you know, in particular during 2020, when it's an election year in the middle of the pandemic and you have these protests that sometimes turn violent. Um, people understandably

• 28:53Speaker 01

  were afraid to speak up, I think. And so I think you've seen pretty big shifts away from that particular movement. And this happened in the past. I mean, we had like, I'm a little bit too young to have experienced this firsthand, but you had political correctness in the late eighties and early nineties that had a shelf life of a couple of years because it was easily, easily mockable. Um, so I, I think some of this has, has peaked.

• 29:19Chris Williamson?

  What's different about Trump's coalition of voters than past Republicans and the same for Kamala?

• 29:26Speaker 01

  So what's interesting is that we actually have some degree of racial depolarization in the electorate, meaning that, um, white voters are getting more democratic, whereas voters of color, especially younger ones, younger black voters, younger Hispanics, younger Asians are getting more Republican. Um, so in one sense, that's good, you know, other things being equal, I'd rather not have a, a vote that you can strictly determine by who's in what racial group in the United States, but it does lead to some counterintuitive things on, on the map. Um, you know, if you're doing better with white voters, if Harris is doing better with white voters than Biden was four years ago, that's why you can keep like the whiter Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan states, even if her polling is not

• 30:09Speaker 01

  as strong in say, North Carolina or Arizona.

• 30:13Chris Williamson?

  It's so fascinating how all of this stuff breaks down. What do you think that we need to know about the seven and a half states that are likely going to determine this election?

• 30:24Speaker 01

  Um, you probably don't want to turn on a TV in one of those states from about now onward. You'll literally see, I spent a fair amount of time in Las Vegas. Yeah, you'll see every single commercial as a campaign commercial by the time you get into September, October, November. Um, but yeah, obviously, look, if you are interested in the outcome of the election, I think it's an important election, then, then vote, you know, donate. By the way, you might want to donate, um, not to Trump or Harris, who have lots of money, but, um, to your favorite down ballot candidates, things like state Supreme Court races matter a lot and get far less attention, or even city council and things like that. Um, but yeah, I mean, you know, some people enjoy like the scoreboard watching element of elections where

• 31:05Speaker 01

  they like seeing the numbers go up and down. Um, but you're not going to really learn anything new from, from the polls between now and November. Not that you shouldn't read my newsletter, but like, but it's very likely to be close. We have a very good idea of which states are likely to be most important. And if you're in one of those states, then you should probably vote.

• 31:23Chris Williamson?

  Which are the states?

• 31:25Speaker 01

  Um, so Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan are like the northern midwestern group, and then Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina.

• 31:35Chris Williamson?

  I'm surprised by Nevada. I'm, I have to admit that I'm a total like noob to, to this. This is my first election, being in the US. I'm not used to this sort of set of insights. If you gave me most of those states, except for Nevada on a map, I wouldn't be able to put a pin on them. Um, but it surprises me that Nevada would have been one of those. Uh, that being a swing state is kind of culturally surprising to me.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. So if you go to Nevada and, uh, spend time in the casino settings there, um, you'll see why it's a swing state because you have this, um, very working class workforce that is often people who are, um, who are minorities, you know, Hispanic, Asian, black. It's a diverse workforce, diverse working class workforce, casino industry. Um, and that's a group that has shifted more toward Trump. Um, if Democrats are relying on these like college educated, knowledge sector workers, um, that's not the typical blackjack dealer, although it does require quite a bit of skill, frankly. Um, that's not the typical person working in, in food service at a big resort or room service in a big resort in, in Las

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Vegas. So that population has been risky for Democrats.

• 32:50Chris Williamson?

  Would a viable third option ever be able to get in? You know, we saw RFK Jr. give it as good of a crack, I think, as could have been expected this year? Or is this essentially just impossible right now?

• 33:03Speaker 01

  I don't think it's impossible, but the issue is that the parties are pretty clever at adapting to the changing political tides, right? So like, in some ways, in some ways, Donald Trump was like a third party candidate. He disagreed in 2016 with George Bush and Mitt Romney and criticized John McCain and was moving toward a much more culturally conservative, but fiscally, maybe less conservative, actually, policy than you have like under Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney, for example, or Bernie Sanders, who is technically an independent. He ran for the Democratic nomination and he produced change on things like the minimum wage and stuff like that. But like, so I think the risk is that third party votes get co-opted by the two major parties.

• 33:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that is, it's interesting to consider Trump as kind of like an outside option previously. This is what people are saying when they're shouting about drain the swamp and he's not one of the globalist elite lizard people, whatever. This is what they, it's kind of how they see him, right?

• 34:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you know, keep in mind that there was a whole GOP autopsy. Hey, they have to move to the center on immigration. And he had the foresight, I guess, to kind of zig where other people zagged and, you know, whatever else you say about Trump, he's a former real estate guy. And so he can kind of like, maybe has some sixth sense for when there's a underpriced piece of political real estate somewhere.

• 34:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Why did the polls lowball Trump in the past? Is there a risk of that happening again?

• 34:36Speaker 01

  There is a risk. In fact, there's probably a risk of both directions. In 2022, you had polls underestimate Democrats in some big races. In 2012, they underestimated Obama a little bit. So pollsters offer two basic. Excuses and, you know, I say excuses because how valid they are, we can, I mean, I don't think they're, I think the pollsters would love to have unbiased results, but it's tricky. One problem is that people who are more politically engaged and college educated are more likely to respond to polls and also more likely to be Democrats. You know, your typical MSNBC, watching New York Times, whatever, you know, Starbucks drinking liberals is pretty likely to respond to a poll, but will vote Democrat in November.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  That's one issue. There were also issues in 2020 potentially related to COVID, where Democrats were much more likely to socially distance. So they're sitting around without much to do. And, you know, I probably made more phone calls during COVID than I ever have in my life, right? So Democrats were more likely to respond to surveys during COVID and that may have caused issues in 2020. But yeah, these are legitimate reasons to worry. The reason why I would say maybe I'd expect less of a polling error this year is just because like, what the polls are saying is that it's 50 50, which is like a very reasonable suggestion, I think, right? They're saying we're going to be somewhere in between 2016 and 2020, most likely. Comes down to a photo finish again, the electoral college, and that's like not exactly going out on a limb.

• 36:05Chris Williamson?

  Is there a social desirability thing still with Trump? I walk around my very white, very three and a half kids in a golden retriever neighborhood here in Austin, Texas. And I see a whole host of blue signs for Harris Walts and I don't see a single one for Trump. Something tells me that people in two and three million dollar houses aren't all Democrats.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  I think there is some, but maybe, maybe less than people assume for a couple of reasons. One is that Americans tend to be pretty forthcoming when you ask them in surveys, which is not true everywhere, right? In India, for example, it's just considered kind of a bad idea to share your political opinion with a random stranger, which in some ways maybe it is, right? But Americans tend to answer polls pretty honestly. The issue is more that you're not getting Trump supporters answering polls in the first place, that they're less likely to trust, trust a news outlet that calls and says, do you want to take a survey?

• 37:09Speaker 01

  I would also say that the degree of social acceptability is wider now for Trump than it used to be. Certainly on Silicon Valley and in Wall Street, you have more explicit Trump support than you had four years ago or eight years ago. Also in communities like, like younger black men, for example, or younger Hispanic men and things like that. I think, I think the social circles expanded a little bit where you're, where you're allowed to say you're, you're a Trump voter.

• 37:38Chris Williamson?

  I would agree. Getting into your current thesis of choice, how have you come to think about the sort of landscape of influential cultures in America? The village, the river, et cetera?

• 37:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the village and the river are terms from my book, On the Edge. The village is kind of what it sounds like. It's the East Coast establishment. It's Harvard, it's the New York Times, it's the Washington Post. It's academia, media, government, tends to be politically progressive, tends to be very collective in its orientation. What you don't want to do in the village is be canceled or ostracized. It's about kind of the group cohesion plus winning elections for, for Democrats. Whereas the river is my name for a community of like-minded risk takers. So it's people in Silicon Valley and Wall Street. It's the casino business. It's people trying to, you know, who are A, very, very competitive, and B, very analytics driven.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  So they're smart about things, they're trying to estimate and quantify things, but they also, they also really want to win.

• 38:42Chris Williamson?

  What are the strengths and weaknesses of each of those groups?

• 38:46Speaker 01

  Um, so as we kind of move into a world that's more algorithmatized, and we're like basically math and probability are becoming a more and more important skill, then, then that Revarian, I call it, you know, someone from the Revarian, that cluster of attributes is becoming more and more important, right? As like tech and finance basically become a larger and larger share of the economy, then that's kind of more. Immersion and important and maybe some of the more verbal skills.

• 39:16Chris Williamson?

  So we can, we can debate. We can't just vibe our way through the future.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  I think as well, it gets more complicated and it gets harder to harder and harder to vibe. Or maybe.

• 39:25Chris Williamson?

  I don't know about you. I'm vibing. I've been vibing throughout this whole conversation.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  It's fun. No, having conversations is good. And actually, if you look at large language models like chat GPT, like a language is actually more mathematical than people maybe assume you can kind of like transform it to vectors and do math on on language, basically.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  But but yeah, I look, I think. You know, it's also the fact is that we live in a very competitive world where the capitalist system, and I'm for the most part pro free market, is very efficient at producing winners and losers and sorting through different ideas for better and for worse. And so the people who are who were naturally competitive get ahead, of course.

• 40:10Chris Williamson?

  Is the village not made up of a lot of people who are also competitive, though? They're highly decorated in terms of academia. They're still working in areas that are, although internally, they may try and sort of relabel it, they're driven by capitalist sort of fundamentals. Is that not the case still for them?

• 40:31Speaker 01

  I mean, I think they are very concerned with their social status, right? That you want a certain credential. I mean, these are people where during COVID, if you didn't have the right credential, or even if you had the right credential and said the wrong thing, then people say, oh, it's not that what he's saying is wrong. It's that he's the wrong person to say it. Or that's also adjacent to some of the wokeness stuff, right? Where, well, as a person of X, Y, and Z, then I have the right to say this, but not the right to say, talk about this other thing. So, yeah, whereas classically, people in the river are more willing to be contrarian. They don't care as much about offending society.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  They just want to be right. They just want their bets to win.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  And appearances sake don't matter as much.

• 41:23Chris Williamson?

  What are the advantages of the village and disadvantages of the river?

• 41:28Speaker 01

  Um, so I think the village sometimes has its heart in the right place, right? I mean, you know, I, I believe that climate change is a big issue and I believe that, um, you know, we're a very wealthy country that can afford to have some redistribution and things like that. Um, you know, I believe in expanding rights to LGBTQ people. So on that stuff, I'm probably kind of culturally aligned with them. Um, you know, they certainly perceive Trump as being quite dangerous to democracy. I think after January 6th, then that argument becomes, you know, very credible, frankly. Um, yeah, look, I mean, we have

• 42:10Speaker 01

  had historically in the U.S. very competent institutions. Um, although I know Americans are frustrated with the government, you know, you look at us compared to, um, you know, these middle income country, Greece or things like that, like our economy is still growing when other economies aren't as much. Um, but I worry that this is getting like swallowed by bipartisanship. Um, you know, I think during COVID that we saw that the expertise is kind of conditional on, on the politics a little bit, you know, I, media is complicated. I mean, media is a very dynamic business, but I think sometimes there are thumbs on the scales in different directions. Um, so I worry that the river is going to kind

• 42:51Speaker 01

  of lose what, or the village is going to lose what make it, what made it great. Um, I mean, the disadvantages to the village or to the river rather is like, I think you are getting, um, you are getting a lot of difficult people, right? If they want the once in a generation founder who breaks the mold, well, you're going to have a lot of people like Sam Bankman-Fried or Elizabeth Holmes that, um, that do this in a destructive way potentially instead. Um, you know, I think it's a, it's, there can be some selection bias in who they pick to be founders. I mean, it's still very male, um, you know, not very diverse in terms of black or Hispanic representation in the VC industry. And so I think those things are valid critiques.

• 43:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, certainly one of the things I've noticed, one of the reasons I think being left-leaning is so seductive at the moment is that much communication is going on through social media and whoever sort of prioritizes for first-order compassion, sounds like somebody that cares more. And it's all well and good being Tim Kennedy or Tucker Maxx and telling everyone to go fuck themselves because I've got an AR-15 and a thousand magazines of ammunition, but it's not as compelling at getting other people on board. By definition, it's exclusionary in a way that the sort of left-leaning talking points also can be exclusionary, but they're like inclusionary exclusionary.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, look, and I do think that, you know, it's inherently, I like how you put it. I think it's inherently like a more sympathetic argument that's a little bit more humane and that goes, that goes a fairly long way. I mean, let's keep in mind that even though there are excesses on the left, Democrats win their fair share of elections. They win the popular vote almost every night, time now in the presidency. They control the Senate. They might win back the House later this year. So it's a message that actually is maybe more broadly appealing than people might assume.

• 44:48Chris Williamson?

  Talking about some of the more risky people, Elizabeth Holmes sentenced recently, Caroline Ellison in court recently, Sean Diddy Combs and Sam Bankman-Fried in the same Brooklyn jail unit at the moment, apparently. What did you learn from being around SBF? And can you sort of tell that story of how that happened?

• 45:08Speaker 01

  So I spent a lot of time with SBF. I first talked to him in, I think, January 2022, which is during one of the early Bitcoin peaks. And he's riding high. He can't seem to imagine that you'd ever have a sustained decline in crypto, or at least it's kind of like what he's telling me, right? And was insanely tolerant for risk. I mean, it's a book about people who are risk takers. But so he told me that if you're not willing to risk ruining your life, that you're doing something wrong, that you're not accepting enough risk, which seems crazy, right? If you're worth a lot of money. What you should be doing to some degree or another is hedging your risk.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  That you can make these very big bets because if you lose a bets, well, you still have a billion dollars left over if you're SPF or $5 billion or $10 billion. You know, he was not doing that whatsoever. And I think was like enabled by a lot of people who, who ought to have asked more questions. You had, I think, you know, in New York, we have the bystander effect where you see like somebody like bleeding out on the street or something and everyone walks by to figure someone else has called 911. Well, sometimes nobody called 911 and did the due diligence and that person winds up, you know, dying or being gravely injured because of the bystander effect. There were so many people who were vouching for Sam. You know, he is on stage at the World Economic Forum with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair and, and he's hanging out with these like Oxford philosophers.

• 46:34Speaker 01

  But he, the whole time he was giving very dangerous signals.

• 46:39Chris Williamson?

  Is he actually smart or is he just a moron that was able to tolerate more risk than everyone else and get first mover advantage?

• 46:47Speaker 01

  I think he's smart, but I think he's like,

• 46:51Speaker 01

  you know, 99.5 percentile smart and not like 99.95 percentile smart, like one in a thousand and not one in, in 10,000.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  I think he's also somebody who is overconfident. I mean, this is a big problem that actually people in the river can have. In theory, they're supposed to be probabilistic and, and cautious and learn how to make well calibrated bets. In practice, that can lead itself to overconfidence. And so, um, you know, he, I think, overestimated his ability to navigate these various rapids that we have with crypto prices and NFTs and so forth, going up and down. I think he was over optimistic about his persuasive ability. When I talked to him and I went down eventually to the Bahamas and talked to him a couple of days there. He seemed to think that he could. Charm his way into a very sympathetic jury verdict.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  You know, I asked him, last time I met with him, he was in Palo Alto, California, at his parents' place where he's under house arrest, has an ankle bracelet. And I said, what if you just got two years in jail and then some, some light probation after that? Would you take that deal? And he said, I'd have to think about it, when it would have been a great deal. He wound up getting 20 years instead, which was, I think, a fairly predictable outcome.

• 48:06Chris Williamson?

  Not just 20 years, Nate, 20 years in the same jail as P Diddy, which I think is the same functionally as 10,000 years, actually.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know, it is. There's some riddle, I think, about like forever being trapped in a jail and that's gonna be, I don't know, I'm, although I'm sure, I'm sure SBF will find ways to have little schemes and so forth in jail. I'm sure he'll have an interesting time.

• 48:30Chris Williamson?

  Well, look, to sort of tie the two big topics that we've been talking about today together, presidential candidates and high risk takers. Caroline Ellison, SBF's girlfriend, managed to finesse an entire army of nerds into being some weird inverted harem, and then managed to finesse her way into a 107-year discount on her jail sentence. She went from 110-year potential maximum to three years of, you can kind of go around, just don't, don't go near the internet or something for a while. She is the person that we should be looking to for president. She can, the Ukraine's sorted, the Middle East is sorted. I'm Caroline Ellison for president. That's me. That's my vote.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  It's probably her versus Mr. Beast next time around.

• 49:22Chris Williamson?

  Oh, man. So you looked at the sort of sociology, psychology of crypto investors, why they were so prone to being scammed. What did you learn there?

• 49:33Speaker 01

  I think part of it is the kind of time of human history when this is happening. You know, if you read Matt Levine from Bloomberg, he's fond of talking about something called the boredom market hypothesis, which is that people are locked down. I know it's not a formal lockdown, but people's social lives are radically curtailed during COVID. They're spending a lot of time on the internet. Meanwhile, the government is pumping a lot of money into the economy. So there's a lot of cash. And so I think it was just like, you know, look, I think the blockchain is a really interesting technology. So I'm not trying to demean it. But I think you had kind of that, you know, that NFT era.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  I mean, most bubbles, people kind of, they kind of almost know they're in a bubble and they kind of can't help themselves anyway sometimes. Cause it's fun. And also there are times if you, if your timing is perfect, then you can come out ahead. Very few people do, but I think it's this boredom and anxiety of the pandemic is producing, you know, producing a lot of speculative assets. Although, you know, this is amazing. When people forget like how annoying like the GameStop, how amazing, rather not annoying, how amazing like the GameStop story is, right? That basically keep people banned together on the internet to severely disrupt stock prices. I'm not sure that it's good for the economy, but like, it's amazing that people are able to, to, to do that for sustained periods of time.

• 50:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Two thoughts on that. First one being, I have asked a lot of my friends who are into crypto, if there was no potential to make a profit from your trading in it and your investment in it, would you still put your money in it? And the number of people, 95% of people, I think, if you ask them like carefully and get their real opinion, doesn't. I'm like, dude, you don't love the blockchain. This isn't about somebody in Zambia being able to send money back home safely and securely. It's because it's fucking high risk gambling with massive upside. That's why you love it. Second thing, do you read much Morgan Housel? You subscribed to Collaborative Fund, his, his blog?

• 51:35Speaker 01

  I have, I have not, no.

• 51:36Chris Williamson?

  Dude, so he put a post up that is very similar to what you're talking about. I read it this morning, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna tell you about it. Compounded knowledge versus cyclical knowledge. So he starts off with this story of germ disease. So before germ diseases were understood and that these surgeons used to think that a crusty, blood-filled, pus-soaked operating room was kind of like, it was evidence of all of the work that you'd done. That they thought, they basically mocked the first proposals of germ disease and said, this is the same as relying on spirits. There's no way that this could be the case.

• 52:20Chris Williamson?

  Like, this is so tiny, invisible little things that get it. It's not, it's the miasma. You know, they were putting cow manure into people's wounds. They were injecting cow milk into people's veins in the hope that the fat would turn into white blood cells. Like, just like really, really out there stuff. And then Morgan's point is that as soon as you learn about a germ theory of disease, that knowledge is locked in, so it compounds over time. And yet he has, you know, maybe 10 different examples, 10 different quotes from Seneca 2,000 years ago to the Great Depression, to the Florida housing prices in the 1900s, all over the place, and everybody is saying the same thing. That any time that you get some money, one of the primary problems is that it makes you want to protect your money,

• 53:04Chris Williamson?

  which makes you actually more skewed in weird directions. You become sort of more illogical, the richer you are, as opposed to being more rational with it. And he talks about that being cyclical knowledge, that each time that a situation comes back around, this time it's different, this time the market conditions are altered. People always are going to be driven by this desire for more. It's got this built-in hedonic adaptation thing and this sort of dissatisfaction that humans have. His point being that he can, can see a time in future where maybe all cancers are solved. We don't have to deal with, with death and disease in the same way as we do now. We've basically sort of conquered human health. But there is no time in future when he doesn't see that greed and envy and the desire for more will not be a fundamental driving force.

• 53:49Chris Williamson?

  I thought that was a really nice, a really nice concept.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, look, I mean, one thing I worry about, again, I'm pretty pro-capitalist for the most part, but I worry about Where we are giving all our data to these big, powerful companies and potentially AI systems, and they know more about us than than we know about them. And that if you're not smart, that you wind up getting, taking advantage of and exploited. If the if the economy becomes more casino-like, that seems probably pretty bad for for human well-being.

• 54:21Chris Williamson?

  What are some of the most interesting insights or lessons that you learned from researching Vegas and casinos and stuff like that?

• 54:28Speaker 01

  I think one thing that's a little bit counterintuitive is, you know, people don't understand how important regulation actually is to having a functional casino industry at all, because for years casinos just cheated their patrons, right? And they kind of competed to see who could play better tricks on their patrons. There was like no real way to establish credibility. And then on top of that, you have the mob skimming profits off the top before the era of all these big entrepreneurs. And so the fact that like casino industry is now this respectable business is actually kind of an underdog story. I mean, there's nothing else to do in Nevada, right? It's beautiful land, but like, it's not very hospitable

• 55:11Speaker 01

  to the population. It's surrounded by mountains in all directions. And so, yeah, let's build a whole bunch of casinos. And, you know, and Vegas is an incredible success story in certain ways. But it's, you know, partly because of the, you know, the visions of the Steve Wynn's of the world. These are the big casino magnates who was like, we can make casino a luxury destination item. And they made that big bet and they were and they were right.

• 55:38Chris Williamson?

  Was it not always?

• 55:40Speaker 01

  No, I mean, it was kind of very much, you know, you read the mobile travel guide, and I'm dating myself. But no, the casino industry was seen as like, maybe cheap, lower middlebrow. Fun. I mean, there were some things. I mean, there was like the Rat Pack era, of course. Um, but you go into like, uh, the old school casinos on in downtown Las Vegas, some of which are a lot of fun. It's a good thing to do to get off the strip sometimes. Um, but they're, yeah, it's showgirls kind of vibes. It may be a little bit of a speakeasy vibe, but it's not, it's not highbrow luxury, right? You get a $20 room that they give you for free. So you'll, so you'll gamble more.

• 56:19Speaker 01

  You get a coupon for a free steak dinner, but it's not, you know, Michelin star, we're winning three star chefs next to the poker room kind of thing.

• 56:29Chris Williamson?

  Going back to the, uh, high risk takers, uh, and the, the people from the village that you were talking about before. What are, what are the big lessons that you want people to understand about the sort of psychological makeup of these people and, and sort of how they can use those lessons, the best, the best of each of them to sort of, uh, embody them themselves?

• 56:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, even though it's a cliche, it's extremely important to be cool under pressure and to understand that when you're facing high stress situations that involve physical risk or real financial risk, that your body has a reaction to them. Um, that if I'm playing a $1, $2 poker game, just nothing is going to faze me. Um, if I'm playing a $100, $200 poker game where pots could get into the five figures easily, then the fact is that your body will intuitively recognize that this is a fight or flight moment where you have more on the line. And there are other moments like that. Um, if you do, are into public speaking and you walk out on a stage in front of

• 57:30Speaker 01

  a couple of thousands of people, you're, you're naturally going to get butterflies because that's an important moment compared to when you're just walking down the street to catch your airport or catch the cab to the airport or something. Um, so understanding that when that's happening, you're actually on a different operating system. I've talked to guys who study the neuroscience of all of this. Um, and understanding that when you're under pressure, that you have to slow down and simplify things sometimes. People want to be a hero, to make some really exotic play in poker. If you can just kind of execute and stick to your training when other people are losing their shit, then that's a really powerful advantage.

• 58:11Chris Williamson?

  How do you step in to do that functionally or practically yourself? I think I saw somewhere in the release about the book that you've made a not insignificant amount of sum of money while writing the book in poker. So it seems that you must have sort of been around some of these high stress situations. Someone has got a presentation to do at work or they've got a job interview or they're for some reason playing in a poker game that's got you on the other side of the table. What should they do to regulate themselves in that moment? Or what do you do?

• 58:40Speaker 01

  So one thing, it's, you know, it's recognizing that having a physical stress response isn't necessarily a bad thing. So for example, when I talked to a professional golf trainer, he's a guy who trains golfers and poker players can both get, both get the yips, both get nerves. A professional golfer who is a fit athlete, maybe not as fit as like a basketball player or something, but these guys are pretty fit, will have his resting heart rate at like 90 or 100 beats per minute, just from walking around the golf course at a major tournament. Because it's a, it's, the body is correctly saying, this needs to have, I need to have an increase in my performance.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  And so, understanding that if you feel nervous, then it isn't necessarily a bad thing. If you're doing public speaking, what you don't want to do is kind of what Joe Biden did in the first debate and began to freeze. Usually if you just kind of say the words that are coming out of your mouth, then they will work perfectly fine and you, and you can't be as cerebral about things as you would be ordinarily. However, it also means that you're actually intaking more information. If you've ever heard the phrase being in the zone, like Michael Jordan would describe, where I'm seeing things as though they're in freeze frame or slow motion, right? And I'm able to anticipate my opponent's moves before they make them and things like that.

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  Like that's, that's actually a real thing you can experience, like when you're, when you're under stress and being able to get used to that is, is helpful.

• 1:00:11Chris Williamson?

  I had a, an incident on a podcast a few years ago where I'd decided to fast before I did it. And that's good because it meant I was super aroused and had all of this, you know, adrenaline coursing through me. But I went hypo during the middle of the episode, which caused my brain to just go completely blank. So I'm sat there watching this person go, but da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da. And listening back to the episode now, in retrospect, there was some bit of me cruise control governor that was just saying things. But my mind was captured with me going, oh, my God, I can't believe that I've got nothing to say. How am I going to get some, is that, is that chocolate over the far side? Can I ask for some chocolate? Do you think that I could get a break and get a Gatorade? But my brain was just going, looping around in

• 1:00:56Chris Williamson?

  this. And my mouth was just feeding stuff out of it that was totally cogent. I was like, ah, okay, that's interesting. That's getting out of your own way and sort of using experience.

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  Now, people's ability to go on autopilot and the amazing like plasticity we have with how we direct our attention to, I mean, you know, imagine that you're in this crowded restaurant in the middle of Manhattan, and there's bad acoustics and 500 conversations, you're able to like attune to the conversation with your friend most of the time. I mean, our minds are quite, are quite amazing in that respect. Although I would recommend against fasting and poker, like, don't go well together. Um, I don't like to be super stuffed when I play. But I don't want to be totally famished either, because your body will find ways to make you lose to feed you. That your friend will be like, hey, we're going out to get dinner at the Japanese place later. Uh, we know you're still in the

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  game, right? You'll, you'll always find a way to like bust out when that, if you're, if you're starving.

• 1:01:52Chris Williamson?

  Yes. What are the disadvantages of being a person who lives life with the worldview and perspective and predilection and disposition that you have?

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  I think sometimes you rub certain people the wrong way. I mean, I don't know. I mean,

• 1:02:12Speaker 01

  I mean, I've always felt kind of estranged in in politics because I'm concerned with this question of like, who's going to win? And what's the optimal strategy? And and the kind of game theory of politics? And most people are into politics because they are on one team and they want that team to win. The reasons being on that team might differ from identity stuff to to more high minded policy stuff or thinking, you know, and that's and that's fine. But like, that's like not my people. So I kind of wind up getting thrust into environments where the thing I'm best known for politics is is not a thing I that's my most natural interest.

• 1:02:53Chris Williamson?

  Is that something you're worried about as a legacy type picture being the political forecast guy?

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  I mean, it's probably irreparable at this. Although I could, you know, I thought about not running an election forecast publicly this cycle. I thought about just doing some consulting. We had, we had with several different firms, different discussions about just taking the forecast totally private. I decided in the end that like, so I'm building a small business. I have this newsletter, Silver Bulletin, which is subscriber newsletter on Substack and

• 1:03:29Chris Williamson?

  Everyone should go and subscribe. I love it.

• 1:03:31Speaker 01

  Appreciate it. And that's doing really well, right? And so now all of a sudden, half my burnout about the election stuff was working for a giant corporation called the Walt Disney Corporation that owned 538 before. And so, so yeah, I don't know. I mean, we'll see. I was having a lot of fun, I will say. I know you're not allowed to say you're not supposed to have fun when you cover politics. So having a lot of fun until about like, two weeks ago, where, you know, after Labor Day, People just kind of lose their minds. They get very mad at any pollster or forecaster who doesn't say good news to their candidate. But we're in the stretch run here now. We only have, what is it, forty-four more days to go or something.

• 1:04:14Chris Williamson?

  Not that you're counting down, obviously.

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  No, not, I mean, I've got a trip to Korea planned for December. I got some poker stuff planned for earlier December, so I have, I have some things to look forward to.

• 1:04:27Chris Williamson?

  Oh, you absolutely deserve it. One of the words that me and a bunch of my friends are massive, massive fans of is agency. And you've got agency, plurality, and reciprocity as three sort of very important traits. Can you just explain what those mean to you and why they're so crucial?

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, so these are kind of my core values that I think we need in a more, in a more data-driven slash risk-on world. Agency means having good choices is how I define it, right? So liberty is great, but like, you know, we want you to be able to have two or more real choices for how you lead your life, where you're well informed about those choices. It's not coercive. I worry, for example, that with algorithms, you have people who are manipulated into making kind of false choices. Plurality just means that I don't want any dominant group or faction to dominate. I want to have, this is why I like democracy still, is that, is that you have to have agreement between different perspectives

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  or different people. I think that's very important. And reciprocity is kind of a form of fairness, but in a more complicated way that gets derived from game theory. This is about not exploiting people, right? In game theory, you adopt a strategy, say in poker, that assumes that you're playing perfectly and we are playing against one another and trying to balance our strategies out with one another so that neither of us lose in the long run. I know it's a complicated metaphor, but it's basically saying, you know, treat others how, how you want to be treated.

• 1:06:03Chris Williamson?

  What about what is sort of when it comes to a personal level, you know, you're not just this nameless, faceless data inputter that's writing words and trying to predict elections. You've got the stuff that you do with poker, private life, all the rest of it. What are the traits or habits that you rely on yourself personally the most? I think there's a lot of people, certainly myself, I want to become better with dealing with risk. I want to, I would say I'm the sort of opposite in terms of risk taking to Sam Bankman-Fried, that my required barometer needs to hit an unreasonable level for me to make a decision. So what are some of the traits that you rely on or that you value most in yourself when it comes to your ability to sort of deal with risk and move forward?

• 1:06:48Speaker 01

  Um, you know, look, I think I understand that we live in a world where there's a lot of abundance, at least if you're a lucky person like I am. So, you know, I think people who, I mean, I grew up middle class, basically, right? I think a lot of people like that don't realize that sometimes it's worth it to, to pay to make your life easier and more convenient, I think, so not feeling guilty or shame about that. I mean, I work really hard and I have a lot of-

• 1:07:16Chris Williamson?

  You mean like getting a gardener or a maid or something like that?

• 1:07:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, things like that, or, you know, or staying in a nicer hotel, well, you'll sleep better. Cause if you do the math and you have these election years where that's where most of your income is made, then like, you know, one hour of extra sleep is worth quite a bit in terms of productivity. If you can write another newsletter post and get more subscribers and things like that. You know, I think I'm very good at like intense focused work. I mean, if you ask me, I'd probably say that like, I worked more hours 10 years ago when I was a little younger, but like I worked much more focused now, right? If you're working for yourself and there are no like- Pointless meetings to take, um, then if you don't have any busy time and it's all

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  real work, then doing like, then doing six to eight hours of real work in a day is a lot of real intellectual work and kind of recognizing that you have to like pace yourself a little bit. Um, and also if you're, if you're a writer, at least for me, you're constantly writing in the background, right? Like I'm writing like four blog posts whenever I go to get coffee or something.

• 1:08:23Chris Williamson?

  So you're optimizing for a maker's schedule rather than a manager's schedule in Paul Graham language?

• 1:08:30Speaker 01

  Absolutely. You know, the, the manager's schedule, you know, when I have more than three scheduled commitments in a day, right? Even three is pushing it, then I'm like, okay, the day is kind of ruined.

• 1:08:40Chris Williamson?

  We are the founder mode versus manager mode, uh, blog post that Paul put up the other week, me and my housemate have been talking about that a lot. Uh, really interesting little pivot that he found with that, which is if the beginning of his day gets sideswiped by something which puts him into, uh, manager mode, uh, or manager schedule, I guess technically, he just commits the rest of the day. He's like, right, okay, I'm going to commit that the rest of this is fucking ruined. I'm not going to get anything sort of meaningful or deep done. So he then just starts messaging all of the outstanding meetings that he knows he's got. I guess it's kind of like, uh, I don't know, uh, your firsthand going really badly, uh, around the poker table and go, okay, I'm just going to adapt the rest of

• 1:09:24Chris Williamson?

  my game to this and maybe I'm going to just try and learn stuff and then I'll come back to the table a better way tomorrow.

• 1:09:29Speaker 01

  I think that's smart. I think, and I think batching your work like that is smart too, right? Um, like I'm not really a clothes fiend, but you know, you have to go shopping to look nice sometimes. And like, I will just go fucking balls out and be like, I'm just going to spend six hours shopping a day and then not do it again for six months or something. I think that's more, it's more efficient than doing a little bit at a time.

• 1:09:48Chris Williamson?

  Agreed. I'm currently testing trying to have Wednesday as a meeting day and then the rest of the week is nothing as opposed to this sort of weird like distribution of seeds on a, an open field that I had previously on my calendar.

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  No, I think that's, I think that's much better because I, you know, you really do need like, especially writing a book. You really do need these times of like three hours minimum to get totally immersed in it, I think.

• 1:10:12Chris Williamson?

  Heck, yeah. Nate Silver, ladies and gentlemen. Nate, I love your work. The book's fantastic. It's really story driven, which I appreciate from someone that has the seduction of numbers, I guess, in front of them all the time. Why should people go? They want to keep up to date with all the stuff you're doing.

• 1:10:26Speaker 01

  So Silver Bulletin is my newsletter and Risky Business is my podcast that I co-host with another poker player, Maria Konikova.

• 1:10:33Chris Williamson?

  Heck, yeah. Nate, I appreciate you. Thank you.

• 1:10:36Speaker 01

  Of course. Thanks so much.

• 1:10:38Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:10:54Speaker 03

  What would happen if I stopped going? You start, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:10:58Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:11:01Speaker 03

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:11:03Speaker 02

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.