Good evening. Welcome to the John Adams Institute. My name is Tracy Mets. Welcome to our season opener with Nate Silver, statistician, writer, and the founder of the polling website 538.
Nate has been on our wish list for a long time and we're delighted that he is here. A special word of thanks to our friends at Mavenpic Remco. Always generous with your facilities. Thank you for putting Nate up for to help us. We really appreciate it.
Nate Silver gained national fame after 538 correctly predicted the results of the 2008 and 2012 US presidential elections. He's no longer with 538. It was bought by Disney a few years back. There may be a connection. I don't really know. I hope Kosper will ask him. But he's still a political junkie.
His second and most recent book is On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything. And the key word here, of course, is risk. In it, he looks at how risk shapes our lives and the world around us. I think you'll understand his obsession with risk better if you know that he's a professional poker player.
He will be interviewed by Kosford Thomas, a dear friend of the John Adams author, journalist for the newspaper Fenotel Dplots and the magazine Duna Amsterdammer Duna, and former US correspondent.
And we are looking forward to hearing from you. You can pose your questions to Nate via the app Slido. It's easy. You just scan the QR code with your phone and off you go.
I want to say a special word of welcome to our new partner, the American Book Center. We're so happy to be working with them. It's so much fun. After the event, Nate will sign books at the ABC stand in the lobby. I will be back afterwards. And for now, over to Nate Silver.
Thank you so much.
Oh gosh, it's such a nice venue. It makes me a lot more nervous, right? It looks a bit like Geffen Hall, the Symphony in New York, but like much better acoustics. They're notoriously terrible there. Um, I'm just going to be fairly brief here and we'll bring Casper up soon. Um, I love being in Amsterdam. It's one of my favorite cities in Europe or anywhere in the world. I've been coming here since I was a college kid.
I took my year abroad in London. If I 1999, I'm getting old. If you saw two giggling students named Nate and Jessica at the Van Gogh Museum who seemed like they were probably tripping on shrooms and looking at the pictures, that might or might not have been me and Jessica back 25 years ago.
Um, so I wrote On the Edge in part because I felt lost, I suppose, like a lot of people did coming out of 2020. We had a pandemic, of course, worldwide. We had an election. Um, and I felt kind of like estranged in a weird way from American politics.
Um, one curse of being really well known for something, right, is you can kind of like never live it down, right? Like I'm really well known for covering elections and politics for some good years that we had predicting 2008 and 2012. The truth is I'm like I'm kind of a political junkie by force or by default. But like the things I really care about are things like football for example, right? Or basketball, American football, not European football, sorry, right? Or things like AI or things like poker or things like internet culture.
Um, but I'd gotten really well known for politics and like you know the thing is I kind of come from a background where we think in terms of probabilities and risk of course, right? Before I ever covered politics I actually wrote prediction systems, algorithms to predict how baseball players would do and they're all probabilistic, right? Like no team has more than a whatever 10 or 15% chance of winning the World Series and there's a very large sample size, it's pretty random. Baseball in particular is a sport where you know you hit a ball a little bit differently, you get a home run versus a popup and whatever else.
Um, and kind of also having like a gambler's mentality for things, right? Um, you know, in college I was kind of also a little bit lost, I suppose. I took my junior year abroad in London, like I said. All of a sudden, I'm a senior at the University of Chicago and I'm like, 'Oh no, I have to like actually go out and get a job in the real world.' I hadn't really thought about this very much. My parents were academics, you know.
Um, wound up being a consultant but for KPMG, maybe it's a Dutch company I think, KPMG or something, right? Um, got really bored really fast, right? But they had some like fancy Cisco software at KPMG so I started using that to like build the baseball forecasting system, do other things like that. Um, wound up quitting my job after four years.
Meanwhile, by the way, we had like what was called a poker boom, um, where because poker was coming online, because it was on television, but all of a sudden the average poker player was really bad. I played a little bit, teaching like summer camp in college and things like that. And all of a sudden I was like staying up until like 4 in the morning and pressing buttons and playing poker against people here, I suppose, or in Europe or whatever else, right? People at 4 in the morning, they're either in Europe or they're drunk or both or I don't know, right?
Um, and like started making a lot of money doing that and then kind of fell into analyzing baseball, fell into other things. Um, if you guys know kind of the book Moneyball or kind of the movement as it might be called toward bringing more data into American sports, right? Um, I guess I was kind of like coming of age at that period of time and it felt like, um, well, okay, people are becoming much more data-driven about sport and I love sports, right? They're an amazing thing.
Um, they're probably not as relevant as things like elections. And yet we were becoming more data-driven about sports and politics was still kind of like the stone age when it came to forecasting elections, when it came to understanding what makes a party more popular or what makes a strategy more sustainable.
And so kind of, you know, 2008, I'm living in Chicago at the time. There's a young guy named Barack Obama who had been like a law professor at University of Chicago where I went. Um, I'm like, who's this like hipster who's like trying to run for president right in my town? But lo and behold it was the start of a very interesting, interesting kind of in italics era for American politics in 2008.
2012 was a little bit more boring, right? Then we had, you know, the dominant figure of course the past 10 years American politics now is Donald Trump, more than 10 years, he came down the escalator at Trump Tower and like, and the world and the US has never been the same quite since.
Um, so I've gotten kind of stuck covering politics, but still after 2020, it was time for like a little bit of a reset. Um, I kind of knew at the time that 538, which I did sell to Disney, probably the tenure there was not going to remain true for very long, right? Um, and I don't know, I like stepping back and thinking about things.
And um, I published a book called The Signal and the Noise in 2012. My editor had been asking me for years, what about the second book? It was a two-book contract. And I'm like, okay, maybe now it's actually time to write that book. And I gave her three ideas. One was a book about AI, one was a book about gambling, and one was a book about essentially game theory, right? Um, and she's like, we love the gambling idea actually, which I kind of secretly was hoping for.
Um, my friend Maria Kanova had written a very successful book for the same publisher about kind of training herself. She's a writer, became a professional poker player. Um, but really the book is about all three things. It's hard to write about risk and about anything in the world today without thinking about AI. It became a much more prominent topic in the book than I was expecting when I first started it.
Um, you know, game theory you might talk about with Casper a little bit. I mean, I kind of like think of the world in terms of equilibriums, right? Like a one-player game where it's just you against the world. That's easy, right? But like what are the dynamics that emerge when everybody's trying to execute their best strategy, trying to be competitive? Um, you know, why is the world kind of like it is from like a very economics brain standpoint?
Um, so again, we had the pandemic. You know, I was pretty careful during the pandemic. I think we ate indoors at a restaurant maybe two or three times, right? We would insist on the freezing cold of having our burgers or whatever outdoors. Um, but we got our two vaccine shots, right? We actually had much faster rollout in the US than in most of Europe.
Um, and the first thing I did basically was like fly down to Fort Lauderdale, Florida and went to a gigantic casino to play in a poker tournament, right? This is my celebration back from the pandemic. Um, you know, Florida, if you have stereotypes of as a European, like we basically, the stereotypes are true of Florida. Um, it's a very wild scene.
Um, where in the casino you're still supposed to be wearing a mask in the casino. However, if you are able to be drinking, eating, or smoking, you have an exemption from the mask limit at the casino, right? So, what are people doing in a casino? One of those three things nearly always.
Um, and yet this poker tournament, a World Poker Tour event, drew a record number of entrants, even though you couldn't really travel to the US from Europe, even though um you had like glass dividers at the tables, right? Very hard to get tells near your opponent. You can't really kind of see them through this like paneled glass, right?
Um, but people had felt very cooped up during the pandemic. This is when I was like starting to work on the book and kind of like, okay, this is my safe space really, right? Somehow playing poker, this game of risk, feels more natural for me than being involved in politics and punditry and whatever else, and it kind of radiated out the book On the Edge from there.
Um, I kind of found this community called the river, we call it in the book, which is a community of like very much like-minded risk-takers, right? So you go and talk to like, I talked to Sam Altman for example, people who work for OpenAI or Claude or whatever else, um, Anthropic I should say. Um, they use the same vocabulary, right? They use terms like expected value or game theory or loss function or whatever else, right? And obviously also like people who are successful in finance and in tech think the same way by and large.
Right. Um, I was surprised, you know, I'm a journalist, right? I don't usually do a lot of kind of capital R reporting or capital I interviewing. It's more analysis, right? But for this book, I talked to 200 people, kind of experts and practitioners from all walks of life. Um, I was surprised how many people wanted to talk to me.
People that, you know, some of the more conservative people in Silicon Valley, for example, were eager because I'm not, you know, I'm a liberal. I'm a liberal kind of in the European sense more than the US sense. But like I like to think I'm kind of like able to be more fair and at arm's length and take time and consider things and give people kind of a fair hearing.
So like I saw writing reporting this book the emergence of what's called the tech right now, right? Where you know all of a sudden there was like dabbling with, you know, Silicon Valley had always been California very blue. You saw the early signs of flirting with Trumpism and conservatism of various kinds. It was tied up in debates about wokeness and regulation of capital and other things, right? But I kind of like saw that emerging.
I saw, um, you know, I was with Sam Bankman-Fried in the Bahamas, um, like four days before he was arrested, right? I'm like, I better have this trip happen now because he might not be there very much longer, right? He'd issued an invitation for me to come down. 'Hey, come down whenever you want to Bahamas, Nate.' Right.
And we had the midterm elections in the US and things kind of blew up, right, in his world and mine, I suppose. And he got charged with or went bankrupt. Um, was about to be charged with various crimes, right? And I texted him. I'm like, 'Hey, Sam. Um, you know, I had this invitation to come down to see your company FTX, right? You know, how about now?' Right?
Um, and to my surprise, he said yes. So I was like a little bit afraid. I was like in this very isolated part of the Bahamas. I was a little bit afraid like what if he attacks me? Can I escape? But like, I had a firsthand seat for a lot of things.
I'm excited to talk about that with Casper. We'll talk, I'm sure, about American politics too. Do not ask me any questions about Dutch politics. I'm an idiot about those. But like, what a great turnout. Thank you so much, and I'm going to enjoy this evening with you today. Thank you.
Am I in the right seat? Okay, right there. I'll be here. Good to see you, Nate. Definitely happy to have you here in Amsterdam and happy to have such a big crowd. Good evening, everybody. Is the world becoming more risky?
I think it's forcing us to make more risk on decisions whether we want to or not, right? Um, you know, a substantial number of people in the AI community, for example, think that AI is going to be transformative, right? And the entire way that we live and relate to one another will be very different on short time scales, maybe like five or 10 years. You know, I think I'm a little bit more hedged about that. I'm not quite sure about that.
Um, but no, look, I think we're in a world now, or like American politics, you know, the stability of American institutions, that um, the state of Florida for example, I think just this week like ended mandates for like childhood vaccines, right? Um, our relations with the rest of the world are changing quite profoundly. This kind of long era of like American hegemony, I think, is that coming to an end in some ways.
You know, American might and AI power will maybe favor superpowers like the US and China. Um, but you know, we have the curse of living in interesting times and like people who are able to like assess risk quickly, reassess the risk quickly, that part is important too. Um, and like it's a loaded term, but think for themselves, quote unquote, I think are going to be at like an advantage and it's almost a matter of necessity I think too.
So people need a risk education or an education to how to deal with risk or estimate risks in their lives. And is that also why you wrote this book?
It's part of why I wrote this book. I mean it's kind of like part memoir and part reporting and part analysis really. Um, yeah, I mean maybe you feel a bit less acutely in Europe I suppose, right? I've been in Europe for a week and a half now. I went to Bergen, Norway to see the fjords. Went to Helsinki, Finland, which is a city I've discovered I liked quite a bit, right?
Um, and you know, I think Europe in some ways has opted for, I was going to say pastoral, right? But like for like a slightly more stable and kind of like slower pace of life. I'm sure people here think that Dutch politics are crazy for example, or German politics are crazy or whatever else, right? You know, it seems like a little bit more stable than in the US.
Although, although you know, although Amsterdam's interesting because like you know I live in New York now, right? Which is kind of like has Dutch origins at least kind of or not implicit, explicitly, right? Dollar. Holland's a bit more capitalistic than other parts of Europe. Um, but still, I mean, I think the world's like changing as rapidly as it has since any period since World War II at the very least.
So, were you just suggesting that risk is more of an American thing? Is that because I think you also hint at that in your book, like the Americans are the risk-takers and the Europeans are the slightly more risk-averse type of people. Is that what you're suggesting?
It's, I mean we were like, you know, on this fjord tour in Norway in this like bus, right? It's like a rocky terrain, right? And they're like, you must put your seatbelt on, right, in this bus. We're like 30 rows back, there's like no risk. I mean, like in certain ways I suppose that we are, right? We're, America is not terribly paternalistic, but this is changing I think too.
We have to step back, step back one bit. You mentioned in your opening talk the river community. It features centrally in your book. It's the community of quants or finance people, techies, people who think statistically, etc., etc. There's another crowd as well, and which you contrast the river with... the village. Please explain to me the village.
So the village, it's, and again one thing about On the Edge, it like is from an American point of view. And by the way, one thing I forgot to mention, you know, America does or had been attracting more founders, entrepreneurs than any other place in the world, right? We'll see how much that holds up under immigration restrictions and things like that. I have a question about it. Yeah.
Um, but no, look, the village is academia. The village is government when you have a Democrat in office. So maybe not now so much, right? The village is institutions. The village is the media for the most part. Um, and the village has been on its heels a great deal in the US, right?
Um, we have had persistently in the United States less and less trust in experts of all kinds. I think maybe half of that is earned and half of that is unearned, right? It's a trend you see in other countries, but not as profoundly as you do in the US. Um, you know, I think American academic institutions were not prepared for what might happen when you had an aggressive conservative administration who was targeting them, right? How much they were kind of like relying on the goodwill of people.
Um, but they can be too risk-averse, right? I think Democrats were too risk-averse in initially renominating Joe Biden last year when he was clearly, I think clearly unfit for duty. Right. I'm happy to say can go in the newspaper. I think Joe Biden was not...
Or they were taking a great electoral risk.
Yeah, it's a great risk. It was also I think a problem for the country, right? I think he was like not, I don't want Joe Biden at age 82 or Donald Trump at age 79 now, you know, answering the red phone from Putin, right? It's a big risk that we're taking I think. Right. Um,
And to go back to the village once more, you describe yourself as a river person. What exactly, it seems to me that the idea of this village, does it coincide with the elites? Is that...
They're both tribes of elites, right? I think the... the Riverians would like to think of themselves as being like the rebellious whatever emerging class, but like, but the amount of money in the river is unparalleled, right? They're kind of winning the financial game.
When you see tech and finance grow as a shared economy, every year you have abnormally high returns in venture capital. You have even more of this now with AI, right? Where it had been that like, okay, you have tech companies get very wealthy, but you have disrupted companies are invented in garages and they disrupt the big powerful hedge funds. You have like some recycling of personalities and of wealth, right?
Whereas now you have like Google and Meta and you know OpenAI is a spin-off sort of from Microsoft, right, backed by Elon Musk, Peter Thiel. So like you know the powerful get more and more powerful all the time and insert themselves more and more in politics. And I am again, I am a liberal. I'm not offended by the presence of billionaires, right? But you know basically like Elon Musk has the power of like an entire European nation practically, right? Um, and that can be a little bit worrying.
Yeah. On this sort of the river entering the village basically, the tech bros joining forces with the Trump administration. When I saw that happening with your book in the back of my mind, I thought that's not very risky behavior. It's basically trying to hedge yourself against risk. You want political favors, you want government contracts, you're basically doing away with what is essentially the characteristic of your corporate and personal culture.
Well look, I think there are a couple of things. One is they realized early on that like Trump was a pretty good ticket to ride. I mean, Peter Thiel in 2016 was one of the few people in Silicon Valley to endorse Trump, right? He'll kind of tell you that, oh, I knew Trump was going to win or I thought it was a good bet relative to the odds, right? You know, he's a pretty conservative guy, very conservative. Not sure how much of that is self-serving or not.
Um, but in 2024, you had a very distressed Democratic candidate named Joe Biden, right? We had had very high inflation in the US. We've had very high immigration levels. The US is, I think, still probably more pro-immigration than Europe, but still we are a part of the global backlash against looser borders, right? Um, and Biden was going to be 82 years old by the election.
So like, you know, and you don't have a lot of like, how do I put this right? You don't have a lot of human capital in the Trumpian GOP as much, right?
There was a vacancy essentially. There was space for people to move.
Yeah. When he won in 2016, it's like, okay, you got Jared and Ivanka, right? And like you have some holdovers from kind of the old regime and you have like anybody who like was kind of in the broader Trump orbit. So they kind of figured like, okay, you have a vacuum, right? You have this very, I mean Trump thinks in terms of real estate, right? Um, he's like, here's this very attractive lot that is blighted right now but we can redevelop it into something golden and beautiful, right?
And I think people in Silicon Valley were like, okay, we have the opportunity to become like very influential in a new administration and yes it will help with like taxes and regulation and things like that. Um, but also kind of shaping the direction of policy, although I don't, I think they might have gotten more than they bargained for, right? Um,
I think probably not, right? I mean, some of like the internal message groups and things like that, I think they're, you know, they're not happy about tariffs. They're not happy about immigration restrictions. Um, you know, I mean, it probably could have been foreseeable, right? I mean, Trump is on the one hand not the most honest politician. On the other hand, like he's pretty clear about what he wants, right? And like restricting immigration have been a long-term priority.
Um, you know, the tariff thing he's been obsessed with for a very long time. Um, I think Elon tried to talk him out of it at first, but you saw the interactions, if you kind of like see the interactions where Elon and Trump are on the White House lawn, right? And they're kind of like test driving a Tesla. I mean Elon is very deferential to Trump, right? When you're the president of the United States, you have all the cars, you have all the power in the world in the relationship.
So I think maybe tech overestimated how much it could control the kind of MAGA Trumpist element.
And so is then Trump, is he river or village?
He is neither, right? Because 98% of people are in either community and Trump is kind of like...
98. So they're both, they're very both very small sub...
Both very, very small subcultures. Absolutely.
But very influential and they compete. They're rivals. Um, you know, Trump is kind of from the great unwashed masses I suppose, right? I mean, he was in the casino business, which makes it a little bit more complicated. Um, was not very good, right?
No. I mean, and they actually were very nicely built casinos here. Like here, the casinos are dumpy in like Amsterdam, right? The Trump Taj Mahal was like one of the most...
Ambitious real... I've played poker there. Yeah. Most ambitious real estate projects in the world at the time. But like he took out like a 14% interest rate loan based on junk bonds and things like that. So like within a year the Trump Taj Mahal was in bankruptcy filings.
And so he's not very, you know, I mean, the river on the one hand we are supposed to be, I'm putting myself in this for now, right? We're supposed to be very kind of risk-taking and risk-loving, but we also want to like assess risk carefully and precisely and be analytical like you might be in sports, sabermetrics or whatever else, right? And Trump shoots like way too much from the gut to be a true Riverian I think.
Yeah, this whole ascendancy of the river and the quant thinking, is that also a reflection that the way we relate ourselves to the world is becoming more quantified, or is that happening because this culture is winning? I'm just trying to see in which order the things go.
Look, I'm a capitalist more or less, right? But like capitalism is like relentlessly efficient. It will solve for the equilibrium whatever the equilibrium might be. And as the world gets more information dense, more things are tracked, more people are aware of opportunities to spend capital in ways where the market might be inefficient, right? Um, it's just the way the world's going, right?
I mean you've seen it in sports where sports get relentlessly more efficient. There are kind of fewer clear errors that you can correct for now. And so like, and we kind of leave a data trail and like a paper trail everywhere that we go. Maybe some of European regulations on privacy and data security are warranted. But like to me it feels inevitable, right?
Um, capitalism is a march toward inevitable profit maximization pretty much unless you put regulations on it. Regulations are hard to design, but like it's kind of what you get when everyone's kind of trying to solve for the equilibrium.
So what are we then, what are we losing with the quantification of the world?
I mean, look, I think there are obviously, you know, it's really easy to build bad models. It's easy to build bad election models, right? Um, you know, on the whole, I'm very impressed by LLMs or large language models, the AI models like Claude and ChatGPT, but like I think people are inclined to say, okay, well, ChatGPT gave me this answer, it must be true, right? Whereas like sometimes it's hallucinating or whatever else.
Um, you know, look, um, there's sometimes like a tyranny of the measurable where if you have a factor you can quantify and a factor you can't quantify, then you sometimes say, okay, this factor that you can't quantify, we treat it as zero, right? Which is not always the right idea.
Sometimes things, you know, in sports, can a guy perform when all the pressure is on, a clutch performance kind of thing, right? Um, you know, is it easy to quantify the quality of like a meal in a nice restaurant? Is it easy to quantify kind of when you'll be compatible with a partner or things like that? Like probably not really.
I think part of becoming like a more mature model builder is understanding like kind of what the limitations of the data are. And like often it's, you know, you know, often it's 80% of the way with the model and 20% with kind of experience or gut instinct.
Because let me offer something that I thought we might be losing in the river world after also reading your book on this. I thought what we're losing is, maybe, and now I'm sounding like a beady-eyed village person probably, so my apologies for that, but we lose narrative. It always seems, the word sterile comes up with me. But I don't know, that makes me feel uncomfortable as a villager.
We lose context right often. Um, I'm suspicious of narrative, right? I think people... So I was going to say you get 80% of the way with data and then 20% of the way with like kind of to get the last mile with careful still semi-empirical heuristics and analysis or experience or life experience, right?
Um, what people do in practice though is they substitute their desires, right? They're like, okay, I assume that things will always be shifted in my direction, right? Where I see a forecast, I'm a Democrat, I think therefore here are these factors X, Y, and Z that Nate's not considering that will make Biden or Harris win, for example, even though Trump has actually beaten his polls three out of three times so far.
So like I worry about, I don't know, the world's complicated, right? I worry about kind of the narrative oversimplifying things, right? Um, in some ways like models also oversimplify things, right? Say here's something that has like 30 components and we'll kind of reduce it down to like three things that we can measure in a fairly linear way and interact them in some ways, and like narrative can kind of work the same way.
Whereas I think, you know, so like, um, you know, the palate of an experienced wine drinker, for example, might capture factors that can't be alleged by an algorithm, for example, right? Um, or in poker is a much better example perhaps, right? Where like, okay, we have computers now that more or less solve poker. The solution is complicated. It involves game theory. It involves randomization, right?
But like, you know, if you're an experienced player and I see you and like I've seen thousands of examples of how a player reacts to a certain situation or certain hand, like my instincts are probably pretty good because they're trained on a different type of data that I might not put into a model.
Um, but I'm worried about like gut instinct for things where we don't have a lot of experience, right? Um, people told themselves some kind of stories about COVID, for example. I mean, in the US or in New York where I live, um, we have hurricanes occasionally. In the US, like a hurricane hits and you kind of know when it's going to start, you know more or less when it's going to end, going to go on for a couple of days, right?
It might be very bad, it might be less bad. That much you don't know, right? But like we kind of treated COVID in New York like it was going to be a hurricane, where the mayor at the time, Bill de Blasio, two days before the city shut down, was like, go out to the bars and like see your friends tonight because you won't be able to for a few weeks, actually a few months, right? Which was like the worst possible time to do that, right? We didn't have...
A narrative mistake, you're saying.
A narrative mistake. We're like, 'Oh, it's just going to be like a hurricane, like a little snow day or winter storm, right? Have fun tonight. The bar's going to be shut down on Friday, whatever else.' Whereas like that was like the singular worst time to be having people go out and congregate without masks in public. Um, but we get kind of trapped in these like oversimplified narratives and that's kind of what his instinct was.
And so when the river victory is final, also no religion?
I don't know. I think some of the things involving AI pose some pretty deep existential questions, frankly, right? No, yeah, I'm not sure that's true actually. Maybe, you know, even I become like I think more of an agnostic and less atheist potentially. I think it's like not particularly a village versus river characteristic.
With AI you mean, or religion in general?
I mean, look, the questions get very weird. I mean, I was like listening to a podcast earlier about kind of like weird...
Is, yeah, is AI conscious or what's that mean when you kind of like delete a model to build a better large language model? Does it have feelings? Should you kind of put it in like some model safe space, right? There's some model sanctuary we can go and like hang with other models even after it's like...
But these are real questions that people struggle with, that people get paid to...
Give answers to these questions.
And look, I think we should think more about these kinds of questions actually, right? Like I think, you know, philosophy is kind of like adjacent to like a lot of STEM majors really, right? If you look at kind of like who has like the highest math graduate record examination scores, like the philosophers are like right up there with the mathematicians and the computer scientists and everyone else.
I think we need to like think more about philosophy and religion and like the meaning of life. No, I think it's quite important actually.
So that's where the villagers sneak in through the back door again.
Maybe. I mean, you know, Peter... let's try to carve out a space for like kind of people in the world. Well, I think the villagers are too concerned with narrow politics a lot of the time, right? And particularly Trump, I think, is like kind of very good about... I'm not sure it's the right way to put it. There are a lot of very understandable crisis-like outbreaks that emerge because of Trump.
It's like quite important to kind of like slow down and like see the big picture. I like to travel a lot. It's kind of like part of it. You're in a different time zone from the US. Um, you're not as much of a slave to like the political news cycle.
So no, I think stepping back and thinking of like, you know, what's the nature of the universe? Like what's the meaning of life? We should think about those questions, right? I think quantifying more things might distract us more, but doesn't really kind of answer those questions any more effectively.
I'm sure you've had a very relaxing holiday and you've been in Europe for a while, but as somebody occupied with risk in his mind, what keeps you up at night? What do you worry about?
I mean, look, one reason why I say I'm like not a political junkie in the same way that a lot of journalists might be is like I'm thinking about like, okay, I'm going to make my flight back on time, like what I'm going to have for dinner tonight. I have a newsletter, Silver Bulletin, that I run. And so like that's the day-to-day life, right? It's like, okay, um, you know, if we post things that are popular, people sign up for the newsletter, you make more money. What can we do that's good? I have two people that work for me now. And so like, yeah, I'm consumed a little bit by kind of the...
Will people show up for my John Adams event? Great turnout by the way. Great numbers.
No, but like, which, but I think that's good, right? I think if people, you know, if you kind of like are immersed in this world, oh, the country's going to hell, whatever else, like I think actually makes you kind of like very incapable of like actually making political change or political movements. It's good.
You know, one thing about the pandemic was like people shut themselves off from like in-person human contact. I think that was a big mistake of the village actually, right? Where it's like, okay, we see things X and Y and Z as essential. I think it's like pretty essential like kind of see other people in person for like many reasons. And like thinking oh we can kind of like medicalize this away I think was quite a big problem.
I want to move back to the past a little bit, but for one more question, because I was very happy when reading your book and also now in your talk you bring up COVID quite a bit.
Something I've been struggling with is it was so big, it affected everybody.
It changed everything in society essentially. But still we don't talk about it much anymore. We don't reflect on it very much, which is very odd for such a big event. Why do you think that is?
Um, I mean it was very traumatizing. It was a shared kind of trauma, right? Um, you know, what's the official number now? You know, 7 million, 8 billion people died around the world, probably higher than that if you look at kind of the unofficial data. Maybe, you know, probably into the eight figures and things like that.
No, look, it's very weird. Like I wonder how much kind of the rise of populism around the world has to do with COVID, distrust of institutions has to do with COVID. I think it was a very traumatizing thing. I think people are... it is weird we don't talk about it more, right? Um, you know, I think kind of because there was like a lot of blame in the US context, right? I don't know if maybe things were wonderful here in the Netherlands. I tend to doubt.
I have a question about it. Yeah.
We had guidelines for how to cheer for the football.
But in the US, I mean, you had on the one hand the US kind of had bars and restaurants open, but like schools were closed longer than they were in most of Europe, for example. You know, there's been a backlash against vaccines, for example. On the other hand, you know, not like Republicans got things right either, right? Where like the management of the pandemic was very chaotic in the US. Trump's greatest accomplishment was Operation Warp Speed, the rapid development of vaccines in the US, and yet now he's almost like ashamed to take credit for it. So like it's kind of like it was kind of fought to a draw. No one wants to bring it back up again. And like even now, like we have not had, you would think if nothing else, if nothing else, we should approve more funding for like future pandemic prevention, and instead you have a backlash against that. I mean, no matter how bad the pandemic was, if we had a COVID now in the US with like greater vaccine skepticism, even greater skepticism of like scientific authorities, right? Again, I think like 30 to 50% of which is kind of halfway deserved. I mean, it would be a true nightmare, I think.
Let's go back to 2008, slightly younger Nate Silver, maybe slightly more optimistic time also. You're entering the field of political analysis, political statistics. It's maybe almost impossible to recall, but how did we talk about politics before the data revolution that you, to a large part, catalyzed?
It's a lot of folk wisdom, right? It's a lot of like, and remember, like, people think of elections as a variated-driven thing. We have like one election every four years, and kind of like...
We have one every two years at this rate, so...
Oh, there you go. Yeah. And like modern electoral history in the US might consist of like, you know, of whatever we've had. How many elections since World War II? You know, 16 or 17, right? If you're a veteran journalist covering elections, you might have been through, you know, four or five or six campaigns. So we extrapolate from very small sample sizes, right? People were surprised that like an African-American man in Barack Obama could become president. People were surprised that a guy named Donald Trump, not the name, right, but that the person named Donald Trump would become president, you know, immediately after Obama. But no, it was like a more innocent time, right? I think Americans really felt like, okay, we, you know, the arc of history bends toward progress, where we elected this guy, this black guy as president, and like we're having a progressive revival in the US. I remember, you know, I knew some of the kind of Obama campaign people at the time, right? Even though I'm nonpartisan, and like people were so excited about the election, they almost kind of didn't know what to do next, right? And then within two years, the 2010 midterm in the US, you had kind of the Tea Party movement, the beginnings of kind of populist conservative, not the beginnings, but like the manifestation of it, right? Democrats lost 63 seats in Congress. Obama got some things done, but not half the things that he had hoped to do or planned to do. And so like, yeah, no, I mean, it's kind of like the Fukuyama theory about the end of history, which is much maligned kind of unfairly. So it's a very smart and sophisticated book, but like, no, I think we...
2008 was still the end of history, you're saying?
2008, it felt like, yeah, we're in the march toward data revolution, toward everything, and we're becoming, you know, now America's not racist anymore. We solved that problem too, right? And then now we'll have Hillary too, so now we're not sexist anymore either. You know, it was a little bit premature, I think, obviously. But no, I mean, I think a lot of people, me included, were naive.
Yeah. You said you started with innocent, and you said more innocent time, and now at the end of your qualification of that time, you've gone to the word naive. I think that is probably what you're...
No, it was naive, and Americans, you know, look, America benefited from kind of like post-World War II hegemony, right? So the generation before me kind of grew up, whatever, like in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and they're quite tumultuous decades, at least the 60s and 70s in some ways, right? But still, like when the US, when you have the world's biggest economy, the world's biggest military, when you're on a continent that's, you know, an 8-hour flight away from Europe and a 10-hour flight away from Asia, you have like a lot of intrinsic advantages. And so I think we took for granted that the stability we had with the end of the Cold War, right? People, I mean, this is the biggest mistake that like any gambler makes, like they think they're on a winning streak, right? They will continue indefinitely or even accelerate further, when in fact, you know, we might look now at kind of like the, you know, World War II through the end of the Cold War until maybe September 11th or so was like kind of a lucky period for American hegemony.
Liberalism stuck around in the casino for too long. Is that what you're saying?
Yeah. I mean, again, you know, I kind of prefer the more European definition of liberalism and what that means, right? It's been interesting being in a couple of Nordic countries, here in Finland and Norway beforehand, and here in the Netherlands, right, where I think...
Maybe liberalism is healthier than it is in other parts of Europe or the world.
But no, I mean, the notion that like this kind of transcendent ideology that would kind of end world history, or that's, I'm kind of misphrasing Fukuyama a little bit. But no, I mean, the view that the world's a bit more cyclical on the one hand politically, although technology kind of marches on unabated, I think has regained currency.
So this, say, pre-populist times, but also the pre-data times, it's interesting, the data revolution and the populist backlash happened more or less in the same rhythm and pace.
So what is then the relation between the two? You know, I'm not sure there is as much of one, although there are probably a couple, right? Not accusing you of anything.
Yeah. No, look, one is kind of when you make politics a matter of like optimizing your technique. Like in some ways, I think actually like American politics has gotten more efficient to its detriment, right? In game theory, you have what's called the prisoner's dilemma, where even though it might be good if you can cooperate, if you can't trust the other party in a literal or figurative sense, and you're not supposed to cooperate, you're supposed to like one man for himself. So like we relied a lot on like the trust of institutions in the US, and once that begins to erode, I mean, we've seen now, for example, this is a little bit in the weeds, but in the US we have like a battle now over how our districts are drawn in seats for Congress, right? In states like big states especially, Texas, California, where we have more seats that can be won, right? And so we've moved from a paradigm where, I mean, there's always been gerrymandering as we call it, but there was some effort to like kind of have the shapes look nice and kind of correspond to natural communities, and like the GOP, Republicans, stopped doing that first, more or less. You've seen reciprocation now, but like, you know, so like both parties are kind of fighting for like the correct equilibrium, but like it leads to like a worse outcome for the rest of society, right? And so like, you know, and like in some ways the fact that like when a politician makes a mistake, right, you can run an ad for it, put it up on the internet right away, you can optimize that ad in 20 different ways to maximize impact with particular subgroups and everything else, right? Where we kind of micromanage politics from day to day, like they probably are playing the game of politics more efficiently, but like that might not be a good outcome for like for society or for the country overall.
So, how has Trump benefited from this? But the initial question I had was, is Trump or Trumpism, is that something that you can even grasp numerically or statistically, because it's such a weird phenomenon and it's so insanely unpredictable?
So it's one, I think one problem you have with any type of empirical situation, right? Or think of marketing, right? That you have some new campaign for some new car, some new candy bar, or you know, new airline or whatever else, right? And like it has a cool design, and then people are like, okay, I like this product, right? If you keep repeating that, then all of a sudden the connotations change, right? You know, just like different baby names, a baby name that's popular in the 1970s will seem, will read as old later on. And so like I think people sometimes like don't realize that when you're in a dynamic competitive system that like the equilibrium like changes all the time, which maybe means that kind of like just kind of pushing buttons at random might be more effective than you might think. But also, Trump understood that like the madman theory of international politics. You're unpredictable, and people will fear you do something strange.
For sure, and like maybe in weird ways when it comes to foreign policy, I appreciate having like a little bit of a madman in the US.
But also like, you know, populism has been a thing in politics for a long time, right? And like on issues like immigration, again, in the US, we probably are more pro-immigrant than parts of Europe. But like, you know, immigration was less popular than either party in the US kind of thought at the time, or than most European, including like center-right European parties, thought at the time. And so like in some ways Trump was quite responsive to like public demand, right? Conversely, welfare programs like Medicare, Social Security are fairly popular. They may cause more debt, but people don't care about the debt so much in the short term, right? So like kind of Trump, I think, actually offered a more popular version of the GOP than maybe his predecessors like Mitt Romney, for example.
So, do you think Trump is strategically unpredictable or just fickle and actually unpredictable? Like if he's a poker player, you're playing poker with Trump. Is he the guy who folds on a great hand and bets at a terrible hand and basically doesn't know what he's doing, or is he so smart you can't...
I would be happy enough to play poker against Trump, right?
This, I look at it like everybody now has this image in his mind. It's you and the president sat at the Resolute desk, cards in hand. How do you, how do, how would Biden, frankly, right, as his current state...
Yeah, that'd be too easy. No, seriously.
How would you go about...
I mean, look, Trump understands leverage, he understands tactics, right? I think his big flaw is he kind of thinks everything is a zero-sum game when it isn't so much, right? This is like behind the whole tariff thing, he doesn't understand that like actually having, you know, especially if China is rising in power and Russia is more of a threat, like, you know, being friends with other people, they carry like mutual benefits, right? Or like Canada, right? Again, the Americans are blessed by being an ocean away from like the rest of the world. For the past 100 years, we've gotten along with one another pretty well, and like we're just kind of adding to like the strength of our circle by being aligned with Canada and Mexico and Brazil and countries like that. So like no, I think he's kind of like, I don't know, he's like some misprogrammed algorithm almost, right? Or like he's solving for a certain problem quite effectively, but it's the wrong problem he's trying to solve, right? It's a zero-sum game when international relations, the health of the country, should not be zero-sum games.
Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned the word winning here and zero-sum. So let me poke you a little bit on this because this is also in your book, and I think you also mentioned this in one of the interviews you did for the Dutch newspaper NRC. It's nice to win. Winning is good. It's nice to have beaten somebody else at something that doesn't seem too far removed from what Trump likes.
Well, no. And especially his win in 2016, I think, was unexpected to everybody, including Trump himself to some degree, but he has to feel very vindicated, right? Where like literally, I mean, I don't know if you call January 6th a coup, but like it was an attempt to overturn the...
