Nate Silver on Life's Mixed Strategies

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. 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 9 years ago. And talk about everything I want to talk about. Nate, welcome.

Tyler, always a pleasure.

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

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

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

No, I feel it still feels fresh to me. I mean, I, you know, I think so when I've talked about the book to people, people kind of understand the expected value part, right? That's like easily explicable to like Economics 101 people. I think the equilibrium part that, you know, solve for the equilibrium is something that people don't get as much. It's like, what's the equilibrium that 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.

Let's say random Nash equilibria. 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?

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 it's 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, and you think some of the other people do it too.

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

Yeah.

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

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

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

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?

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 the carotid artery or carotid, 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 him in poker. So, You need, 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 forms of 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.

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

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, okay, C series, like they're a great team, they beat my expectations, but like they're not gonna be able to keep up with this team for, for 4 quarters. Mm-hmm. But that's not like physical read so much as kind of, again, it's kind of a little bit of physical observation and a lot of priors and context.

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

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

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

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

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

No, look, I think in some ways what has come out of academic circles has been interesting. I mean, I think effective altruism has been interesting, for example. I mean, certainly critical theory or whatever the origins of wokeness have had a lot of influence on the discourse more broadly. But 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 blue sky, I think, and I can't tolerate blue sky really. It's too much of a circle jerk, I think. And so I think academics have maybe lost influence 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 It's so reflexively anti-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.

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?

Yeah, maybe papers is kind of like the wrong part of the, of the, of the curve right now where 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 there 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 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.

Yeah. Just say what you think, right? Just say and let the world sort it out.

Say what you think. And also, you know, one of the things I like about writing a newsletter is 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 dry, sterile tone of a typical academic paper.

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

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, then you probably wind up being fairly miserable. I think Yeah, I mean, I guess it'd be hypocritical if I said I was 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 bandwagon quite as much. I'm sure I will. Probably if we do this again in 3 years, I'll be, I don't know, right, some health nut or something. But for now, I'm making serious but incremental improvements, I guess.

Is it better? Do you take Pascal's wager seriously?

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

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.

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 0.001. Well, not P equals 1.

No one, but there's some chance, right?

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.

Sure.

For example, a lot of them. 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 I think if you kind of ignore the 1% of edge cases, it's probably good to have some people, Will MacAskill or whatever, worrying about those things, or Shrimp Whale Park people having some influence on that. But I'm trying to kind of move in the realm of the tractable. I've always been more poker. What matters is what hand you have. What matters is the read that you have, and the theory matters, but information you have that's local and specific and actionable always predominates that.

So you dismiss Pascal's wager, in short.

I don't worry about Pascal's wager, I guess. 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 strangeness of the world. I do think that some of the AI stuff, Ought to have people asking a few more questions about the nature of reality, I suppose. Yeah.

Now 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?

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

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

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

They do are. Yeah.

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 and it was kind of, you know, kind of my fault.

But like, this is in New York, in actually in upstate New York.

Yeah.

Okay. Yeah.

You gotta be careful of upstate.

Real home of thieves.

Yeah, sure.

Yeah.

But like, and you're like, okay, well, I can afford a new pair of headphones. It's not that big a deal. But like, but if you were 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.

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.

I mean, look, I think—

Or are those people just in jail?

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. And 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. 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, that's a very big problem, I think. And you're surrounding yourself with, with yes men.

Why haven't you been to Oklahoma yet?

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

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

New York City is kind of crazy for, I mean, I think one thing people have 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, yeah, high-end, like sushi, omakase, for example.

Right. I don't do it anymore.

Yeah. No, it's, it's, it's, you know, or like the US Open used to be something really fun. Go to the US Open in, 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 and now it's like $200. Right. Which is kind of the fair price, but like, you know, you see now Delta using AI tools to price discriminate.

That's right.

A little bit more, which I think we probably should—

That's gonna be bad for you.

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.

Yeah.

No, I think that's—

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

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

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

Yeah. I mean, I think there'll be, I think some of this is short-sighted in the sense that we'll probably have like a pretty profound backlash to it, I would think. Yeah. And I mean, it rubs me the wrong way intuitively.

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?

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 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 siding. You can potentially pick up on things.

So it is helpful.

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.

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

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.

Why?

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

Yeah.

The order in which candidates are eliminated. Can affect who wins. Like, Brad Lander, for example, is kind of the compromise candidate between Mamdani and Cuomo in the New York mayoral 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—

but would he have had a head-to-head matchup under a normal voting rule?

Well, I mean, it's plausible you could. I mean, I don't know, or the traditional— I guess traditional runoff wouldn't be like any better, potentially. No, I mean, fair enough, right? You also almost had Momdani wound up winning the first choice vote. Although in, in 2021, Eric Adams nearly lost to Kathryn 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 gameable 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 3 or 4 weeks after the election, you finally get the official tally of how all the ballots transferred. 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.

Brazil does it, right?

India does. I was doing a little work on the Indian election, which was fascinating in different ways. And 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 in every respect that country is. 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. But yeah, I think, you know, I don't think it should be a Republican talking point that we want the vote counted quickly and not taking days and weeks.

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

I think 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 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. Economically, 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, if you're a Japanese-American woman born in New Jersey, isn't that the world's longest lifespan?

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 6 to 7% 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 expressive bettors 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 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 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 like that. Look, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, we talked a little bit before about how some of the academic historians, political scientists have kind of gotten enraptured by this anti-Trump thing. And I do think the scenario where Trump runs for a third term, I mean, I don't say it's zero, right? And I'd say if it's 2%, then that's still alarmingly high, but it's probably probably 2 and not, and not 6 or 7. 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—

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.

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

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?

Maybe 2%.

I think it's 4 or 5%.

Okay.

I don't think it's crazy.

We had a draft of like the 20 most likely Democratic nominees. I think, I think Stephen Smith was like a 9th round Yeah, I found draft pick, right?

And what does that scenario look like where he wins?

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 emerge, right? Like, I had not frankly heard of Zoran Mondani's name when we taped our last conversation a year ago, when he might now be one of the 5 most recognizable names in the party. The fact that he's from Uganda prevents him from running for president, 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 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 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 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. 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'd 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. 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 a external savior who's a centrist is becoming a bit less likely than I would've thought a year ago.

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?

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 quite 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 X number of days out from the election, whereas there's nothing to kind of calibrate AI-type models, right? I mean, I, 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, 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?

Well, look, if I know your just your name and your zip code, I can probably predict with 90% accuracy who you're going to vote for. Right. From the name, you can infer gender, race, age. From the zip code, you can infer socioeconomic status. Right. That gets you pretty darn far. The issue with elections is that they operate on this 1% or 2% margin. 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 plenty of ways to get to a kind of blunt approximate view. But I think those would not be any superior to the other ways, like polling, namely.

Do you have a prediction for most likely Democratic Party nominee? We may be doing another of these in 3 years, right?

You know, AOC was the first pick in the draft I did, and I think that would be reinforced by the New York mayoral race. I mean, I think she's a very bright person who has demonstrated some tact in certain areas. And look, again, I am not a socialist or Democratic socialist, right? But even I, as someone who likes seeing new faces in the parties, right, who thinks, who had no affection for 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.

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

Yeah.

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

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'm curious, I'd be curious what you would think, right?

Well, a year ago I said 2 to 3 years. Yeah. And right now I'm gonna say 1 to 2 years, which is the same prediction. So I think you're, you're way too pessimistic in your timetable.

It depends on kind of how competitive the exercise is, right?

If it's like a, like a Math Olympiad tournament. 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. So you don't think on superforecasting they can improve?

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 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 data 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 complicated evolving kind of game theory dynamic and you have to develop exploitive strategies very quickly. 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.

Potentially. 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.

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

But other AI models play chess great.

Correct. No, look, I mean, this gets to 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, but those will work in less than a year, I think. I mean, there's an agentic model now.

This is where I get to like 8, 8 kind of rough AGI versus superintelligence, right? 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 dataset. I mean, I think they do reason sometimes. I think they're kind of quite smart, and I no longer am bashful about saying, oh, ChatGPT thinks this. I used to avoid that term think. But there's a big gap between 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 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, you know, if you try to solve, what's this, a Lucas critique or whatever else, right? It's a version of Goodhart's law, version of that, I think, for AI models.

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

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 know. 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 don't, I maybe have a B, B+, right? I can kind of train myself on him and say, what does he like in art? And so, you know, but that probably caps me at like a B+ understanding potentially. And in markets, you know, a B+ trader is often on the losing side of a trade.

How good do you think you could become at appreciating art? Let's say you put in 2 to 3 years, not full-time, but made it one of your 2 or 3 big things, you know, after basketball?

I'd probably be very studious about it. Look, 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 4 or 5 hobbies that kind of occupy all my time, some of which have already become kind of professions, right? I think maybe architecture more in the silver DNA. There's 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 spatial. I have a very good spatial memory. If I've been to a restaurant before, even if it was a different restaurant 10 years ago, I remember the space very well. Whereas art, I have just an okay eye for it.

Now, 9 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. Yeah. 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?

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

But that's very recent, right? Where you have a 9-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.

It is surprising, I think, in, in a lot of ways, 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 genetic, but like maybe it becomes easy 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 straight men of the same demographic cohort otherwise, right? So it's not like a physical ability thing, but like, but selecting into sports and sports becomes more professional, I guess, like, not the right term at the high school level, but like, you're tracked into, like, you know, Cooper-Flagg, whatever, right? You know, he didn't kind of spend all his high school in Maine. He went to Monteverde 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.

GPT also claims that 44 players in the WNBA have come out as something other than standard hetero. Yeah, it's a big gap, right?

It's a big gap for sure. Right. And I went to— I saw Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever against the 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.

Does betting help it in relative terms?

2 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 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 wait, just that look EV plus EV to the 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.

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

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.

You mentioned Cooper Flagg before. As you know, he was drafted number 1 by the Dallas Mavericks.

Yeah.

Who are quite a good team. And you have what, Houston and Philly drafting 2 and 3, and the Wizards draft number 6?

Yeah.

Do we need to redesign the NBA draft lottery?

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 3 teams are accomplished in certain ways, right? 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? You kind of know ahead of time which one it is. Yeah, 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 is a perpetual underdog, right? 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. It doesn't seem to bother people as much. It's very weird how American sports— it's a cliché— are kind of socialist and European sports are more capitalist, basically.

Is there a crisis in NBA regular season design?

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. So I understand why they might not want to change it. But yeah, I think you probably want to go to maybe not 66, but maybe 72 or something like that and see how that goes.

There were so many decisive injuries this year. I forget the whole list. But it seems like almost half the important players, including the 7th game of the Finals, were decided in essence by injury.

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

Right.

In hockey, apart from the goalie, you're playing, you know, there are 3 or 4 lines at 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 '70s or the '80s 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 herky-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 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 high effort, I think. You also have short-term incentives. Teams don't really care that much about what happens to their star player if he's on the end of his contract. In theory, they might be happy. Yeah, but I think you have to have— I think you probably have to trim a few games off schedule or have something where maybe you say, okay, the individual player limit is 75 games, right? Every player is guaranteed at least 7 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 seeing the Bucks without Giannis in their current form, for example. Maybe something like that could be an intermediate step.

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?

Yeah.

What do you advise LeBron? Just as a human being, LeBron, what should you maximize? What do you tell him?

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.

I agree.

He, 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 short of winning like 3 more titles that would kind of put him ahead of Jordan in that conversation. I, I want to go to, I want 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?

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

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

Really? That would shock me. I would give that, I don't know, 4 or 5%.

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 that relevant for like a 30-year-old mid-career player, but for like someone like Victor, is relevant. Like, he was probably the 5th best NBA player by the time he kind of shut down his season.

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. LeBron needed some years.

So you don't think Wemby and LeBron would be, and you know, and they have little, let's say, some other children.

No, I'd love to bet. I don't bet, but I'd love to bet against them.

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

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?

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 Bulls and Warriors dynasty.

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

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

Like Halliburton was what, number 12? Steph Curry was number 7. I forget all the numbers, but you know, not everyone's a top pick who's great.

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

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

Yeah.

I want to claim victory on that one.

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

No, but would he do it?

Yeah, of course. Okay. 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 Edgecomb 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.

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

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

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

I mean, Bill is kind of a, kind of a wiseass, 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 8 out of 10 as a writer and 8 out of 10 is like a statistician, that might be more valuable than being a 10 out of 10 and a 2 out of 10 in the other area, potentially in this era where we're, well, of and things like that. Richard Thaler is somebody I got to know at Chicago a little bit and someone I'd consider a mentor. I followed you for a long time, Tyler, as well. But yeah, I'm also someone who's kind of, it's a cliché, but kind of always blazed my own trail a little bit. I think in terms of election forecasting, I mean, there's some people, Robert Erikson's a professor at Columbia who had kind of pretty good election models early on, 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 gonna have to go ahead and, and make it myself.

What do you feel you need mentors for now?

I mean, I don't know if I have mentors for as much. I, I just want people that are interested in—

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

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

Like, yes.

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

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

Yeah. You might, you might think he's correct, but you know, look, I do think that kind of the AI safety/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?

No, but I know what it is. Yeah.

How do I put this diplomatically? Right. I've been around a lot of weird— these people are weird even relative to the other weird people in that cohort, I think, right, in ways that allow them to be kind of very experimental and open-minded about everything from polyamory to whatever else. But I do think they maybe don't recognize a political constraints, B, the kind of adaptability of human beings potentially, C, as I talked about before, I think it's not at all obvious to me that you leap from rough AGI to comprehensive AGI and then to comprehensive AGI for the physical realm and then to ASI. I think the AI 2027 forecasters, when I was at Manifesta, 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 tariffs were going into effect. And I wrote then that my P-Doom had increased relative to the book.

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

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.

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

Look, we have not lived with techno— I mean, you've said this before too, like we have not lived with nuclear weapons for that many generations, right? 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.

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?

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

Are they? I don't know.

Some of them are.

Some of them are.

Yeah.

I think of them as high variance in conscientiousness. High variance.

Very high in it. The EAs are, and the rationalists are more high variance, I think. Yeah. 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. 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 a party. Like little things like that, little cultural norms. You go to Seattle, it feels like Canada to me almost. And so these things are diverging more.

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

I mean, if you ask Ayla, I guess she might say, well, if we're all going to 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.

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.

No, look, 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, they're 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 practice more. And 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.

Why can't Canada win the Stanley Cup? I remember 1992 the last time. Is that correct?

I remember, uh, Forgotten when writing about this in the New York Times in 2012, 2013, maybe 2013, right?

Yeah. And it's still true.

Yeah. I go in my, one of my favorite sports bars. 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 and 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.

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

It's a smaller market overall. It's like kind of less wealthy than us, right? Yeah. If you're a Canadian NHL superstar playing 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.

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. Uh, Canada, not at the national level, but it almost happened in some way.

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

Yeah. 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 Eoghan McGregor is running, and I don't think he'll win, but he'll have some kind of impact.

I think parts of Europe that are, and maybe Canada, anti-US may become more resistant to populist sentiment, for example. 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+, right? I think. 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?

Something like that. Yeah.

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

Look, I, 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.

And globally, it seems we're not at a high water mark. It's rising in quite a few other nations.

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

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?

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. 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.

I mean, and there 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, then admitting somebody new to it is potentially going to cost everybody. Look, I think all this might reverse within a few years 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 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. The US also has, I think, particularly efficient political outcomes in some ways. People take for granted the fact that 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 electoral technology is better. Well, right now, America is quite pro-immigrant compared to most of the world and becoming— and because of backlash to Trump, becoming kind of at least nominally more pro-immigrant again. It would have been interesting.

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.

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 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 actually reach a consensus on. But yeah, 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 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 3 months really of, of COVID 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, if we're 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 in power, then, then things do get taken too far, even though kind of nominally the incremental stuff, they might agree with the liberal side.

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

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

It is. But do you have a surprising prediction for the NBA? Like, I think the Lakers will do poorly this year.

I'm not sure it's surprising, but in my records, I have the Lakers ranked relatively highly, actually.

Yeah. Our last session, you said Luka 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 him. To me, that's a lot of negative information. So I think the Lakers will do poorly.

I'm looking more kind of like a 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 Luka 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, has a drinking problem or not drinking, but having too many beers or being a little bit lazy, he has much more potential to grow if he gets his act together. So like kind of fully healthy Luka and their salary cap situation is pretty good in the long run, could be a powerful team.

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—

People who are maximizing currently or—

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

But you want high variance here, right? You want high variance here. And maybe if Luka takes Ozempic or something, then all of a sudden you have a Lakers championship.

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

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, having these big projects that I work on, I find to be very important.

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

I don't want to give— 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? You know, I have ideas for books about sports. I don't want to give away too much that might surprise people 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 3.5-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 one, '28. We'll see.

Nate Silver, thank you very much.

Thank you, Tyler 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 @TylerCowen and the show is @CowenConvos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.