SPEAKER_02: We're really excited to have our next speaker here. Nate Silver is the editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight. And he came to our poker game recently.
SPEAKER_01: Oh, Nate came to our game. Come on out, Nate. Ran the game over. Hey, guys.
SPEAKER_04: Good morning. Who was the big loser that night? I think, wait, who was the big loser? Because Nate was the big winner, right?
SPEAKER_01: He was the big winner. I was basically trying to kind of break even.
SPEAKER_02: I think I donated a little bit to Nate Silver's new Model S Plaid. Model Y, Model S Plaid. I think he got the Model S Plaid coming to the game. This was the largest poker win you've had in your life. Largest cash game win, yeah. By a factor of five? Two. Two, okay. Yeah. Well, we're happy to donate. You're getting, by the way, your speaker fee, I just canceled it. Okay. But, ladies and gentlemen, Nate Silver on the mind of a gambler. I'm really excited to talk to you all today.
SPEAKER_00: I'm working on a book about gambling, risk, and rationality. I prefer the term critical thinking to rationality. It's partly involved talking to people about global societal risks, so talking to people about the risk of nuclear war, which is not very cheery conversations, by the way. But also people who take risk for a living or, at the very least, manage risk and have real skin in the game. They're not just some actuary gaining a salary. They're assessing risk and making big decisions financially, mostly based on that assessment. So I've started out talking to poker players and sports betters. I'm a former poker player myself. I still play recreation a lot. I'm currently, I think, number 301 in the global poker rankings. Not that I look that up every morning. But mostly it's the examples of talking to other fantastic poker players and sports betters about their process. And I'm also talking now more to VCs, to founders, to hedge fund managers, for example. There are a lot of similarities. There's a certain type of person. That's what I'm talking about today. Quality traits, modes of thinking, it even affects maybe their political views a little bit and you see a lot of things in common. So I gave you some of this context already. This is a work in progress. I mean, the book is kind of halfway, 0% written, about 50% research. So things may change. I'm evolving and learning and correcting things. But it's fun to write a book. It's fun to have great conversations with the besties and other people and really kind of experience this firsthand. So I'm going to start with some things that I think are relatively straightforward and obvious and then get into things that are maybe less so toward the end. But one really obvious one is that successful gamblers think probabilistically. It's not just a matter of understanding probability but being comfortable with uncertainty, being willing to take bets on an uncertain basis. That's kind of table stakes for even getting into any field involving risk. In poker at least, you probably also need a fair amount of mathematical ability. There are now these things called solvers in poker that come up with a game theory optimal strategy for every situation. It's a very complex situation. It's way too hard to memorize. You have to kind of develop a mathematical intuition behind it. But even players with rare exception, Phil Hellmuth might be the one exception actually, right? But even players who are known as being field players or exploitive players, people who rely on tells and psychology and table talk. I talked to Daniel Negreanu, for example, one of the probably five best poker players of all time. And he told me that about four years ago, he realized that these solver kids, as he calls them, the math whizzes were better than him, at least at certain forms of poker. And he totally remade his game to look at computer solutions to be more studious and mathematical and it's improved his results quite a bit. In the VC field, I don't know if you're necessarily doing as much modeling as I might an election model, for example, but at the very least, people understand the intuition. And the intuition is you need both, but I think the intuition is more important than the application. Number two, this one ought to be really obvious, but it needs to be said. Successful gamblers are highly competitive. Things that you hear from people over and over again is, I want to kind of prove people wrong. I want to outsmart the competition. I want to show who's best. It's almost more this motivation than financial motivation, I think. It's partly a matter of you can't settle for being average. As a gambler, the average poker player loses money to the house, so does the average sports better, so therefore you have to deviate from average in some ways. But kind of one conclusion I've come to talking to people for this book is that human beings are a competitive species, right? To get people to get along in society is pretty hard. One good thing about capitalism is that you have some managed type of competition. Democracy is kind of a type of competition, and that's probably a better way to kind of challenge these conflicting urges we have than things that are too centrally planned. But certainly people in this room, people I talk to, are on the high end of the competitive scale. Successful poker players and sports bettors have to care a lot about small edges. It's the nature of placing bets in a field where you lose money on average. So a very good sports bettor might win 55 or so percent of his or her bets. You have to win 52 and a half percent to make up for the house cut for the rake or the big as different names. That means you can't afford to make 1% errors, right? You really have to squeeze every last drop of expected value or EV out of any situation that you're in. This makes people very, very, very detail-oriented. Poker players tend to be very studious about their craft. They really kind of love poker. You can't just get the big things right in poker. You have to get the small things right too. It's too competitive a field right now. This might not be as true, by the way, of VC. The average investment makes money. It may not make an above market return, but it'll make money, which is not true for the average poker hand that you play. By the way, casinos too, if you talk to casino executives, you might think you walk into a casino and everything that you do is maximized to make the maximum amount of revenue possible. Not really, right? They're pretty good at the big stuff. They protect their downside risk a lot, but they're not maximized as much as you would think because when you have a license to make money, you don't have to get the small stuff right. But in poker, where only 10% of players probably make money in the long run, you have to be very, very detail-oriented. Number four, you see here a Paul Graham thread about Elon, actually. Successful gamblers are contrarian, at least to some degree. And again, I'm kind of repeating myself a little bit, but there's no edge if everyone does the same thing in the same way. You have to have some angle that you think makes you better than what the market thinks, and the market's pretty good, so it's a hard thing to manage. I think risk takers tend to view themselves as outsiders. Whether they are or not is probably an open question. What they think of themselves as thinking differently from the rest of the world, potentially. This can also make them potentially a little bit annoying, like outside of investing and gambling context, where if you're always the person who says, well, actually, that can get pushed back in social settings, for example, or on Twitter. But you can't settle for having the average view because the average view doesn't do better than the market. There is a fine line between being ahead of the curve and a permanent contrarian. In sports betting, there's a line that's constantly mispriced. Then I can just bet that I don't want that market to correct itself. I want to keep exploiting that error in pricing. In VC, you might want to find a founder or a sector or a company that's undervalued by the market, but eventually you want that sector to grow. You want to attract more talent. You want to attract future fundraising rounds. You are more being ahead of the curve by half a year to a year. I think in some ways, it's analogous to real estate. Maybe you're trying to anticipate where the market will be in the future. That's a subtly different skill than being maybe contrarian per se, but related at least. Number five, and again, this might be a little bit redundant, but successful gamblers take shots. This is very intuitive in VC, where you have a field where you might only have a unicorn or decacorn one percent of the time or 10 percent of the time. Of course, you have a whole portfolio. It may not be that risky in the aggregate. But you have to be willing to make decisions under pressure and be somewhat fearless as a result. Timing is important. You want to be first to market in poker. You have a finite amount of time you can spend on a hand in practice. Sometimes people take these risks in a calculated way. I talked to Sam Beckman-Fried for the book, for example, and he's like, yeah, I knew this would have like only a 50 percent chance of succeeding, but the payoff was so high, I would take it. Some people just kind of more intuitively just kind of want to put skin in the game, want to take risk, get some excitement or pleasure from it. Again, we're talking about the very extreme tales here too, right? The people who are super uber successful maybe are almost taking on more risk than they maybe should. You can instead likely have a very happy and complacent life as an investment banker or something, but people who are true entrepreneurs think at scale and think very, very big. I should say one challenge of writing the book is that talking only to successful people, you risk survivorship bias, right? So kind of which people fell along by the wayside. If you know unsuccessful investors or gamblers, then send them my way. I need to talk to some of them as well. Number six, successful gamblers, especially in poker, work well with incomplete information. One thing that differentiates kind of people in academia, and academia is very useful for basic research and for advancing science and things like that, right? But you don't get months and months and years and years to develop a hypothesis when there's actual money on the line. By that time, the people who were faster will already have moved. So the skill is kind of knowing what information was available at the time you made the decision. I think there is a limit to how useful an after action review might be if you kind of pretend as though you had perfect hindsight, right? We can say, what would we have done about COVID now if we had known all the things that we know now about it back in February 2020, and it would be an easier problem to solve. But that's not how the real world works. So decision making under uncertainty is I think an understudied and underappreciated topic. You can't be too much of a control freak, certainly in a game like poker. You can lose your temper very easily. Emotional management's a big part of people who are successful in these fields. But all the value is in making the hard decisions, right? Hard because their edge case is hard because you have some information but not others, and you're going to get some things wrong. But otherwise, if it's easy, then everyone else is already going to do it. There's no excess returns to be made. I think related to this is that successful gamblers focus on process much more than results. One thing I found good for the book and refreshing is people, if you ask them kind of what makes you tick, what's your advantage, they're quite thoughtful and deliberate about it. They step back and think about what skills do I possess? What's the bigger kind of problem that I'm trying to solve? Again, emotional displacement is a big part of this. I'm not saying that you're supposed to be totally emotionless. I mean, emotion can help to guide intuition, which I'll talk about in a bit. But it does mean you have to be willing to lose poker hand, lose 10,000 bucks, and then play the next hand as best as you can, right? Or have an investment or many investments that go sour and still be on your kind of best state of mind for making future investments. It's pretty hard. Most people aren't very good at this at all. You can't go too far and sometimes make excuses. There are lots of different ways to get unlucky in poker or investing. But having that focus on kind of what was my thought process, it seems intuitive for people in this audience maybe, but it's not intuitive for the average person. It differentiates successful gamblers quite a bit. This next slide here, you may have seen this video online where there are a bunch of girls bouncing basketballs. They ask you to count how many times the basketball passed back and forth. And during the video, kind of unbeknownst to the watcher, a gorilla walks on stage, like things change colors, weird things happen. And the point is to try and say, okay, well, you were so focused on counting the number of basketballs being passed that you ignored the gorilla in the room, so to speak, right? I think, though, that if you're instructed to count the number of passes, that it's actually a sign of intelligence that you do focus on that, right? If you're an air traffic controller and you're trying to land planes at Miami Airport and you get a bunch of text messages from your teenage daughter, right, you shouldn't be distracted by that. You should kind of focus on the task at hand. But the point is that people have an amazing ability to vary what they're paying attention to, especially in the moment. And in poker, this is very important because most of the time, poker is pretty boring, right? Good players fold 70% of their hands for the most part, right? A lot of decisions are fairly automatic. But maybe once an hour or once a day, you'll have a decision for tens of thousands of dollars or where you'll be knocked out of the tournament or win the tournament, right? And so having that kind of, knowing where you focus your attention is an underrated skill that I think people who were, at least in poker, are pretty good at. By the way, one thing I've noticed is that you used to kind of think of poker players as being kind of quite schlubby and sloppy, and some of them still are. But more and more, the good players are focusing on physical and mental fitness. It is like a demanding game. It's a little bit demanding physically to kind of keep your composure and not give away information from your mental state. And to really concentrate is like actual lot of work. I mean, the kind of famous studies of chess players and how Magnus Carlsen will lose five pounds over the course of a chess match just thinking, which might seem ridiculous, but if you're really playing poker at your A game, at your A plus game, which you don't achieve very often, I often find that when I am able to do that, rarely, I'm completely wiped out afterward. It is a physically demanding game. But in general, kind of having your ear to the ground, looking out for opportunities, and being flexible enough to take advantage of those opportunities is an underrated skill set. Number nine, successful gamblers apply practiced intuition. So I'm 44, and one of the things about becoming middle-aged, you start to kind of potentially trust your gut a lot more, which can be risky in some ways. I think people can, in matters that happen only occasionally, like a presidential election, people think, well, my gut is that so-and-so will win. You don't have enough practice at forecasting elections to really, for that to be very useful, right? We have one election every four years. If you're a poker player, though, you're playing tens of thousands of hands every year. If you're a VC, you're hearing thousands of pitches every year, right? And part of what experience does is kind of take things that were once hard and then become more automatic, right? You'll hear people say, oh, I made a decision very quickly, right? I make snap decisions. You hear someone give a pitch, and you decide maybe in 30 minutes whether or not to fund them or not. You hear examples like that. But that doesn't really reflect the fact that this person has spent years and years and years honing their insight and listening to pitches, and that that produces value down the line. So it's intuition of a sort, but it's practiced, refined, well-calibrated intuition that involves working really hard and learning, right? I mean, in poker, you kind of go through cycles where you kind of are grinding and get better at something. You feel like you achieved some condition of mastery. Then you kind of slip. You get complacent. Maybe you tilt a little bit. You're finally able to step back and re-evaluate your game, like Negreanu or someone, and say, look, I have to make some adjustments here. Maybe I'm doing better than I ever have, but now I learn different flaws that I have, right? My opponents are getting better, too. That bottom of this chart here, where you re-evaluate and grind back up and expect that you're going to have to keep doing that for your whole life, frankly, differentiates successful people, I think. Number 10. These are more subtle ones, I think, but successful gamblers are structured thinkers. They want to understand the process behind the outcome. Again, in poker, it's too complex a game just to purely learn through memorization and rote skill, right? You want to understand how things adapt, what the underlying kind of curvatures are and everything. Heuristics or rules of thumb are pretty useful, right? Like in poker, a heuristic might be that you should call with your medium-strength hands, right? Your best hands, you raise. Your worst hands, you fold or check, right? And then you kind of call with your medium-strength hands, but there are exceptions to that, and heuristics only go so far. But the kind of flip side of this is like, so at this conference, there's a lot of talk about investing and gambling, but also politics. I do think when you're kind of a highly structured philosophical thinker, that politics is very frustrating, right? People in the other world I work in, which is, I run a website, I talk to people in politics, talk to academics who are trying to get on TV and stuff like that, right? It's a lot of very hypocritical and ad hoc thinking in politics, right? It's instrumental reasoning toward trying to win an argument at that moment in that day. And so you can see why someone like Elon Musk might get very fed up with the kind of hypocritical nature of political discourse. That's another conversation we might have in the Q&A, but it does lead to some personality clashes I think. The last one here, which is maybe a little bit counterintuitive, but I've kind of learned I think from observation is that the most successful gamblers don't actually care that much about money. They tend to be for the most part very generous. They're always going to pick up the tab. They're going to spend a lot on good wine and things like that, right? They're in it really for the love of the game, and when they get bored, they tend to quit. Again, this might differentiate the 0.01% or 0.001% from the 1%. Certainly you want to manage your money carefully in poker, but still when you have people whose net worth fluctuates by the amount that poker players does, like in poker it's basically like three states, right? Super rich, somewhat rich, and dead broke. Not a lot in between. When that's the nature of your field and you've been in those states for different parts of your life and many good poker players have had periods where they're broke, you tend to recognize the ephemeral nature of success and to celebrate life in the moment a bit more. So that's all. Thank you very much. Look forward to the Q&A now.
SPEAKER_04: Ladies and gentlemen, Nate Silver. I don't know if there was this in the introduction that you run FiveThirtyEight. Like does everyone know the site? So like during the election cycle, Nate does the best job of anyone on earth, gathering together polling data and then using statistical models to represent a distribution or a set of expected outcomes and making that known on his site in a way that's super, I think, informative better than anything else that's out there. So thanks for that. Now I get really addicted to them leading up to elections. I'm like, I got to go in and check what Nate's changed on the site every day. And I know a lot of people did. And then what I observed on Twitter, which I think speaks to your first point here, was a lot of people followed your prediction on the Trump election, right? And they're like, Nate made a prediction that Trump was going to win. But what you said was that there was a 43% chance that Trump would win and therefore people assumed he was going to lose. And that the nature of a lot of people's understanding of things is very deterministic and binary. It's like win or lose as opposed to, hey, the future is not binary. The future is not deterministic. There's a set of outcomes that may occur and you can get a better sense of what that set is. You make that determination enough times, you'll be right most of the time. You'll be wrong some of the time. Do you think most, so my question for you, based on how I saw people react negatively to your polling, which was crazy because it was like, dude, he gave a really good set of statistical models.
SPEAKER_01: No, people blamed you.
SPEAKER_04: But my question is like, do people have the ability to think probabilistically? Is you say you need to think probabilistically or is that a minority of people that can really get themselves there? Because so many people just want a yes or no answer. They want to say this is the future, this isn't. They don't want to think about a distribution of outcomes, which is really the way the world works.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think people think probabilistically all the time in real life, right? If you're like running late for a meeting, you have to decide, should I speed? What's the risk of getting into an accident? What's the risk of getting pulled over or things like that? I think in... They don't realize they're doing that. Yeah. I mean, they don't know they're doing that. I think part of the answer is that I think politics kind of breaks people's brain, right? Because before the 2016 election, we got a lot of criticism from liberals for being too bullish on Trump. The market price was about 15%. We have it 30%, right? So we were very bullish on Trump relative to other people, but people thought we were playing with the numbers to try to, I don't know, affect turnout somehow or try to cover our asses or things like that. So I just don't think that politics teaches people to think critically. And it's like, yeah, part of that is they're not thinking probabilistically, but it's more like people just want to see their priors confirmed.
SPEAKER_01: What was it like when people blamed you for Trump winning?
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, there was a lot of that, right?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. And why did you pick Trump as president? They literally...
SPEAKER_01: I think they pointed to you and basically said, you tipped the election. It's almost as if you convinced people to go and... how did you deal with that?
SPEAKER_00: You just kind of have to say, fuck you and move on with your life. I've been very lucky in my life overall, right? Including that things that I think are not that remarkable, like saying, oh, the polls are going to be right usually, which they were in 2008 and 2012, I think we got way too much credit for that. But you can't... I mean, again, we're all poker players here, right? So it's kind of like if you get your money in really good and you make a flush or something, you kind of have to have that attitude about it.
SPEAKER_01: So you were able to just basically shout it out and say this... and what about just the fact that you live inside of an organization, now FiveThirtyEight is owned by ABC? ABC News, yeah.
SPEAKER_04: Was that before the election?
SPEAKER_00: We were ESPN at the time of 2016 election, now we're ABC News currently.
SPEAKER_01: And so does that change? How do you make sure that you can actually just do your job no matter how unpopular the answer may be or the distribution of outcomes may be?
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so why am I working on this book? It's partly because I want to diversify away from just... First of all, I think forecasting elections is an interesting problem, but it's not the most interesting problem, right? But no, I'm not going to spend the rest of my life just being the election forecasting guy. Because you also face disincentives where the downside... We got some elections really right. 2018 midterm, we nailed perfectly, about as good as you could, right? And people are like, oh, that's nice, right? If you get kind of... The 2020 primary, we were very bullish on Joe Biden when people weren't and thought he was going to lose. And so you don't get a lot of credit and you do face a lot of downside for being actually wrong or perceived to be wrong. And so, yeah, I'm not going to spend the rest of my life making election forecasts. I hope that's part of the portfolio of things that I do, but I'm interested in a lot of other questions about the world.
SPEAKER_04: Nate, what do you think about social markets that are defined about social behavior, like an election? People are going to vote one way or another. You then make a prediction and then that changes the way people vote. And the same is true in stock markets. I was going to ask you about your experience in stock markets because people have an assumption about rate hikes. The market then reacts to the assumption about rate hikes, then the market tanks, and then the Fed is like, let's change the rate hike system because the market's tanking. How do you think about building probabilistic models that account for social feedback loops where the social decision that's made is driven by the forecast you make or by the market making a forecast?
SPEAKER_00: I think the evidence is that in two-way elections, so Democrat versus Republican, that there's no clear effect from. And by the way, what we do is a tradition. There's always been horse race media coverage, there's always been polling going back for many years. We think our version of it is a little bit more grounded and objective. In two-way races, it's not clear if there's any impact either way. Where it can in effect is when you're having a multiple candidate race. In 2020, when Elizabeth Warren started to fall behind Bernie Sanders in the polls, if you're a left-wing voter who prefers Warren to Sanders but Sanders to Biden, you may switch your vote as a result of the poll. That can create momentum. Mathematically trying to model a multi-way election, we do it. It's very hard. It's way more complex, in part because of the feedback loops that it introduces for sure.
SPEAKER_04: And stock markets are the same? Again, I don't- Or any financial market behavior?
SPEAKER_00: It is funny, by the way, that if I lose $1,000 at poker, I'd be furious. But I lose much more than that in the stock market. And they're like, oh, I don't care. I just invest in low fee, mutual funds, and stuff like that. For sure, it's... I don't know. You guys would know more than I would. But I think there are certainly complexities that involve feedback loops, for sure.
SPEAKER_02: Nate, we live in a very polarized world right now. We all spend far too much time on Twitter. And we're seeing this house of mirrors. I'm curious how the 19% of people who believe in banning abortion and their impact and their outsized voice versus the far left and their outsized voice with democratic socialism affect your ability to predict what's going to happen in the country. Because the majority of the country's beliefs sometimes are in stark contrast to political things that happen. And even on our podcast, people want to pit Sax and I as being incredible rivals. No, no, no.
SPEAKER_01: You want to pit yourself versus Sax. Just to be clear.
SPEAKER_02: In fact, we agree on almost everything. Yet, it feels like in our society, they want to push us to pick very binary belief systems. And I'm just curious how that impacts what you do day to day in your job in predicting what's going to actually happen in reality. And maybe you could tell us, based on what you've learned over time, are people as polarized as it seems? Or is America actually got a majority consensus on most of the issues that we struggle with?
SPEAKER_00: Well, OK. One reason that markets work is because you get feedback in the market, right? And you adjust your strategy as a result of negative feedback from consumers, people running with their feet. I think one problem with Twitter and with the political atmosphere more generally is that both the left and the right are now insulating themselves from feedback in a lot of ways. And if you're someone who tries to call BS, if there's a 12 characters, having a good bullshit detector is an implicit theme of people who are successful gamblers. If you're someone who's like, that's kind of bullshit, I can't let that sit there, I have to say something about it, even though it'll piss off my followers, you really get boundary policed a lot. Totally. Boundary policed, yes. Totally. Yeah, and when feedback mechanisms are broken, then you run into potentially some really dangerous outcomes, right? I think both the left and the right have become more authoritarian in certain ways. I think the type of authoritarianism on the right is quite a bit more dangerous in the moment. But they're both kind of moving away from liberalism in some kind of classical sense in some ways. And I think that has to do with the feedback loops that social media tend to produce. The other thing about social media too is it really, really flattens things. One thing that people in Silicon Valley get right for all their faults and self-servingness in some ways, they kind of get the orders of magnitudes right, they understand scale, and social media and the daily news cycle really collapses that. So some extremely important problem and some trivial nonsense are kind of treated on the same level when one is 1,000 times more important than the other, and that produces a lot of news. Right, in a feed, it's one right after the other. Yeah, and again, I don't know if there are ways to redesign Twitter to make that better, but the fact that you're kind of always on, right? I mean, before Twitter, the kind of cable news cycle, you have to have some controversy to talk about, and things are completely dropped the next day there's another news event. I mean, sometimes it should be maybe actually this thing was terrible, but something is like way more important, and so we should continue to focus on that, and so that's damaging, I think.
SPEAKER_02: Is there a way out of this? Will this pass in your estimation? Is this an intractable problem?
SPEAKER_00: I'm a little bit bearish in the short term, yeah, to be honest. Can you say more?
SPEAKER_01: What does that mean?
SPEAKER_00: I mean, there are different types of risks that we face, right? I mean, one problem in particular is that if we have a close election next time, particularly one that's close where the Democrat appears to narrowly win, right? You're having more and more Republican elected officials, secretaries of state, some of the candidates in Pennsylvania for governor, for example, who kind of believe the election was stolen in 2020, which it wasn't, to be clear, and that's a very dangerous argument to have. It's not going to resolve itself at the end of democracy, but that's a risk that's in the 10% range or maybe higher of a severe constitutional crisis in 2024, and maybe repeated that in 2028 and so forth, and so that's, I think, the most immediate threat, but also kind of government capacity to deal with big problems, right? I don't necessarily take the standard line about COVID where you say, oh, we should have done this and that and managed it more top-down more, but clearly state capacity seemed to be not so great, right, as we deal with other existential risks from climate change to AI potentially to nuclear threats. I'm a little bit bearish about state capacity. To make good decisions in complex situations with not perfect information.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: And frankly, being down in Miami or traveling to other parts of the world, you see there's more reason to be optimistic, right, where people at least are excited and dynamic and there's something happening. It may not be exactly the right thing, but people are happy. But no, I think, I don't know. I'm usually an optimistic person and I'm a little bit worried about-
SPEAKER_01: What should we expect then going into the 2020 midterms? 2022 midterms. 2022 midterms.
SPEAKER_00: So the baseline is pretty strong, which is that the president's party loses seats the large majority of the time and given the Democrats majority are so narrow, they're pretty big underdogs to keep both the House and the Senate. With that said, in Senate races in particular, individual candidates do matter to some extent and you might have enough off the wall GOP candidates nominated that would cost them two or three seats potentially and that might be enough to save Democrats in the Senate. The House for the candidates are more anonymous and there are more seats in play is a little bit tougher. I do think something like Roe v. Wade is important. Democrats talk a lot about Republican extremism, but a lot of it is theoretical, right? It's saying, well, what will happen in 2024 will be this or that. This is the kind of rare example of big social change by the opposition party and that could, I think, motivate Democrats a little bit, but midterm elections are more predictable than presidential elections. And the base case is that you wind up with Republican majorities of some magnitude.
SPEAKER_02: Zach, any thoughts on Nate's handicapping of the situation and description of the political climate we're in?
SPEAKER_03: Well, I mean, pretty clearly the Republicans are expected to have big pickups in this midterm, right? I mean, I agree with you. The Senate is tougher for the GOP because there aren't that many. Just the at-risk seats are on the Republican side, right, not the Democratic side.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, there are also seats like Pennsylvania that the GOP held and could lose potentially, but you have like, I mean, I don't know how technical you want to get. If you have a generic ballot that favors Republicans by like two points, the Democrats can probably keep the Senate. If it gets to like six points or seven points, then the wall topples and like there's just too many forces going the other way. And so, yeah.
SPEAKER_03: So where is it right now? Are you looking at that?
SPEAKER_00: Right now it's two or three. However, that's among registered voters and doesn't reflect voter enthusiasm. So typically the challenger party is more motivated to turn out. You saw that in states like Virginia last year. That gap seems to be closing a little bit. I do think some of the anti-abortion legislation, right, some of the fact that the GOP kind of is now back on offense, on culture wars against LGBT people, right, I think potentially is going to help motivate Democrats to turn out, right? It wasn't the stuff in Virginia where they were talking about, oh, schools and kind of, I mean, you always want to like play counterattack in politics, right? And Republicans found some effective counterattacks with respect to educational policy, certain attitudes where kind of very left-wing ideas have crept into discussions of education and race and other things, right? But now they're like kind of calling like gay and lesbian people and trans people pedophiles and stuff like that, right? And that's like surprisingly mainstream discourse. And like it's not, I don't think politically wise, it's also a little bit dangerous in terms of potentially, you know, triggering violence and things like that. So I don't know. Either party can really like help itself, I don't think, and kind of being like the worst version of itself.
SPEAKER_03: Right, yeah, that's interesting. But Youngkin is an interesting case because one year after Biden won that state by 10, Youngkin wins that race by two or three. So it was 12 point swing in one year. How emblematic is that of how quickly the mood of the country has changed? Is it like a one-off because Youngkin was a strong candidate against a weak candidate? Or does it represent, you know, a much stronger generic Republican ballot?
SPEAKER_00: I think it's, I mean, that's what you might get if you had 50 Glenn Youngkins running for Senate, right? He clearly, I mean, there's usually a pretty big midterm shift, but that was a little bigger than normal in Virginia. And that reflects the fact that, I mean, you can like model it out mathematically. We have lots of data points. We have 35 Senate races every two years, right? And you can actually see the effect of being more moderate will gain you an extra two or three or four points, right? Being less moderate, more radical in some cases will lose you two or three or four points. And so the fact that the GFP didn't kind of take that lesson and say, we can actually kind of occupy the mainstream and have potentially really large majorities, at least in 2022, I mean, I think that's kind of disheartening in some ways. And of course, Trump is still a big figure in the GOP.
SPEAKER_03: Democrats learned the lesson of that race either. No, of course they have.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I don't think anyone's really learned very much.
SPEAKER_00: Nobody's learned any lesson at this point.
SPEAKER_03: It's still chaos, right? The lesson for Democrats would be to tack towards the center as well. Instead of embracing sort of the progressive left.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, the Democrats are still talking about canceling student debt, which is a fringe issue that affects eight to 10% of the Democratic Party without realizing that it actually is because it represents 50 or 60% of the working majority of the Democratic infrastructure. And that's really the difference.
SPEAKER_00: People are self-serving, and if you don't have good BS detectors, then you become more self-serving, right? I mean, clearly the class of people who are high student loan debt are people who are well educated and aren't necessarily making as much money. And those describe people that tend to be Democrats, right? It describes people like academics and people in media.
SPEAKER_01: I understand, but Democrats used to also be the workers' party for the welders, the truckers, the construction workers. So you should say, let's forgive up to $10,000 in debt for public university students' undergraduate
SPEAKER_00: educations, right? That really does capture a lot more people who are truly middle class, right? Half of student loan debt is people going to graduate school. I'm not that sympathetic if you went to Dartmouth and got a philosophy degree. Masters. Masters, right? Yeah, you're on your own. But if you went to a state school and got a degree in nursing and are kind of- Why should an electrician bail out the person getting a master's in philosophy at Dartmouth?
SPEAKER_00: This is kind of a matter of like the-
SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's a reasonable thing to say.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it doesn't seem partisan. It doesn't seem unreasonable. Super reasonable.
SPEAKER_00: But, you know, but I don't know. And again, people are, it's also different. I think if you needed more financial stimulus, then it might make more sense to find some way to do that. It's a thing that the president can probably do by executive authority. It's a little bit disputed. But no, you kind of have, I mean, both parties are quite self-serving. And if you're kind of not listening to critiques or feedback, then you kind of wallow in that self-servingness I think a little bit more easily. All right, everybody.
SPEAKER_02: Please thank Nate Silver. Thank you. We'll let your winners ride. Rain Man David Saks. And it said- We open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, Saks.
SPEAKER_03: I'm the queen of Kenoah. I'm going all in. I'm going all in. I'm going all in. Besties are gone. That is my dog taking a notice in your driveway. Oh, man. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge door because they're all just used to this like sexual tension that they just need to release. What? You're the beat. What? You're the beat. What? We need to get merch.
