Nate Silver on Risk-takers, Politicians, and Poker Players

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 back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm in New York City chatting with the great Nate Silver. It is late July 2024 and Nate has recently risen in status, you might say. He has a new book out which I thought was excellent, informative, fun on every page, On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything. Nate, welcome.

Thank you, Tyler.

Now, if we simulated the world 1,000 times, in how many of those scenarios would you end up more or less where you are today?

This is, of course, a question I asked Peter Thiel and other people in the book.

Your father was a political scientist, presumably very smart, got you connected to politics.

Well, I mean, this is a hard— I mean, I feel unfair that you're asking me this question, that I— it's an unfair question I asked other people. But no, I think I would wind up somewhere in this vicinity, like 20% of the time, or maybe less than that. I don't know. I mean, because the fact that you had this big breakthrough, or I did,— in the kind of 2008 election, which really was— did involve like a lot of happenstance in certain ways. I had been like an online poker player, and basically the US government shut down online poker. I mean, technically they shut down payment processing for online poker, but that got me very interested in the 2006 midterms because I wanted the people who had passed that law to lose their seats in Congress. Meanwhile, I lost my source of livelihood. I couldn't play poker and press buttons. For 24 hours— or not 24 hours, for 40 hours a week, right? So founded FiveThirtyEight just kind of on a lark, and that kind of changed everything. So yeah, there's a lot of circumstance and luck, and there are probably, you know, many ways that life could have unfolded in a way where I was unhappy at some consulting job or something tragic happened or whatever else.

But poker players, they're ornery, they're individualistic. You don't always want to hire them. And you're one of them. So isn't it, if not inevitable, likely you would have ended up as some kind of independent?

Yeah, I mean, that's the thing, is like, because now I'm doing like 3 or 4 different things, right? Which in some ways makes it feel like— I mean, I sometimes feel like I'm living out multiple versions of the simulation all at once anyway, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, because I'm diversified in different ways. Yeah, and there might be worlds where I had won like a big poker tournament early on or something like that. But like, yeah, I'm someone who's I get pretty unhappy when I'm bored and I also can focus and work pretty hard. So I think I would've wound up in interesting places a lot, but I feel very blessed and lucky to have wound up in this particular place, I think.

What do you maximize?

I don't know. I mean, in the short run, some combination of like, look, this year it's kind of easier to answer that because you kind of have like a shorter or more medium term.

Right. Everything's thrown at you. You've got to get through the day simply.

Yeah, look, I'm 46, so there's some extent to which I feel like this year's important as far as earning a fair amount of income, I think, because it is very cyclical with election cycles and other things like that, of kind of having good options for the second half of my life, basically. I found a lot of energy recently this year. I think I probably work fewer hours than I once did, but probably work much more efficiently, have a little bit more balance. But yeah, it's kind of like I am trying to like get as much productive work done as I can over the next, you know, 4 or 5 months until the election happens. I'm trying to build the newsletter Silver Bulletin in the long term. But you know, I've matured a little bit. I mean, I do, I, you know, I tend not to work most evenings, for example. I take my share of, we were talking about travel before, right? I do my share of travel. I have poker tournaments, which are fun and kind of stressful, but also like a lot of hard work and kind of are an escape in different ways. So yeah, like I want to, I want to get to a point where for the rest of my life I can do intellectually challenging and stimulating work, I think, and experience different things. And, but this year there is like a little bit of hustle, I think, required to help kind of ensure that in the long term.

There's a Steve Levitt paper you cite in your book that indicates people make better decisions when they flip a coin to avoid status quo bias. A, do you believe that paper? And B, looking forward, will you be flipping any coins?

No, I literally will, like, flip coins for, for, like, do we want to go get Italian food or sushi?

But a big decision, bigger decision, even just where should I go on my next vacation? You could randomize that. Do you do it?

That, like, a vacation location might be up to the max of what I would randomize, I think. Right.

But not something really important.

I tend to be pretty analytical about, like, really important, like, career and life choice decisions, I think.

Right. So you don't think you have that much status quo bias?

I'm sure I do, but like, look, I mean, I've, I've done a lot of different things and I've bounced around quite a bit and I'm, I'm kind of inherently, inherently restless. I mean, one thing I think is like, you know, some of the common personality flaws that— flaws is a jaded loaded word, right? Some of the common personality traits a lot of people have, I think maybe poker players over-index a little bit toward, toward the other way. You know, poker players are, are pretty good at going with the flow when you're playing a poker tournament. Everything is contingent, right? Because a tournament could last 5 more days or 5 more minutes. And so you're like, yeah, I'll go to dinner with you conditional on being knocked out of the tournament and not entering this other tournament and X and Y and Z. And so you're kind of, you're very used to dealing with different stressors and contingencies and things like that. And I think that's somewhat unusual.

So if you're very restless, does that seem to you like a bias in your decisions you want to counteract with nudges or something you should double down on? I would say you should double down on it. What's your view?

Closer to double down.

Double down.

Yeah.

So what's your main bias when you make decisions?

I think I'm probably more emotional than people might think on, on the surface.

I would think you're pretty emotional.

Yeah. That can come out like on Twitter and, and things like that a little bit. You know, look, people who are very competitive and I, and I put myself in that category, right? I think can sometimes be like, a little bit irrational about continuing to fight even after they've already won. In some ways, I think that can be a bias potentially in certain ways.

Who was the first human to think probabilistically with a reasonable degree of consistency?

I mean—

Or have we seen one yet?

No, look, I think people are actually more intuitive probabilistic reasoners than than maybe the kind of conventional wisdom holds, right? I mean, if you're thinking about like some hunter-gatherer, right, they're reading like context clues about where there might be like the particular wild beast they want to kill and want to avoid being killed by. You know, gambling goes back very early in many cultures. It's apparently not quite universal, but probably very common in most cultures.

But that's a sign they don't think probabilistically because most gambling is negative sum, right? At best zero-sum, so we should see very little of it.

I mean, it's originally divine from kind of divination, literally, right? And then kind of it becomes gamified and kind of commodified, but it plays almost like a spiritual role, I think, in ancient— I don't know this anthropology super well. I've read a couple of books on it, but like it almost is like a spiritual divination role, right? The notion of like gambling halls or casinos, I think, kind of dates back to maybe 16th or 17th century Europe roughly. That's potentially newer. But the notion of tempting one's fate, I think, which is still a romantic notion I think some gamblers have, right? Irving Goffman, who I cite in the book, is like, this is someone who has enjoué or whatever. Maybe I'm using that term wrong, but they need to prove that they're capable of taking a chance. It can be a little bit gendered. I think he thinks of it more as a you know, post-World War II American male who feels like he has fewer chances to like demonstrate his bravery. And that's always been kind of one conception of gambling is a simulation of actual risk.

Why shouldn't people gamble only in the positive-sum games? So take the US stock market. That certainly seems to be one of them. And manufacture all the suspense you want, learn about the companies, the CEO, get your thrill that way. And don't do any other gambling? Why isn't that just better for everyone?

Yeah, look, I'm not necessarily a fan of gambling for gambling's sake. Twice a year I'll be, 'cause I'm in casinos and in Las Vegas a lot, twice a year I'll have a friend who's like, let's just go play blackjack for an hour and have a couple of free drinks and things like that. But I like to make bets where I think at least in principle I have an edge, or at least can, can fool myself into thinking I have an edge. Sometimes with the sports stuff, it's like, you probably know deep down you're kind of roughly break even or something like that. You're doing some smart things like looking at 5 different sites and finding the line that's best, which wipes out some, but not all the house edge. But no, I, I'm, you know, I'm not a huge fan of like, of like slot machines. Certainly I think are kind of very gnarly and addictive in, in various ways.

They limit your sports betting, don't they?

Yeah, I've been limited by, by 6 or 7 of like the 9 New York retail sites.

And what's the potential edge they think you might have?

It's just that if they think, if you have the pattern of some, so if you're betting $2,000 on like the Wizards Hornets game, the moment the line comes out on DraftKings, right? You're clearly not a recreational bettor. So just the hallmarks of trying to be a winning player, meaning betting lines early, cuz the line's early and you don't have price discovery yet, right? The early lines are often, very beatable. Betting on obscure stuff like, you know, will this player get X number of rebounds or things like that. But like, it's, you know, if you have a knack for— if DraftKings has a line at -3.5 and it's -4 elsewhere, then it can be called steam chasing, where you bet before a line moves in other places. If you have injury information, I mean, it's like, it's a very weird game. And I think people— I think one thing people— I hope people are more aware of is that they are A lot of the sites, and some are better than others, right? But they really don't want winning players. And their advertising has actually changed. It used to be they would say for like Daily Fantasy Sports, which was the predecessor, "Hey, you're a smart guy." I mean, the ads were very cynical, right? "You're a smart guy in a cubicle. Why don't you go do all your spreadsheet stuff and actually draft this team and make a lot of money and like literally you'll be sleeping with supermodels in 2 months. You win the million-dollar prize from DraftKings." And now they don't even try to advertise it as a skill game anymore, which in some ways is a mistake because the appeal to like the male ego is like a huge, is a huge way to, to get new customers for sports betting and things like that. Every sports fan thinks he knows, has some proprietary edge or knowledge or, or, or insight. So, but no, they, they, they really don't want, I mean, I think, you know, I, I guess like plus EV sports bettors are like not a big lobbying group or not a big cause exactly, but you know, I think there should be regulations on like how much can you kind of price discriminate between your customers, right? Because literally they'll take like a million dollar bet from somebody and like wouldn't take even a $50 bet from me on the same game and things like that, which also creates problems because, you know, money has a way to flow. If, if Tyler, if you are able to bet a million dollars, right? And I'm able to bet $50 and I'm a winning bettor, then there's certain ways in which information will probably flow from me to you in an inefficient way, but eventually, but no, the industry is very cynical in some ways. And, you know, the kind of old school Vegas idea of we're gonna post our line and everybody gets a crack, right? You can bet X amount at a time. When you make a bet, then we may change the line and you can bet again. Like that attitude has been, lost kind of more of this European, UK style where you're doing lots and lots of customer segmentation and trying to maximize the amount of money you make from whales, which are bad degenerate gamblers, and not take much action at all from sharps. Of course, you lose the price discovery element of that. It's a pretty interesting industry economically. So what happens is there are a few sharp sites that will say, hey, we will take $5,000 from anybody, and that helps us have better pricing and discover better lines, right? Because by the time you get to, you know, kickoff or tip-off of a game, then you're taking $50,000 bets or more. So, so to have someone who's willing to give someone a small plus EV bet for a smaller amount, because then you'll get your retail customers later on. That was like the old, the old model.

Shouldn't they just stop the betting on, say, how many rebounds a player pulls down? Because it encourages corruption. It's not actually a suspenseful act whether it's 7 or 8 rebounds, whereas who wins the Super Bowl presumably is a suspenseful, meaningful act for many people.

That's right. Or, you know, if you have like a Jalen Brunson— I'm a Knicks fan, right— or someone who's like a major star, then it might make sense. But these books have way too wide a menu of events, and the sharper books don't. The sharper books will kind of pull a line down if Seth Curry is questionable for the game, right? You can get a gigantic edge if you have any inside information about like whether he's going to play or not. So they will just like not take that bet or they won't do the more esoteric player prop stuff or things like the NFL Draft, which is very— if you, you know, if you are an NFL reporter for ESPN, then you could probably absolutely crush NFL Draft bets. You might get fired if someone finds out. But like, but the retail books are like, yeah, we can put bets up that a knowledgeable person could make money on because we won't let the knowledgeable people bet in the first place. That's the kind of, I think, relatively— I guess it's a sustainable equilibrium in the long run. I'm not quite so sure. One thing that sites like DraftKings are relying upon is they're basically piggybacking off the sharp sites because you can kind of just set your line based on— like Pinnacle, for example, or Circa. These are books that are sharp and they actually do take bets from winning customers. So DraftKings kind of piggybacks off them.

If we could enforce just an outright ban, what's the cost-benefit analysis on banning all sports gambling?

I mean, I'm more of a libertarian than a strict utilitarian, I think.

Sure, but what's the utilitarian price of being a libertarian?

Look, I think most of the studies on gambling says that it's kind of a good transaction in terms of like, people get some degree of enjoyment and excitement out of it, but maybe you have 5% of the population that becomes very addicted and that 5% can account for a large share of volume. Look, if it were me, if I were kind of the gambling czar, I would probably ban slot machines and let everything else go. More or less, I think. The utilitarian part of me for slot machines is maybe enough to outweigh the libertarian part. I mean, they're deliberately designed to be addictive. It's not very transparent kind of what the odds actually are. You can't actually go and it doesn't say you have a -9% ROI at this particular slot machine. If you look at the demographics of slot machines, it's much lower income. I mean, sports betting and poker, which are the two kind of forms I participate in myself, are like are mostly done by fairly high-income people who can, I think, afford to lose. But yeah, slot machines are nasty things.

Speaking of skill, if we put you in a time machine, send you back to 1970, and you're playing poker, why exactly is it that you would win so much?

So one way to put it is that— so poker actually has been solved more or less with game theory, with big complicated programs called solvers that calculate the Nash equilibrium for for any situation given certain inputs.

But when you're at the table, that's of limited use to you, right? No.

I mean, because like, yeah, I mean the strategy. So if you think about like the history of like Texas Hold 'Em or poker, like probably 99% of poker that's ever been played, every hand that's been played counting online and things like that has been played in like the last 10 years, right? Poker's not that old. The game, it kind of goes back to the kind of Mississippi Riverboats, for many years people weren't really trying to use computers or anything to solve it when Doyle Brunson played, right? Just like actually he would literally by hand simulate hands by like dealing out a deck hundreds of times to see does a pair of twos beat ace-king offsuit more often than not, right?

So why isn't there evolution across temperaments? So say people back then, they don't know to be aggressive enough because they didn't study game theory, but the ones who are aggressive enough naturally, they're just gonna win more money. It will become somewhat obvious over time that's the way to play., and you might be slightly better than the others in 1970, but not have a huge advantage. Like, is the abstract knowledge that powerful compared to market evolution?

Well, so what are we— are we seeing if I went back today?

Today, everything you know, time machine, you sit down, you're going to do really well, right?

I would, I would, I think dominate the, the games. Yeah, for sure.

And it's because you know game theory and they don't. Like Thomas Schelling was what, 1960? Von Neumann, Morgenstern, you know, just after World War II. Like game theory is not that new. What exactly is it you know to be like a tight aggressive player with your strategy?

Tight aggressive bet.

I feel I saw that in a lot of old movies.

Tight aggressive is part of it, right? But like, it's very hard to maybe intuitively know what the right bluffing frequency is in a certain spot, right? You know, for many years, people would also give away lots and lots and lots of, Tells, if you go back and like watch like footage of like the 1987 World Series of Poker, there are incredibly obvious tells. And I think it just kind of, it's kind of just like there's pressure on the market to like compress it into a diamond or what am I even talking about? But, but like, I, I think we are just kind of very early in the life cycle of the competitive pressures on the game in, in poker. And in some ways it's like kind of a metaphor for like other kind of capitalistic ventures. I think you, while people may be underestimating the efficiency gains that are to be had when there are kind of proper incentives, incentives and proper technology, basically the kind of combination and just like the sheer volume of the number of kind of nodes on the game tree that have been explored.

So let's say you're a poker champion, you want to quit, you can prove you are a champion. You're still young. Who is it who wants to hire you in the actual world?

Oh, for sure. I mean, where would you go?

Like a trading firm or?

Oh, I mean, hedge funds. I mean, you know, Some of them like Susquehanna or Jane Street in particular are known for hiring ex-poker players.

And what's the main flaw those individuals have as traders, whatever their virtues may be? I mean, like chess players have flaws as traders, Math Olympiad types have flaws as traders. What's the flaws of the poker players?

I mean, I've only been on the poker— I have done a little bit of consulting for financial firms. You know, my experience doing that is, is that it's actually very similar, right? Because if you're like, working for a trading desk and you're being asked, what's your opinion of how event X will affect opportunity Y to trade in the market? It's very much a game of estimation and it's very much a game of incomplete information and it's making decisions quickly, which is very, I think, poker-like. And there can be value in running a formal model and being more complete about something. That's what I do for the election modeling type stuff, but like, but the trading opportunities pass, pass very quickly. And the premium on, on speed relative to, you know, I mean, journalism, actually there's a little bit of premium on speed too, right? But, you know, to negatively stereotype academia would be the contrast to that, right? Where there it's like you can have the perfect answer, but like it takes you a year to publish a paper. Whereas, whereas can you have a good answer in in 5 minutes, right? If you're trading some commodity and Joe Biden has kind of a face plant at this debate, you have to make a decision within a couple of minutes about that. Likewise, in sports betting, you see some line that clearly doesn't make sense and you have to infer, is this like a golden opportunity or did Patrick Mahomes just get injured or something like that, right? And you have to make inferences very quickly. And so I think I think the poker players probably do pretty, pretty well in that environment.

Now you've run FiveThirtyEight. Now your newsletter has evolved into being like a true business. Do you seek to hire top poker players or you avoid them like the plague? Like one is enough. I'm enough. You know, we don't need any more of that skill. Get lost, fellow.

I would for sure. I mean, so poker players are sometimes a little bit lacking in organization and probably I'm a little bit lacking in, in organization. Right. And poker players are people who are kind of, Sometimes they're a little bit irreverent, which is a quality I like, but I think I need people who are like the elections analyst I hired now. I mean, he is somebody who, he's never failed to like, he's great, Eli, never failed to return a text message within 15 minutes or something like that. I don't know when he sleeps, and I need somebody like that, because I'm running all over the place, and I can be like a little run hot and cold and be like a little bit moody. So I think you want someone who's a little bit more, more steady for the newsletter. I think also, you know, the writing skills are very important. I mean, I don't know if it's becoming more important or less important in the kind of world of ChatGPT and so forth, but like just the ability to like, I mean, working on the book and then the newsletter just so you're, you know, to write every day. I mean, I feel like you can get like 2x or 3x like faster at writing, like literally if you just kind of get a lot of reps in and things like that.

Sure.

For sure. There are like, I was very blessed by— it was the first time I've ever hired someone for this job as opposed to at FiveThirtyEight, and I was very excited by how many smart, mostly young people there were out there. So hopefully I'll find other ways to hire more of them in the future. But yeah, but people who are a little bit more directed, I think, and organized.

In running FiveThirtyEight and now your current ventures, what have you learned about social science, economics, game theory? That you didn't know to begin with?

I mean, I think I've— I feel like I've learned more in the past 3 years. It's kind of— I mean, formally, I've been away from FiveThirtyEight for like a year and change now, right? Informally, there was kind of a lame duck period where I was, you know, I was allowed under my contract with Disney to write a book. So it's kind of probably—

and that was this book, On the Edge. Yeah.

Yeah. And it took 3 years. And just like, if you take 3 years and just like talk to like 200 really smart people. That's, that's a, that's an amazing thing to do. I mean, it's kind of what you do, but like, I wish I kind of spent more of that time in my whole life. But at FiveThirtyEight, I mean, the constant frustration was that we were kind of brought in during a period of, during a peacetime period for ESPN before we went to ABC News, where they felt like they had the world's best business and could just kind of print money. And we could be like a, a loss leader for them. And so you never actually had any incentives in place to run an actual business. It was no, no one was gonna lose their job because FiveThirtyEight lost X amount of money every year when you have a company that's making hundreds of millions of dollars a year until you face, you know, headwinds in like cable TV and theme parks and all these things all of a sudden are like become very challenging businesses in, in a lot of ways, the movie industry during COVID and things like that. So yeah, I mean, it's a shame because based on the early growth of the newsletter, I mean, I think, I think FiveThirtyEight could have been a very, very good subscriber business. And we kind of tried to push that internally, but like at a big company, the logic doesn't make sense. They're like, well, we have Hulu Plus launching and therefore we can't have another subscriber business that would distract from Hulu+, right? It's just, it's just very strange. I'm not sure how much of that is a result of being at Disney in particular, because they're all about gigantic scale, right? It is theme parks, it is NBA and NFL contracts for hundreds of millions of dollars over a period of time. It's being in every kind of household in America, every movie theater. So I don't think they saw the value of like a, a small to medium-sized business that could still be a good business and a prestigious business and profitable on its own merits. And that was frustrating. I mean, you know, given that I tend to be pretty incentive-driven, like to have spent like 10 years at a company where you basically had like no incentive to work hard and sometimes some probably for the first 8 years of that, I worked my ass off anyway, but it just, it's just so nice to like actually kind of own your own, own your own work product. And like, you know, with subscriber newsletters in particular, the incentives are pretty, are pretty linear, right? If you post more, you tend to get more more signups in the long run, make more revenue. And so that's a very nice change of pace and very motivating, I think.

Do you think that sports analytics has made sports too homogenized and more boring? So right now, for instance, the New York Knicks, they're in a way trying to copy the Celtics. Well, everyone should be a good shooter and everyone should be a good defender. In the 1980s or '90s, teams were more different. Should I be happy about this?

I think that's a— I think it's the better version of the critique, right? Because some sports, like, I think the average NBA style is fairly attractive now, right? Like I like—

Too many 3-point shots, I would say.

Maybe a little bit, but like, I mean, if you go watch, like if you go watch footage of like a game from like the '90s or something, right? I mean, this is, this is more aesthetically appealing. It shows off some of the athleticism, I think. But no, the fact that you have less variety, this is true in poker too, by the way, right? There are fewer different varieties of like loose aggressive versus tight aggressive poker players. You can't get away as much with having like a flawed eccentric strategy and then making up for it in other ways, which is kind of a shame. Maybe in the long run, it means we're not exploring different branches of the tree as well. And that can be problematic. But yeah, I mean, it's a bad time when things get hyper-efficient, then maybe the quirky players. I mean, even if I saw a video yesterday about like Major League Baseball batting stances, and there used to be guys that had like very, very funky batting stances and things like that, right? And those have largely disappeared, right? If it kind of costs you two hundredths of a point of batting average, so you hit .289 instead of .291, then like there's enough money on the line and enough kind of resources and training and enough kind of sports science where that'll probably get beat out of you potentially.

Will Joel Embiid ever win a title?

I know Daryl Morey pretty well, and he— I think I'm probably a fan of yours. And so I'd say yes, I think.

I mean, and you think Paul George was a good idea? I think it was a bad idea. He's 34. He's had a history of being flaky. He's a very talented player, but he doesn't seem like the kind of guy to put you over the edge. And they need more of a glue guy.

I mean, so, so Darryl Morey is very good at finding like the league average players that can like, that can provide the glue guy. No, I think, I think it's a good move. I mean, I think like, you know, look, Darryl understands the importance of, of swinging for the fences. If healthy, that's a very big, big 3. And then he'll find ways to, you know, acquire the minimum salary guys or whatever loopholes there are in the salary cap to get the $10 million a year guys. And, you know, if healthy, that's a team that can challenge the Celtics, I think. I mean, if healthy, I mean, what's the conditional probability in all 3 of their Big 3 being healthy? Probably below 50%, frankly. But, you know, but you don't want, like, the average outcome. And also, the incentives in the NBA, I mean, if you try to, like, model out what the true discount rate is for sports general managers, I mean, they have some absurdly high discount rate, like 30% or something like that, or 50%, because their jobs last for, like, 5 years.

Yeah, sure.

On average, right? And so, you know, I think it's a fairly smart play to swing for, swing for the fences.

Luka, overrated or underrated?

Well, I lost a fair bit of money trying to bet against the Mavericks in the playoffs, so I can't call him underrated or can't call him overrated, I guess. I think Luka is properly rated.

Properly rated. Yeah. And who's the most underrated player in the NBA? I use 2024 for our listeners.

I mean, I think Jalen Brunson in some ways, and now that's the Knicks fan coming out, although he was, I think, 5th or 6th in the MVP voting potentially this year.

Yeah, he was pretty high. Yeah.

I mean, as a Knicks fan, that's kind of one that comes to mind a little bit. I mean, I think some of the Celtics, like, you know, Derrick White, I think is a very underrated player, you know, because I'm not, I mean, I like Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, right? But I think, I think, you know, they are maybe respectively like the, you know, 7th or 8th and like the 23rd best player. In the league, and they were like a great historic team. And I think that, you know, the Hollidays and the Derek Whites and players like that are maybe like top 30 NBA players, like really, really good.

I think I'd say Jokic, who to me is the greatest offensive player ever, not necessarily recognized as such, certainly has a very high reputation, but maybe not as high as it should be.

No, people are always— I mean, even this year, right, you saw people were willing to kind of turn on him a little bit. I don't think people— I mean, I think he, you know, I think the consensus now of smart NBA nerds that he's the best player in the league. I think people might not realize that this is one of the highest peaks of any player in NBA—

Exactly.

Ever.

Yeah.

I don't think that's widely recognized.

How will AI improve sports analytics?

I mean, I think it will improve things in areas like computer vision things and classifying plays and things like that, I think will help a fair bit. I mean, sports is weird because it's kind of in this medium data environment where it's not quite a big data problem.

But you could have more data if you put money into it, right?

Yeah. No, I think it'll help more in the sports where they're kind of like less linear. I think things like, you know, classifying strategies in like soccer and football where you have like a lot of things happening at once and you can't kind of have your nice little regression model. I think, I think, you know, as compared to say baseball where baseball is kind of very easy to represent with kind of classical statistics. So, you know, I mean, I think it'll probably— there'll also be ways where it enhances like the sports viewing experience in different ways. I think it'll help like sports video games a lot.

So are hockey and combat sports going to use more analytics in the future?

I mean, one of my friends named Sonny Meta is an analyst for the Florida Panthers and assistant GM, and he's an analytics guy, former poker player, former jazz musician, and just won the Stanley Cup in Florida. So, so it's transitioning in. In all the sports, I think. I mean, hockey, probably of the big four in the US, is considered the most old school. But yeah, look, I mean, the market's fairly, fairly efficient. And I think people have, you know, we're kind of long past the old boys network in most of the sports, probably in hockey. If you talk to Sonny, he'd say maybe, maybe two-thirds of teams are fairly smart and one-third of them are still kind of, are still kind of dumb. I think we probably passed the low-hanging fruit from Moneyball gains stage, right?

Here's a question I was asked during a Jane Street talk once. What is the most underrated basketball statistic for judging a player?

Well, it's contextual because, you know, I think like we've gotten to the point now where like offensive rebounding has gotten underrated, actually. If you try to tease out the effect of rebounding in statistical models, then there are various kinds of things where different variables are correlated where basically I think if you look carefully, then offensive rebounding is actually quite valuable. I mean, you regain a whole possession that's worth a lot. Whereas defensive rebounding is kind of, you know, rarely is an individual player doing something right to get a defensive rebound. Whereas an offensive rebound requires like a lot more skill and provides a lot more value because the expectation is 75% chance that like you lose the ball. So So if you get an offensive rebound, that's like adding like, you know, 7/10 or 8/10 of a point. Basically, you get a whole possession back.

My answer was team wins, at least if you've been on more than one team. Like, does a good team want you? That's picking up your intangibles.

Yeah, look, I think uniquely in basketball, because it's 5 players in a lineup at any given time and a good player can control, you know, half the offense or, or more, literally a Luka-type player or Steph Curry-type player. Yeah, I think that's a more adequate test in basketball than other sports, or maybe for an NFL quarterback, right? I grew up kind of in baseball, was my favorite sport for a long time, and there it's more individual, and there I was always kind of fighting against the team wins argument. Like, I think it's like not a major indictment of Mike Trout that the Angels haven't been very good.

But it's not just you causing possible wins even before you've played for the team. The fact that they want you. Says something good about you. So like KCP has been wanted by good teams. His stats are good, but not awesome. But that is a good sign about his quality.

I think so. Although we start to get into circularities when people become kind of aware of that kind of thing. I mean, I feel like this way a little bit with like prediction markets too. And I, you know, I consult now for Polymarket. So I'm kind of officially a champion of prediction markets, but kind of when people believe, oh, the traders must be doing something really smart, therefore it's trustworthy. It kind of can become circular logic, I think, sometimes where you can make yourself vulnerable to thinking you have blind spots and kind of having like a bystander problem, basically. But yeah, I mean, you have to— someone actually has to have alpha they're providing, value-add they're providing, and then other people can kind of drift off that. Or what's draft off that? I'm thinking about the cycling term, but now and then someone thinks that everyone else has vouched for somebody. It's kind of like the story of Sam Bankman-Fried in the book a little bit, that everyone assumed that because he has such prestigious coattails, that he's hanging out with Anna Wintour and hanging out with, you know, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. And like, he has his name up on a basketball arena in Miami and he's getting his praises sung by everybody in Sequoia Capital and things like that. That like, you know, at the heart of it, I mean, it was kind of a big fraud. I mean, that's a term I'm choosing Intentionally.

And what's your model of his risk-taking behavior?

I mean, I think he— I mean, like interviews with you, I mean, I think he is quite insane. I think it's a term, you know, irresponsible and insane. But like, you know, I think he was very literal about like, he'd literally be willing to like take the St. Petersburg paradox bet where like if he could improve his version of utility by 2.0001x, like he would like literally say, hey, I'm a strict utilitarian, I'm willing to take that gamble. I think he was like, you know, in my interviews with me, he was almost proud of the high risk of ruin that he was taking. And he would say things like, if you're not willing to like actually literally ruin yourself where you're literally a laughingstock, then you're doing something wrong.

Is asking whether he might have been a sociopath a substitute for a risk analysis of his behavior, or is it a way of getting at the proper risk analysis of his behavior?

No, I think that term is properly used because he's also engaged with other people and running a giant company that people have deposited millions of dollars with and invested hundreds of millions of dollars in. And I think that's a proper frame, right? I mean, the kind of combination— the book's all about people who have this, I was going to say, risk-taking gene. I realize it's like a little bit— imprecise. I think it probably is genetic in part, but how does that pair with other different qualities? The most common pairing in the book is being really risk-taking with really analytical, which is a very powerful, I think, pairing.

And you use this phrase, what, those people are in the river, on the river? What is it?

So I call the community the river. So the river is the virtual community of like-minded people, but that includes everything from from poker to Silicon Valley, if you go kind of further upstream, as I call it, even things like effective altruism and rationalism. Like one thing that I found in the book is I kind of had this outline of like, here are all these areas that are interesting to me and kind of literally started out. I mean, the first act I took for the book was I flew to Florida, my first trip on a plane after the pandemic, and went to a giant casino in Hollywood, Florida, and played a poker tournament and just kind of like branched out from there. But like, But the commonality you have between how the— how all the different analytical nerds think, right? How the effective altruists and the hedge funders and the poker players and the VCs. I mean, it's like not exactly—

those are very different groups, though. Don't some subsets of those groups get fooled to an especially high degree? So maybe not the hedge fund people, right? They face very strict discipline. But the effective altruists, the rationalists, There's something to me a bit clueless about them, maybe systemically.

Yeah, I think the EA— and look, the book has a very long discussion of EA, and in the spirit of EA, I'm sure it'll get reviewed on these different forums, and I hope that it's—

And I mostly like EA, to be clear.

I mostly like them.

There's still some epistemic defect in the people that I observe regularly.

I think they're a little bit too trusting, is one thing. I think there is a lot to be said for having skin in the game, is a term that I didn't invent, but You know, I think poker players, one of their best qualities is they have really good BS detectors, right? And they've seen like lots of smart SBF-like nerds who go on a winning streak and win a couple of tournaments and like, and, but are bullshitters and like, aren't all they're cracked up to be. And I think, I think EAs maybe kind of lack that, that BS detecting ability.

You ever see that old YouTube video when Ali G presents to Donald Trump? Pre-presidential Trump, and Trump just dismisses him immediately and walks away, right? So Trump has the BS detection ability. And how does that fit with your model of the river people? Isn't he in other ways almost the opposite of the analytical river people?

I mean, so I will say, if you take the EAs and put them in a separate camp, I mean, they are unusual because they have this analytical skill set, but they are less competitive, I think. But then kind of the movement gets You're served by this guy, Sam Bankman-Fried, who's extremely competitive and I think runs circles around them in some ways, even though he's kind of lying about things in other ways. Maybe competitiveness is good. And like, you know, I mean, the book is also against Peter Singer form of kind of selfless utilitarianism where, you know, I worry that people aren't— I mean, some of this comes from like your critiques, I think of, but like, people that aren't a little bit partial, then I worry that everything just kind of falls apart on some level, right?

There's no incentive compatibility without some partiality.

There's no incentive compatibility, and it's interesting. I think Peter Singer too talks a little bit about how he almost thinks people that are somewhere on the spectrum are actually better moral reasoners, he thinks, in some ways, right?

There's evidence for this in some papers, in fact.

Yeah.

They have less status quo bias, they're more impartial in some ways.

Yeah, I think there might be something to that, and there are lots of people in the book that probably would be classified as being on the spectrum, or would classify themselves that way. You know, poker uniquely, I think, involves some combination of analytical skills and street smarts. If you totally lack the street smarts, then I think it's still pretty hard to get ahead in a kind of competitive world. You're too likely to be taken advantage of.

Now your father was an academic. Did you get your street smarts from him or from somewhere else?

Probably not. I mean, my dad's, you know, a sharp guy and he would do things that were difficult problems. Like he tried to basically, he was a Sovietologist back in the day and would try to interpret from rigged Soviet data, like what the real vital statistics were, right? How many births, deaths, abortions.

So he's like you.

Yeah, so it's, yeah.

Yeah, things have become more like criminology all the time in US politics.

Yeah, so that involves like making inferences from, from incomplete data. At one point, he was offered to be part of a team to kind of figure out how many deaths there had actually been in the Holocaust. I think, thankfully, turned that down because that would be a thankless task for sure. But yeah, but he was starting out by working with data that was imperfect, inadequate, sometimes fabricated, and trying to find the real inferences from there. But no, look, a lot of it comes from being very competitive, being on debate team and things like that in high school, playing poker for for many years now, you know, having a fair amount of life experience. I mean, we kind of talked before about how like I'm a little bit rambunctious and easily dissatisfied. And, you know, at this point I think I've traveled, not like you, but been to a lot of different places and things like that and talked to a lot of people.

What's the stupidest risk you're willing to take? It could be, oh, I'd go in a submersible with a billionaire, or, you know, I'd take a helicopter ride every week. Or what's your stupidest risk?

Maybe not thinking enough about— I've tried to become more healthy over time. This is a boring answer, right? But like, you know, I think I still probably have like too much of a short-term bias in terms of like kind of, you know, not doing enough things to help extend my lifespan and things like that, right? I mean, I don't know. I mean, I've, you know, one time when I was like 10 or 11 years old, the one at sleepaway camp, right? One of the instructors like dared me to like go walk around this pond with only a flashlight at midnight or something like that. Right. And for some reason I did it. I don't know why. I think they got fired. It was like a big scandal or something.

But that doesn't sound risky. If you're walking around the pond, you're not walking on the winter ice, right?

No, to be fair. Right. But like, you're 11 years old and you're by yourself and you have only a flashlight. It's probably not the smartest thing in the world.

I think my stupidest risks might just be road trips in places where the drivers are bad.

Oh, for sure. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I should do less of that.

I went to Costa Rica a couple of years ago. Right. And you're like, it's very rainy there, obviously, at least the part of Costa Rica that I was in.

Yeah.

And you're probably doing things like, you know, going swimming on these, I mean, the waves in Costa Rica are really something. Right. But it's probably, probably like objectively pretty dangerous to be, you know, in the Pacific Ocean without a lifeguard nearby. It's probably fairly dangerous. Right.

Yeah.

Or going up some gravel road in the middle of a rainstorm. But I think people need some, you wouldn't want to take that risk constantly, right? But you have to, I think you have to like live a little bit, you know?

But what's the way you would describe or think about what it adds to your life? Because I do know people who don't do any of that. Maybe they're missing something, but what is it? What is it exactly?

I mean, I think probably it is genetic in part. There is some like quote unquote thrill-seeking gene. You know, I like spicy food, for example, right? You know, I like travel. I like experiences that are more visceral. I mean, I think they're, I think there has to be some innate component and people I've talked to that like I've talked in the book, it's like mostly quants and things like that. It's like hedge fund people and poker players. There is one section of people who are physical risk takers, people who are literally like explorers. I talked to an astronaut, for example, and they'll say, yeah, if you talk to the people who are mountain climbing, scaling the Seven Summits where you're up 28,000 feet and you actually have some risk of dying, Their community thinks there's something, something genetic about it. They think it's like related to a certain type of stoicism almost.

But what's the richness they get added to their lives that maybe I would not? Because I'm somewhat risky with travel, but I'm not at all risky with physical activities.

I think the notion of, of cheating death has to be kind of, has to be kind of thrilling, right? I, I mean, you know, I think Some of them are maybe a little bit depressed in some ways, and it's kind of like a not quite self-destructive or suicidal, but adjacent to that, right? Like maybe you figure, well, you know, I'm a little depressed and so I can kind of like, I can have a lot of fun and cheat death. Or if I die, then maybe it's not that bad. I mean, I know it's kind of going to a dark place, right? But like some of like, some of Sam Bankman-Fried's confidants who are, I think, in a very different category than like these mountain climbers or things like that, right? They would say things like, well, he was kind of miserable anyway, right? So he wouldn't necessarily mind going to jail because his day-to-day life, he just, he was depressed and kind of unhappy. And so therefore, you know, that's probably a pretty bad reason to be massively risk-taking. But I think there might be some, some element of that. I mean, maybe if you think of like a, it's going in a slightly dark place, but like an Anthony Bourdain type, right? As someone who you would think of as being very risk-taking and liked, you know, like probably traveling to places where it's objectively pretty dangerous. I'm sure he had like a very adequate crew with him and things like that.

He never struck me as a risk-taker. I mean, he's always going to places that look dangerous and aren't, would be my sense of what he did.

Yeah. I mean, I guess maybe I'm kind of revisiting now in light of his suicide. Right. But like, that's a personality type that like, but, you know, but he liked to, he liked to drink and do drugs and eat spicy food and things like that. And I think, I think I think you kind of see like a cluster, and he had the, you know, some obviously penchant to travel and things like that. I think you see some cluster of personality traits there.

Do you ever think much about how broader world history of politics and political leaders may have been shaped by drugs and alcohol? So there's a book about how many of the Nazi commanders were high on different kinds of speed. I don't know how true that is. There's a book about Soviet Union, it's called Vodka Politics. Sam Bankman-Fried, there's various allegations what he was taking. You see the photo of whatever on his desk. How important are drugs in all of this?

I mean, I'm not a historian of drug culture or things like that, but you must have—

you've talked to all these people, you've thought about it, right?

Yeah. Look, I think in the case of SBF that like drugs are maybe less a part of it than some things. But look, I mean, look, I think in general that history is often quite contingent on on very flawed human beings. There's a good Matt Yglesias post about this in the context of decisions about whether people run for president or not, from Joe Biden deciding to step down to like Teddy Roosevelt and things like that. And when you kind of do have some access to really smart people in kind of the halls of power, I mean, people are often kind of winging it, you know what I mean? Of course, usually. Yeah.

How can you not?

With limited information.

And no second chances, really.

Often no second chances. I do think that people who are risk-taking tend to prevail for various reasons, right? Because they are the people on the right tail of the graph. I think kind of financial risk-taking probably has some positive correlation with risk-taking as far as substance use, not that high, but maybe like 0.2 or 0.3 or something like that, right? So yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if more important decisions than we think in the history of the world have made in various states of intoxication.

If there's status quo bias, should political leaders take drugs more?

You know, before Joe Biden dropped out, right, I mean, it would have been a funny scandal if maybe Joe Biden should have slept with the porn star, right, and taken some shrooms. It would have changed his evaluation, the way people viewed him a fair amount. And we've had a couple of teetotaling presidents twice in a row.

Trump is one of them, yeah.

Which is interesting, I think. I mean, I'll probably give like the standard kind of centrist, left-of-center answer, which I think probably psychedelics are probably for some people pretty good, probably pretty dangerous for other people. Otherwise, I don't know. I think probably some people are able to kind of simulate different states of consciousness in different ways naturally. If drugs are one way to kind of get to play, to role-play a different person a little bit, then I think that probably is helpful for a fair number of people.

Is the US presidency now in an age of what you might call parity in NBA terms, a series of one-term presidents, one after the other, just like the NBA champions keep on turning over and there's no dynasty? So we had this long era of dynasty, you know, Bush, Clinton, my goodness, whatever else, and now it's over and there aren't going to be repeats or what? What's that going to look like?

So I think part of it is a result— and yeah, so if Trump wins again, then he'll be limited to one term. So you would therefore have three one-term presidents in a row for the first time since I think like 1892-ish. I was trying to look that up the other day. So I think one thing that happened is that like the canon— so again, I'm 46, so Carter was president when I was born, right? But like the kind of canon that you emerge into when you're kind of first covering politics is post-World War II. Politics, kind of, you know, 1946 through Bill Clinton, 1996 or whatever. That was a period of historically very low polarization in the United States. I mean, you have lots of things going on, right? It's like de facto three-party system with Northern Democrats and Republicans and Southern Democrats. But, you know, but you had relatively low partisanship, a lot of bipartisanship.

A lot of things are going well.

Things are going pretty well. It's a good time for the US. Incumbent presidents get reelected by landslide margins. Very often there's a lot of goodwill. If you go back though to the kind of turn of the previous century, so the kind of Grover Cleveland years of every year the election is separated by 2 points, right? And you bounce back and forth quite rapidly. That's an era of high polarization and kind of more like the era that we're in right now. So yeah, I mean, even before Biden's age and other problems, the incumbency effect, if you tease it out carefully, has really dissipated in elections for Congress. We have a fairly large sample size. And in the presidency, you know, you may now have two incumbent presidents in a row who are voted out of office. I mean, technically it'll probably be Kamala now. But yeah, so there is precedent for it. But this kind of era of comedy, this kind of post-World War II era of comedy that we think, C-O-M-I-T-Y, not C-O-M-E-D-Y, that we all think of as being Normal is actually kind of more of the outlier in some ways.

How long will it be before we have AIs who are better predictors than you are?

Depends on—

so it's like, let's say it's a Centaur model. So the AI sits down and says, Nate, you know, please talk to me for half an hour. Tell me your thoughts. Tell me what you know. You give it your best half an hour worth of consulting on, say, the next presidential election. And then we just get rid of you. I mean, we send you out off to pasture. And the AI does the work and you're paid like a small fee and it does the actual prediction. How far away is that?

I think election forecasting is kind of like an oddly hard problem where the mathematical structure of it is fairly complex. The data is quite sparse and you often have to make kind of judgment calls based on incomplete information. So that might be kind of one of the relatively more robust areas.

But it gets half an hour of your time, right? It could pay for more if need be.

Okay, then where's the line between like me using an AI. I mean, in some ways, like, the book is like, you know, in a very limited way, but the book is kind of like AI enhanced in different ways, right?

Yeah.

And so, look, I am not like a— I am not convinced necessarily that we're going to achieve superintelligence. I think it's plausible-ish that it kind of like plateaus at very smart generalist human capabilities and is very good in certain areas. But I've become a little bit less convinced just kind of in the last 6 months, since I kind of had to send the book in to the printer, basically, of the inevitability of achieving superintelligence. I mean, I think that—

Well, maybe it's not super, but let's say until an AI is as good as one of Phil Tetlock's superforecasters. I would say that's 3 to 4 years away would be my guess, maybe closer to 3. Maybe even 2. What would you say?

I would take the over, I think, on that.

But over as in 200 or over as in, oh, it's 5 years away?

15 or 20.

15 or 20. That's a long time.

Yeah.

Yeah. So GPT-5 is not going to wow you.

Look, I mean, it wows me in certain ways. I mean, as someone who's kind of fascinated with language, right? You know, I'm fascinated with the way languages are mathematicized in different ways. And, you know, one of the In the book, there is a lot on AI, including reasons to be optimistic or pessimistic about P-Doom. Your readers probably know what P-Doom is, I assume.

Of course. Yeah. If they don't know, they deserve P-Doom. Right.

But it does seem plausible to me that large language models reveal more about the kind of mathematical structure of language than about just the intelligence of AI. Right.

But they can now do Math Olympiad problems. Right. So there's one forecast by someone working on this that within a year they'll win Math Olympiads. I could be wrong, but when you say that it's only a year away, I would take that pretty seriously.

I think prediction is actually a pretty hard, pretty hard skill that probably life experience helps. I mean, you know, sometimes a prediction, right? If you're trying to like predict, like you have a phone book of millions of records, right? And you're trying to predict, you know, what's the likelihood that this spam email will be responded to and result in additional sale? I mean, I'm sure like AI is already better than humans at that. But things that are less structured, I think, are harder for AIs and hard for humans.

And why do businesses not seem to care that much about most predictions? Surely this has puzzled you. So for 20 years, I've been waiting for prediction markets to take off. Obviously, in politics, sports, it's more than up and running. But most areas, they're pretty weak. What's the actual problem on the demand side?

I think this may be changing. I mean, one of the things I did in trying to kind of figure out my next steps after FiveThirtyEight/Disney is talk to different financial firms and hedge funds and Wall Street firms about different types of consulting arrangements. Clearly, there are players in the market who are thinking carefully about political risk and other types of risks that you can price adequately by prediction markets. I think there probably is some notion of critical mass where you have, when you have enough kind of liquidity and enough volume to have relatively efficient pricing. I mean, I think we may now be at that threshold, but we weren't like 4 years ago or something like that, right?

But take a truly important commercial question like, will China invade Taiwan or when will they invade? I've looked at different markets or pretend markets on that. I just don't take those seriously. It's not that I feel I have a better estimate. But they don't cause much updating for me.

I think that the time horizons might be too long to be actionable necessarily. In the same way, in sports betting, you can probably make money on futures bets, right? If I were to bet right now on like who will win the NBA title in 2024 or '25, there are probably some plus EV bets there on the surface. However, that means I would have to like tie up my capital for a year, right? There might also be some risk that the site I bet on goes belly up or something, or that I die or something. And so like, it's not— these long-term bets, I think, are—

But that's not very long-term. I mean, that's less than a year away. And T-bill rates, they're higher than they were, but they're not that high. You have some marginal funds in things like T-bills. You're in good enough health, you don't want to do the submersible with a billion in it.

But like, oftentimes your edge in sports betting is like, is like 2 or 3 points, right? Yeah. 2 or 3% as an ROI. So if you're like, if you can put in the S&P 500 and make 8%, then it becomes a negative EV bet.

But that gets back to my point. People should only bet in essence on US equities and nothing else. And they're sort of fooling themselves in these other areas. And if they want to spend their money that way, I'm libertarian enough, but I'm not that enthusiastic about it. And I don't bet myself at all really on anything. Other than buy and hold and diversify.

I mean, it is fun.

It's not fun for me somehow.

Yeah.

But I'm a person who's never bet. I go to Las Vegas, I'm not even tempted. I don't bet on any games. I don't do slot machines. Like, what's wrong with me from your point of view?

No, it's probably rational in various robust and narrow senses of the term. And again, I'm not somebody who's like that big on— casino gambling. But like, but look, it's the intensely competitive nature of things. I mean, if you look at— there's something called like an Enneagram. Do you know this? Like one of the different personalities? Yeah. So the two rarest Enneagram types are the type that— the type that's really analytical, basically, and the type that's really competitive. And if I take my Enneagram chart, or Enneagram, I'm not sure how you say it, those are the two where I have the highest scores. So something about 'Cause typically you think about, oh, who is someone who's like analytical? Well, maybe they're kind of like an actuary type. They're calculating. Maybe they're somewhat risk-averse. Maybe they're somewhat, maybe they're on the verge of being like a little bit neurotic, right? That's kind of the stereotype. And the people in the book are not that, right? They're analytical, but they want to like, look, a lot of times they had things in their childhood. Like a lot of people like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, for example, I mean, they had childhood trauma, but not so traumatic, and they had enough privilege in different ways that they were able to still, you know, have people take their phone calls and things like that. But like, it's often people who something I think went a little bit haywire, and they're not necessarily kind of strictly rational in some sense.

Last 2 questions. First, where do you want to travel next?

So I have a good friend who's Korean American. We're hoping to go to, Korea in December.

That is cold. I've done that. In fact, I love Korea. Yeah, I don't know about December.

I've been very little to the Middle East. I'd like to go. I like to go there more. We're talking about Israel a little bit before.

Last question. What is it you want to learn about next?

One of the problems with writing a book where you kind of take all the things that you really love is that like you kind of use a lot of your ideas. I think a lot, you know, I'll give you a dumb— I'd like to learn more about Pot Limit Omaha, which is a form of poker that I haven't played. Very much yet. Yeah, I have this list of things, like I want to learn more about European soccer, Potlatch Omaha, and wine, basically. Those are all things that I think I would like very much, but I've never quite explored fully.

Again, to repeat, Nate's book, On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything. Nate Silver, thank you very much.

Thank you, Tyler.

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.