Nate Silver on Life's Mixed Strategies

In his third appearance on Conversations with Tyler, Nate Silver looks back at past predictions, weighs how academic ideas such as expected utility theory fare in practice, and examines the world of sports through the lens of risk and prediction. Tyler and Nate dive into expected utility theory and random Nash equilibria in poker, whether Silver's tell-reading abilities transfer to real-world situations like NBA games, why academic writing has disappointed him, his move from atheism to agnosticism, the meta-rationality of risk-taking, electoral systems and their flaws, 2028 presidential candidates, why he thinks superforecasters will continue to outperform AI for the next decade, why more athletes haven't come out as gay, redesigning the NBA, what mentors he needs now, the cultural and psychological peculiarities of Bay area intellectual communities, why Canada can't win a Stanley Cup, the politics of immigration in Europe and America, what he'll work on next, and more. Read a full transcript https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/nate-silver-3/ enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video https://youtu.be/EEnB4jS82T0 on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel. Recorded July 23rd, 2025. Help keep the show ad free by donating https://mercatus.donorsupport.co/page/podcastgift?utm_source=cwt+podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=shownotes today! Other ways to connect Follow us on X https://twitter.com/cowenconvos and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/cowenconvos/?hl=en Follow Tyler https://twitter.com/tylercowen on X Follow Nate https://x.com/NateSilver538 on X Sign up for our newsletter https://mercatus.tfaforms.net/5060931 Join our Discord https://discord.gg/JAVWP7vTxt Email us: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here https://www.mercatus.org/podcasts.

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

• 0:04Tyler Cowen?

  Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com.

• 0:27Tyler Cowen?

  Hello, everyone, and welcome to Conversations with Tyler. Today, I'm chatting with Nate Silver, live in New York. We are here to commemorate the paperback edition of Nate's On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, a book that last year I described sincerely as absolute fun on every page. We're also going to revisit some of our earlier predictions from a year ago and nine years ago, and talk about everything I want to talk about. Nate, welcome.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  Tyler, always a pleasure.

• 0:57Tyler Cowen?

  At current margins, do you learn anything from studying expected utility theory?

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I probably spend a tenth of my time playing poker, and certainly, in that respect, you're quite explicit about calculating things like that, right?

• 1:11Tyler Cowen?

  But are you learning new ideas, new theories, new concepts, or are you just applying what you learned, say, 13 years ago, whenever?

• 1:17Speaker 01

  No, I feel it still feels fresh to me. I mean, I think, so when I've talked about the book to people, people kind of understand the expected value part, right? That's easily explicable to Economics 101 people. I think the equilibrium part, that solve for the equilibrium is something that people don't get as much. It's like, what equilibrium should emerge, given everyone has their incentives to play this hand optimally, so to speak, right? Or everyone has different incentives, but they're all being rational in some capacity? Like, that kind of thing I think about a lot when it comes to even like, online discourse, for example. You know, why are people behaving a certain way on Twitter or X, for example?

• 1:54Tyler Cowen?

  It's a random Nash equilibrium. Do you take that seriously? It seems to hold with soccer kicks, right? But in poker, anything you do, do you ever use the concept?

• 2:03Speaker 01

  Oh, sure. No, I will literally randomize sometimes, right? Where you look at the tournament clock, and if it's a high number, then you'll bluff, and if it's a low number, then you'll play more passively. For example, you can look at the rotation of your chips or things like that. I mean, look...

• 2:15Tyler Cowen?

  And you think some of the other people do it, too?

• 2:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can tell there's a certain look. You see people are like looking up at the clock and it's like a kind of daydreaming and they're and they're waiting for a number, right? You can like rotate your cards. One thing people didn't realize until they actually solved the National Libra for Poker is how many mixed strategies there are. Basically, every hand is a mix of some kind, right?

• 2:36Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  The flip side to that is that if you have any tell or read on your opponent at all, you move from literal indifference toward a dominant strategy in that context, right? So I believe actually in like reading players tells, picking up on the moment and how you are perceived and how your table image shifts a lot. But no, I mean, poker has gone further than anything else in the literal manifestation of game theory in real life. I mean, you also see it in in football and things like that. I'm working on an NFL model now, right? I wonder if NFL teams are optimally mixing their strategies, for example, but you see it there, right? Like a a draw play on third and long, right? Has a higher expected value because it's not expected and because you're supposed to always pass there, right?

• 3:18Speaker 01

  And, and, you know, economics is amazing in the in the sense that human it predicts human behavior, I think. I think fairly well when you have repeated trials and people that have good feedback and incentive to to be optimal.

• 3:30Tyler Cowen?

  Your ability to read tells, does it help you at all in real life? And if so, how?

• 3:34Speaker 01

  There's probably some people reading, but it's very specific, right? It was on the subway getting here, right? I didn't have a seat on the train. I was like, oh, that person's going to stand up. I can tell and I was wrong, right? The tells are not always 100% reliable.

• 3:45Tyler Cowen?

  If someone wants to learn how to read tells, other than just say, playing a lot of poker or doing the thing, how do they do that?

• 3:52Speaker 01

  I think there is not a substitute for for how it correlates to real world scenarios because it's so kind of contextual and kind of semantic. So I was at the World Series for most of June, played in the main event, which is a $10,000 tournament. And there was a guy who had like a very rapid heartbeat that you could kind of see his. It's called like a carotid artery or cartoid. I don't know what it's called, right? But his heart's beating in his neck. And so that's obviously often a tell. However, for some people, they get more nervous when they're bluffing. Some get more nervous when they have a strong hand, right? So you have to like kind of correlate that with. With behavior and that's contextual, the fact that he was an intermediate player and not a really good player or a complete novice fish, we call them in poker. So no, you need,

• 4:34Speaker 01

  you're building up kind of an implicit database in your head, I think, just by, by watching a lot and including like watching when you're not involved in a hand in poker, you're folding and most of them are poker most of the time. But like I'm watching people and like, kind of like making a little prediction. Oh, that feels strong, something he did, right? And then, you know, if you're right, 60% of the time, 60 instead of 50 random, right? That's a huge edge. And in gambling, any 55, 45 edge is enormous, right? And 60, 40 or 65, 35 is, will make you a very winning player.

• 5:06Tyler Cowen?

  And if you're watching an NBA game, is there any meaningful way in which you can read tells like, oh, Luca has a bad attitude tonight?

• 5:13Speaker 01

  I'm not, I mean, you can tell from the body language of a team sometimes. I had a fairly good year betting the NBA playoffs and like, does the team have it tonight? I mean, that should be in principle, you know, actionable, I would think, but you know, you would think that markets might pick up on that. But yeah, there are things like this team is tired. They don't have the personnel, right? Like the, you know, the Nuggets in that, in that OKC series, like they're a great team. They beat my expectations, but like they're not going to be able to keep up with this team for, for four quarters. But that's not like physical reads so much as kind of, again, it's kind of a little bit of physical observation and a lot of priors and context.

• 5:50Tyler Cowen?

  What was the last interesting thing you learned from the academic political science literature?

• 5:56Speaker 01

  Oh, boy, this is gonna seem like, kind of like an insult to.

• 5:59Tyler Cowen?

  No, no, we're all for insults here.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  I mean, look, I read a lot of sub stacks and things, and things like that, right? Oh, my gosh. I don't know.

• 6:08Tyler Cowen?

  I think that might be the right answer to be clear.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  No, look, I, I think in some ways, you know, what has come out of academic circles have been interesting. I mean, I think effective altruism has been interesting, for example, you know, I mean, certainly critical theory or whatever the origins of wokeness have had a lot of influence on, on the discourse more broadly. But like, yeah, I don't, I don't really read a lot of journal articles anymore. It's also a lot of it's gone on, on Blue Sky, I think, and, and I can't tolerate Blue Sky, really. It's too much of a circle jerk, I think. And so, you know, I think academics have maybe lost influence in that, in that respect, even though I have great experiences talking to academics and I'll do events at universities a couple of times a year. And they also kind of fall in this trap where like, it's so reflexively anti-

• 6:55Speaker 01

  Trump, a lot of it, and I'm anti-Trump, right? In most senses of that term, but something about it has kind of melted the brains a little bit of like the nuance and the subtlety and the things that, you know, the slow cooking method of academia where you're supposed to take more time with things, I think is not always a good match, you being one of the major exceptions for kind of rapid fire reaction to the news cycle.

• 7:19Tyler Cowen?

  If there were a paper you wish someone would write, is there such a thing? Something you'd like to know, but you don't know now? And in principle, an academic could do it.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe papers is kind of like the wrong part of the curve right now. We're like, yeah, like a Substack newsletter that you take a couple of days with or a blog post, right? Or a book. I mean, I'm still a big believer in books where you kind of go into a conclusion more in depth than anyone has before, right? Or investigative journalism, you know, I was just listening on the way over to like the Ross Douthat podcast with the woman who kind of helped to break the story of Jeffrey Epstein for the Miami Herald. And she's like, this was a major story featuring all types of people that are extremely well-known and notorious internationally, right? But people are kind of lazy, right? And they were not like a lot of reporters, really kind of pursuing every detail of that case. And so I think that, you know, 90% of academic papers would work perfectly fine as like,

• 8:13Speaker 01

  as like blog posts, right? Including the tone of like, okay, I ran some regressions instead of having like Greek symbols and things like that and the pretense of all of it.

• 8:23Tyler Cowen?

  And just say what you think, right? And let the world sort it out.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Say what you think. And also, you know, one of the things I like about writing newsletters, I can use my tone to say, when am I speculating a little bit more? When am I making a joke? When am I being more serious, presenting some original finding and things like that? And that can be lost with the, with the dry, sterile tone of a typical academic paper.

• 8:43Tyler Cowen?

  So when you think about maximizing expected value, how obsessed should you be with longevity? I mean, should you be the next Brian Johnson?

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I ask myself a lot of these questions, right? Like, I don't know. I think if you kind of hyper optimize for every parameter in your day to day life, and you probably wind up being fairly miserable. I think, yeah, I mean, I guess it'd be hypocritical if I said I was like terribly concerned about longevity. I mean, in your 40s, you are kind of, both by choice and by force, you kind of are required to be a little bit more careful about certain things, I suppose. Yeah, I haven't gotten on that on that bandwagon quite as much. I'm sure I will. Probably if I do this again in three years, I'll be, I don't know, right? Some health nut or something. But for now, for now, I'm making serious but incremental improvements, I guess.

• 9:29Tyler Cowen?

  As a better, do you take Pascal's wager seriously?

• 9:33Speaker 01

  I take the notion that we're profoundly uncertain about the nature of this universe seriously, right?

• 9:39Tyler Cowen?

  But why not believe, right? It would seem to maximize expected value. Just jump right in. You don't have to say you know the answer, but you would say, well, this is the most likely path I have for getting to the answer, is to start by believing something.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  Well, I don't really believe in heaven as such, right? Or I don't believe in kind of like Pascal's, I mean, I put, you know, P equals point 0001.

• 10:00Tyler Cowen?

  Well, not with P equals 1, but there's some chance, right?

• 10:03Speaker 01

  There's some chance, but like, I mean, look, a lot of these, a lot of problems in, I guess it's called like infinite ethics. You know, you now have this big debate over like shrimp welfare.

• 10:12Tyler Cowen?

  Sure.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  For example, and I'm like, we have enough problems that are in the kind of terrestrial tractable realm, right? Well, I'm just not going to worry about those things so much. And I think, I think, you know, as thought experiments, they can be helpful and fine, right? But like, I think if you kind of like, you know, ignore the 1% of edge cases, it's probably good to have some people, Will MacAskill or whatever, worrying about those things. The shrimp welfare people having like some influence on that. But like, I'm trying to kind of move in the realm of, of the tractable. I've always been more, you know, poker, you know, what matters is what hand you have. What matters is the read that you have and, and, and the theory matters.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  But like, information you have that's local and specific and actionable always predominates that.

• 10:58Tyler Cowen?

  So you dismiss Pascal's wager, in short?

• 11:02Speaker 01

  I don't worry about Pascal's wager, I guess. You know, again, as I said, I've evolved toward being more affirmatively kind of agnostic as opposed to atheist, I suppose. But that's not because of Pascal's wager per se, just because of. The strangest of the world, you know, I do think that like some of the AI stuff ought to have people asking a few more questions about the nature of reality, I suppose. Yeah.

• 11:25Tyler Cowen?

  There's plenty of material in your book about people who take a lot of risk. Subtitle is The Art of Risking Everything. How much do you think people segregate areas of risk-taking? So for instance, people might say, well, Tyler, you travel to some dangerous locations, but I'm totally afraid to scuba dive. I feel I'm very strongly segregated. I either take a fair amount of risk or close to none at all. Is that your model of most humans?

• 11:48Speaker 01

  That's pretty normal. Yeah. I mean, the example I think I use in the book is Ezekiel Emanuel.

• 11:53Tyler Cowen?

  Sure.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  You can't go to, you shouldn't go to restaurants because we still have some COVID. It's like now in 2022, 2023, right? But he rides a motorcycle, which is like known to be one of the most dangerous things per mile that you can do. Yeah, people are usually not super meta rational about risk, right?

• 12:09Tyler Cowen?

  But should they be? Like, like, should you have one general risk attitude? Is that more meta rational?

• 12:15Speaker 01

  Look, I think things that seem irrational are often kind of rational on, on a higher plane, right?

• 12:23Tyler Cowen?

  True, yeah.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, you know, like loss aversion, you know, you shouldn't, you know, I had a pair of headphones stolen from me the other day, right? And I felt very kind of guilty about that. We hadn't locked the door of our, our car. It was kind of, you know, kind of my fault, but like.

• 12:35Tyler Cowen?

  This is in New York?

• 12:37Speaker 01

  In, actually in upstate New York.

• 12:38Tyler Cowen?

  Okay.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. You gotta be careful of upstate.

• 12:40Tyler Cowen?

  Real home of thieves. Yeah.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. But like, and you're like, okay, well, I can afford a new pair of headphones. It's not a big a deal, but like, but if you are chronically sloppy about things like that, then that would cause more hardship and would be wasteful. And so like, you know, loss aversion, things like that aren't necessarily, I mean, they come from flawed iterations of rationality that might serve a, might serve a higher purpose or might have served an evolutionary purpose earlier in kind of human civilization.

• 13:06Tyler Cowen?

  Can you think of cases of people who have truly integrated attitudes toward risk? That is, they have some level of risk-taking. They apply it more or less evenly to all the things they do.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  I mean, look.

• 13:18Tyler Cowen?

  Or those people just in jail.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I mean, look, I think some of Silicon Valley has that attitude a little bit. You know, it tends to be correlated with other things that might be less desirable. The calculated risk-taking part is hard, I think, right? If you're very successful, I mean, one thing you see when you do play poker is like, people play very differently when they're on a winning streak. People play very differently when they're when they're confident. They usually play better, quite a bit better. In fact, I'm probably true for like human beings too, but you know, but I've had moments in my career where I kind of flew way too close to the sun and you stop getting, you begin getting worse feedback from people. That's very, that's very damaging, right? Where people are sycophantic around you potentially, where you shut off criticism.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  I mean, Elon seems to have this problem a little bit, although Elon at least has kind of, you know, Elon didn't concede to Trump on tariffs and skilled immigration, things like that. So he had some values at least, but that's a very big problem, I think. And you're surrounding yourself with with yes men.

• 14:20Tyler Cowen?

  Why haven't you been to Oklahoma yet?

• 14:23Speaker 01

  I'd like to go. I had designs on, I was hoping the Knicks were going to play OKC, then I'd have gone for a couple of games there. It's cheaper to fly to OKC, stay in a in a Ramada or something, or maybe even a nice hotel, than to go to Madison Square Garden for playoff games.

• 14:38Tyler Cowen?

  I was thinking of trying to see a playoff game in OKC, not the finals. The tickets were so cheap, I was stunned because I'm used to like Bay Area, New York City prices, which I won't buy at, but I look at them and then I say, oh, that's too much.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  New York City is kind of crazy for, I mean, I think one thing people figured out is like, all the kind of high taste things that like, that rich people really like, like, there's been huge inflation. This is like the world's tiniest violin problem in like,

• 15:03Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  high end like sushi omakase, for example, right?

• 15:06Tyler Cowen?

  I don't do it anymore.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's, it's, you know, or like the US Open used to be something really fun. Go to the US Open in Flushing Meadows, right? You go to like one of the early sessions, you can go like to any of the 17 courts or whatever. There used to be a pretty good deal. You get in for like 50 bucks and now it's like 200 bucks, right? Which is kind of the fair price, but like, you know, you see now Delta using AI tools to price discriminate.

• 15:28Tyler Cowen?

  That's right.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  A little bit more, which I think we probably.

• 15:30Tyler Cowen?

  That's going to be bad for you.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, probably. We should probably have some law. Although in New York, we have, in New York, we can fly on multiple carriers to almost everywhere.

• 15:40Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  No, I think.

• 15:40Tyler Cowen?

  But if they all price discriminate using a common algorithm, it's not literally collusive, but it's in a way like collusion.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Is that legal or not? You would know more than me.

• 15:49Tyler Cowen?

  There are pending court cases. I'm not sure how they're all being decided, but it will be an increasingly important issue.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think there'll be, I think some of this is short side of the sense that we'll probably have like a pretty for pound backlash to it, I would think. Yeah. And I mean, it rubs through the wrong way intuitively.

• 16:05Tyler Cowen?

  If you're betting on NBA games or just trying to enjoy them, how much does it help you to have seen the team live? Like if you go to see Oklahoma a few games, do you learn anything?

• 16:16Speaker 01

  I mean, given that the edges are pretty small in general in sports betting, you know, you're probably either losing by 1% ROI or winning by 1% ROI, then any of that is, is helpful, I think. And also sometimes, you know, the markets are a little bit behind. If you're kind of there in the arena, it's called court signing, you can potentially pick up on things.

• 16:35Tyler Cowen?

  So it is helpful.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  I think so. Yeah. I mean, again, if it improves you by like 0.5% your ROI, that becomes pretty meaningful in the context of a sports bet.

• 16:45Tyler Cowen?

  Does ranked choice voting really matter? Does it really matter in affecting outcomes?

• 16:50Speaker 01

  It potentially can matter. I mean, particularly you've seen candidates adopt different strategies for it by cross endorsing, for example, although I think I've kind of turned mildly anti RCV for a couple of reasons.

• 17:03Tyler Cowen?

  Why?

• 17:04Speaker 01

  One is that it's not Condor say optimal, right? The order in which candidates are eliminated. Hopefully I'm saying that name correctly, right?

• 17:11Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  The order which candidates are eliminated can affect who wins. Like Brad Lander, for example, is kind of the compromise candidate between M'Donny and Cuomo in the New York Merrill race. It's plausible. He would have won any head to head matchup, but he was eliminated third from last, or I guess second from last. So he didn't get.

• 17:27Tyler Cowen?

  But would you have had a head to head matchup under a normal voting rule?

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, it's plausible you could. I mean, I don't know. Or traditional, I guess traditional runoff wouldn't be like any better potentially. No, I mean, fair enough, right? You also almost had Mumdani wound up winning the first choice vote. Although in, in 2021, Eric Adams nearly lost to Catherine Garcia, despite being way ahead in the penultimate round. And Garcia nearly was eliminated by Maya Wiley in the round before that. Right? So it's more gamable than you might think. Also, like, it takes a really long time to count the votes and all the tallies, right? Like, just yesterday, we're taping this, what is it, July 21st? Or, yeah, so three or four weeks after the election, you finally get the official tally of how all the ballots transferred.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  It wound up not being that close, but like, I think we need it more of a norm in American elections toward counting votes within 24 to 48 hours.

• 18:22Tyler Cowen?

  Brazil does it, right?

• 18:23Speaker 01

  India does. I was doing a little work on the Indian election, which was, which was fascinating in different ways. And, you know, they have a physical polling place up in the Himalayas and things like that. I don't know how many languages they speak and how diverse and they respect that country is. And, and they count their results very quickly. They also have better exit polling in international countries, where in the US, the exit pollsters are trying to ask this like 100 item long, proper kind of political science, like demographically weighted survey, right? Whereas in Europe and Latin America, places like that, it's like, we just want to know who's going to win. Right? To make for more exciting TV. So just ask them one question, who'd you vote for? They do it in a very organized way. And so exit polling is quite good in foreign countries and quite bad elsewhere.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  But yeah, I, I think, you know, I don't think that should be a Republican talking point that we want, we want the vote counted quickly and not taking days and weeks.

• 19:17Tyler Cowen?

  And if you could wave a magic wand and bring proportional representation to the United States at the national level, would you do it?

• 19:25Speaker 01

  I think I I'm enough of a critic of the two major parties that I'd have to say yes, for the most part, although I don't know. I mean, you know, we have more veto points in the American system. That's probably been good for capitalism and economic growth and and maybe a certain type of liberty, I suppose, right? I mean, I think a question I'd like to see addressed more, maybe there's some good books is like, you know, I see the US and Europe as diverging more and more canonically. Europe is getting longer and longer lifespans. We're not really right. We still have fairly good economic growth and they don't really, how much of that is kind of culture? But our Europeans have long lifespans, right? Well, that's what I'm saying. If you're a Japanese American woman born in New Jersey, isn't that the world's longest lifespan?

• 20:10Speaker 01

  It's pretty, I mean, New England is almost like Scandinavia. Yeah. Or something, right? Including being like, you know, slightly boring in certain ways, right? The food's a little, a little plain. But yeah, I'm a big proponent of like, kind of New England. It's not where I want to live, but like New England exceptionalism, they did much better under COVID. I mean, Boston had a very big outbreak early, right? But like Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine had much lower COVID cases than anywhere else by far in the United States. They're doing something clearly right. If I look at some of the prediction markets, at times I've seen Trump at six to seven percent likely to be the next Republican nominee to run for president. Is that long shot bias that it's hard to shorten those markets? Do you think it's the right number? Is it just

• 20:53Speaker 01

  expressed as betters who want to see Trump again and they're willing to lose some money to send that message? What do you make of that? So the prediction markets, and I consult for polymarket have gotten quite a lot better. They've gotten quite a lot more, more liquid, but, but you still see some, you know, obvious mispricings like Zoran actually had like a 7% chance of becoming the Democratic nominee when that market launched at polymarket and he was born in Uganda. So there's no workaround to that, I don't think. I think on, on the Papal betting markets, they didn't have Pope Leo priced higher than 1% or things like that. And I think they got overconfident about a system where they had like no, no inside knowledge and the outside view was maybe only marginally useful and things

• 21:36Speaker 01

  like that. Look, I don't know. Yeah. I mean, that we talked a little bit before about like, About how some of the kind of academic historians, political scientists have kind of gotten enraptured by this anti-Trump thing. And I do think the scenario where like, Trump runs for a third term, I mean, I don't say it's zero, right? And I'd say if, if, if it's 2%, then that's still alarmingly high, but it's probably, probably two and not, and not six or seven. I mean, you'd have to just totally, my question is, in that world, are we even having an election in the first place, right? If you're just kind of flagrantly ignoring the constitution that much. I mean, I think there are

• 22:13Tyler Cowen?

  But it's common that weird, non-democratic governments have elections of some kind, right? Most of the, even the Soviet Union had quote unquote, elections.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  They, they do, but like, for that transition to occur in the US of, and also, you know, Trump is not particularly popular. His ratings kind of fell pretty fast early because of, I think predominantly terrorists and then recovered. Now they've fallen again. I don't know how much, how much of that is more terrorists versus, you know, if I could like the, the Epstein stuff, for example. Yeah, a lot of the scenario, I mean, you know, it helps for populists to be popular. We certainly have enough kind of checks and balances and the US people are not being forced to have information from like, from any one source. And so, yeah, I worry about a lot of things with Trump. That's probably not the foremost concern.

• 23:02Tyler Cowen?

  I've seen Stephen Smith, the ESPN sports commentator, you probably even know him, but as high as 9% in the market to be Democratic nominee. What do you think his actual number is?

• 23:13Speaker 01

  Maybe 2%.

• 23:15Tyler Cowen?

  I think it's four or 5%. I don't think it's crazy.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  We had a draft of like, the 20 most likely Democratic nominees. I think, I think Stephen Smith was like a ninth round, ninth round draft pick, right?

• 23:26Tyler Cowen?

  And what does that scenario look like where he wins?

• 23:29Speaker 01

  I think it's where Democrats feel really, well, the reason why I would not be as optimistic as you are, right? Is I think that other people with the platform will, will emerge, right? Like, I had not frankly heard of Zarron Nantani's name when we taped our last conversation a year ago, when he might now be one of the five most recognizable names in the party. The fact that he's from Uganda prevents him running for president, but like, but you'll see other people emerge. I think there is probably some indication that you're going to have more, more energy on the left, more energy from people who are kind of like explicitly partisan, maybe to the point of being like, a little bit Paranoid even, right? You have, you know, there is a little bit of election denialism

• 24:14Speaker 01

  among certain threads of Democrats, for example, that Trump stole the election from Kamala Harris. It's, it's, you know, it's nascent for now, but, but I think, I think a partisan fighter and also, you know, you're filtering out. I mean, you know, people get confused because they're like, okay, well, why is Democratic electorate? Because Cuomo did very well always in New York City when running statewide. Hillary Clinton did very well in New York City. It kind of, kind of diverted Bernie Sanders' campaign in 2020. But like, it's because people in the center have like migrated away from the Democratic Party. So you're having these two things that go on at once. I do think there's a chance that Democrats will overestimate how tolerant the rest of the country is for progressive governance.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  But, but with that said, I think J.D. Vance is also a pretty flawed candidate. I think any other non Vance candidate is going to have a lot of trouble escaping the shadow of Trump. So I regard Democrats as like a 55, 45 favorite for 2028. Pricing in some chance they'll nominate what I would think of as a suboptimal from an electoral standpoint candidate, right? I'm not telling anybody who they should nominate in terms of whose values they have. You know, I think people neglect the importance of the primary system and the optionality and the revealed preferences of voters. It is a, a pretty good proxy for running a general election campaign is running a primary campaign that goes through all 50 states and you're raising money, you're giving speeches, things like that. But yeah, I, I think the idea of like, uh,

• 25:39Speaker 01

  external savior who's a centrist is becoming a bit less likely than I would have thought a year ago.

• 25:43Tyler Cowen?

  Do you think the major tech companies have proprietary information where they can predict elections better than anyone or anything? They may not even bother to do it, but is it there in principle?

• 25:55Speaker 01

  I tend to doubt it. I mean, one nice thing about polling for all the flaws that polling has, and I think polling has, I wouldn't call it a crisis, but like on the, on the route to a crisis, is you do have a good baseline to compare with, right? You can say, we are going to go back to like, you know, 1936, I think, was the first time Gallup issued a presidential election poll and look empirically at how accurate those polls are at extant days out from the election, whereas there's nothing to kind of calibrate AI type models, right? I mean, you know, you could probably predict how an individual voter will vote. So if they're gathering, I mean, the amount of things I tell.

• 26:32Tyler Cowen?

  But if you spent a lot of money and you have everyone's, say, Facebook posts. And you just fed it into a sufficiently complicated model. Wouldn't that be the best predictive model?

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Well, look, if I know you're just your name and your zip code, I can probably predict with 90% accuracy. You're going to vote for right from the name you can infer gender, race, age from the zip code. You can infer and for social economic status, right? That gets you pretty darn far. The issue with elections is that like, is that they operate on this like 1% or 2% margin, you know? The polls will have a disaster because one candidate gets 51% instead of 47%. That's still pretty good. If you're estimating how many jelly beans there are in a jar and you're like, oh, 51% of them are purple. And it's really 47, then that's not too bad, right? But you need a lot of precision for election polling and you have, and you have plenty of ways to get to a kind of blunt approximate view, but I think those would not be any superior to, to the other ways, like polling, namely.

• 27:30Tyler Cowen?

  Do you have a prediction for most likely Democratic Party nominee? We may be doing another of these in three years, right?

• 27:35Speaker 01

  I, I, you know, I AOC was the first pick in the draft I did, and I, I think that would be reinforced by the New York Merrill race. I mean, I think she's a very right person who has demonstrated some tact in, in certain areas. And look, again, I am not a socialist or democratic socialist, right? But even I as am someone who likes seeing new faces in the parties, right? Who thinks who had no affection for like the Clinton dynasty or the Cuomo dynasty or the, or the Bidens who can't seem to stay out of the spotlight. And so I think she's, she's smart enough and fresh enough, good enough on social media. And so, you know, no one's higher than like 15%, but if you gave me a free bet, I think I'd pick her.

• 28:20Tyler Cowen?

  Now, speaking of predictions, a year ago, we talked about how long will it take AIs to be as good as human super forecasters? And you made a prediction where you said at least 10 to 15 years.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:31Tyler Cowen?

  Now, a year later, do you want to revisit that and revise?

• 28:34Speaker 01

  I think it's probably about right. I mean, I, I would say relative to a year ago, AI is about at the. 40th percentile of progress I would have expected. I'd be curious what you would think, right?

• 28:47Tyler Cowen?

  Well, a year ago, I said two to three years.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:50Tyler Cowen?

  And right now, I'm going to say one to two years, which is the same prediction. So I think you're way too pessimistic in your timetable.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  It depends on kind of how competitive the exercise is, right? If it's like a

• 29:01Tyler Cowen?

  Like a math Olympiad tournament. So, you know, they just did gold medal performance. I said this last year, I said in a year, they're going to do gold medal. And a year ago, they weren't sure how many Rs were in the word strawberry.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  I think

• 29:13Tyler Cowen?

  So you don't think on super forecasting, they can

• 29:16Speaker 01

  I think it's very different when you're dealing with a static problem as compared to a dynamic system where the inputs are changing all the time. So currently, the AI labs, or not the AI labs, but like the large language models are very bad, very, very bad at like poker. They're not trained on poker data. I'm sure if you did train them, there are these things called solvers that are trained on poker day that do very well, right? But like they cannot quite impute the general patterns just from mediocre text data or amateurish kind of hand analysis. But if you probe them on why they're bad, they're like, yeah, maybe it's tough for us when you have a a complicated, evolving kind of game theory dynamic and you have to develop exploitive strategies very quickly.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  I mean, the amount of like, you know, it is amazing poker players where if you have a computer solve a poker hand to get to one where there's enough loss minimization, it can take like, you know, a very strong computer can take like minutes, right? Whereas poker player makes those calculations implicitly in a handful of seconds, for example. I worry with the math Olympiad stuff, there's like a little bit of teaching to the test where because you kind of set this as the goal that a large language model should have, that therefore there's a lot of prestige when you meet that goal.

• 30:30Tyler Cowen?

  It isn't teaching to the test what we should do, even with humans, in a sense, right? Like the test is what you think is important and that's what you ought to teach.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  Well, but like the poker example, right? Or chess, I mean, I think AI models are very poor at chess from everything that I've heard, for example.

• 30:47Tyler Cowen?

  But other AI models play chess great.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  Correct. No, look, I mean, this gets me the question of like, kind of like, what's it mean to be generally intelligent? I mean, yeah, we'll probably have like scaffolding of model on top of model and you'll now like patch different things. Like right now, you can't really very effectively make like a plane reservation using ChatGPT, but I'm sure if you dedicate a resource to that, then you have these agentic models now or agent models are just kind of like creeping into the system a little bit, but like

• 31:16Tyler Cowen?

  But those will work in less than a year, I think. I mean, there's an agentic model now from OpenAI.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  Eight, eight, kind of rough AGI versus superintelligence, right? I, I am less convinced that we're going to have some intelligence explosion than I would have been maybe. I don't think I was ever convinced of it, right? But like, you know, this emergent superintelligence where you train it on relatively simple data and extrapolates beyond the data set. I mean, I think they do reason sometimes. I think they're kind of quite smart and I no longer am like bashful about saying, oh, ChatGPT thinks this. I used to avoid that, that term think. But there's a big gap between like approximate general intelligence for kind of desk jobs and then superintelligence on the one hand, or then kind of AGI for physical labor on the other hand. I, I, I

• 32:04Speaker 01

  think people are much too quick to make that leap. And I think the math Olympiad in part because maybe the data, the answers are somewhere latent in the training data, but even if they're not, I, I, you know, if you try to solve, what's this, a Lucas critique? Yeah. Whatever else, right? It's, there's a version of, of a good version of that, I think for AI models.

• 32:22Tyler Cowen?

  My intuition is that if you took five super forecasters and just had them write a five-page prompt for GPT-5, which will be out this summer, that we'd, we'd be there already. I don't think it would be superintelligence. You could say it's not AGI, but the human super forecasters, they're not that impressive, right? Like they're not Einsteins. They just have good methods and they're disciplined.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  It requires so much on general knowledge. I think both general knowledge of how the world works and heuristics, I think it might be. A little tougher. I mean, I don't, I mean, can you train on a thought process? Like, I try to do that in real life sometimes, right? Like, my partner is an artist and has a very good eye for art. And I, I don't, I maybe have a B, B plus, right? I kind of like, kind of like, train myself on him and say, what does he like?

• 33:09Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  In art. And so, you know, but that probably caps me at like a B plus understanding potentially. And in markets, you know, a B plus trader is often on the losing side of a trade.

• 33:21Tyler Cowen?

  How good do you think you could become at appreciating art? Let's say you put in two to three years, not full time, but made it one of your two or three big things. You know, after basketball.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  I'd probably be very astute about it. Look, I, I have confidence that like, when I devote myself to things, I can get kind of quite good at them. I think there's kind of no physical limitation there, but still, I mean, look, you know, I have four or five hobbies that kind of occupy all my time, some which have already become kind of professions, right? I think maybe architecture more. In the silver DNA, there are some architecture genes. We're related by, not by blood to Frank Lloyd Wright, right? My grandma was an architect, designed the home I live in part-time now in Westchester County. My uncle is an architect. So that would kind of be more the direction where I would go. I like things that are, are spatial, have a very good like spatial memory. If I've been to a restaurant before, even if it was a different restaurant 10 years ago, I remember that space very well.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  Whereas art, I have just a okay eye for it.

• 34:21Tyler Cowen?

  Now, nine years ago, in our first conversation, we discussed why more professional athletes had not come out as gay. And you and I both thought then that over the forthcoming time period, more players from the NBA would come out as gay.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:36Tyler Cowen?

  I asked ChatGPT, they said Jason Collins came out 12 years ago, and since then it's been zero. Why is that? What did we get wrong?

• 34:45Speaker 01

  I mean, there's been a little bit more of a conservative backlash in sports where you see kind of more outspoken Trump supporters.

• 34:52Tyler Cowen?

  But that's very recent, right? Where you have a nine-year period. There's 2020, the extremes of woke are part of this period. Gay marriage is really quite solidified in American life and no one comes out.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  It is surprising, I think, in, in a lot of way, you know, look, I am not so. PC, I mean, there may be kind of like some selection mechanisms. I don't necessarily know that they're they're genetic, but like maybe it becomes easier for gay people to like come out in high school and things like that. They're attracted to fields apart from sports, even though, you know, gay men typically are are quite in shape and quite athletic relative to a straight man of the same demographic cohort, otherwise, right? So it's not like a physical ability thing, but like, but selecting into sports and as sports becomes more professional, I guess, like not the right term at the high school level, but like

• 35:47Speaker 01

  you're tracked into like, you know, Cooper flag, whatever, right? You know, he didn't kind of spend all his high school in Maine. He went to Monteverdi Academy or whatever else it was. And so if anything distracts you from that, whether it's kind of questions about your identity or anything else, right? You kind of get off track. Maybe it's like kind of harder to make that up later on.

• 36:05Tyler Cowen?

  GPT also claims that forty four players in the WNBA have come out of something other than standard hetero.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:12Tyler Cowen?

  It's a big gap, right?

• 36:13Speaker 01

  It's a, it's a big gap for sure. Right? And I went to a I saw Caitlin Clark and the Indian in a fever against New York Liberty last year. The WNBA is like fascinating, right? It's a very, very, very different demographic than like any sporting event I've ever been at before. You know, I think it's kind of great. It's getting more cultural salience, I think.

• 36:34Tyler Cowen?

  Does betting help it in relative terms?

• 36:37Speaker 01

  Two years ago, I had a really good time betting the women's NCAA basketball tournament kind of before the markets had adapted, but I think people figured out like, okay, these are pretty soft lines. And so yeah, no, I mean, the, the issue is like in any type of betting, if you're any good, you'll get limited if you have repeated success or even even waitress at Look EV plus CD with casino, you'll also get get limited quite quickly. But yeah, probably like. Betting women's sports probably is, there's probably some smart kid out there, some smart college kid who's going to make a lot of money betting WNBA, women's college basketball, women's anything really.

• 37:12Tyler Cowen?

  And he's building a model or just using intuition or reading a lot on the internet? How, how might he be doing that?

• 37:17Speaker 01

  You know, my guess is the model combined with knowledge of the league can get you, get you pretty far, like, you know, so injury data, for example, is much worse for women's sports than for men's sports. They don't have the same reporting protocols. So if you were, you know, for even for the NCAA tournament, we actually were trying to use injury data in our women's NCAA model and like, you have to like do one by one individual Google searches for it, right? And so, yeah, there's still a reward to like having knowledge that nobody else has, right? Or that few other people have and people are basically pretty lazy and don't necessarily do the legwork on that.

• 37:52Tyler Cowen?

  You mentioned Cooper Flag before, as you know, he was drafted number one by the Dallas Mavericks.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:57Tyler Cowen?

  Who are quite a good team. And you have what Houston and Philly drafting two and three? And the Wizards draft number six?

• 38:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:05Tyler Cowen?

  Do we need to redesign the NBA draft lottery?

• 38:08Speaker 01

  People complained before that there was like too much tanking and now I guess they're saying that it doesn't reward tanking teams enough. No, I think it's probably, it's probably fairly optimal. I mean, this year was, was weird in the sense that like all the top three teams are accomplished in certain ways, right? Or other things going for them, but no, I, you know, I, you know, I kind of like the old, was it the Mike Zarian proposal for like the wheel where every team gets the first pick once every 30 years and you kind of know ahead of time which one it is. Yeah, I, I, I don't like, I don't like incentivizing failure in any context. I don't think fans mind like rooting for leagues where one team is great and the other's a perpetual underdog, right?

• 38:50Speaker 01

  The most popular sport in the world, of course, is, is soccer. And there, you know, you have teams that are winning teams every year for a century almost in some cases, doesn't seem to bother people as much. It's, it's very weird how American sports, it's a cliche, are kind of socialist and European sports are more capitalist, basically.

• 39:09Tyler Cowen?

  Is there a crisis in NBA regular season design?

• 39:13Speaker 01

  I had been kind of a naysayer of this a little bit until I watched this year's playoffs and kind of how much higher octane they were and how enjoyable it was to watch a game from, from start to finish. Look, I think it's a moving target. If you shorten the season to 66 games or 72, people will still complain about, about that being too many. And I used to live near Madison Square Garden and they're, you know, for regular Knicks game, they're, the get in price can be 200 bucks. So I understand why they might not want to change it. But yeah, I think you probably want to go to maybe not 66 or maybe 72 or something like that and see how that goes.

• 39:49Tyler Cowen?

  There were so many decisive injuries this year. I forget the whole list, but it seems like almost half the important players, including the seventh game of the finals, were decided in essence by injury.

• 39:59Speaker 01

  Well, look, in every other sport, right? In football, you're only playing half the downs roughly, right?

• 40:04Tyler Cowen?

  Right.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  In hockey, apart from the goalie, you're playing, you know, there are three or four lines that shift, right? In baseball, you're only in the field half the time. The continuous strain on NBA basketball played at such a high, I mean, it's a totally different sport, right? You go back and like, watch clips from like the seventies or the eighties and you're like, it's a totally different sport. I think it's a much better sport now, but like, I don't know. I mean, it sucks to see these guys like, you know, so great. Jason Tatum's a very graceful player. Halliburton's a little hooky jerky, but has a certain grace in how he steps and like, yeah, I, I, I think the league has to, I mean, you've seen it in baseball too, with like Tommy John surgeries and things like that. And, and, you know, there are always downsides to achieving

• 40:47Speaker 01

  optimization to a degree we didn't necessarily expect and, and pushing things to the brink. Now, the equilibrium probably is that players always are pushing things to the brink, right? They're very competitive. They're extremely well compensated, right? There is appropriately demand for coaches and trainers and everything else for like, for high effort, I think. You also have short-term incentives. Teams don't really care that much about like what happens to their star player if he's on the end of his contract in theory.

• 41:16Tyler Cowen?

  They might be happy.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I, I think you have to have, I think you probably have to. Trim a few games off the schedule or have something where maybe you say, okay, the individual player limit is 75 games, right? Every player is guaranteed at least seven days rest. Maybe you are required to publish them in advance. So if I'm going to see Giannis play for Milwaukee, I have no interest in the Bucks without Giannis in their current form. For example, maybe something like that could be an intermediate step.

• 41:43Tyler Cowen?

  Let's say you're advising LeBron James and this coming year possibly is his last or certainly his next to last. The Lakers are not good enough to really go anywhere in the next year. Probably you agree with that, but he has a signed contract for what about $50 million?

• 41:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:59Tyler Cowen?

  What do you advise LeBron? Like just as a human being, LeBron, what, what should you maximize? What are you telling?

• 42:05Speaker 01

  LeBron's in a funny place because I think he's clearly by the career metrics, now the best NBA player of, of all time.

• 42:15Tyler Cowen?

  I agree.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  I don't think he'll ever win the hearts of people. I mean, you could argue LeBron was not as good as Jordan at the peak, right? You could argue Kareem's peak was also higher, maybe very early in his career. So like, there's kind of nothing LeBron could do sort of winning like three more titles that would kind of put him ahead of Jordan in that conversation. And I want to go to a young team where I can win a title and mentor some guys. I mean, go to the Spurs, for example, that might be a lot of fun, right?

• 42:43Tyler Cowen?

  But they're not going to win a title with LeBron, not this year.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  Oh, I think the Spurs with LeBron James this year could potentially win a title.

• 42:50Tyler Cowen?

  Really? That would shock me. I, I would give that, I don't know, four or 5%.

• 42:55Speaker 01

  I mean, Wemby is very, very good. I mean, he was playing at a level where there's this Darko NBA metric that kind of tracks performance in real time, which is usually not irrelevant for like a 30 year old mid-career player, but for like someone like Victor is relevant. Like he was probably the fifth best NBA player by the time he kind of shut down his season.

• 43:16Tyler Cowen?

  But the chance that he's still on the court by the end of the year and as such a young player, you look at the other true greats over time. Kareem won something very early, but usually people need, you know, Michael Jordan needed some years.

• 43:28Speaker 01

  You don't think Wemby and LeBron would be, and you know, and they have little, let's say this motherfucker.

• 43:32Tyler Cowen?

  I don't bet, but I'd love to bet against them.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  Well, well, next year maybe then, right? They have one more year of maturity. They probably fill in maybe Dylan Harper's a positive value asset at that point. And LeBron can have his like, you know, sign a minimum contract in, in San Antonio.

• 43:47Tyler Cowen?

  Anyway, we know that's your advice. What do you think of the hypothesis that in a given season, there's only a few teams that can win it all and you know in advance who they are. So maybe last year it was Boston, Oklahoma, possibly Denver. And you should just bet on those teams. Anything else is a true long shot. What do you think?

• 44:04Speaker 01

  Look, I think every basketball fan believes in some like stylized version of that, but I think it's become like a little bit overstated. Many of the teams now, you know, the Nuggets, people until Jokic was seen as like this ultimate beast of a postseason player, people were very skeptical about their ability to thrive in the postseason, right? You know, Toronto didn't fit the paradigm a couple of years ago. Even Giannis had struggled in the postseason before they found success later on. So yeah, look, you don't have that many years of relevant NBA history. I think people maybe over indexed a bit to like the, the Bulls and Warriors dynasty.

• 44:35Tyler Cowen?

  Why are the core young players of the Wizards mediocre, as you suggested in a recent sub stack?

• 44:41Speaker 01

  I mean, they haven't had that many elite picks in the, in the most valuable drafts, right? I mean, they're probably doing okay. That was my kind of, I think co-authors saying that it were mediocre, although I agreed with him to be fair.

• 44:55Tyler Cowen?

  Like Caliburton was what number 12, Steph Curry was number seven. I forget all the number, but you know, not everyone's a top pick who's great.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  I haven't looked at how persistent skill and NBA drafting is. To me, it seems fairly persistent for San Antonio, OKC to consistently pick up players or even Miami, right? I mean, that seems to be a pretty consistent, persistent skillset.

• 45:17Tyler Cowen?

  And what's your current update on the Philadelphia 76ers? You were kind of bullish last year and I was down on them.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:26Tyler Cowen?

  I want to claim victory on that one.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, you know, Daryl Morey, who have you had him on conversation with Tyler?

• 45:32Tyler Cowen?

  No, but would he do it?

• 45:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course. Daryl's a big geek. He loves chess, loves a lot of things like that, right? He will tell you that like his strategies are very high variance, right? You know, if Embiid is healthy and if Edgecombe is good in his first year and if Paul George is, I mean, they have like, you know, if they won 56 games next year, would it be? 56 is a lot. 52, 53, would that be shocking? I mean, not totally, right? The, the, the East is pretty wide open. You know, they have this kind of like second timeline that now is a little bit more optimistic. No, so we, we have this piece now where we're ranking all 30 NBA teams by their long-term 10-year chance of winning a championship and they're right in the, in the middle for me. I think like 15th out of 30.

• 46:14Tyler Cowen?

  Who are the most important mentors in your life, including for basketball?

• 46:18Speaker 01

  I mean, for sports writing in general, you know, Bill James is somebody who's a mentor. You know, I consider-

• 46:24Tyler Cowen?

  And what did you learn from him personally, other than reading, which he's a great writer?

• 46:27Speaker 01

  I mean, Bill is kind of a, kind of a wise ass, right? But like, but understanding that like, good writing about technical subjects can still be good writing, period. That if you're like a, you know, an eight out of 10 as a writer and eight out of 10 is like a statistician, that might be more valuable than being a 10 out of 10 and a two out of 10 in the other area, potentially in this era where we're, well, have substacks and things like that. You know, Richard Thaler is somebody I got to know at Chicago a little bit and someone I'd consider a mentor, you know, I've followed you for a long time, Tyler, as well. But yeah, you know, I'm also someone who's kind of, it's a cliche, but kind of always blaze my own trail a little bit, you know, I think in terms of like, election forecasting. I mean, there's some people, you know, Robert Erickson's a professor at Columbia who had

• 47:10Speaker 01

  kind of like, pretty good election models early on, but like, but in general, all this was done kind of badly. And so I'm like, okay, the product I want doesn't exist. I'm going to have to go ahead and make it myself.

• 47:21Tyler Cowen?

  What do you feel you need mentors for now?

• 47:26Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't know if I have mentors for, as my, I just want people that are interesting-

• 47:29Tyler Cowen?

  Like I need mentors to learn what's new in AI, right? I can follow it myself, but I need a lot of help.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  Well, maybe mentor is not quite, you know, for like AI stuff, reading Zvi, is it Moshavitz, right?

• 47:41Tyler Cowen?

  Yes.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  You know, he is a mentor for like following AI developments, right? Cause he's kind of very level-headed about it and very comprehensive. And he'll write like, you know, a novel every week, basically on, on AI.

• 47:54Tyler Cowen?

  But he thinks it's going to kill us all. It's funny you would call him level-headed.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:58Tyler Cowen?

  You might, you might think he's correct, but-

• 48:01Speaker 01

  You know, look, I do think that kind of the AI safety slash rationalist community, I mean, it is- It is kind of a bubble, right? If you go to like the manifest conference, for example, have you been in?

• 48:12Tyler Cowen?

  No, but I know what it is.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. How do I put this like diplomatically, right? I've been around a lot of weird, these people are weird even relative to like the other weird people in that in that cohort, I think, right? In ways that allow them to be kind of very experimental and open minded about everything from like, you know, polyamory to to whatever else. But like, I do think they maybe don't recognize a political constraints, B, the kind of like adaptability of human beings, potentially, you know, C, as I talked about before, kind of, I think it's not at all obvious to me that you leap from rough AGI to comprehensive AGI and then to comprehensive

• 48:56Speaker 01

  AGI for the physical realm and then to a SI, right? You know, I think the AI 2027 forecasters, when I was at manifest, I said, okay, our timelines have moved out by by a couple of years. That seemed interesting, an interesting update, for example. So I wrote a new preface to On the Edge, and I wrote this back in, I guess, February and March, right? At a time when Elon had a lot of influence in the White House, when they were pressing the accelerator on AI stuff more, when terrorists were going into effect, and I wrote then that my my P doom had increased relative to the book.

• 49:31Tyler Cowen?

  You just don't think it can be a super forecaster, but it can do us all in.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Well, I worry about humans killing other humans with with AIs that make making weapons easier or certain types of terrorism easier, right? Or chemical compounds could be dangerous. I worry about like, like all of that.

• 49:49Tyler Cowen?

  But that wouldn't be doom. Those would be some bad events. Like, right now, drones can be very bad, and they are every day.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  It clear, look, we have not lived with techno, I mean, you said this before, too, like, we have not lived with nuclear weapons for that many generations, right?

• 50:00Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  Like, that's still a little bit frightening. You get to get like, kind of some of the Nick Bostrom stuff, where eventually, when we have some technology, we unfortunately invent where it's asymmetric, where any one crazy person can like, maybe destroy the world if they get access to the right systems that can't be that well protected, and things like that. But, you know, look, in some ways, I think the AIs are more human like than people expected. And that, to me, seems like a positive update.

• 50:26Tyler Cowen?

  If you think about the manifold types in terms of the framework in your book, how they think about risk, is there a common feature that they're more risk averse? Or that they worry more? Is there a common feature that they like the idea that they hold some kind of secret knowledge that other people do not have? Like, how do you classify them? They're just high in openness or what is it?

• 50:49Speaker 01

  They're high in openness to experience, right? I think they're very high in conscientiousness.

• 50:56Tyler Cowen?

  Are they? I don't know.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  Some of them are.

• 50:58Tyler Cowen?

  Some of them are, yeah. I think of them as high variance in conscientiousness. Rather than high in it.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  The EA's are and the rationalists are more high variance, I think. I mean, I think there can be like a certain type of gullibility is one problem, right? I mean, you know, I think obviously EA took a lot of hits for Sam Bankman-Fried, but I think if anything, they probably should have taken more reputational damage, right? That was really bad and there were a lot of signs of it, including like his interviews with you and other people like that.

• 51:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. Because it contrasts with like poker players who have similar kind of phenotypes, right? But are much more suspicious and much more street smart. And, you know, also the Bay Area is weird. I feel like the West Coast is like diverging more from the rest of the country. It's kind of like a long way, long way away. Just the mannerisms are different, right? You kind of like, small thing, right? You go to like a house party in the Bay Area, right? There may not be very much wine, for example, right? In New York, you know, the host isn't drinking, then it'd be considered sacrilege not to have like plenty of booze at, at a party, like little things like that, little cultural norms. You go to Seattle, it feels like Canada to me almost. And so, and so these things are diverging more.

• 52:15Tyler Cowen?

  And why is belief in doom correlated with practice of polyamory? And I think it is.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  I mean, if you ask Ayla, I guess she might say, well, if we're all gonna die or go to whatever singularity there is, right, we might as well have kind of like fun in the meantime. There's like some of that, some of that kind of hedonism, although in general, it's like not a super hedonistic movement.

• 52:35Tyler Cowen?

  It seems too economistic to me, like even I, the economist, I don't feel people think that economistically, that there's more likely some psychological predisposition toward both views.

• 52:45Speaker 01

  No, if you, if, I mean, I guess you could argue that society would be better organized, you know, in a more polyamorous relationship, people kind of do it implicitly in a lot of ways anyway, right? You know, including in like the LGBTQ community has different attitudes toward it potentially. There's, and you know, if there's not as much childbearing that can have an effect potentially. Yeah, but I think it's kind of like, you know, look, the not being constrained by the arms of society thing is taken kind of very seriously in that group, right? There's enough kind of disconnectedness and aloofness where they're able to kind of play it out in, in practice more. That creeps into a little bit into Silicon Valley, too, which can be much more whimsical and fanciful than like the Wall Street types I know, for example.

• 53:29Tyler Cowen?

  Why can't Canada win the Stanley Cup?

• 53:33Speaker 01

  I remember.

• 53:33Tyler Cowen?

  It's 1992, the last time. Is that correct?

• 53:36Speaker 01

  I remember, um.

• 53:37Tyler Cowen?

  I've forgotten when.

• 53:38Speaker 01

  Writing about this in the New York Times in 2012?

• 53:41Tyler Cowen?

  2013, maybe?

• 53:42Speaker 01

  2013, right?

• 53:42Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah, and it's still true.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I go in my one of my favorite sports, I have the article printed out in the bathroom. They let people see articles in the bathroom while you're taking a shit, right? You can read some article, I'm reading my own article in the bathroom. Look, tax laws matter a little bit, right? Where like Florida has no state income tax, you know, in a league with a salary cap. Actually, a good friend of mine is the assistant general manager for the Florida Panthers, Sonny Meta. And like, yeah, if you're making de facto 10 or 15% more in a hard capped league, that matters quite a bit.

• 54:11Tyler Cowen?

  If you're playing in Canada, isn't your endorsement income higher, maybe? Or is that not true?

• 54:17Speaker 01

  It's a smaller market overall. It's like kind of less wealthy than us, right? If you're a Canadian NHL superstar playing in, in the US, like, you know, I don't think Sidney Crosby has any trouble. I don't know if he's on Tim Hortons ads or whatever, right? Yeah, I don't know.

• 54:35Tyler Cowen?

  Around the world, you know, we used to talk about which countries are immune to populist right sentiment, or whatever you want to call it. Now Japan is flirting with populist right sentiment. Canada, not at the national level, but it almost happened in some way.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  The truck driver thing a couple of years ago in Ottawa, yeah.

• 54:54Tyler Cowen?

  So what's your update since the last few times we've spoken? Is it just going to come everywhere? Is anywhere immune? In Ireland, you see signs of it. They may not win the next election, but it seemed to be totally absent a few years ago. Now, Ian McGregor is running, and I don't think he'll win, but it'll have some kind of impact.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  You know, I think parts of Europe that are, and maybe Canada, are anti-US, may become more resistant to populist sentiment, for example, right? I have a friend who is Irish, actually, and gay, and moved here when he was 20. He's like, when I was growing up in Ireland, it was quite anti-gay, right? It was a very religious country. Now it's like almost aggressively pro LGBTQ plus, right? I think.

• 55:38Tyler Cowen?

  But it could be both. As you know, the head of AFD in Germany, she's lesbian with a Sri Lankan partner, is that correct?

• 55:45Speaker 01

  Something like that, yeah.

• 55:45Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah. So, but she's populist right, and she is pro-gay rights, and openly and proudly so.

• 55:52Speaker 01

  Look, I mostly believe in kind of like thermostatic effects in politics, where people run in the opposite direction of the kind of status quo more and more. I think there were reasons why anti-incumbent and populist spirit rose from the pandemic onward, but like, we might have been at a high watermark for it, potentially, in.

• 56:14Tyler Cowen?

  But totally, it seems we're not at a high watermark. It's rising in quite a few other nations.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  I guess I'm thinking about, kind of like, Canada, Western Europe, other high-income countries. Maybe I'm wrong.

• 56:28Tyler Cowen?

  Something that's puzzled me, and I've even asked prime ministers this, I've never gotten a good answer. It seems to me really a lot of European voters in some key nations want much lower immigration, whatever you and I might think, they clearly want it, and they don't get it. And the populist parties on the right continue to rise. Why don't they get it? Why don't the centrist politicians in power just do something, hold their noses if they don't like doing it, but just do it and stay in office?

• 56:55Speaker 01

  I mean, you have seen some of that in Denmark. For example, you've seen much less immigration, you know, even Justin Trudeau has said we need to cut down the amount of legal immigration as well as illegal immigration.

• 57:06Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah, I mean, Germany's not doing it, UK is not doing it, Ireland is not doing it, Netherlands is now doing it, but it just seems to be a very slow process, given how I think about democratic accountability on most other issues.

• 57:20Speaker 01

  I mean, and they used to be more of a strain of it on the left in the US, right? Where like Bernie Sanders, for example, would have issues like immigration, where he's a little bit more cautious, right? If you have a generous welfare state and admitting somebody new to it is potentially going to cost everybody. Look, I think all this might reverse within a few years where we kind of, where the world realizes we have a shortage of young people in general, a fertility crisis, if you want to call it that, right? And aging the population and will want to have like, you know, people who are willing to work hard and are skilled in particular. And so maybe they're kind of like skating to where the puck is going. You know, the US also has, I think, particularly efficient political

• 58:03Speaker 01

  outcomes in some ways, right? People take for granted the fact that like, you have these coalitions that are 50 50 approximately, very consistently, that Trump remade the GOP in a lot of ways, but still every election is roughly 50 50 with a different coalition than you had before. So maybe our, our electoral technology is, is better, you know, well, you know, right now, I mean, America is quite pro immigrant compared to most of the world and becoming, and because of backlash, Trump becoming kind of at least nominally more pro immigrant again, it would have been interesting.

• 58:35Tyler Cowen?

  I'm not sure that's true, though. I know all the polls that people cite, but when I look at the electorate's willingness to tolerate, say, ICE activity, my sense is they'll just put up with it.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  Look, I think the consensus is that we have some, some bad guys, as Trump would call them, and people are not particularly sympathetic to them. I think people are broadly tolerant toward, toward the migrant worker class, for the most part. I think people are broadly supportive of skilled immigration. People want more border enforcement. There is a consensus there that kind of, the two parties can't seem to, to actually reach a consensus on. But yeah, look, look, I agree with the polling issues a little bit, right? If you kind of like ask people, how do you feel about this 10 item list of questions on immigration? They'll kind of side with the left. And who do you like more, Trump or Democrats? They'll still say, we trust Trump a little bit more. I mean, Democrats do have this problem a little bit where, where, you know, you give them an inch

• 59:28Speaker 01

  and they'll take a mile. I mean, I think people correctly are, are worried about those excesses, right? Where I think during COVID, for example, I mean, I was kind of very cautious in the first three months, really, of, of COVID. I remember the first time I went like outdoors to a restaurant, it was like June or something, right? I was like terrified. I hadn't been around other people, apart from a couple of friends, for being honest, in months, right? But then you kind of realize that like half of the public health people wanted no real socialization until we had vaccines and maybe not even after that, right? And so, and so people are worried that like if you kind of let progressives some power, then, then things do get taken too far, even though kind of nominally, the incremental stuff, they might agree with it with the liberal side.

• 1:00:12Tyler Cowen?

  Two last questions. First, do you have a surprising prediction for the United States?

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  I mean, how long will the US last? I, I don't know. I don't know if I have a prediction there, exactly. It's hard to have surprising predictions, Tyler.

• 1:00:27Tyler Cowen?

  It is, but do you have a surprising prediction for the NBA?

• 1:00:32Tyler Cowen?

  Like, I think the Lakers will do poorly this year. I'm not sure it's surprising, but...

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  In my bracket, the Lakers ranked relatively highly, actually. Yeah.

• 1:00:40Tyler Cowen?

  Our last session, you said Luca was properly rated. I now see his own team didn't want him. LeBron is not crazy about having him around. Earlier, Jalen Brunson didn't want to play with them. To me, that's a lot of negative information. So I think the Lakers will do poorly.

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  I'm looking more kind of like the long-term brand intangible, which I think does seem to matter a lot in the NBA. They have like new ownership now that can spend all the luxury tax that they want. Look, when I saw Luca last year, he didn't seem quite like himself. But it's actually a reason why you want to like, do you want to bet on like the... Overachieving athlete? No, they're already overachieving. Whereas like an athlete who is a problem, right? As a drinking problem or not drinking, you know, having too many beers or being a little bit lazy. He has much more potential to grow if, if he gets his act together. So like kind of fully healthy Luca and you know, their salary cap situation is pretty good in the long run. Could be a powerful team.

• 1:01:33Tyler Cowen?

  Larry Bird is an example on your side, but I tend to bet against such people mentally when it comes to it. Maybe that's a difference between.

• 1:01:40Speaker 01

  People who are maximizing currently or.

• 1:01:42Tyler Cowen?

  No, people who have some problem like they drink too much or they're not conscientious enough or bad attitude.

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  But you want, you want high variance here, right? You want high variance here and, and you know, maybe if Luca takes Ozempic or something that all of a sudden like you have a Lakers, a Lakers championship.

• 1:01:58Tyler Cowen?

  Again, a plug for your, the new paperback edition, On the Edge, The Art of Risking Everything. And the final question is, what will you be doing next?

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  I'm working on an NFL model currently. Yeah, I miss having a book project, Tyler, because every day, even days when you're struggling to write or an interview doesn't come through, whatever else, right? Like having these big projects that I work on, I find to be very important.

• 1:02:23Tyler Cowen?

  No one's stopping you. So what's it going to be? Or you're still looking?

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  I don't want to give, I have, I have. So first of all, the newsletter, Silver Bulletin, did quite a bit better than I expected last year. So that's kind of like the short term project. I have a couple of ideas for books when I write the next book, which might be in a few years, right? And you know, I have ideas for books about sports. I don't want to give away too much that might surprise people.

• 1:02:48Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  A little bit, you know, I kind of still think of poker as a little bit of a project getting, it's satisfying to be really good at something like poker. But for now, the newsletter building toward that is kind of the, the three and a half year plan here until the next election. Then maybe I finally won't escape the election treadmill, maybe after that. I said that every time, this might be the last 128, we'll see.

• 1:03:08Tyler Cowen?

  Nate Silver, thank you very much.

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  Thank you, Tyler.

• 1:03:14Tyler Cowen?

  Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm @TylerCowan and the show is @CowanConvos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.