Speaker 1: This is Masters in Business with Barry Ridholds on Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 1: This week, we have a very special guest. And I
Speaker 1: know I say that every week, but really, this week
Speaker 1: we have a very special guest. You know him from
Speaker 1: the five thirty eight blog, formerly of The New York
Speaker 1: Times and now with ESPN, Nate Silver. We had a
Speaker 1: wide ranging and lengthy conversation about everything from sports to
Speaker 1: statistical analysis, to politics and campaigns, and given the current
Speaker 1: madness in the um campaign season, we spent a lot
Speaker 1: of time talking about what's going on, much of which
Speaker 1: is really really fascinating. We we went a little long,
Speaker 1: and normally I like to give you a little more
Speaker 1: details in these intros, but I think this, uh, this
Speaker 1: podcast stands on its own. We covered everything, so rather
Speaker 1: than me continually babbling about how fast and in this is,
Speaker 1: let's just jump right to it. Here's my conversation with
Speaker 1: five thirty eight Nate Silver. This is Masters in Business
Speaker 1: with Barry Ridholts on Bloomberg Radio. This week on Masters
Speaker 1: in Business, my special guest is one Nate Silver. You
Speaker 1: probably know him from five thirty eight. A quick bit
Speaker 1: of background about Mr Silver graduated in two thousand from
Speaker 1: the University of Chicago bachelor's degree in economics, became frustrated
Speaker 1: by what he was seeing both in the world of
Speaker 1: sports statistics and politics. Created we'll talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about Pacoda, which was the baseball statistical system you had
Speaker 1: set up, and basically said, while stranded in an airport
Speaker 1: in New Orleans, the idea for five thirty eight popped
Speaker 1: fully formed into your head. Is that true? I'm not
Speaker 1: sure fully formed right. There was a certain amount of
Speaker 1: you know, gumbo and stuff have been consumed, and yeah,
Speaker 1: and on a slash slash thought lots of other things
Speaker 1: in New Orleans to but the analysis about about elections
Speaker 1: was frustrating you. And and obviously five thirty eight is
Speaker 1: a number of total votes in the US Electoral College,
Speaker 1: of which you need to sixty nine or two and
Speaker 1: um and created five thirty eight. Just a quick background
Speaker 1: about five thirty eight. In two thousand and eight, it
Speaker 1: correctly predicted the winner in forty nine of fifty states
Speaker 1: for the presidential election. Uh. It gets licensed by the
Speaker 1: New York Times in two thousand ten in anticipation of
Speaker 1: the two thousand twelve election, and he basically Nate runs
Speaker 1: the table in two thousand twelve predicts every state and
Speaker 1: the district of Columbia correctly as to the winner of
Speaker 1: Barack Obama versus Mitt Romney, as well as all thirty
Speaker 1: five UM senatorial race. I should be correct. The Senate
Speaker 1: was in two thousand and eight, we had thirty thirty five.
Speaker 1: We missed think two in how dare you sir? Well
Speaker 1: the irony and we'll talk about this morning ironies and
Speaker 1: like the fact that you know, uh, because we got lucky. Basically,
Speaker 1: you know, there's some skill, but there's a lot of lucky,
Speaker 1: and so let's jump right into that. So normally at
Speaker 1: this point I say, welcome to Boolberg, but I know
Speaker 1: you've been here before, and I'm I'm really thank you
Speaker 1: so much for doing this. I'm really excited. We'll talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about your relationship UM with various uh
Speaker 1: statistical approaches, how five thirty eight just blew up at
Speaker 1: the New York Times, and how life is currently at ESPN,
Speaker 1: and then we'll take a really close look at the elections.
Speaker 1: So I'm sure there's a ton of stuff. I would
Speaker 1: be remiss if I failed to mention that you were
Speaker 1: named by Time magazine is one of the hundred most
Speaker 1: influential people in the world, and that your book, The
Speaker 1: Signal in the Noise was a New York Times best
Speaker 1: seller and an Amazon number one pick for Best our
Speaker 1: Nonfiction in two thousand twelve. Well, thank you. So so
Speaker 1: that's really um, we're out of time now, but let's
Speaker 1: let's let's start with a little bit of of baseball.
Speaker 1: So you develop something called Pakoda. Tell the listen one,
Speaker 1: it's exactly what that. So Pakoda is a terrible acronymic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like picture empirical comparison and optimization tests algorithm. But
Speaker 1: the idea is that couldn't you've come up with something
Speaker 1: wonkier than that? Yeah, but Pakoda built Pacoda was a
Speaker 1: baseball player. I played for the Royals, like in the eighties,
Speaker 1: the Tigers fan and so it was a thorn in
Speaker 1: the side of the Royals, right, So it was meant
Speaker 1: to be kind of intentionally self parrying and giffy a
Speaker 1: little a little um part of the punt inside baseball,
Speaker 1: a little inside baseball. Yeah, And that's the thing I
Speaker 1: think people don't realize about, you know, kind of what
Speaker 1: I do. It's always a little bit very serious work.
Speaker 1: But we're not taking ourselves too seriously. But anyway, the
Speaker 1: idea of Pakoda was to use baseball is very rich
Speaker 1: history to project the future, which is really all you
Speaker 1: know of Cisco models are really using this history protict
Speaker 1: the future, right, an extrapolation based on what's the highest
Speaker 1: probability relative to what's happened in the past. But in
Speaker 1: baseball you have so many good years of data and
Speaker 1: so many players every season where you can say, you know, uh, taked,
Speaker 1: you know current player, right, Curtis Grander cent or whatnot,
Speaker 1: age thirty three whatever is for the Mets, and go
Speaker 1: back in history and see who were the guys who
Speaker 1: were like Curtis Granderson at age thirty three and similar attributes,
Speaker 1: similar history, similar attributes, right, and you can say, okay,
Speaker 1: so now we can say kind of, here are a
Speaker 1: hundred different career paths for um, what's the risk of
Speaker 1: a you very easily could have ended up in a
Speaker 1: career path where you would have either been in Wall
Speaker 1: Street analyst or economists because essentially the better ones. That's
Speaker 1: what they do recognizing the limitations of pretty similar right.
Speaker 1: And we're spoiled in sports in the sense that, um,
Speaker 1: so much data is so much data. The data is
Speaker 1: so reliable, you know, there's not really a lot of
Speaker 1: uh uncertainty there in terms of measurement error. Right. Um,
Speaker 1: so you get really spoiled in sport and you spend
Speaker 1: a lot of your time actually testing hypotheses, whereas in
Speaker 1: most fields, you know, to some extent, including politics, you're
Speaker 1: spending nine saying your time cleaning up the data and
Speaker 1: scratching your head and saying, you know, does this tell
Speaker 1: us anything at all? We we look at non farm payrolls,
Speaker 1: the way it's measured each month has changed and evolved
Speaker 1: over time. Everybody forgets, you know, this data doesn't go
Speaker 1: back forever. Was only after the Great Depression, and FDR
Speaker 1: essentially created the Commerce and Bureau of Labor Statistics Department
Speaker 1: in order to assemble this data so we can actually
Speaker 1: so so let's get into a little more details and
Speaker 1: and we'll we'll come back to Pacoda because it's it's fascinating.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and seven, you're still working for you
Speaker 1: sell Pacoda to Baseball Perspectives, you're writing for them, and
Speaker 1: you start posting at the Daily Coast under the name
Speaker 1: Poblano looking at various um polling data in a way
Speaker 1: to to, well, why don't I let you describe, yeah,
Speaker 1: what you're doing? An oh seven? So uh, So, I
Speaker 1: had worked for Baseball Perspectives for for several years that point,
Speaker 1: and this was kind of in an era when Moneyball
Speaker 1: came out in two thousand three, right, fantastic book, the
Speaker 1: movie was great, great book, and you kind of that
Speaker 1: triggered a lot of interests and things that Bill James
Speaker 1: have running about for decades. Actually, metrics has been around
Speaker 1: for yeah, it seems like forever. But you saw how
Speaker 1: much of an impact that had both on the game itself,
Speaker 1: the way the game was played, and the way the
Speaker 1: game was covered by the media, and it seemed like
Speaker 1: there was very little of that in campaign coverage at all. Um.
Speaker 1: So I kind of started anonymously a daily coast, uh,
Speaker 1: kind of writing these little things about about the two
Speaker 1: thousand and seven primary between Clinton and Obama. Um and
Speaker 1: eventually said, you know, I kind of want to be
Speaker 1: on my own here, and so I launched five dot
Speaker 1: com in March two eight. You're listening to Masters in
Speaker 1: Business on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest today Nate Silver
Speaker 1: of five thirty eight, the man who correctly predicted just
Speaker 1: about every race that mattered in two thousand and twelve
Speaker 1: and came pretty darn close, and in two thousand and
Speaker 1: eight got just about everything right then. So you launched
Speaker 1: the side in o A. You do a great job
Speaker 1: with the election in oh eight, uh, not only determining
Speaker 1: who's going to win the Democratic primary. So a lot
Speaker 1: of your insights turned out to be very prescient on that.
Speaker 1: But then you do the head to head between Obama
Speaker 1: and McCain and Hillary McCain and tell us what you found. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, two thousand and eight was not really among
Speaker 1: them more suspenseful general elections. Um, I guess early on
Speaker 1: in March when I launched, uh, it was a little
Speaker 1: bit closer. But historically polls in March don't tell you
Speaker 1: very much, right, And that's one of the things you
Speaker 1: talk about very often, which I think a lot of
Speaker 1: people don't really pay attention to us, which is, hey,
Speaker 1: here's the polls, but at this stage don't give us
Speaker 1: at election cycles are really really long thing, right, And
Speaker 1: we spend this country, in this country, the UK, they
Speaker 1: don't understand it's five and a half weeks and they
Speaker 1: spend nine million dollars and They look at us like
Speaker 1: what crazy? But here we have it's a two year process, right, um,
Speaker 1: and we probably spend eighty percent of that time at
Speaker 1: eight saying you know what, these polls are not very meaningful.
Speaker 1: You should not take them to literally interpret them with
Speaker 1: a lot of caution. Right. Then at the end we say, actually,
Speaker 1: when you get after Labor Day, polls do a pretty
Speaker 1: good track record, right, and pay more attention to them.
Speaker 1: And so but people people don't do that, right, the
Speaker 1: kind of are too distrustful of the polls in November
Speaker 1: and much too serious about the polls like now in
Speaker 1: August of all things, a year before the election. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, you could go back and look at who
Speaker 1: was ahead in August of the past nomination campaigns. Well,
Speaker 1: in two thousand twelve, Rick Perry at this point in
Speaker 1: time was surging past Mitt Romney. In two thousand and eight,
Speaker 1: it was Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton. Two thousand and
Speaker 1: four it was Joe Lieberman and Howard Dean on the
Speaker 1: Democratic side. Right, Um, so kind of four in a row.
Speaker 1: I'm before that two thousand was a more predictable year,
Speaker 1: right u. Um, but you know ninety two, Bill Clinton
Speaker 1: hadn't even entered the race yet. Um, So you know,
Speaker 1: people kind of ignore history at their at their peril.
Speaker 1: That's fascinating. We'll get to that more in in a
Speaker 1: later segment when we talk about this carent election. So, so,
Speaker 1: oh eight comes and goes and you do a you know,
Speaker 1: killer job. Who else besides The Times approached you? How
Speaker 1: did that come about? We had four or five or
Speaker 1: six conversations with different people, and you know, I try
Speaker 1: and be respectful of those conversations, but there was there
Speaker 1: was a lot of interest. I mean, I think people
Speaker 1: knew how big a story two thousand and eight had been.
Speaker 1: You know, for me, it was kind of like it
Speaker 1: would be useful to have. I mean, I was basically
Speaker 1: running eight on my own. We had some other part
Speaker 1: time contributors. I was doing everything from doing the graphics
Speaker 1: to writing the stories, trying to promote the blog, and
Speaker 1: it was just a lot of work. And I think, um,
Speaker 1: that's a nuver used word, but there has to be
Speaker 1: some synergy between what a contributor might have to say
Speaker 1: and a big media company like The Times. For example, Um,
Speaker 1: was that the M I. T. Sloan Business Conference, which
Speaker 1: is a sports business conference every year and ran into
Speaker 1: an editor from The Times on a train platform and
Speaker 1: we really and we talked, and so it's kind of spontaneous, right,
Speaker 1: a little serendipity and uh yeah, a little serendipity, and
Speaker 1: it wound up being a really good fit for a
Speaker 1: couple of years. It was a tremendous fit. And if
Speaker 1: memory serves something like in the height of the election
Speaker 1: the I'm sure I'm destroying the statistic, but you were
Speaker 1: twenty or of the total New York Times web traffic.
Speaker 1: I think, you know a second, it's a little at
Speaker 1: a peak. At a peak, yeah, um, you know, I
Speaker 1: think on election week something like twenty percent of unique
Speaker 1: and users at the Times went by and viewed eight Um.
Speaker 1: It was really nice, and it definitely got really crazy.
Speaker 1: I can imagine towards the end of I mean, it's
Speaker 1: a little bit like this is really self agruandizing, right,
Speaker 1: but it's a little bit like, um, I feel some
Speaker 1: sympathy for like Olympic athletes, where you know that every
Speaker 1: four years their life becomes like a total crazed swamp
Speaker 1: of although the difference between you and an Olympic athlete,
Speaker 1: um is that they're training the entire for you. They
Speaker 1: train the entire for you. You have I need a
Speaker 1: lot better than I do. But uh so let me
Speaker 1: ask you about training. Food doesn't matter as much as so.
Speaker 1: You have an undergraduate degree from University of Chicago, great
Speaker 1: school in economics. I would have assumed it was applied mathematics, statistics,
Speaker 1: and probability. I know those can be concentrations within economics.
Speaker 1: How did you find your way into this form of
Speaker 1: statistical analysis? I mean, you have c is a pretty
Speaker 1: quantitative school in general, but it was really kind of
Speaker 1: stuff I did outside of of school and outside of work.
Speaker 1: So sports in particular was kind of like a lot
Speaker 1: of applied statistics. You want to win your fantasy baseball league,
Speaker 1: you want to win your instate tournament, Brackett. And you know,
Speaker 1: like I said earlier, the data and sports is so
Speaker 1: good that it's a good way to train your hypothesis
Speaker 1: testing skills and logical inference skills and stuff like that.
Speaker 1: But it's all, you know, it's all kind of a
Speaker 1: passion jacked and also you know, I'm motivated by um
Speaker 1: there's that cartoon about oh someone's wrong on the internet.
Speaker 1: You can't get to sleep right like I'm motivated by that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: x K c D one of my favorite come to
Speaker 1: bed somebody on the internet. But I'm a little bit
Speaker 1: like the person in that cartoon, right, he's not going
Speaker 1: to bed because I'm like, boy, you know, you go
Speaker 1: and read the campaign coverage and in the mainstream press,
Speaker 1: and it's blatantly wrong think that because somebody saw some
Speaker 1: one signs and palm beach, that didn't determine who was No.
Speaker 1: I mean they rely on an anecdotal evidence or or
Speaker 1: the you know what's funny, which to an article about
Speaker 1: how how Hally Clinton's problems are at least as far
Speaker 1: as the Democratic primary concerned, a little bit overrated. But
Speaker 1: I went back and looked at the kind of coverage
Speaker 1: of past campaigns like two thousand, Al Gore versus Bill
Speaker 1: Bradley and theme for themes, sometimes almost word for a word.
Speaker 1: You can see the same stories written, and the fact
Speaker 1: that people kind of forget that history, right. It's not
Speaker 1: it's not forgetting right. I mean, they're really smart people
Speaker 1: working on on campaign coverage, but there's an insane have
Speaker 1: to to tell the story and to sell the story
Speaker 1: in a narrative format, and a narrative format, and that's
Speaker 1: kind of for me. Campaign journalism's original sin, right, UM
Speaker 1: is it's like a baseball season where things play out
Speaker 1: really slowly. It's a really long season. Not that much
Speaker 1: happens from day to day. Maybe you'll have a few
Speaker 1: genuine events that are um, upset the apple cart, but
Speaker 1: not many. But it's hard to write every day of
Speaker 1: the story. Like you know, today people campaign and nothing
Speaker 1: of importance happened. Right. So, in the last minute we
Speaker 1: have in this segment, how did you end up finding ESPN?
Speaker 1: I'm going to assume your love of sports has made
Speaker 1: that a really strong fit. Yeah. Well, there were a
Speaker 1: couple of reasons. I mean, afterlve the contract with the
Speaker 1: New York Times, UM expired and we again UM we
Speaker 1: the Royal We meaning me and my lawyer and whatnot,
Speaker 1: talked to six or seven different companies, um, you know,
Speaker 1: but ESPN offered a couple of things that were unique.
Speaker 1: One is that they realize that I'm not just about
Speaker 1: politics that to some extent, I want to hedge and
Speaker 1: diversify what I'm doing because we did get lucky in um.
Speaker 1: Another thing is that you know, they have the resources
Speaker 1: to invest in a company that can grow at a
Speaker 1: sustainable rate and UM and evolve a little bit. Right.
Speaker 1: We have twenty five or thirty people now working for
Speaker 1: us at at UM. You know it's sustainable. We we think,
Speaker 1: we hope, I mean, you know, we say, hey, look,
Speaker 1: our traffic is growing. Therefore can we hire this person
Speaker 1: who will help us to keep that growing? Um. But
Speaker 1: you know, that kind of more entrepreneurial attitude, I think
Speaker 1: is is a good fit at ESPN. You're listening to
Speaker 1: Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My special guest this
Speaker 1: week is statistical wizard Nate Silver On, the man who
Speaker 1: correctly forecast the O eight and twelve elections. Let's talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about baseball. So here we are. This
Speaker 1: is being recorded in middle August. What stands out this
Speaker 1: year is statistically aberrant or interesting or unusual. I think
Speaker 1: you actually look at the preseason predictions and thank I
Speaker 1: don't have to make these anymore. They've had one of
Speaker 1: the more inaccurate years in a long time. A lot
Speaker 1: of the set systems said the Royals um were likely
Speaker 1: to regress heavily to the mean not so much, and
Speaker 1: they haven't. Right. Um. You know, the Nationals, I think
Speaker 1: we're supposed to win nine games and they're struggling, uh
Speaker 1: to break five d Right now, you've seen the Mets
Speaker 1: to pretty well, which is um, maybe not that's shocking,
Speaker 1: given how it is New York. You're waiting for the
Speaker 1: late season collapse. But given how much talent they had
Speaker 1: in their farm system, maybe not that shocking. But it's
Speaker 1: come maybe maybe the first time that's look at all
Speaker 1: this talent. Well, look, we'll see how it goes. And
Speaker 1: you know, finally teams have learned how to manage their
Speaker 1: young pictures a little bit better and a little bit
Speaker 1: more cautiously. Maybe, and we'll see if this is sustainable
Speaker 1: for the Mets or not. But that's a little bit different.
Speaker 1: You mean, not ruining them early on. It's not ruining uh,
Speaker 1: not ruining them early on like the famous like Triple,
Speaker 1: the van Popol years or the Jason if Ringhausen crop
Speaker 1: and you know, um, so so far it's gone well
Speaker 1: for the Mets with their with their young pictures famous
Speaker 1: last words. I guess we'll we'll see how long that
Speaker 1: that stands. Earlier, we were talking about Pakoda. Um. I
Speaker 1: didn't realize that was just pictures. I thought that was players.
Speaker 1: Is so start out with pictures, the idea being that UM,
Speaker 1: pictures are much harder to predict than hitters. UM. And
Speaker 1: so I thought this is later more. Yeah, what why
Speaker 1: is that? Uh? For a lot of reasons. One is
Speaker 1: that kind of measures of pitching are more indirect, Right,
Speaker 1: like if you look at wins and losses, well, it's
Speaker 1: conditional on how many runs you give up and how
Speaker 1: many runs give up? Is it conditional on how many
Speaker 1: hits you give up and how many walks you give up?
Speaker 1: So now we know a lot. But you would think
Speaker 1: you would think pitch is thrown and strikes versus balls.
Speaker 1: And but ten years, ten years ago, this is not
Speaker 1: where the state of the art of thinking was. And
Speaker 1: also we didn't actually have data like now we can say, oh,
Speaker 1: you know what, um, Jason Berlander, he's not the picture
Speaker 1: he winch was. We can actually say, well, now he
Speaker 1: doesn't throw as hard as he wins did write you
Speaker 1: have data on every pitch and what the velocity is,
Speaker 1: what the speed is, what a picture is doing on
Speaker 1: different counts. Right. UM, So now the pitching UH, forecasts
Speaker 1: have come a long way past Pakoda. But you know
Speaker 1: the other thing too, is that pitching is kind of
Speaker 1: an inherently unnatural act on a on a picture's arm. Right, Um, Okay,
Speaker 1: I I pitched in high school, so i'll uh and
Speaker 1: you know I have the torn real rotated to prove it.
Speaker 1: But I'm not gonna argue with you whipping a ball,
Speaker 1: whipping your shoulder around that way for ninety or so
Speaker 1: throws a game is is not what normal you could
Speaker 1: You could throw a spear if you're out in the
Speaker 1: on the savannah hunting mammoths, but you're not gonna throw
Speaker 1: a spear nineties seven times. The pictures, Yeah, pictures. And
Speaker 1: you know, even though now pitch counts are monitored more.
Speaker 1: Now every pitch, every at bat is contested so much, right,
Speaker 1: and the strikeout rates are so high. There are a
Speaker 1: lot of pitches per plate appearance. Obviously, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of focus on taking walks and played discipline. Um. The
Speaker 1: thing about pitching that people realize now, maybe not ten
Speaker 1: years ago, is that a lot of what people think
Speaker 1: of as pitching is really positional defense. And you've seen
Speaker 1: phases evolved. Kind of in the early moneyball days, people
Speaker 1: were like, well, it's hard to measure defense, Therefore, let's
Speaker 1: just kind of ignore it and put a big lot
Speaker 1: of big, clunky, chunky out fielders out there, and they'll
Speaker 1: hit a lot of home runs, right, And then teams realized, um,
Speaker 1: you know, actually a lot of this is positional defense,
Speaker 1: Like really the impact of having a good center fielder,
Speaker 1: a good tes not necessarily the slugging sort of batter
Speaker 1: as they used to be, but the difference between a
Speaker 1: hundred yard blooper over the UH over the second baseman's head,
Speaker 1: depending on where it goes, is either an out or
Speaker 1: a double. And the funny thing sasonally the same bad
Speaker 1: contact with the ball. I mean, if you save uh,
Speaker 1: you know, twenty hits a year with your defense, I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, if you've got treen or hits a year
Speaker 1: with your batting average, and that translates to what forty
Speaker 1: points of betting average, right, So it's really pretty significant,
Speaker 1: and the differences can be that large. But you know,
Speaker 1: one one thing to remember here is that there's always
Speaker 1: the peril that people think, oh, if you can't measure
Speaker 1: something there, for it's not Wharton. And once we got
Speaker 1: better locational data, we can actually say, oh, now we
Speaker 1: can actually physically measure how much range uh Lorenzo Caine
Speaker 1: covers or whatever. Right, we're no longer guessing, and it's like, boy,
Speaker 1: those are some pretty big differences. Actually. So recently on
Speaker 1: there was an article about tennis gets essentially the Moneyball treatment.
Speaker 1: What other sports will benefit from this sort of statistical
Speaker 1: analysis that currently are are escaping its gaze? I mean
Speaker 1: in terms of kind of what sports are on that
Speaker 1: nice part of the learning curve. Um, the NBA is
Speaker 1: one of them, certainly. I mean, you know, teams like
Speaker 1: the US TO Rockets are run by Darryl Moore, isn't
Speaker 1: m I T guy? Right? Um, you know, we're actually
Speaker 1: introducing a kind of basketball version of pakoda um called Carmelo,
Speaker 1: which will debut at some point the next Oh gosh,
Speaker 1: it's a very clever acronym. It's like career arc regression
Speaker 1: estimate something like that. But a lot of layers in
Speaker 1: Carmelo were good with very geeky words. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: soccer is a sport where there's been very little data collected.
Speaker 1: But now you see teams in the Premiership have their
Speaker 1: their stet heads and whatnot. And obviously the magnitude of
Speaker 1: the economy of soccer is so enormous right where um
Speaker 1: where you know that might be the next frontier. You're
Speaker 1: listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My special
Speaker 1: guest this week is statistical wizard Nate Silver. And here
Speaker 1: we are towards the end of the summer in and
Speaker 1: we just had the Republican first debate, and we're looking
Speaker 1: at Iowa and New Hampshire coming up. This is quite
Speaker 1: a fascinating electoral season, isn't it. Yeah, we've never seen
Speaker 1: so I know, Um, I'm being a little bit anecdotal here,
Speaker 1: but the type of um traffic that we're getting on
Speaker 1: our politics articles in August, which is historically this August
Speaker 1: year before, Yeah, a year before this is historically about
Speaker 1: the slowest time of the year for politics news or
Speaker 1: hard news in general. Right. And it's it's kind of
Speaker 1: like it's September of the election year, right, it's not
Speaker 1: the November peak. But like you know, um, people are
Speaker 1: fascinated by Donald Trump, by Bernie Sanders, um in a
Speaker 1: way that's way ahead of where things were at twelve.
Speaker 1: So I kind of conflicted here. On the one hand,
Speaker 1: it's probably good for business. On their hand, it's a
Speaker 1: little maddening, right, And I think, you know, so much
Speaker 1: of what we say at is slow down, right, this
Speaker 1: is not gonna unfold today or next week or this month.
Speaker 1: It's gonna take a while. Slow down, take the long view,
Speaker 1: don't hyperventilate about this stuff. And so they're conflicting impulses here.
Speaker 1: I say that about stock markets all the time. It
Speaker 1: is it is people wanted, like the hairs on fly
Speaker 1: Apple is down. Part of this that you have this
Speaker 1: whole industry of commentators who are asked to say, weigh
Speaker 1: in on what happened today, right, and are very close
Speaker 1: to the subject matter. Um, and you know, so to
Speaker 1: a first approximation, you might learn more about the campaign
Speaker 1: if you went on vacation for for a month right now.
Speaker 1: We just love when reports. We'll get back on Twitter
Speaker 1: and they say, oh my gosh, you know we're still
Speaker 1: talking about Trump now. It's like, well, yeah, let's let's
Speaker 1: talk about Trump for first. What does he do to
Speaker 1: the calculate? Really, the first question is how unusual of
Speaker 1: a candidate is he? So I'd say, right now, he's
Speaker 1: not quite as unusual as people would say, at least
Speaker 1: if you kind of made him a ciscal data point
Speaker 1: right in the sense that first of all, we had
Speaker 1: in UM four or five different Republican candidates from Michelle
Speaker 1: Bachman to New ging Rich, who surged Herman Kaine in
Speaker 1: the polls to about where Trump is UM and then
Speaker 1: faded UM, sometimes rapidly sometimes slowly after that. But there's
Speaker 1: also another tradition of kind of gadfly entire sufficient candidates
Speaker 1: like Pat Buchanan which Trump belongs to, to UM, you know,
Speaker 1: and some of them were able to hold on to
Speaker 1: a segment of the Republican base UM through Iowa and
Speaker 1: New Hampshire. So I don't discount the possibility that Trump
Speaker 1: could be with us for for a long time. I
Speaker 1: do discount the idea that he could ever become the nominee.
Speaker 1: Or you think it's highly unlikely that Donald Trump will
Speaker 1: be the Republican nominee. Yeah, I mean I put the
Speaker 1: chances recently at which is when you kind of go
Speaker 1: through and say, well, they're basically six different hurdles that
Speaker 1: he faces, and say he has shot of clearing a hurtle.
Speaker 1: Then you get to you know, one and sixty four chance,
Speaker 1: which is, you know, right, that's that's pretty fascinating. So
Speaker 1: what about on the other side, Bernie Sanders, what does
Speaker 1: he do with this calculus? So socialist running for press,
Speaker 1: socialis running first time in half a century. I mean,
Speaker 1: the funny thing is, you have all the media hype
Speaker 1: is about um a Democrat who's not even officially Democrat
Speaker 1: and Republican who, let's be honest, it's not really even
Speaker 1: a Republican, right, you know, I never thought that, but
Speaker 1: that's absolutely true. Um, I think the Bernie Hillary race
Speaker 1: is a lot more typical in some ways, where you
Speaker 1: have someone to the far left of a Democratic candidate. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and if you kind of mapped out and kind of
Speaker 1: um actually mapped out in a very mathematical way, kind
Speaker 1: of where our Democrats preferences, then you know about a
Speaker 1: third of the electorate would say we're closer to Bernie Sanders.
Speaker 1: He's not quite there yet in the polls, but it
Speaker 1: would not be surprising if he got a third of
Speaker 1: the vote nationally. And the thing is, though, Um, Iowa,
Speaker 1: New Hampshire, you have a lot of liberals, and you
Speaker 1: had a lot of a lot of white liberals, and
Speaker 1: Bernie Sanders is doing pretty well with white voters, not
Speaker 1: so well with his manox African Americans. So um, so
Speaker 1: it's entirely possible he could win, Um, New Hampshire, maybe
Speaker 1: Iowa and a few other states could win, Wisconsin and
Speaker 1: Oregon and states like that Massachusetts. Um, you know, but
Speaker 1: there was a poll out recently in Alabama which is
Speaker 1: where Hilly was beating him eighty one to twelve or
Speaker 1: something like that, like an Alabama football score or something almost. Um,
Speaker 1: you know. And um, look, what you don't get from
Speaker 1: kind of reading the press coverage every day is that
Speaker 1: by every metric she's doing as well as any non
Speaker 1: incumbent has the stage of the primary. Ever, whether she's
Speaker 1: beating Sanders by twenty points or thirty points nationally, she's
Speaker 1: still a way ahead. He's already been endorsed by half
Speaker 1: of the Democratic Congress, basically. But also that you know,
Speaker 1: these things tend to tighten if you go back and
Speaker 1: look at candidates like Clinton in the past. So al
Speaker 1: Gore UM came within a couple of points of losing
Speaker 1: to Bill Bradley, right. Um, you know, George Bush and
Speaker 1: was a sitting vice president, which is kind of analogous
Speaker 1: to Clinton's position. He finished third in Iowa, lost like
Speaker 1: seven or eight states. Um, George W. Bush in two
Speaker 1: thousand was as a much of a juggernaut as you
Speaker 1: could be. But McCain caught him one a few states.
Speaker 1: So that kind of modal outcome was that is that
Speaker 1: she does lose a few states, New Hampshire being one
Speaker 1: of the better candidates, right um, and then by um
Speaker 1: by February March of next year, we're like, you know,
Speaker 1: what was all the what was all the fuss about it?
Speaker 1: She's also out raising him monetarily and the money and
Speaker 1: the money helps too. It might stay with Jeb. Right,
Speaker 1: Jeb is the big winner on the Republicans. Jeb has
Speaker 1: although on the GOP side, Uh, everyone has so much
Speaker 1: access to capital that that's one of the things that is,
Speaker 1: I think a little bit different now it used to
Speaker 1: be that. So look at um Tim plenty uh in
Speaker 1: two thousand and eleven, right, perfectly plausible Candy Midwestern governor
Speaker 1: right um, kind of down the middle positions for Republican UM,
Speaker 1: but he ran out of money, uh, you know, even
Speaker 1: four years ago, and so he's like, well, I have
Speaker 1: to put the plug. Um. You know. Now a candidate
Speaker 1: like Rick Perry who's raised almost no public funds, like
Speaker 1: a million dollars, which is Um, you know Donald Trumper
Speaker 1: called that pathetic. I think, uh, you can, you can
Speaker 1: tap into a superpack. The superpacks no longer are maintaining
Speaker 1: any pretense of separating their operations from the campaigns. I
Speaker 1: think there's no um enforceable legal risk there and so
Speaker 1: his campaign can can continue. But that's why I think,
Speaker 1: you know, we are a little bit in New Territory
Speaker 1: with a goop slide, just because you have seventeen candidates running.
Speaker 1: And as much as Democrats might not want to admit it,
Speaker 1: these are seventeen candidates, a lot of whom have some
Speaker 1: really impressive credentials, right like governors and centers from big
Speaker 1: large swing states as our typically pretty strong candidates. Um,
Speaker 1: of course, like let's stall go Hio then yeah, uh well,
Speaker 1: um Ka Sick is a candidate who maybe is a
Speaker 1: little bit of a of a dark horse. Um, he's
Speaker 1: done something interesting, which is he's invested a lot of
Speaker 1: money in advertising in New Hampshire. Now, um, the reason
Speaker 1: interesting forging Iowa and going straight to New Hampshire. Well,
Speaker 1: I think the goal is actually to get some media buzz, right,
Speaker 1: because the advertising says that hey, um or the empirical
Speaker 1: literature says advertising has really short lived effects. Right, you
Speaker 1: see an ad, you might remember it for a week
Speaker 1: or two, So you should save your money towards the
Speaker 1: end and then advertise. But I think he wants to say, look,
Speaker 1: it's a field of seventeen candidates. I want to stay
Speaker 1: on the first debate stage, so to speak, get some
Speaker 1: positive attention, build some momentum. And so he's kind of
Speaker 1: investing in trying to make a name for himself now.
Speaker 1: But yeah, he is a case and he can say, look,
Speaker 1: I'm really popular in Ohio. Boy, that happens to be
Speaker 1: a pretty important state in the general election. Um, And
Speaker 1: I'll what it indicates that I can I can win
Speaker 1: over abroad and diverse coalition of voters to um. So
Speaker 1: you know, I mean there are questions about uh, you know,
Speaker 1: so I'm skeptical about Trump's chances. There's no one Republican
Speaker 1: you can point to though and say, boy, they've had
Speaker 1: a great start to their campaign so far either right, Um,
Speaker 1: Jeb has kind of faltered on the Iraq question a
Speaker 1: few other things. I think people were generally unimpressed with
Speaker 1: Walker's performance. Walker, although I would say, um, Rubio didn't
Speaker 1: hurt himself yeah, Rubio is Rubio was in win candid
Speaker 1: where you know I talked about on the Democratic side,
Speaker 1: come March, we might be saying, yeah, that was kind
Speaker 1: of obviously I was going to play out right. I
Speaker 1: think we could say that March of next year. You know, boy,
Speaker 1: it was clear that Rubio was a really smart consensus choice. Right.
Speaker 1: He's a little bit more relatable than Bush. He's a
Speaker 1: little bit more electable than Walker. Um, you know, he
Speaker 1: wasn't panicked about trying to boost his poll numbers in August.
Speaker 1: He waited till towards the end. Um you know, Ruby O,
Speaker 1: I think I don't know. I mean, you know, Bush
Speaker 1: has the money, he's a little bit ahead of Ruody
Speaker 1: on the polls. And no, one can't have a Bush.
Speaker 1: You can't have a Bush Rubio ticket. You can't. Well,
Speaker 1: there's some machinations about I guess there are some end
Speaker 1: arounds maybe, but we you know, I don't know all
Speaker 1: the constitution of details there. But basically the answer is
Speaker 1: basically no, I think you would not have you could
Speaker 1: have you know, Rubio and Walker, or Rubio and Kasick.
Speaker 1: You do have a lot of all the way around
Speaker 1: Kasi Rubio, the senior potentially. So one thing that happened,
Speaker 1: by the way, is that the GOP had UM a
Speaker 1: very good election in and then another one in UM,
Speaker 1: and they won lots of Senate and governor seats and
Speaker 1: swing states. So you know, that's the benefit now as
Speaker 1: they have a whole suite of caanics pick for them
Speaker 1: that are are popular or at least somewhat popular in
Speaker 1: in big swing states like Florida and Ohio and whatnot.
Speaker 1: Quite quite fascinating. So I just said, Kasi Rubio, how
Speaker 1: important are the VP choices to the electability or the
Speaker 1: polling note numbers of either candidate? So history really, VP
Speaker 1: choices are are not all that important. UM. As best
Speaker 1: as we can tell, you get about a two or
Speaker 1: three percent boost in the state where the VP candidate
Speaker 1: is from sometimes, so even that seems to be fading.
Speaker 1: Paul Ryan didn't help hit Romney very much in Wisconsin apparently, UM.
Speaker 1: But there's downside of the VP choice, you know, I
Speaker 1: think UM, although she was heralded at first, Sarah Palin
Speaker 1: probably UM wound up further injuring any chance, but came
Speaker 1: muld have had in two thousand and eight. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: we go back to seventy two and Eagleton and Shriver
Speaker 1: and that whole mess. Um, so you know, some extent
Speaker 1: making the um the way Obama played it, where you
Speaker 1: picked this boring, old, safe, safe white guy basically right, Um,
Speaker 1: but I know there are different ways to do it.
Speaker 1: We've been speaking with Nate Silver. If you enjoy this conversation,
Speaker 1: be sure to check out our podcast, where the tapes
Speaker 1: keep rolling and we keep recording until the guests pass
Speaker 1: out from exhaustion. If you enjoy this conversation, be sure
Speaker 1: and check out all of our other interviews. Follow my
Speaker 1: daily column on Bloomberg View dot com, or follow me
Speaker 1: on Twitter at Ridhults. Your your Twitter handle is at
Speaker 1: Nate Silver Silver, Nate Silver Fight. What did somebody else
Speaker 1: grib Nates at Nate Silver? I think so, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: that's a shame. I'm sure you're you have the blue checkmark,
Speaker 1: so you've very got the blue check mark and um,
Speaker 1: but you know so our website is actually five spells
Speaker 1: spilled out, not the number. I'm Barry, Ridhults. You're listening
Speaker 1: to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. All right, welcome
Speaker 1: to the podcast portion of our show. Nates, thank you
Speaker 1: so much for doing this. I'm really I'm excited about
Speaker 1: this and I've been looking forward to for a while
Speaker 1: for having me my pleasure. So there's so many different
Speaker 1: questions we we didn't get to that I really want
Speaker 1: to talk to you. This is the big, big one
Speaker 1: will save. So the one quiet Mike bat Nick in
Speaker 1: my office is, uh said you have to ask him
Speaker 1: this question, and it's how important are managers to team's
Speaker 1: successful failure? And how do we measure that statistically? So
Speaker 1: in in baseball in particular, I think you can talk
Speaker 1: football also because that that that comes up quite often.
Speaker 1: I think in baseball, First of all, the strategic choices
Speaker 1: of manager makes are not very consequential, right. Really you
Speaker 1: can debate like, oh, how MU should you sack bunt
Speaker 1: or you know, um, some guys now have the picture
Speaker 1: hitting a The impact of that stuff is probably not
Speaker 1: more than a couple of wins a year over a
Speaker 1: hundred two games season. Um. What I think is understudied is, uh,
Speaker 1: how much influence a manager has on getting the best
Speaker 1: out of his players? As simple as that sounds, right, Um,
Speaker 1: you know there's been some studies done in the NBA.
Speaker 1: When you say take a preseason prediction about a guy's
Speaker 1: ciscal line that doesn't know who the manager is. And
Speaker 1: then how often does uh, Gregg Popovitch, for example, get
Speaker 1: his players to outperform that prediction, either by by improving
Speaker 1: their skills or I fit up feeling a all better
Speaker 1: than the answer is, you know, routinely the Spurs and
Speaker 1: way that's disically significant beat their kind of raw um
Speaker 1: projections from name, not scars from Vegas. Vegas can account
Speaker 1: for that um, but from like a naive algorithm. Right,
Speaker 1: and so I've not seen that done for baseball, and
Speaker 1: I'm sure someone has, but kind of saying, you know,
Speaker 1: who really motivates their guys to do the best, that's
Speaker 1: still kind of a black box a little bit. That's fascinating.
Speaker 1: I have a mixed um relationship with sports books. Some
Speaker 1: are better, some are worse. The one that I really liked,
Speaker 1: which is right up your alley. Did you read Tom
Speaker 1: Coughlin's book on the Right to Win? Former coach? I
Speaker 1: did not know. So the one statistical thing that stayed
Speaker 1: with me from that book that was so fascinating. I
Speaker 1: don't remember which player was complaining about it, um, uh
Speaker 1: center linebacker. That was you know, they would run a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of numbers for every opponent on second and long.
Speaker 1: Here's what they like to do on third and one,
Speaker 1: here's what I like to do on in the red
Speaker 1: zone late in the game. Here's what they like to do.
Speaker 1: And they they would just bury these guys who just
Speaker 1: weren't used to this sort of mathematical stuff. And he always,
Speaker 1: I wish I can remember who it was, which giant
Speaker 1: um that one a championship with him, and complained about
Speaker 1: this constantly, and then gets traded somewhere else and it's
Speaker 1: you know, third and one. He goes, all, right, what
Speaker 1: are they gonna do? And I don't know? And it
Speaker 1: dawns on him that, oh, this conkling cockling guy was fantastic,
Speaker 1: that that data was really helpful to know what the
Speaker 1: Certainly it's not a sure thing, but hey, they like
Speaker 1: to do this at at third and one. And I
Speaker 1: got to think that that how do you measure? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I mean football is a different story, right. I think
Speaker 1: everyone from stat heads to UM coaches themselves would say
Speaker 1: that NFL coaches are pretty darn significant. Yeah, look at
Speaker 1: get the Seattle UM the Super Bowl. This year. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, well, so this is you know, we would
Speaker 1: say that there was some very long announced we did
Speaker 1: that the choice that Pete Carroll may was fine, you
Speaker 1: defend that, right, I see, I looked at it as
Speaker 1: he was playing a U a high risk, lower probability game. Consistently,
Speaker 1: if you look at a lot of the choices that
Speaker 1: were made, you start to veer into the anecdotal Well
Speaker 1: what about this and why did they run here? And
Speaker 1: why did they But you know, something like one percent
Speaker 1: of passes get intercepted in this situation, so it's kind
Speaker 1: of a a rounding error really, and there's a lot
Speaker 1: of kind of you know, post facto sure analysis. Right,
Speaker 1: no one would ever have complained about that play call
Speaker 1: for a second, if he caught the past, if it
Speaker 1: was if it wasn't intercepted, it's a whole different Well,
Speaker 1: to the to the victors not only goes to spoils,
Speaker 1: but the opportunity to write. Um, So we we mentioned intangibles,
Speaker 1: how do you measure the intangibles of a player? And
Speaker 1: and again mentorship, attitude, locker room behavior. Can you ignore
Speaker 1: these things? What do they actually actually mean? So I've
Speaker 1: been thinking about ways to kind of set up a
Speaker 1: um uh verifiable experiment for this, and one might be
Speaker 1: if people identify in advance, say twenty baseball players they
Speaker 1: think have strong or weak leadership, and then see what
Speaker 1: happens when they change teams and as there's some residual
Speaker 1: value you can identify, but you know sort of that
Speaker 1: can you really another ways unless you really run a
Speaker 1: control group, it's pretty hard to. In baseball performance is
Speaker 1: pretty individualized. Like the NBA is different the NBA. The
Speaker 1: whole challenge the NBA is you have um you know,
Speaker 1: one possession per possession, right, one shot per possession. You
Speaker 1: have to get the guys to cooperate. They have selfish
Speaker 1: incentives to each take the shot and boost their stats
Speaker 1: or whatnot, right, And so that makes coaching important, It
Speaker 1: makes um chemistry important, and you can to measure this.
Speaker 1: You can kind of say, uh, what residual value is
Speaker 1: there when a guy is on the court or off
Speaker 1: the court. And there's some better and better methods for
Speaker 1: doing that. Now it's some of the guys who UM
Speaker 1: who play twenty five minutes a game, they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: they're defensive players. It might have been ten years ago
Speaker 1: that the stats were like, oh, this guy can't shoot right,
Speaker 1: you can't really do anything. And now we're seeing actually
Speaker 1: they often do have a big impact on the game.
Speaker 1: But baseball I'm a little bit more more skeptical, in
Speaker 1: part because I think sometimes, um, sometimes the guys who
Speaker 1: um have a rep for being good clubhouse guys are
Speaker 1: just guys who are friendly to the media. And that's
Speaker 1: a slightly different thing necessarily. Sure. So in basketball, you know,
Speaker 1: I always as a nick fan who always felt thwarted
Speaker 1: by the bulls under Michael Jordan's I always a picture
Speaker 1: him as a guy who doesn't put up with any
Speaker 1: nonsense in the locker room, and he demands top performance,
Speaker 1: and he drives the rest of his team the way
Speaker 1: that Patrick Ewing never did. It's arguable whether anybody since
Speaker 1: Michael Um, since um, anybody in the Lakers ever did this,
Speaker 1: since Magic Johnson. Um. You know, you don't really know,
Speaker 1: you don't really see Kobe Bryant is that sort of player?
Speaker 1: Is that just anecdote? And and after the fact, or
Speaker 1: did he? Is he the sort of guy that really
Speaker 1: had that impact? And is there any way after the
Speaker 1: fact we can we can determine that. I mean, one
Speaker 1: weird thing about and I grew up a Pistons fans, so, um,
Speaker 1: you know, everyone hated Michael Jordan for reason or not.
Speaker 1: I remember in the in the final Championship E one
Speaker 1: was it I kind of involuntarily found myself rooting for him, right,
Speaker 1: And I'm like, I can't root for Utah, come on, right, Um?
Speaker 1: But those contents and letters to Nate Silver at ESPN
Speaker 1: dot Com. One thing that I think helped Jordan's reputation,
Speaker 1: apart from being maybe the best best player of all time,
Speaker 1: that he didn't have a lot of near misses, right
Speaker 1: you know, Uh, the Bulls were probably the favorites and
Speaker 1: five out of the six UH championship seasons where they
Speaker 1: won the championship, right, um, but they were blown up
Speaker 1: in a hurry, right Um. The year before they won
Speaker 1: their first one one, it was a really strong time
Speaker 1: for Eastern Conference kind of sat out the year and
Speaker 1: a half, right Um. So for some reason, it almost
Speaker 1: feels to me like if Jordan had UH won five
Speaker 1: championships and ten tries, he would look worse than six
Speaker 1: out of six. But that's a pretty petty complaint. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, Jordan had an amazing career. One reason I
Speaker 1: kind of like the NBA and contrast to other sports
Speaker 1: where there's so much randomness, is that in the n
Speaker 1: b A there are not very many undeserving NBA champions right,
Speaker 1: we saw in the not a lucky call or a
Speaker 1: bad bounce or something like that in tennis. Really, if
Speaker 1: you want us opens coming right, um, but you have
Speaker 1: to earn the NBA championship. We saw in the NBA
Speaker 1: Finals last year the Calves playing the absolute best of
Speaker 1: their ability and they can win. They can win two
Speaker 1: close games, right, It's really hard to win a seven
Speaker 1: game series against the team when you know your second
Speaker 1: base player, best players j R. Smith or something more
Speaker 1: power to j R. Smith. But but so in other words,
Speaker 1: Lebron doesn't have the same supporting cast that Jordan's did,
Speaker 1: and the Calves need to do some offseason. Well they've
Speaker 1: done some stuff, they need to do some more. I
Speaker 1: mean everyone's if everyone's healthy, they're a good team. I
Speaker 1: mean it should be really fanned. That's a great era
Speaker 1: for the NBA. By the way, between the Spurs and
Speaker 1: the Warriers and the Calves, um, you're gonna have three
Speaker 1: great teams are all very different, looks different stylistically, so
Speaker 1: you know, Um, you know, my boss just signed this
Speaker 1: big new NBA contract. Should have a great season coming ahead. Um,
Speaker 1: and you said you mentioned tennis. Let's talk a little
Speaker 1: bit about some of the the male players who I think.
Speaker 1: It's been fascinating watching this go back and forth between
Speaker 1: uh Na Doll and you know, go down the list
Speaker 1: of the top five players. There's been this sort of
Speaker 1: rotating how fast do the skills deteriorate? At age thirty?
Speaker 1: It seems like these guys peak nine and then they start,
Speaker 1: you know, just losing it a little bit. I think
Speaker 1: twenty eight or twenty I might even be a little
Speaker 1: bit early. Obviously, you have guys like Samprus that held
Speaker 1: an agacy that held on for for longer, but maybe
Speaker 1: more like like twenty five. I mean, I go to
Speaker 1: the US Open every year. I'm not a huge tennis fan,
Speaker 1: but I think people who are watching on TV don't
Speaker 1: realize how physically demanding it is. A five set match,
Speaker 1: right Um, in the heat in in New York in September,
Speaker 1: or in Australia and in the you know what summer
Speaker 1: down there, right Um, these guys are hitting at a
Speaker 1: hundred thirty d and it's insane. And where that there
Speaker 1: the guys now actually play a you know, really good
Speaker 1: defensive game. Um, you know, very very challenging if you're
Speaker 1: not absolutely in the top of shape. Right, And so
Speaker 1: in general happens is that for you look at baseball
Speaker 1: where the data is good or something, Um, you know
Speaker 1: the average player peaks at twenty seven. What that really
Speaker 1: is is at your fiscal attributes probably peak actually at
Speaker 1: at age twenty three or something. Your mental attitudes keep growing. Um,
Speaker 1: that makes up for the physics you have the best
Speaker 1: overall combination for And if three of these guys peak
Speaker 1: at twenty if you look at like an NFL running back,
Speaker 1: and um, guys were just kind of purely about brute
Speaker 1: strength and how beat up or not your body is. Right,
Speaker 1: Very often in NFL running back is as best as
Speaker 1: we'll ever be in his rookie season. Right. There's a
Speaker 1: quarterback conversely, where obviously the arm streak matters, but the
Speaker 1: mental parts important to a quarterback. Of course, those guys
Speaker 1: can be perfectly good, sometimes even better in their thirties.
Speaker 1: You could, you could deflate football's way into your thirties.
Speaker 1: You can keep it. You could. I don't think there's
Speaker 1: in any age limitation. But I love the stories about
Speaker 1: Jerry Rice about how he used to train in San Francisco,
Speaker 1: and you talk about the mental out of it. He
Speaker 1: used to invite people from the opposing teams to train
Speaker 1: with him, and he would just run up and down
Speaker 1: the hills of San Francisco and he would destroy these guys.
Speaker 1: They like could not keep up with him, and then
Speaker 1: they seem on the field and they would be horrified.
Speaker 1: Stop and think about that sort of head game. I
Speaker 1: just find that, uh, fascinating. But he's a guy whose
Speaker 1: career went you know, quite quite deep into his thirties.
Speaker 1: That's um. Is that unusual for a receiver for receiver is? Yeah,
Speaker 1: receivers are not quite as early peaked as running backs.
Speaker 1: But um, but you know they're definitely mid to late
Speaker 1: twenties for for the most part. Well, that that's amazing. Um.
Speaker 1: So tennis we mentioned is the is one of the
Speaker 1: next things. And soccer, how are they going to change?
Speaker 1: How are you going to change the statistical analysis of
Speaker 1: of World Cup football, of of soccer? Well, how do
Speaker 1: you how do you look at that? Um? I mean
Speaker 1: historically the only data that was collected, we're just goals
Speaker 1: and bookings and yellow cards and and red cards. Right,
Speaker 1: that's it. That's changing now though, Right So now, um,
Speaker 1: you know in the big four or five leagues in Europe,
Speaker 1: paying what you think of the French League? Um, you
Speaker 1: know you have lots of real time data collectives. And
Speaker 1: now we ran a big article and we know Messy
Speaker 1: I remember that where it's like he actually is saying, now, okay,
Speaker 1: now we can actually measure all these things that we
Speaker 1: thought of as intangibles before, right, like how well does
Speaker 1: he set up his teammates, how much space does he cover?
Speaker 1: Some things are actually a little bit kinter intuitive, like
Speaker 1: I think Messi doesn't cover that much territory. He's very
Speaker 1: much kind of thinking about how can I have the
Speaker 1: most impact and being in the center of of the
Speaker 1: pitch more or less to kind of be the focal
Speaker 1: point for for the offense. Um. But yeah, I didn't
Speaker 1: play in the World today Messi for sure. Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 1: and people people don't realize how good he's amazing he is. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I'm a World Cup fan for a long time and
Speaker 1: I find it fascinating and I wish we had the
Speaker 1: World Cup every uh every two years. I actually went
Speaker 1: uh to the Women's World Cup and in Canada, which
Speaker 1: was a ton of fun. Right, Um, to see Americans
Speaker 1: actually win something at soccer was spectacular. So, UM, all right,
Speaker 1: so let's see what else we've forgotten or I skipped
Speaker 1: over in the prior segment. Um, So we'll save the
Speaker 1: election stuff for a little later. And I'm gonna I'm
Speaker 1: gonna touch that. We did that, we did this. Wow,
Speaker 1: there's so much stuff I could I could stay on
Speaker 1: sports for a long time, but I want to. I
Speaker 1: want to bring it back to um, bring it back
Speaker 1: to to what you're doing with five thirty eight now
Speaker 1: and a little bit of the history with that. So
Speaker 1: your name to one of Time magazines most influential people
Speaker 1: in two thousand and nine. Then comes the Times, then
Speaker 1: comes the the election. Personally, what's it like blowing up
Speaker 1: like that? I mean, I used to be disorienting and
Speaker 1: kind of like what's going on? So one thing is that,
Speaker 1: um two twelve, you're so busy that you kind of
Speaker 1: don't have time to process it almost all really, so
Speaker 1: he doesn't, Well, my book came out in September two
Speaker 1: thousand twelve. Um, and so you know the combination of that,
Speaker 1: and of course the you know Penguin. My PR people
Speaker 1: had me doing shows like this like like every day
Speaker 1: pretty much, right, and then there was random stuff. Hurricane
Speaker 1: Uh Sandy hit at that time, so also's going on.
Speaker 1: I was like kind of commuting in the dark from
Speaker 1: my uh apartment then in Brooklyn to to the New
Speaker 1: York Times office sort of do a media hit or whatnot.
Speaker 1: It was just kind of crazy time and then you
Speaker 1: emerge from it. And I was like at some conference
Speaker 1: in Chicago the weekend after the election, and it was
Speaker 1: like like every time I got the elevator, someone would
Speaker 1: like recognize me and be like, hey, are you Nate Silver? Right?
Speaker 1: And that was that was that's pretty weird. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: I do less TV than I used to. But the
Speaker 1: one place that I got to ask, if you have
Speaker 1: this experience, if you ever check a bag when you
Speaker 1: fly and you're waiting by the carousel, you're just fair game.
Speaker 1: You're you're fair game. For some reason, it happens a
Speaker 1: lot in airports. I think a lot of people watch
Speaker 1: serious quote unquote TV and and airfats on the planes.
Speaker 1: But um, but it definitely there's a half life based
Speaker 1: on how recently you've been on TV. It probably happens,
Speaker 1: you know, a couple of times a month still, but
Speaker 1: not daily it used to be used to be. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and certainly we may we may see that pick up
Speaker 1: again towards next year, towards we'll see that although I'm
Speaker 1: trying not to be uh, I don't know, I'm trying
Speaker 1: not to overexpose myself too much. That makes sense, And
Speaker 1: part of it is that you know, you've probably learned
Speaker 1: this too. But if um, if you have your own
Speaker 1: platform right and we have the opportunity to reach a
Speaker 1: very large audience at five eight every day with the
Speaker 1: writing and the stuff we produce in house podcasts and videos, um,
Speaker 1: you get very finicky about how you're presented. You know.
Speaker 1: It's really easy to kind of come across as oh,
Speaker 1: here's this kind of you know, NERD is a know
Speaker 1: it all and you know, and we trying to have
Speaker 1: a little bit more subtlety and how we're presenting our
Speaker 1: view of how campaigns and elections work and so you know, um,
Speaker 1: so I'm trying not to uh go to overboard with
Speaker 1: the with the media stuff. So what I certainly wouldn't
Speaker 1: argue with Nerd. However, you never struck me as someone
Speaker 1: who presents himself as a know it all. In fact,
Speaker 1: your whole approaches. We don't know what the future can bring.
Speaker 1: We don't understand which of these polls is gonna actually
Speaker 1: be right. However, we can look at statistically taking the
Speaker 1: average of all. Do you see how that didn't did
Speaker 1: in the best adjusted for some minor modifications, and come
Speaker 1: fairly close to the actual outcome. That's a humble approach,
Speaker 1: not an arrogant. Appreciate that, thank you, But right, was
Speaker 1: that part of the plan? So I think it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's kind of how do you wait, what's your baseline?
Speaker 1: Prior's right? Um? You know in a general election, the
Speaker 1: prior in a campaign where the incumbents running is that
Speaker 1: the incumbent will probably win unless things are pretty bad.
Speaker 1: In an election with the incumbent, it's probably this is
Speaker 1: going to be really close, right, Um. You know in
Speaker 1: a primary it's maybe a little bit more difficult, but
Speaker 1: you know, the history is that the establishment usually wins
Speaker 1: the primary. In the primary, Um, you know, the candid
Speaker 1: who it's a consensus building process, a nomination process. Literally,
Speaker 1: it is a democratic party's nomination and the gops to
Speaker 1: bestow they kind of set the rules for how delicates
Speaker 1: are allegated and what happens. Right, So they have a
Speaker 1: lot of influence on the a lot of influence, right.
Speaker 1: You know, if the GOP doesn't want to nominate Donald Trump,
Speaker 1: it's actually not a popularity contest, Right, they can make
Speaker 1: it very difficult for Now and Crump to do it.
Speaker 1: And there are maybe one or two cases. So McGovern
Speaker 1: in seventy two, UM was very smart about getting UM
Speaker 1: a lot of grassroots support from people who would be
Speaker 1: delegate at the Democratic National Convention and kind of UM
Speaker 1: he had designed the system for how delicates re alligated
Speaker 1: and so he really knew allocated, so he knew how
Speaker 1: to UM how to work that system really well. But
Speaker 1: seventy two is kind of the only example of where, uh,
Speaker 1: the inmates started burning the asylum. What about oh eight, Um,
Speaker 1: wasn't Hillary sort of ordained in advance and sort of that?
Speaker 1: So I'm upset the apple card a little bit. So
Speaker 1: Clinton in two thousand and eight had ah, you know,
Speaker 1: at this point in the race, like a ten or
Speaker 1: fifteen point lead over Obama. This year it's kind of
Speaker 1: a thirty point lead over Bernie Sanders. But it has
Speaker 1: more let's do with Hillary and more to do with
Speaker 1: uh with Barack Obama versus versus Bernie senators where Barack
Speaker 1: Obama represented a whole, huge, kind of mainstream part of
Speaker 1: the Democratic coalition. Um, obviously he did very well with
Speaker 1: African American voters, which is a huge voting block in
Speaker 1: the coalition. So you know, um, you can basically split
Speaker 1: the Democratic Coalition into the third so you can have uh,
Speaker 1: white liberals, white moderates, and non white voters. Actually it's
Speaker 1: more of it really, right, and um, you know he
Speaker 1: had better support across coalitions. But also he about the
Speaker 1: support from Harry Reid and whatnot. Right, lots of influential
Speaker 1: people in the dipretic party said said, we have an
Speaker 1: amazing cadate in Obama, right, and we want to make
Speaker 1: it a fair fight. Whereas this year there is not
Speaker 1: a single sitting Democratic legislator excuse me, senator or representative
Speaker 1: or governor who has endorsed Bernie Sanders, in part because
Speaker 1: you know, he's not a Democrat. Um, he's seventy four
Speaker 1: years old. He probably lose general election by by ten points. Right, Um,
Speaker 1: you know, uh, what about Buden, what about al Gore.
Speaker 1: Is anybody else got a credible gonna throw that hat
Speaker 1: in the ring? Or is that just early chatter? I
Speaker 1: mean I think, you know, let's say that Hillary Clinton,
Speaker 1: I think it's not likely. Maybe it's a ten percent chance. Right,
Speaker 1: Let's say these scandals are more serious than they appear
Speaker 1: to be the email or something else, maybe something else.
Speaker 1: I'm not I'm not totally persuaded. So you know, baseball,
Speaker 1: there's just set value over replacement player. Right, It's like
Speaker 1: for me, it's like valuable replacement scandal. Right, We're gonna
Speaker 1: you see over the Clinton's that there's something like slightly
Speaker 1: funny going on, Right, So maybe something that's a given
Speaker 1: in Otherwise, Yeah, the placement scandal, I'm not sure that
Speaker 1: this is that remarkable proved to be, you know, the
Speaker 1: Republican Control Committee. But I have Republican friends who are
Speaker 1: in d C who insist the email scandal is totally
Speaker 1: different than it's. Sorry, this is more serious. You've seen
Speaker 1: a long decline in Clinton favorability ratings. It's really hard
Speaker 1: to determine cause and effect and say has that been
Speaker 1: accelerated by the email scandal or it certainly isn't helping
Speaker 1: um but overall, you look at markets and their betting markets,
Speaker 1: their perception of where Hilly Clinton stands hasn't changed. They've
Speaker 1: had her with about an eight chance of winning the
Speaker 1: nomination for a long time. It's not been affected except
Speaker 1: at the margin by by Bernie or by the scandals. UM.
Speaker 1: You know, Biden, UM or someone like Biden would at
Speaker 1: least be a little bit different in that UM in
Speaker 1: that let's say that Clinton is not doing well, Democrats
Speaker 1: would still, i think, want to intervene to not nominate
Speaker 1: Bernie Sanders. Whether they could say, well, Biden, he's fine, right,
Speaker 1: you know, Biden will give us a shot at least,
Speaker 1: and so you know, that would be one of the
Speaker 1: more significant developments so far. From what I've read, it
Speaker 1: all seems pretty speculative. I think part of what Biden
Speaker 1: wants to do is say, you know what, UM, it's
Speaker 1: tricky because it's August right now. It takes a long
Speaker 1: time to mount presentational campaign. What happens if there is
Speaker 1: maybe it's the email thing, maybe something new, maybe it's
Speaker 1: a health problem. What happens if Hiller Clinton, if that
Speaker 1: happens in November, and then UM and then only Bernie
Speaker 1: Sanders is on on the ballot, right, then you have
Speaker 1: a deeply damaged Democratic nominee in Clinton, or someone who
Speaker 1: the party will not want to nominate in Sanders. That's
Speaker 1: where you have the kind of break glass for emergency Biden, Gore,
Speaker 1: John Kerry uh type candidates. Right. Um, And so I
Speaker 1: think part of what Briden's trying to signal is to say, look,
Speaker 1: I'm here, I'm around if everything else is going wrong.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm at least thinking about this. I have
Speaker 1: a few people who are loyal to me. I can
Speaker 1: mount a campaign on the fly that's very different from
Speaker 1: actually run. And the way he sends signals it's very
Speaker 1: much like kind of his inside baseball you know, Marine
Speaker 1: Dowds Sunday column Right, those are kind of dog whistles too.
Speaker 1: I think other Democrats, more than to like mainstream voters, like, hey,
Speaker 1: if something really goes wrong with Clinton campaign, then then
Speaker 1: I'm here. But I would say, you know, um, we
Speaker 1: are speculative or dismissive. A lot of speculation about Clinton
Speaker 1: is struggling. If Biden ran, that would at least be
Speaker 1: a more tangible sign that that some influential Democrats are
Speaker 1: worried about Clinton. So right now. Statistically, if we had
Speaker 1: a guess, you're guessing Hillary Clinton is the Democratic Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know, like I said, betting markets put the
Speaker 1: chances at eight percent, I put them marginally higher. I think,
Speaker 1: um you know, and I think of the of the percent,
Speaker 1: most of it's not Bernie Sanders. Most of it is
Speaker 1: that um Al Gore, Biden, Biden carry Gore right are
Speaker 1: the kind of the three people who could step in
Speaker 1: and in an emergency. So it's fascinating that you say
Speaker 1: that when we were looking at the O eight election,
Speaker 1: And I'm curious that you of your perspective. My thesis
Speaker 1: was at the time, so the Iraq War by then
Speaker 1: had turned sour, the economy was in a free fall,
Speaker 1: we were in the midst of a financial crisis. The
Speaker 1: running on the incumbents track record, I said, no matter
Speaker 1: who the GOP put up, they're willing to get destroyed
Speaker 1: by whoever the Democrats put up. But people have argued
Speaker 1: with me, well, if they would have nominated somebody instead
Speaker 1: of McCain, and someone less charismatic than Obama, perhaps it
Speaker 1: would have been a very different outcome. But I mean
Speaker 1: it was about the most difficult imaginable set of circumstances
Speaker 1: for the Republicans to win. I mean not that I
Speaker 1: feel sympathetic for them, because you know, they had a
Speaker 1: president who made some mistakes, shall we say, but you know,
Speaker 1: you had the economy collapsing, a very unpopular war, the
Speaker 1: sitting president had approval rating. Right, it wasn't a hugely
Speaker 1: low number for a sitting president. You can you know,
Speaker 1: one could argue about my ship won by twelve points
Speaker 1: instead of seven or something like that. Right, But that
Speaker 1: was about you know, there are some years that political
Speaker 1: scientists debate and say, you know, uh, he kind of
Speaker 1: was perceived to be kind of still in recession if
Speaker 1: you look back on revised cistics. Now it was actually doing.
Speaker 1: The recession was over before anybody realized. But oh way,
Speaker 1: it's one of those years where I don't know, Democrats
Speaker 1: would have had to make a huge error. Uh. And
Speaker 1: in some ways McCain wasn't a bad candidate. He was premoderate.
Speaker 1: He broke from the GOP in a lot of ways
Speaker 1: of the the time when that party was really unpopular. Right.
Speaker 1: You know, um, I thought he was a better candidate
Speaker 1: in two thousand. He seemed to be less captured and
Speaker 1: therefore less well, that's part of people are are kind
Speaker 1: of concerned about which of these seventeen Republicans will get
Speaker 1: nominated to some except that all kind of get except
Speaker 1: if it is a Trump or something. Right, Um, they're
Speaker 1: all going to kind of have the stamp of the
Speaker 1: party on them anyway, Right, And the ones who are
Speaker 1: more moderate Jeb Bush at least by the times you
Speaker 1: gets nominate, would be pulled more toward UM, toward the right.
Speaker 1: Scott Walker might be pulled more towards not the absolute left,
Speaker 1: but you know, become a little bit less conservative on
Speaker 1: some issues, and then they'll kind of go and do
Speaker 1: what they need to do for the general election. But um,
Speaker 1: but to some extent um, you know, it is a
Speaker 1: party driven process, and the candiates own policy positions might
Speaker 1: be swamped by what the consensus is among Is it
Speaker 1: still true you you um run the primary to the
Speaker 1: right and then um run the main election to the center,
Speaker 1: or for the Democrats, run the primary to the left
Speaker 1: and then tack to the center. For this, I mean
Speaker 1: that's the default, right, I mean I think, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: I think some partisans would say, well, it's all about
Speaker 1: turnout now, so you want to motivate your base, right.
Speaker 1: I'm always a little bit suspicious of that kind of
Speaker 1: the notion that where you can kind of have your
Speaker 1: cake and eat it too. Right. Um, you know, it
Speaker 1: maybe works a little bit better for Democrats in the
Speaker 1: sense that there are just a few more Democrats and
Speaker 1: the electorate and Republicans, so if everyone turns out, Um,
Speaker 1: they might have an edge out of those numbers. Different
Speaker 1: what what's the GOP percentage? And how accurate is is
Speaker 1: that about independence? I always thought people just angry at
Speaker 1: their party. A lot of people say their independence aren't
Speaker 1: really independence, right, but you know Democrats have right now
Speaker 1: about it five or six point edge and party identification,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't give them any well, els would be
Speaker 1: a whole another hour long segment right that time. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, but there are a lot of qualifications to that,
Speaker 1: one being that they Democrats get a lot of people
Speaker 1: who are only marginally likely to vote. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: if if we had mandatory voting in this country, a
Speaker 1: lot of things would be different. That's weird hypothetical, right, Um.
Speaker 1: Without mandatory voting benefit who would benefit Democrats? The Republicans
Speaker 1: on the other hand, you know a lot of times um,
Speaker 1: people won't turn out necessarily. Also, one thing that's a
Speaker 1: little bit tricky is that, um, because the GOP has
Speaker 1: been unpopular, Um, a lot of people that formally would say,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm a Republican, now they'll say I'm an independent,
Speaker 1: but I lean Republicans look at leaners and it gets
Speaker 1: a little bit closer still. Um. So I couldn't completely
Speaker 1: relate to that because we were talking before the show.
Speaker 1: I grew up. Jacob Javits was our senator, and that
Speaker 1: sort of center right republican you Kasik is probably the
Speaker 1: closest thing we mentioned. You know, Bush has actually surprised
Speaker 1: me to the extent that, um, he has run pretty
Speaker 1: explicitly as as a moderate right, which is an interesting approach.
Speaker 1: I think maybe he figures that, look, I have a
Speaker 1: very long track record in public life, right, Um, I'm
Speaker 1: not going to fool anyone like Romney tried to do
Speaker 1: in two thousand and twelve, right, Um, and then looked
Speaker 1: like a flip flopper in the general election. You know,
Speaker 1: they're always cases like The one thing that amazed me
Speaker 1: is that in two thousand and eight, all three of
Speaker 1: the major Democratic candidates were against gay marriage. Right officially
Speaker 1: even though Obama had said, like in two thousand two
Speaker 1: that he was pro gay marriage. Right. So I'm like,
Speaker 1: you know, are you really fooling anyone? I'm not. I'm
Speaker 1: not totally sure. And so I think Bush is saying,
Speaker 1: you know what I am? Who I am? I'm a
Speaker 1: moderate conservative, right, Um, you know, I'd be very electable.
Speaker 1: Although this is the thing that's tricky for him is
Speaker 1: usually you'd have a candidate like that, um, like the
Speaker 1: McCain type candid who's a moderate conservative and they have
Speaker 1: good UM electability numbers, and Bush because the Bush family
Speaker 1: name is still not that popular, maybe he's not seen
Speaker 1: as that relatable. You know, He's head to head numbers
Speaker 1: are not any better than like the more conservative candidates
Speaker 1: against Clinton. Right, So let's talk about the head to
Speaker 1: head numbers. So when we look at Clinton versus fill
Speaker 1: in the blank, Hillary versus Jeb Hillary versus Rubio, Hillary
Speaker 1: versus Kasik, who stands the best shot at at winning? Well,
Speaker 1: this is what we talked about. You know, I probably
Speaker 1: would not look at those head to head numbers very
Speaker 1: much right now. They're almost meaningless. Yeah, if you're gonna
Speaker 1: look at them, you know, candidates who have comfortable name
Speaker 1: recognition to Hillary, which is kind of almost no one.
Speaker 1: But you know, for that reason, the Bush number, you know,
Speaker 1: I would discount almost all of it instead of literally
Speaker 1: all of it as I might for like Hillary versus
Speaker 1: Rubio or whatnot. Um, but usually there's correlation between how
Speaker 1: moderate a guy is and how well he does among independents. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, because Bush isn't personally seeing that favorably, he
Speaker 1: might not have that edge this year, which is kind
Speaker 1: of why I say, if you're Republican, you might say, well, um,
Speaker 1: you know what, if we look at Rubio versus Bush,
Speaker 1: then we get a guy number one who's more conservative, right,
Speaker 1: number two who is actually a little bit more popular
Speaker 1: with independence, and number three avoids this whole voice versus
Speaker 1: Clinton dynasty angle. Again, it's not my job to advise parties,
Speaker 1: but that's what Rubio is one candidate where that you
Speaker 1: could kind of go back and say, I totally get
Speaker 1: why they nominated him and what we're all discounting somebody.
Speaker 1: I guess I'm you know, I'm bullish on Rubio's You know,
Speaker 1: here's the thing that I find fascinating. Bright, Hispanic articulate,
Speaker 1: like a really like and you know, has almost a
Speaker 1: Kennedy esk photo genetic photogenic sort of thing. But when
Speaker 1: you look at his policies and I know the Republicans
Speaker 1: are I don't remember was you or wrote about the
Speaker 1: gender gap on the GOP versus Democrats, he is surprisingly
Speaker 1: hard right. If he was a more centrist, moderate conservative,
Speaker 1: I would think that he would be the front runner
Speaker 1: for for getting elected in the general election. Well, and
Speaker 1: we'll and we'll see, right. You know, one way this
Speaker 1: could play out, um, is that people sour on Bush
Speaker 1: and then you'll see Rubio maybe move a little bit
Speaker 1: to the the center. Despite what he said recently about abortion,
Speaker 1: no exceptions for rape, incest, life of the mother, Like
Speaker 1: you don't hear that from mainstream candidates the past twenty years.
Speaker 1: When he is pretty and there are fiscal systems to
Speaker 1: the try and quantify how conservative people are, and Rubio
Speaker 1: is very conservative. I mean, the GOP is a very
Speaker 1: conservative party. So relative to the other seventeen people, he's
Speaker 1: about in the middle of the GOP field. But he
Speaker 1: would be, you know, twenty years ago considered very conservative. Um.
Speaker 1: But you know, um who's more to the right of Rubio,
Speaker 1: So Walker probably, Um, you know Walker is UM far
Speaker 1: enough to the right where he might kind of compete
Speaker 1: for votes with UM with Ted Cruz a right and
Speaker 1: Carson for that matter, right, UM, which you know, maybe
Speaker 1: isn't a good place to be. There is gonna be
Speaker 1: some support for candidates like those, I think throughout the race.
Speaker 1: What's interesting about Trump is that, UM, he's really difficult
Speaker 1: to peg Ideologically, He's kind of all over the place.
Speaker 1: And his support too, was all over the place. Right,
Speaker 1: people with somoa's capturing Tea Party voters not true? Right.
Speaker 1: That coalition he has is drawn from all different kind
Speaker 1: of ideological parts the GOP in. What's one reason I'm
Speaker 1: scipticle by him is that it's also drawn from people
Speaker 1: who don't traditionally turn out and vote in primaries. Right.
Speaker 1: It's a lot of people would say, you know, I
Speaker 1: like that kind of six it to the establishment and
Speaker 1: six it to the media. Right, they're fascinated by him.
Speaker 1: You know, does that translate into driving to the Iowa
Speaker 1: caucus in the snow when you've never voted before. You know,
Speaker 1: we don't know, there's some reason to be skeptical of that. UM,
Speaker 1: but Trump is you know, if you kind of if
Speaker 1: you average out his policy positions, then they're kind of,
Speaker 1: you know, fairly typical right of center. But that means
Speaker 1: you have some things that are like radical Tea Party
Speaker 1: and some things that are like practically like socialists. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it kind of averages out um and that is interesting.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, there were some article right today
Speaker 1: about how um so that was smart, uh, about how
Speaker 1: usually a candidate is so constrained right, and these disagreements
Speaker 1: remember in tuth as an eight the Democrats on on
Speaker 1: healthcare right, Democrats had huge fights about you know, did
Speaker 1: Obama have a employee mandate in his healthcare bill or
Speaker 1: a mandate and Hillary didn't. I mean, these are you know,
Speaker 1: pretty minor differences, whereas Trump is saying, I'm not going
Speaker 1: to play by those constraints where you can be you know,
Speaker 1: an eight point two or an eight point five on
Speaker 1: something right, I'm just gonna be all over the place.
Speaker 1: And that's how a lot of real people I think
Speaker 1: to write, um right there, their views aren't necessarily in
Speaker 1: tonally consistent, So so I would I would dispute that,
Speaker 1: like I think, you know, I don't think the party's
Speaker 1: views are that internally consistent either, Like I'm not sure why,
Speaker 1: you know, policy your views on taxation and gay marriage
Speaker 1: and um and uber and the war and Iraq should
Speaker 1: be correlate with one another that much. But you know, certainly, um,
Speaker 1: you know, these views coalescent to parties and people often. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, our Democrats are Helbicans for like one or
Speaker 1: two big issues, and they kind of say, you know what,
Speaker 1: it's a lot easier to kind of agree with the
Speaker 1: party on everything. Right, So I kind of disagree with
Speaker 1: the idea that, oh, um, trumps use are more incoherent,
Speaker 1: because I don't think anyone's views are all that coherent
Speaker 1: necessarily right, but definitely it's it's maps differently than any
Speaker 1: other candidates would. So at this point, given all the changes,
Speaker 1: well let's let's use gay marriage as an example. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court has ruled. I thought Case six. Answer was,
Speaker 1: and by the way, this is a kiss of death
Speaker 1: if I like you when a Republican primary, you're done
Speaker 1: last year. I thought, last last election, I'm like this
Speaker 1: huntsman guy seems pretty yeah, toast, that's the kisses I
Speaker 1: thought Case six answer was, Oh, that's who the responsible
Speaker 1: adults on the stages. It's him, So you know, he's not.
Speaker 1: And a lot of people who are running cases campaign
Speaker 1: ran Huntsman's campaign. Um, same people. It's a lot of
Speaker 1: same people. And their strategy is, you know, you want
Speaker 1: to kind of appealed to to the media. So the
Speaker 1: first debate was interesting in that, um, you know, the
Speaker 1: media spam was that case that had done really well, right,
Speaker 1: And I thought he did pretty well. I personally liked him,
Speaker 1: But I'm somewhere probably near you want to play the spectrum,
Speaker 1: and I know, right, um, socially progressive, a little, a
Speaker 1: little fiscally conservative and and to me, I I've assumed
Speaker 1: the abortion issue has been settled. I can't believe that's
Speaker 1: still ongoing. And and now it looks like the question
Speaker 1: of of nwage equality is settled. And the only one
Speaker 1: on the stage who seemed willing to say that was Casing.
Speaker 1: But if you looked at Google searches, which they now
Speaker 1: releas stayed in real time, Ben Carson was doing really well.
Speaker 1: People were interested in him. Cross is much less crazy
Speaker 1: than I expected, not that that's saying any He was
Speaker 1: pretty he was pretty down, toned down and mellow, and
Speaker 1: I know I thought that were okay, right, Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: for sure, when he's gaining the polls a little bit.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about Carly Fianna, who did really well
Speaker 1: at the children's tables. People have derisively called it, but
Speaker 1: I know her as a horrible CEO oversaw one of
Speaker 1: the worst mergers in technology history, you know, HP and
Speaker 1: Compact is described like a O L Time Warner. It
Speaker 1: was just a disaster, and she's laid off. I don't
Speaker 1: remember the number, a hundred thousand, some huge number. Can
Speaker 1: she really be a credible candidate given that background, she
Speaker 1: she's managed to fail And again send your hate email
Speaker 1: to Nate Silvertie, but I think she's failed upwards and
Speaker 1: I'm wholly unimpressed with her as a candidate UM or
Speaker 1: as a as a CEO, as a corporate I thought
Speaker 1: she did well in UM in the debate and the
Speaker 1: JV debate. It was very self possessed and kind of
Speaker 1: right understood the balance between you don't want to sound
Speaker 1: like a wing nut, but you want to make sure
Speaker 1: that you're memorable on that stage. People are kind of
Speaker 1: hap paying attention, you know. I know, I think it's
Speaker 1: a little bit premature. I think she's um she's not
Speaker 1: quite yet at the point where you're gonna see a
Speaker 1: lot of scrutiny. Um. But yeah, there's uh, you know,
Speaker 1: this is one of the things about comparing like Hillary
Speaker 1: and Bernie Sanders, right. You know, if you compare a
Speaker 1: candid who has um received a lot of scrutiny from
Speaker 1: the media, from other members of their party, from the
Speaker 1: other party, versus one who hasn't, it's a really apples
Speaker 1: to or or just comparison. Right. Um. You know, Sofia
Speaker 1: a Mina has not yet been through that scrutiny phase. Right. Um.
Speaker 1: If she keeps doing well, then her reward is that
Speaker 1: she'll she'll then endure that, right Um. But you know
Speaker 1: it's not I don't know. I would think she would
Speaker 1: have more chance me the nominee than Trump. Maybe you'd
Speaker 1: have to think about what about her is the vice
Speaker 1: presidential candidate. If Hillary is the nominee, put a woman
Speaker 1: on the ticket, I would imagine that would offset, um,
Speaker 1: some of the gender gap that is inherent with Hillary running. Sure,
Speaker 1: although women don't necessarily um support women who aren't good
Speaker 1: on on quote unquote women's issues, right, I mean, certainly
Speaker 1: not every woman is pro choice, right, but you know
Speaker 1: what many are but but many are, right, Um, and
Speaker 1: so you know, Republican women might have a more difficult
Speaker 1: time of it than than Democratic women. And what since,
Speaker 1: uh we're talking about Carly she kind of um caught
Speaker 1: some positive attention for her comments about the whole Megan
Speaker 1: Kelly Fox thing. Yea, how does that play into this? Uh?
Speaker 1: This is one thing that I, uh, one bad prediction
Speaker 1: we've made, right, I kind of thought that, boy when um,
Speaker 1: when Fox News started taking on Trump, that Fox were
Speaker 1: hammering and that Fox News wouldn't back down, and they
Speaker 1: did back down really really quickly to I mean, so
Speaker 1: you sound as surprised as I was. Yeah, I was
Speaker 1: surprised because I kind of thought that. But look, Fox News,
Speaker 1: like any major media organizations, a complicated place, right. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, they want ratings and attention. On the one hand,
Speaker 1: the their hand, you know, um have some influence in
Speaker 1: Republican politics, so on the some Yeah, on the third hand,
Speaker 1: you know, you have lots of individual producers, some of
Speaker 1: whom are awesome journalists and some of them are not.
Speaker 1: And you know it's a complicated place. But um, but
Speaker 1: you know, it was funny how explicit Trump was about
Speaker 1: the quid pro quel like, I got you terrific ratings
Speaker 1: right and made you all this money, and you're giving
Speaker 1: me this right and I'm like, yeah, you have a point,
Speaker 1: you know, And um, you know, it was amazing. I
Speaker 1: thought Fox did a great job on the on the debate.
Speaker 1: I watched about an hour of it, maybe a little more,
Speaker 1: and at that point, you know it started. You know,
Speaker 1: it's when you're watching a game and it looks like
Speaker 1: a blowout and all right, I don't need to watch
Speaker 1: the stay for the fourth quarter. That's kind of but
Speaker 1: it seemed really interesting. The one name we didn't mention,
Speaker 1: um who I could give you a whole laundry list
Speaker 1: of reasons why he's terrible and I don't like him.
Speaker 1: But I thought Chris Christie did a really good job
Speaker 1: at the debate. So the Christie story is kind of fascinating.
Speaker 1: We've been on um on the Chris Christie's toast man wagon,
Speaker 1: I recall, for a long time before it was cool, um,
Speaker 1: you know, in part because he's a guy who the
Speaker 1: party wants, Kenny, who's conservative but also reliable, right, And
Speaker 1: I think Christie is he is a guy who's not
Speaker 1: that reliable. He's no longer very popular with independent voters.
Speaker 1: But but who knows. I I almost think everyone at
Speaker 1: the office dis agrees with this, right. I think it
Speaker 1: would almost help Christie if um if he dropped out
Speaker 1: of the top ten and then had the stage to
Speaker 1: himself at the next JV debate, right, and could be
Speaker 1: alpha male and totally dominant. I don't think Christy has
Speaker 1: is very likely at all to win the nomination, but
Speaker 1: he's a guy who could have a surge right in
Speaker 1: the media. The media is fascinated by Christie. He's a
Speaker 1: fascinating guy. He's great on his feet. I thought he
Speaker 1: I thought he hurt Ran Paul. I mean, he really
Speaker 1: came at him hard. And then so there's guys who
Speaker 1: you know, there's Christie, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, the three season.
Speaker 1: You know, they're all in the category of candidates I
Speaker 1: think could be the next candidate who searches but probably
Speaker 1: couldn't win the nomination, whereas Rubio Kik kind of slower
Speaker 1: and steadier. I think Rubio is a one candidate where
Speaker 1: you get the sense that he's not trying to win
Speaker 1: the nomination in August, which is probably a really smart
Speaker 1: thing to do. But my general impression of him is
Speaker 1: that he's a little young, he's a little green. Some
Speaker 1: of the other candidates that compared him to some guy
Speaker 1: at this term in his first Senate term named Barack Obama,
Speaker 1: which I find am using. But you could see there's
Speaker 1: a political um uh, there's a wind at his back
Speaker 1: that that could help him. If not this, uh not,
Speaker 1: then certainly. Yeah. Though I think one thing a lot
Speaker 1: of UM Republicans have learned is that UM and a
Speaker 1: lot of cands have learned is that you know, there's
Speaker 1: no time like today, right, you know, I'm sure are
Speaker 1: a lot of candidates this year, UM where you know
Speaker 1: Rick Perry, who was someone who had one of the
Speaker 1: better chances to beat Romney until he kind of imploded, right,
Speaker 1: you know, he was not in the top ten. Rick Santorum,
Speaker 1: who kind of sensibly finished in second place, was not
Speaker 1: in the top ten. So there has to be a
Speaker 1: lot of these candidates now we're kicking themselves and saying,
Speaker 1: you know what, Um, Romney a little bit underrated as
Speaker 1: candidate maybe, but boy, you know it was a much
Speaker 1: easier nomination to win in twelve and probably kicking themselves
Speaker 1: for not having run four years. Why do you say
Speaker 1: undernominated as a candidate. I'm curious about that because in
Speaker 1: the end, it's hard to beat an incumbent president. Um,
Speaker 1: the economy improved to the point where it was okay.
Speaker 1: I would take the other start of the arguments, say,
Speaker 1: when Romney was running against Obama, you had a very
Speaker 1: unpopular or at least it appeared to be unpopular. Um, Obamacare.
Speaker 1: It's since turned out to be quite successful. But here
Speaker 1: was a guy who put Obamacare only was Romney care
Speaker 1: in his state and the weakest economy, the weakest recovery
Speaker 1: you've seen in half a century. Certain, it was a gimme,
Speaker 1: but like like the average elected in president wins the
Speaker 1: second term by by eight percentage points in the popular vote,
Speaker 1: No Ababa went by four three point eight or something. Right,
Speaker 1: So Obama kind of did underperform, But it was a
Speaker 1: huge electoral college blowout. It was so the electoral college
Speaker 1: can make It's kind of designed that way to make
Speaker 1: a relatively small edge and the popular vote be bigger.
Speaker 1: UM in the electoral college, right, Um, And probably I
Speaker 1: think his campaign helped at the margin and some of
Speaker 1: the swing states to UM. But I don't know, I mean, UM,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't think Romney ran a terrific campaign.
Speaker 1: I think he was not a disaster though, either. And
Speaker 1: I think people, um, you know, again, you go back
Speaker 1: to the fact that historically incumbent presidents are re elected
Speaker 1: seventy percent of time UM and this was just one
Speaker 1: of those. And a lot of subtle ways, like going
Speaker 1: into like UM a college football stadium or something, right,
Speaker 1: UM Michigan Stadium where UM US, at least it used
Speaker 1: to be University Michigan was tough to to beat there,
Speaker 1: and it kind of manifests self in all sorts of
Speaker 1: subtle way us to get better officiating, you know, the
Speaker 1: playing surface a little bit better, a little bit better
Speaker 1: under pressure. It's tough to beat an incumbent president. And
Speaker 1: I'm not saying Romney was the most horrific nominee, but
Speaker 1: these guys get kind of tarnished with the loser brush
Speaker 1: or John Kerry is another one where he lost by
Speaker 1: by two points. You know, people are right in the
Speaker 1: middle of an active war, which at the time UM
Speaker 1: that war was somewhat popular, right where the plurality of
Speaker 1: Americans in the four right six months later, different six
Speaker 1: months later, I think um Bush might have lost that
Speaker 1: election was really close. But um, but you know, at
Speaker 1: the time, the economy was had recovered from a mild recession,
Speaker 1: um and looked not bad, right, um, you know, and
Speaker 1: you had a war that was becoming less and less popular.
Speaker 1: But um it it's easy to have hindsight bias now right.
Speaker 1: And their models part of the two their models that
Speaker 1: look at factors like the economy measured in various ways,
Speaker 1: you know, war measured in various ways. Incumbent see and
Speaker 1: most of them said, oh, you know, Carrie should lose
Speaker 1: by by several points, and you know he did about
Speaker 1: as well. I didn't realize it was that close. I
Speaker 1: thought carry had lost much more substantially Democrats, because you
Speaker 1: do have this kind of tied shifting in how Iraq
Speaker 1: was perceived and the Bush presidency was perceived, right, um,
Speaker 1: And I think you had Democrats kind of saying, boy,
Speaker 1: how can we not win this election? And that's kind
Speaker 1: of parallel to two thousand. I didn't hear a lot
Speaker 1: of Democrats saying that to me. I thought it was
Speaker 1: sitting President nine eleven, still very fresh in memory. You're
Speaker 1: you're the old expression I kept hearing was you don't
Speaker 1: change horses mid stream. You're in the middle of an
Speaker 1: active war, and the tendency is to reelect the income
Speaker 1: in in the middle of an active war. Is that
Speaker 1: is that overstating the circumstances. Well, war, it depends on
Speaker 1: it's a popular war and an unpopular war. Right in
Speaker 1: Iraq was going from a war that was initially very popular, uh,
Speaker 1: to one that wasn't And as easy as amazing as
Speaker 1: it sounds like, it's easy to forget the impact of
Speaker 1: September eleven, um, you know, and that still cast a
Speaker 1: real shadow on the way the race was contested to
Speaker 1: so things about Vietnam and seventy two and next we
Speaker 1: got reelected. That was a terribly unpopular war by seventy two,
Speaker 1: by the late sixties it was unpopular. But it just
Speaker 1: seems to be a sense that's not well. S two
Speaker 1: is one of those cases where the kindo was actually
Speaker 1: not so bad and seventy to um. But that is
Speaker 1: a case where the Democrats blew any chance they had
Speaker 1: by nominating McGovern And in this convention where it went
Speaker 1: until three in the morning that the world gave his
Speaker 1: speech and they picked a VP who they had to
Speaker 1: then veto. Right, I mean that was you know. So, um,
Speaker 1: so people should remember that SENTI Too campaign because it
Speaker 1: means like you know, this app doesn't always win, right. Um,
Speaker 1: there is this kind of you know five chance empirically
Speaker 1: that um that they don't um. But the odds are
Speaker 1: are you know, certainly in Hillary Clinton's favor uh, certainly
Speaker 1: against someone like like Donald Trump right where you know,
Speaker 1: and maybe at the party the GOP is weaker than
Speaker 1: it once was, but they're going to fight until they're
Speaker 1: dying embers to not nominate Donald Trump. He's kind of
Speaker 1: a trifecta of things that um that they wouldn't like.
Speaker 1: Number one, he's not very popular with independent voters. Um.
Speaker 1: People talk about how you know kind of Trump is
Speaker 1: extremely he's a new populism take of the country. Well,
Speaker 1: you know he is really awful. Favorability ratings with the
Speaker 1: electorate as a whole about negative positive right um. Number
Speaker 1: two he's now that conservative. And number three, you don't
Speaker 1: know we're gonna get with him, right. Um. So you
Speaker 1: know there's kind of the three criteria that the party
Speaker 1: would say, boy, you know it could this could be
Speaker 1: a real disaster. And and yeah, so gun to the
Speaker 1: head today you're are you looking at Hillary Bush or
Speaker 1: Clinton Bush or is it Clinton somebody else? I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, I kind of think, um, on the GP side,
Speaker 1: it's about Rubio Walker and other Right, Really, that's fascinating.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't have thought maybe I'd diminished Walker's chances a bit.
Speaker 1: He struggled in the polls after the debate somewhat unless
Speaker 1: he really comes back in the next debate. He seemed
Speaker 1: kind of soften, not ready for prime And that was
Speaker 1: some reputation he had, is that this guy is does
Speaker 1: find one on one but maybe his trouble standing out
Speaker 1: a little bit. At the same time, you know, um,
Speaker 1: he's leading the Iowa polls or at least as a
Speaker 1: leading non Trump candidate, depending on what poll you look at, right,
Speaker 1: and he kind of is that's a new category. Leading
Speaker 1: non Trump can today. But you do almost have to
Speaker 1: pull Trump. It's a little bit how uh, in a
Speaker 1: weird way with um Ron Paul in two thousand twelves
Speaker 1: where Ron Paul was going to get of the vote
Speaker 1: and if the vote were divided evenly enough among other candidates,
Speaker 1: then um, then that my have been enough to win.
Speaker 1: He came pretty close, right, you know. You know, but
Speaker 1: being the leading non Trump Candida. I mean the term
Speaker 1: front runners used um sometimes in horse racing for a
Speaker 1: horse that uh jumps out to really quickly, but it's
Speaker 1: not going to have the stamina stamina to go the distance. Right.
Speaker 1: And so you know, if you call Trump for front runner,
Speaker 1: I kind of think in that more ibronic sense, it
Speaker 1: might be more worthwhile. But you could also hold on
Speaker 1: to and then not really grow from there. There are
Speaker 1: a lot of guys that, um, you know again, Pat Robertson,
Speaker 1: Pat Buchanan, Paul Huckabee, Santaurum. Right, Um, you know you
Speaker 1: can win Iowa in a field with seventeen candidates, with
Speaker 1: twenty doesn't mean a lot, you know. One poster recently said, Um, okay,
Speaker 1: let's just take this down to three candidates. Um, you know, Trump, Walker,
Speaker 1: and Bush. I think it was and Trump barely gained anything,
Speaker 1: whereas Walker and Rubio pick up support from the sense
Speaker 1: Christie's and and the fi Arenas and the whatnot right. Um,
Speaker 1: And so as that field consolidates, right, then Trump will
Speaker 1: have trouble or maybe it won't consolidate, but then you're
Speaker 1: gonna have like know him with a plurality of delegates. Um,
Speaker 1: this is a scenario that journalists dream of, um, brokered convention, madness,
Speaker 1: brookered convention or at least, you know, maybe resolved before
Speaker 1: the convention. But and there's a lot of backroom dealing.
Speaker 1: Trump is not going to benefit from that because the
Speaker 1: Party of Salesman faciates his guts. Right. So, um, you know.
Speaker 1: But the one thing that would make me more bullish
Speaker 1: about Trump's chances. You hear he's actually investing in staff
Speaker 1: in Iowa, right, is he or is he not? You
Speaker 1: never know. It's there's a lot of smoke mirrors with
Speaker 1: any candy at the stage the race. Um. And also
Speaker 1: you can invest in something and not do a good
Speaker 1: job of it. Right. But you know, um, you know
Speaker 1: again the one candidate who defied the establishment and one
Speaker 1: was McGovern seventy two a long time ago. Very different
Speaker 1: cannate than Trump, very different. Um. But you know it
Speaker 1: wasn't just uh he got lucky. He had lots of
Speaker 1: grass roots support. He understood how to in caucuses, He
Speaker 1: understood the delegate rules. He understood you know, party conventions
Speaker 1: and how the delegates are allocated that the caucus can
Speaker 1: change later on. Right. Um, you know, so if he
Speaker 1: if Trump has that side of the operation, really good logistics,
Speaker 1: and understands the rules and has had a lot has
Speaker 1: a lot of lawyers willing to litigate when the GOP
Speaker 1: tries to change the rules. Then then you know, maybe
Speaker 1: i'd make his odds six percent instead of two percent.
Speaker 1: But still, yeah, I think so, Because I was the
Speaker 1: last political question I wanted to ask you was what
Speaker 1: happens in the head to head between Trump and Clinton? UM,
Speaker 1: I think Clinton wins thirty eight states or something. It's
Speaker 1: that so so Trump's core audience is his core audience.
Speaker 1: He's got those folks, but as other candidates drop out
Speaker 1: of the race, he's not gonna necessarily attract those those voters.
Speaker 1: Now he's not that popular, right, I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: again his kind of unfavorable reading ORG about Hillary because
Speaker 1: she's now like five points it's like, you know, forty
Speaker 1: to forty two or something. Now right with Trump, it's
Speaker 1: like sixty five to thirty. He is not very popular
Speaker 1: apart from UM, apart from you know, a certain number
Speaker 1: of Republicans. Um, of course you could also run as
Speaker 1: an independent. Is that likely to happen or is that
Speaker 1: a lot of noise? I mean, ordinarily you'd say no,
Speaker 1: but I think Donald Trump doesn't like to hear no
Speaker 1: for an answer, right, And you can certainly decide. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm having too much fun, right, right, And
Speaker 1: it's gonna be grateful whatever my next show is, when
Speaker 1: it's gonna be great. Right. And he seems like he's
Speaker 1: a guy he wouldn't mind spying people. You know, It's again,
Speaker 1: it's not clearly he's really a Republican. Rights Like, Ordinarily
Speaker 1: a Republican would say, you know, at the end of
Speaker 1: the day, I owe an oath of loyalty to my party. Right,
Speaker 1: Trump might say, you know, I don't care if it's
Speaker 1: Jeff Bush or Clinton, right, or Rubio or Clinton. You know,
Speaker 1: it's all the same difference to me. Right, I'm so
Speaker 1: all over the place, So so I don't know. You know, Um,
Speaker 1: there was a story out some time ago that last
Speaker 1: year Trump spoke to Clinton and um, yeah, he was
Speaker 1: encouraged to run or or he wasn't discharged from running
Speaker 1: or something like that, and the conspiracy nuts all uncrazy
Speaker 1: about it. Yeah, I think it's quite a conspiracy. But
Speaker 1: you you clearly you have a guy who's running as
Speaker 1: a Republican who does not care about the long term
Speaker 1: misinterest of the Republican Party at all. Right, Um, you
Speaker 1: know he's a potential spoiler. That's very different. And and
Speaker 1: even though I think he's very unluckly to win the nomination,
Speaker 1: the chance that can make it difficult for the GEOP
Speaker 1: to nominate to candidate, difficult for them to coordinate a message.
Speaker 1: And the chance I still think is low but not
Speaker 1: negligible that he would run as independent. Right, So I
Speaker 1: think he's um mostly bad news for the GP. I
Speaker 1: was trying to make. I always want to make my
Speaker 1: own contrarian case, gendering a lot of enthusiasm where to
Speaker 1: look reasonable as compared to him. But you know, he
Speaker 1: certainly brought a lot of excitement so race that probably
Speaker 1: wouldn't be here August. But what I say is Trump
Speaker 1: can be a problem for the GOP, even if he's
Speaker 1: very unluckly to win. Right. Quite fascinating. So let me
Speaker 1: shift gears on you and talk a little bit about
Speaker 1: you and some other aspects. You know. We we quickly
Speaker 1: went over your background on the on the radio portion. Um,
Speaker 1: prior to Pakoda, there was a quote of yours that
Speaker 1: I really liked. You. You were working at KPMG in Chicago,
Speaker 1: and someone had once asked you what's your biggest regret
Speaker 1: in life? And you said, spending four years of my
Speaker 1: life in a job I didn't like? Yeah? Is that accurate?
Speaker 1: Is that a true? Uh? I've been true, true quote.
Speaker 1: I've been lucky enough. And so whether you work, it's
Speaker 1: been half your time working or you know, man with
Speaker 1: onum work and I we bet listeners of the show
Speaker 1: are somewhere higher on the spectrum of how much energy
Speaker 1: they to vote to work. Um, you know it's time.
Speaker 1: You can't get back really, and even though the day
Speaker 1: to day can be a grind any job, just to
Speaker 1: have a job where you fundamentally our challenged intellectually, were you? Uh,
Speaker 1: where you enjoy yourself, where you have ownership of the work,
Speaker 1: where you like the people I work, you work with?
Speaker 1: I did like my colleagues ATKPMG. That was not the
Speaker 1: issue at all, right, But um, but a really great
Speaker 1: team I work with now, I mean that's you know,
Speaker 1: that's really important to say the least. And then and
Speaker 1: then you quit KPMG and you start playing poker. Yeah,
Speaker 1: how did how did that work out? Um? So there
Speaker 1: was kind of a poker boom, which I would call
Speaker 1: more of a poker bubble really in the mid two thousands. So,
Speaker 1: uh so my buddy at KPMG is like, Hey, we're
Speaker 1: gonna get a game going. I'm like, I'm really competitive.
Speaker 1: So I started practicing online at like Yahoo where you
Speaker 1: play for free, and I'm like, you can't really play
Speaker 1: for poker without without real money, right, So some online
Speaker 1: site was like deposit Bucks and you can withdraw it
Speaker 1: and it's like basically free money. Right. Of course, I
Speaker 1: got kind of hooked and started staying up all night
Speaker 1: and playing poker. And at the time, you know, I
Speaker 1: played a little bit, and Kyle just a couple of
Speaker 1: years out of colle at that point, and you know,
Speaker 1: the quality of play was really poor and just kind
Speaker 1: of using a very basic ABC strategy. You can make
Speaker 1: a little bit of money if you started to, you know,
Speaker 1: um bluff a little bit and be a little more aggressive.
Speaker 1: Could do even better than that. So but yeah, I
Speaker 1: kind of made my living mostly playing poker for a
Speaker 1: couple of years, so you did pretty well and otherwise
Speaker 1: I made a couple hundred thousand and then lost some
Speaker 1: of it, but enough that, you know, it was a
Speaker 1: very cool experience. But ultimately it was like, you know,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like the proverbial hundred dollar bills sitting
Speaker 1: on the ground. It kind of dried up once people
Speaker 1: realize that that's money to be made. It got arbitraged away.
Speaker 1: That's the famous quote, if if there ever was a
Speaker 1: magic formula, it would eventually be whittled away as everybody
Speaker 1: started using the formula, at least in the stock market.
Speaker 1: That's uh, that's that's how it works. Let's talk a
Speaker 1: little bit about hunches, right, And I don't know if
Speaker 1: if Malcolm Gladwell is the best person to use as
Speaker 1: an example for that, and I think he's sort of
Speaker 1: backtracked on on some of his early earlier statements. But
Speaker 1: when you look at the work he's done with outliers
Speaker 1: that after you've done something for ten thousand hours or
Speaker 1: some ungodly decade amount of time, you know enough of
Speaker 1: your you subconsciously recognize the statistical spread at the the
Speaker 1: probable outcomes that you could select the best just out
Speaker 1: of out of habit. How do you, um, how do
Speaker 1: you look at that sort of approach of intuition or
Speaker 1: haunches or what have you. I mean, I'm suspicious of
Speaker 1: the ten hour hypothesis. Right. Um, you know, but one
Speaker 1: experience is pretty new for me now is that now
Speaker 1: we have a whole bunch of employees, a whole bunch,
Speaker 1: but um, you know, two dozen at five thirty eight,
Speaker 1: and I often work with our our younger writers and
Speaker 1: analysts son on the problem. And um, you do see
Speaker 1: the benefit of experience there, right, where you're developing some
Speaker 1: little model or formulate to address like a question in baseball. Right,
Speaker 1: And even though the younger writer I might work with
Speaker 1: is like super smart, as smart as me. Um, I've
Speaker 1: just been doing this now for for ten or fifteen years, right,
Speaker 1: so I can say, you know what, you're unnecessarily complicating
Speaker 1: the problem. They're right, And that's just gonna make it
Speaker 1: hard to explain and make the model. Overfit is technical
Speaker 1: term or you know what oh here in other words,
Speaker 1: overfit meaning it's geared towards what happened previously, and you're
Speaker 1: making it. Yeah, it's like too rigid mask right or
Speaker 1: commercially like, you know what, you're making an approximation here
Speaker 1: that's just way too clumsy, right, and you're missing the
Speaker 1: whole gist of the problem. We're trying to solve here, right,
Speaker 1: Like that intuition for kind of which method works. Um,
Speaker 1: you know that's built from experience, I think, but you
Speaker 1: know what I mean, it's you know again, intuition kind
Speaker 1: of makes it seem like you're not spending much time
Speaker 1: thinking about the problem. It's kinda like you've invested that
Speaker 1: time before and developing some some expertise. Right. Um, So
Speaker 1: I softened on that a little bit. Um. But the
Speaker 1: problem is that you know, um, they're very any systems
Speaker 1: like politics, for example, where kind of it's are all
Speaker 1: the Daniel Kneman system one versus system two type of thinking,
Speaker 1: where the instinctual reaction is to overreact to things, right,
Speaker 1: and to say, oh, here's a new poll that came
Speaker 1: out that shows um, Bernie Sanders ahead of Hiller Clinton
Speaker 1: in New Hampshire. This is really dramatic, and all my
Speaker 1: friends are talking about this poll, right, and you kind
Speaker 1: of ignore the fact that there have been file other
Speaker 1: polls of New Hampshire in the past two weeks that
Speaker 1: show Clinton ahead, and also that New Hampshire is one
Speaker 1: state and pulls every other states so show Clinton ahead, right,
Speaker 1: And that this happens kind of in every election. Cycle. Um,
Speaker 1: so it's very useful to kind of, I think, slow
Speaker 1: down and and not overreacting in the market. We call
Speaker 1: that the recency effect, where you have this long series
Speaker 1: of of of long data series and a trend supporting it,
Speaker 1: and then you'll get something within a statistical range of possibilities.
Speaker 1: But that's off trends, and that's so much of you know,
Speaker 1: we aren't trying to predict what the polls will say tomorrow, right.
Speaker 1: You know, there's a lot of people who want to
Speaker 1: know kind of what's the mark are gonna do today? Right,
Speaker 1: We're kind of like, well, you know, here's your kind
Speaker 1: of not ten year time horizon, right, but here's your
Speaker 1: six month time horizon. Right. That we still think Hillary
Speaker 1: Clinton is very likely to be the Democratic nominee. That
Speaker 1: we're not sure who the GOP nominee will be, but
Speaker 1: we'd be short Trump stock as it were, right. Um.
Speaker 1: It also helps to quantify these things to some extent too.
Speaker 1: So in some sense it's kind of like, um, if
Speaker 1: you ask me what's your chance of Trump winning? We
Speaker 1: don't have a model yet, we probably will at some point, right,
Speaker 1: but you know the nomination I say it's two percent.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's kind of a spit balled estimate, but
Speaker 1: it's useful to have to put at least the order
Speaker 1: of magnitude on the table, you know, a small, non
Speaker 1: zero chance, because there are journalists who will say, you know, right,
Speaker 1: an article and say, oh, of course Trump is unluckily
Speaker 1: to win, but here are all the reasons he has
Speaker 1: momentum blah blah blah. Right, you know, and if you
Speaker 1: read that article, the sense you might get is that,
Speaker 1: you know, kind a pretty decent shot, right, you know.
Speaker 1: But if you actually kind of actually had them say
Speaker 1: we think the chances about two percent or say zero
Speaker 1: to five percent, at least the order of magnitude, right,
Speaker 1: and that would be useful, right, you know, because in
Speaker 1: some sense, if we say a lot of our calls
Speaker 1: that are like, oh, you know, no one gives Bernie
Speaker 1: a chance, but but he could win. It's like I
Speaker 1: give a chance, you know, five percent or whatever. But
Speaker 1: the journalists or Pundy who writes a column saying, you know,
Speaker 1: Hillary is not inevitable. I mean, in a literal sense,
Speaker 1: I agree with that. It's not a percent. It's not
Speaker 1: quite close to say it's a rounding error, right, But
Speaker 1: you know, it's pretty low and to actually say is
Speaker 1: there a real beef here or not? You know, my
Speaker 1: view is at five eight, if we think a candidate
Speaker 1: has a chance of winning, then most of our coverage
Speaker 1: should reflect the reasons why she probably will win, and
Speaker 1: occasionally we would have a piece saying that here's something
Speaker 1: of her to be really worried about. Right. The ratio
Speaker 1: in the mainstream media is like almost the reverse, right,
Speaker 1: where it's like they're so many reasons why the percent
Speaker 1: might come through and there's very little, just a perfunctory
Speaker 1: reminder that, oh, by the way, she's leading in the
Speaker 1: national polls by thirty points and no kind has ever
Speaker 1: done that before, right, you know, without being nominated. Right,
Speaker 1: you know, so the ratio is a little bit askew,
Speaker 1: even though I'm not sure there would really be a beef.
Speaker 1: If I if I, you know, sat down with the
Speaker 1: calumnists that I read a sarchastic tweet about, right, you know,
Speaker 1: he or she might agree that, yeah, Bernie Sander's chances
Speaker 1: are you know, five percent or ten percent just kind
Speaker 1: of in you know, I want the thrust and the
Speaker 1: kind of tone of the articles, you're right to kind
Speaker 1: of reflect that reality, not just as a caveat in
Speaker 1: the fifth paragraph that the that's the problem with narrative
Speaker 1: and the problem with human speech, which developed around a
Speaker 1: time when there was no written language, that narratives are
Speaker 1: more memorable, the more exciting, and the greater the horse race.
Speaker 1: What you give up in accuracy, you gain in page views.
Speaker 1: And that seems to be my gross It seems like
Speaker 1: there's some reduction that can occur. You know, we're lucky
Speaker 1: in the sense that kind of because everyone else is
Speaker 1: saying one thing that we can get a lot of
Speaker 1: attention by kind of saying no, this is probably pretty wrong,
Speaker 1: you know. But you know, I think there's also something
Speaker 1: mathematically accurate, right, um, But I think there is also
Speaker 1: there is also a group think that sets in apart
Speaker 1: from just a page viewing everybody on the same bus
Speaker 1: here in the same nonsense and having that's and that's
Speaker 1: somewhat literally true. So I went to literally Yeah, So
Speaker 1: I went to New Hampshire for a week or so
Speaker 1: in two thousand and twelve, right, and for the first
Speaker 1: time in my life, I went to um a presidential debate,
Speaker 1: one of the primary debates, right, And I kind of thought,
Speaker 1: you go to the debate, and you have credential and
Speaker 1: you're in the debating hall, you kind of see how
Speaker 1: things play in the room. No, it says you're heard
Speaker 1: it in this giant gymnasium with two thousand other journalists
Speaker 1: all checking one other Twitter feeds in real time. It's
Speaker 1: like the literal definition of group think being being manufactured. UM,
Speaker 1: And so I want to emphasize that line, the literal
Speaker 1: definition of group think being manual. And so we're talking
Speaker 1: about kind of the conventional wisdom. You know, sometimes in
Speaker 1: markets you embody the convention wisdom with what the market prices, right,
Speaker 1: but there's some separation. You know, if you look at UM,
Speaker 1: I mention there are betting markets where you can go
Speaker 1: and UM by Stock so to speaking Bernie Sanders Hiller Clinton,
Speaker 1: and they have not seen Clinton's odds changed very much, right,
Speaker 1: whereas the tenor of the news coverage has changed quite
Speaker 1: a bit. That that's fascinating. I'm gonna shift gears on
Speaker 1: you again. UM. So, who are your early mentors that
Speaker 1: you kind of come out of Chicago and you create
Speaker 1: or at least amplify a form of statistical analysis. Apply
Speaker 1: it to baseball, Apply it to UM campaigns, and elections.
Speaker 1: Who who motivated this? I mean, you know, Bill James,
Speaker 1: kind of the guyfathers stuff and in terms of not
Speaker 1: just having the satistical child to being able to communicate
Speaker 1: it to white all agins and kind of ask essential
Speaker 1: questions about about baseball. Um, you know, I looked up
Speaker 1: to some of the guys that work with a baseball perspectives,
Speaker 1: but I'm pretty self motivated on the whole. You found
Speaker 1: your way into this basically, Hey, here's something that's not
Speaker 1: being done right, and here's a bit of way to
Speaker 1: do Yeah. Like, boy, I think, you know, I think
Speaker 1: the coverage I watched on TV during two thousand and
Speaker 1: seven is very frustrating and so um so boy, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna have to do it myself, right, you know I
Speaker 1: kind of if no one else is gonna do it right,
Speaker 1: you might as well step up. That's challenge me now,
Speaker 1: right where I have a bunch of great people I'm
Speaker 1: working with, right, and it's kind of like, you know,
Speaker 1: how can I figure out not to do everything well?
Speaker 1: It's a challenge learning how to delegate that stuff. Let's
Speaker 1: let's you mentioned, um, Bill James, Let's talk about books.
Speaker 1: So obviously Kamon's book very influential to thinking about thinking.
Speaker 1: What other books have really uh, either inspired you or
Speaker 1: you've really enjoyed fiction non fiction that doesn't matter. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's a very wonky book called UH by Phil Tetlock
Speaker 1: was press new book coming out and new becoming out soon, right.
Speaker 1: It was called Expert Political Judgment explic Forecast. So that's
Speaker 1: a good kind of te temic book about about forecasting.
Speaker 1: But um, and how the experts are indistinguishable from a
Speaker 1: random person in public when it comes to making these
Speaker 1: predictions and forecasts a year out. Um, they're like barely
Speaker 1: even better than undergraduates. I think was the most amazing Um,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean, I don't know. In terms of
Speaker 1: UH storytelling, I think Michael Lewis is a terrific storyteller.
Speaker 1: I guess my answers are quite conventional and boring. Here.
Speaker 1: Did you ever read James Glick's The Information? I've read
Speaker 1: parts of it? Yeah, dude, that is so up your alley.
Speaker 1: I will check. I you know, I love his stuff.
Speaker 1: Do you want to talk wonky? So my undergraduate was
Speaker 1: applied math and physics before I switched to Polly say
Speaker 1: and so his book. I found him because of the
Speaker 1: book Chaos Making of a Science, and it's you know,
Speaker 1: way into the weeds on physics. But few people can
Speaker 1: take hard science and make it a narrative. That's interesting.
Speaker 1: I read that on a beach one summer and found
Speaker 1: it absolutely information just absolute fascinating. Diet Tribe on the
Speaker 1: history of of information science. Yeah, I mean, I think
Speaker 1: all these things are you know, kind of history of
Speaker 1: nala tripe. But I know, you know, to be honest,
Speaker 1: I traveled quite a bit and I used to catch
Speaker 1: up reading on planes, and now that I have people
Speaker 1: to manage and there's Internet connections on the planes and
Speaker 1: stuff like that, reading for pleasure has has declined. Unfortunately.
Speaker 1: Um so the net. A related question, what other mathematicians
Speaker 1: or statisticians either influenced you or influenced your approach to
Speaker 1: looking at at what you do? You mentioned Tetlock. Anybody
Speaker 1: who's really a political scientist, anybody else really leap out.
Speaker 1: I mean, there a couple of guys like Colombia whose
Speaker 1: name is and be familiar, but you know, Andrew Gelman
Speaker 1: is a guy there, Bob Arricks, and who are political scientists,
Speaker 1: um who have still at elections for a long time,
Speaker 1: and and we're helpful. But you know, um, you know, I,
Speaker 1: like I said, I'm pretty self taught for for the
Speaker 1: most part. I picture you as a lonely mathematician, light
Speaker 1: burning in the window, and uh, working by yourself. Is
Speaker 1: that kind of how this all came about? Sort of?
Speaker 1: It's different. I mean, I live with a partner and
Speaker 1: I manage people at work, right, so I don't have
Speaker 1: as much, um much alone time as as the old days. Right. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm one of those people who's kind of
Speaker 1: very much in the middle of the extroversion introversion curd.
Speaker 1: I can go, I can go crazy on either extreme. Um,
Speaker 1: but um, but you know, yeah, some of this pursuit
Speaker 1: is pretty pretty solitary inherently, I think, right, uh, sure,
Speaker 1: you're thinking about what the status quo is doing wrong, right,
Speaker 1: and trying to come up with ways of thinking about
Speaker 1: it that makes more sense and as more probitive value,
Speaker 1: more statistics. It seems like if you kind of start,
Speaker 1: you know, so I think about this Clinton versus Sanders thing, right, Um,
Speaker 1: you know, before the campaign began, if you kind of
Speaker 1: had told yourself, well, you know what, no matter what happens,
Speaker 1: there's gonna be a strong incentive for for the media
Speaker 1: to make it seem like the race is really competitive
Speaker 1: and it will be exceptionally clever in UM. In ways,
Speaker 1: almost all this is unconscious, by the way, Right, I'm
Speaker 1: not saying they're deliberately putting their finger on scale. Right. Well,
Speaker 1: you're boards are doing the same thing every day. You're boring.
Speaker 1: There's so many polls, so many indicators to look at,
Speaker 1: so many ways you can Um, it's a very large
Speaker 1: constellation of information, right, so many ways you can draw
Speaker 1: threads together that inevertly. You'll see some stories written about
Speaker 1: how quote unquote unexpectedly you know, Bernie Sanders is doing
Speaker 1: is doing well, right, and you can kind of brace
Speaker 1: yourself for that in in the abstract, UM, but it's
Speaker 1: kind of hard to do that when you're confronted with it.
Speaker 1: Another example is that almost every year, there are some exceptions. UM,
Speaker 1: a candidate gets a boost in the polls after the convention. Right,
Speaker 1: so the bump Rubio, Bush Walker, whomever, Trump, Um, we'll
Speaker 1: have his convention, Uh, get a five point bump in
Speaker 1: the polls and it'll fade, right, And this is you know,
Speaker 1: pretty predictable. Um, it's gonna be really hard when a
Speaker 1: Democrats experiencing that not to think it's something new and
Speaker 1: different this time, and the press will event all types
Speaker 1: of reasons why you know this time is different and
Speaker 1: it it probably won't be. You know, debates can produce
Speaker 1: little bumps too, but it's kind of like you're about
Speaker 1: to go on on a roller coaster. You can kind of, um,
Speaker 1: you can say, well, I know we're gonna go up
Speaker 1: this hill and then come down it really fast, right,
Speaker 1: and there's and I'd relate to it, but you know,
Speaker 1: it doesn't. You can still kind of suspend your disbelief,
Speaker 1: and of course, if you're an roller coaster, you want
Speaker 1: to suspend your disbelief and have a lot of fun
Speaker 1: with it. Right. But you know, my job as someone
Speaker 1: who covers campaigns, someone who's more empirical but also critical,
Speaker 1: is to kind of stay at a distance and say,
Speaker 1: you know what, I know, you guys think that this
Speaker 1: Trump thing is new and different, and by the way,
Speaker 1: it probably won't evaporate tomorrow. Right, it might take some time,
Speaker 1: but um, the odds of a guy who basically isn't
Speaker 1: a Republican being dominated by the Frolican party is pretty
Speaker 1: darned low. So on a related note, I have to
Speaker 1: share a funny story with you. So we just this
Speaker 1: past weekend. We we had family members in from Chicago
Speaker 1: and I remember No. Eight them saying, I know you
Speaker 1: think Hillary is going to be coronated, but this Barack guy,
Speaker 1: who we've seen in town for years, don't underestimate him.
Speaker 1: He's he's got something and he surprises Hillary. He gets
Speaker 1: the nomination and then Lader in the year. As as
Speaker 1: the election move forward, I want to say August September,
Speaker 1: October of eight. Um, my sister in law, we we
Speaker 1: just had this conversation this weekend. I mentioned I'm gonna
Speaker 1: be seeing Nate Silver on Monday. She goes, oh, he
Speaker 1: made my oh eight so much better? Why she goes, well,
Speaker 1: I really thought there were big Obama supporters. I really
Speaker 1: thought he was gonna lose. But every time I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: in every time they went to they said, you were
Speaker 1: reassuring that here's what we are statistically, and while it's
Speaker 1: not impossible for him to lose, you know, the electoral
Speaker 1: College makes it really hard for Mitt Romney to garner
Speaker 1: two seventy votes and and here's the likely and she
Speaker 1: said it was a despite the media drumbeat despite how
Speaker 1: how close this was. So so she credits you for
Speaker 1: making her two thousand twelve much better, and I get
Speaker 1: that coming a lot. Yeah, that exact kind of sentiment.
Speaker 1: That because you can kind of lose yourself in the
Speaker 1: media coverage and because yeah it's weird, like I, um,
Speaker 1: in our election coverage, we kind of always wind up um.
Speaker 1: Incentive wise, We're always kind of rooting for the favorite,
Speaker 1: which is I'm not that kind of guy, right, I'm
Speaker 1: like an underdog, unpredictable kind of guy. Um. But you know,
Speaker 1: the media will take a race where one can it
Speaker 1: kind of objectively quote unquote has a nine chance of
Speaker 1: winning and really really sell the case that it's neck
Speaker 1: and neck. Right. Um. Papers, Yeah, it's how you sell papers.
Speaker 1: And so I kind of always wind up um, you know,
Speaker 1: being the person who says, you know what, this is
Speaker 1: not that schucking and prediction. But Donald Trump probably not
Speaker 1: going to be Republican nominee, Bernie Sanders probably will not
Speaker 1: be the Democratic nominee. And we will, believe me, one year,
Speaker 1: we'll get one of those things wrong. I mean we've
Speaker 1: had cases where um, where another context sports and whatnot,
Speaker 1: where you know, unluckily things have happened. But um, but
Speaker 1: you know, it can really throw people for for a loop.
Speaker 1: Um but you know, the fact is also in fourteen
Speaker 1: we had from the very first time a couple shift
Speaker 1: forecast the GOPS favorites to pick up the Senate from
Speaker 1: from Democrats, and a lot of people were not remotely
Speaker 1: close to seeing that. No. No, it really depends on
Speaker 1: the presidential coattails, and it depends on this Yeah, and
Speaker 1: people you know, and you saw it quite a bit
Speaker 1: of it in in reverse. I think like Harry Reid,
Speaker 1: you know, he's like, this guy's an idiot. He always
Speaker 1: under said, well democrats would do see, you do get
Speaker 1: it from from both from both sides a little bit, right.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying this is you know, we're not going
Speaker 1: to burn another hour here. I'm not saying the parties
Speaker 1: are exactly identical. But um but you know you would
Speaker 1: get comments like how did Nate Silver turn into a Republican? Right,
Speaker 1: It's like my views haven't really changed that much, right,
Speaker 1: just like I think, you know, here's where the polls
Speaker 1: and the fundamentals point is that you have, you know,
Speaker 1: last year's mid terms, howquckly we forget right that, you know,
Speaker 1: with this big blowout for the GOP just last year. Right, Um,
Speaker 1: but you know, all these states are being fought for
Speaker 1: in red states, and Obama's unpopular and democratic turnout looks
Speaker 1: like it might be bad. Right, It's not that complicated necessarily,
Speaker 1: So I would be remiss if I didn't mention unskewed
Speaker 1: polls dot com. Yeah, I found that horribly, horribly amusing. Basically,
Speaker 1: the media is biased. Nate Silver doesn't know what he's
Speaker 1: talking about. We're gonna skew the polls or we're gonna
Speaker 1: unskew the polls, and Romney's gonna you know, he's gonna
Speaker 1: run the table. How often does something that blatant obvious
Speaker 1: concerted that was really like a How often does that
Speaker 1: sort of stuff pop up? Oh? No, I mean it'll
Speaker 1: be there'll be versions of that, probably on both sides
Speaker 1: by the time we get to next year, Right, and
Speaker 1: the more dangerous versions of versions where like, you know
Speaker 1: that guy, I've never met him personally, Maybe he's a
Speaker 1: nice guy to have a beer with, right, he seemed
Speaker 1: a little bit kind of screwy in the head, right,
Speaker 1: just just enumeroate, But it will not be that guy.
Speaker 1: It'll be someone who, um has sort of a sophomore
Speaker 1: acknowledge of statistics, right, who can actually kind of make
Speaker 1: superficially persuasive arguments for why, um, why my hypothesis is true,
Speaker 1: and you absolutely will see that, and I know there's
Speaker 1: a market for you know, one of people I'm realized
Speaker 1: about five thirty eight is there are now six or
Speaker 1: seven websites that do a forecast similar to rors, right,
Speaker 1: and we're always kind of somewhere in the middle of
Speaker 1: the consensus, which I think is usually a good place
Speaker 1: to be consensus of consensus analysis. Yeah right, Um, but
Speaker 1: there will be someone let's say we have Rubia with
Speaker 1: a seventy chance to win the GP nomination, and that's
Speaker 1: where the average is, right roughly, I can guarantee you
Speaker 1: le'll be someone who says, no, it's s Hillary, Um, no,
Speaker 1: it's Rubio right, right, Um, so they look like a
Speaker 1: genius even though statistically their their work is so that
Speaker 1: be someone who looks like yeah, right. And if there's
Speaker 1: someone who um, you know, it's the same problem with
Speaker 1: with Wall Street analysts, I guess right, you know, on average,
Speaker 1: the person someone who makes an outlandish forecast will be
Speaker 1: in first place, even if their meetian outcome is worse
Speaker 1: than the person who makes like a more kind of
Speaker 1: lower case could see conservative going back to Tetlock and others,
Speaker 1: when you look at punditry and people go on TV.
Speaker 1: Someone who goes on television and says, you know, the
Speaker 1: future is inherently unknowable. I don't. I can't tell you
Speaker 1: whether dow will be in one year and someone else
Speaker 1: says it will be at nineteen thousand seven fifty. Not
Speaker 1: only is that person less likely to be accurate, but
Speaker 1: they're more likely to be believed and and so that's
Speaker 1: the enhancement I did. I did a program for the
Speaker 1: BBC on the UK election and we had some guys
Speaker 1: we hire really smart guys and like everyone, they way underestimated,
Speaker 1: uh how well Tories would do. Right, But this BBC
Speaker 1: program was there for a week and my personal take
Speaker 1: was like, you know what, this is a really weird election.
Speaker 1: There are four parties or five parties that are assailiant
Speaker 1: and and um, there's not a lot of agreement in
Speaker 1: the polls, and like so I was fighting so hard
Speaker 1: to avoid how we go to commit to anything, And
Speaker 1: of course their whole stick was brilliant genius stistition comes
Speaker 1: from the United States, and was your you know, like
Speaker 1: tells us exactly what's gonna happen the elections. There was
Speaker 1: there was tension there, I think, right, it was like
Speaker 1: a week of trying not to answer this question. Um, well,
Speaker 1: the data is uncertain. Using a methodology, that data is certain.
Speaker 1: But in the end we published a model on five
Speaker 1: thirty eight and like everyone else, it blew it. So
Speaker 1: but you know, um, but yeah, it's a tricky thing
Speaker 1: to do. And that's a much shorter election, and that's
Speaker 1: a a very different process than in the United States.
Speaker 1: It's a much shorter election. It's only it's only six weeks,
Speaker 1: but when you add multiple parties to the race, it
Speaker 1: gets much more complex, like really fast. Um. But you know,
Speaker 1: we haven't talked about this. I know, we don't have
Speaker 1: too much more time. But the fact that, you know,
Speaker 1: the polls aren't as reliable as they used to be,
Speaker 1: at least in some non US context. So more cell phones,
Speaker 1: less reliable polls. Yeah, you know, Israel and in Greece
Speaker 1: and whatnot. We have a Canadian election. We'll see how
Speaker 1: the polls do there. They've had trouble in some Canadian
Speaker 1: parliamentary elections and whatnot, or provincial elections. Um. But you know, UM,
Speaker 1: polling is not fool proof either, and that's why it's like,
Speaker 1: you know, that's why I say we got lucky in
Speaker 1: part in two thousand and eight. The polls in two
Speaker 1: thousand twelve were okay but not great. Actually, Obama beat
Speaker 1: his polls by an average of three points? Is that
Speaker 1: unusual for the victors who have won by that? It's
Speaker 1: about It's about average. You know, a three point miss
Speaker 1: is about average. The thing is, if you'd had that
Speaker 1: three point miss any other direction, then Romney would have
Speaker 1: won the election, or at least made it really really close.
Speaker 1: All Right, I know we only have you for a
Speaker 1: few more minutes, so let me get to my last
Speaker 1: two questions. Um. This is the millennial question that that
Speaker 1: I we talked about earlier. So you've carved out your
Speaker 1: own kind of unique career by taking a couple of
Speaker 1: subjects you really liked and applying it in a in
Speaker 1: a unique and useful way. What would you what sort
Speaker 1: of advice would you give to millennials who are just
Speaker 1: coming out of school now or whatever we want to
Speaker 1: call this generation? What sort of career advice would you
Speaker 1: give the recent graduating class. I mean, you know, learn
Speaker 1: how to code if you want to become a journalist. Right,
Speaker 1: that's pretty more more important. Um. But you know, I mean, uh,
Speaker 1: it's a combination I think of of working really hard,
Speaker 1: but um, but not tolerating yourself being bored at work. Right,
Speaker 1: I think that's pretty that's pretty important. Um, it makes
Speaker 1: a lot of sense. Um, I mean, you know, uh,
Speaker 1: learning to critique the conventional wisdom, including the wisdom that
Speaker 1: your friends might have. Right. Um, did you get a
Speaker 1: lot of pushback on on what you were doing from
Speaker 1: from friends and colleagues. No, I mean they always know
Speaker 1: me as someone who did different things, so I don't
Speaker 1: think there was ever that much pushed back from it, exactly.
Speaker 1: But I do worry that we kind of enter a
Speaker 1: universe now where, um, where it's kind of so easy
Speaker 1: for an opinion to form on social media or whatnot.
Speaker 1: There's so much kind of communication and sharing that I
Speaker 1: think that can be a little bit dangerous, right. You know,
Speaker 1: I don't think I'm thirty seven. I don't think any
Speaker 1: thirty seven year old should say I have the whole
Speaker 1: world figure out, you know, certainly not any twenty seven
Speaker 1: year old or seventeen year old should say, you know, um,
Speaker 1: you know, my beliefs about the world are just the
Speaker 1: way things are, you know. I think I think there's
Speaker 1: there's that tendency a little bit um, not just with millennials,
Speaker 1: but with everyone now kind of the age of of
Speaker 1: social media. You can kind of feel for rocket bear
Speaker 1: term kind of smug about your view in the world. Um,
Speaker 1: and that can be a dangerous thing. Enough people, there's
Speaker 1: enough selective perception and enough things around that reinforces your views,
Speaker 1: especially with the Balkanization of the Internet that yeah, you
Speaker 1: could you could find applause for just about any opinion
Speaker 1: on the spectrum. Yeah, it's really easy to you know,
Speaker 1: it's part of part of what Trump's doing is you know,
Speaker 1: I sold Julier. He's not actually that popular, but the
Speaker 1: twenty five or the country that really likes him, he
Speaker 1: can kind of wallow in their world, right, I Mean,
Speaker 1: Trump is I'm kind of going on attention here. He
Speaker 1: is incredibly entertaining for sure to write like so one
Speaker 1: thing that I think does separate him out from um,
Speaker 1: from say, the harmon kines the Michelle Bachman's of four
Speaker 1: years ago. Was the guy has real talent for or something?
Speaker 1: Is it politics exactly? Your showmanship or demagoguery or somewhere
Speaker 1: in between those three things. I'm not. I'm not quite sure, right,
Speaker 1: but you know there's a charisma there. He's hosted or
Speaker 1: at least he's been significant in a television show very
Speaker 1: very fast. He has a sense for for theater. He
Speaker 1: can poke the eye. I mean, you know, um, I'm
Speaker 1: not that's a he's got a natural gift for that.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying I like Trump. You know, I wouldn't
Speaker 1: vote for him, but I love the fact that he
Speaker 1: had his helicopter around the Iowa State Fair because it's
Speaker 1: all these rituals that are silly in some ways. Right,
Speaker 1: He's gonna be like, I want to be the evil
Speaker 1: villain and just kind of circle my helicopter around the
Speaker 1: state fair grounds and like driver one's attention, right, And like, um,
Speaker 1: was he giving kids, healthy kids helicopter riots and telling
Speaker 1: them he's he's Batman? Literally? Right? Um? That's great. So
Speaker 1: I like people are willing to defy connection a little
Speaker 1: little bit, right, and he certainly he certainly has done that.
Speaker 1: But you know the reason why we kind of get
Speaker 1: end up as being perceived a very anti trumpet just
Speaker 1: because you know, we think the media takes this fascinating
Speaker 1: story and trumps up so to speak, the chance will
Speaker 1: actually be nominated by the GOP right and also great narrative,
Speaker 1: but also the fact that it is August, right, the
Speaker 1: polls you see in August aren't measuring anything real in
Speaker 1: a sense, people are hypothetically thinking about a vote they're
Speaker 1: going to make in six months when half the candidates
Speaker 1: will have dropped out, right, Um, when they'll have four
Speaker 1: times as much information. The idea of all you have
Speaker 1: a national primary, you don't actually vote kind of one
Speaker 1: state at a time, and so you know, um, some
Speaker 1: people kind of point, um, the Trump's polls as kind
Speaker 1: of self evident evidence that he's succeeding. Then I'm a
Speaker 1: little bit suspicious of that. But he certainly is ah
Speaker 1: entertaining in a way that I think raises some questions
Speaker 1: about the way campaigns are are covered. Right well, there
Speaker 1: certainly raises questions about the way they're run. But the
Speaker 1: coverage is part and parcel of that. The coverage is
Speaker 1: not not necessarily doing democracy any uh any favors. I
Speaker 1: think I mean, you know, kind of I guess the
Speaker 1: two grand thesis about Trump are that, you know, kind
Speaker 1: of Trump reveals what's wrong with the GOP, or that
Speaker 1: he reveals what's wrong with the media, right and kind
Speaker 1: of being Yeah, there some combination thereof I mean kind
Speaker 1: of you know, kind of an amateur media critic, I
Speaker 1: kind of lean towards that explanation more. But there's you know,
Speaker 1: there's something he's tapping into. I think I would resist
Speaker 1: the implication that he's all that popular or that people
Speaker 1: are responding, um, all that literally to the substance of
Speaker 1: his policy proposals. I think there responding to the affect
Speaker 1: to the you know, kind of he to the nerve. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's I think. And certainly if you look
Speaker 1: beyond the poll's terms of is he popular or not,
Speaker 1: people like him or not, there's no doubt that there
Speaker 1: is enormous interest in Donald Trump, right. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: I think we did read some metrics from Google, like
Speaker 1: six of the news coverage of the GP campaign has
Speaker 1: been about Donald Trump. That's amazing, But the Google searches
Speaker 1: for the campaign have been about him. So the public
Speaker 1: is even more obsessed with So you know, you know
Speaker 1: that won't translate into support. Yeah, I want you to
Speaker 1: be president, but there certainly is a fixation with him
Speaker 1: that is not purely a media creation. So last question,
Speaker 1: because I know you have other places to be and
Speaker 1: I've kept you here for a long time. Um, what
Speaker 1: do you know about politics, campaign, sports statistics today that
Speaker 1: you wish you knew fifteen years ago when you were
Speaker 1: starting and you could pick any of those fields to
Speaker 1: work with? Oh gosh, um, I mean there are technical
Speaker 1: answers to this, right, kind of wish I wish I
Speaker 1: had when they took me a while to understand it's
Speaker 1: like really fundamental, but I think it takes other people
Speaker 1: a while too. Is that um, is that a Cisco
Speaker 1: model is built on past data and you're making a
Speaker 1: big assumption to therefore say the model is predictive? Right?
Speaker 1: Sometimes that's true. In baseball, the conditions are so stable
Speaker 1: that if you build a modle that explains the past, well,
Speaker 1: you're kind of, by definition usually predicting the future. Well, right,
Speaker 1: you can extrapolate better with that stable set up than
Speaker 1: you can perhaps with politics. But in politics, you know,
Speaker 1: not always true, and you get into areas like finance, right,
Speaker 1: and there used to be a correlation between which conference
Speaker 1: on the Super Bowl and how the stock market did. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but that was always so I understand. My job has
Speaker 1: always been to point out that's a correlation without a causation,
Speaker 1: and whether it's crazy things like the Hindenburg almen or
Speaker 1: the death Cross, my job is to go back and
Speaker 1: look at these things historically and say, well, here's the
Speaker 1: net result of it, and this doesn't work this, this
Speaker 1: has a strong correlation, but it's a random accident. And
Speaker 1: here's what we get out of this. Um. But the
Speaker 1: leap of you are making a leap of inference. I
Speaker 1: was gonna say leap of faith. That's not really about faith, right,
Speaker 1: but a leap of inference where you say, okay, I
Speaker 1: fit a model the past data, therefore I'm predicting things
Speaker 1: like no, you fit a model of the past data.
Speaker 1: And then there are a lot of factors you have
Speaker 1: to consider in terms of how well that model will
Speaker 1: predict going forward. Right. Um, So you know, whenever I
Speaker 1: see you know, I think a lot of academics make
Speaker 1: this mistake, just like anyone else does. Right, But they'll say,
Speaker 1: you know, I've developed a model too to predict campaigns
Speaker 1: right and perfectly predicts every presidential election. It's like, no,
Speaker 1: you didn't predict anything right. You know, if you publish
Speaker 1: a mouth for the first time in and you say,
Speaker 1: perfectly predicted all fifty two presidential elections, however many there
Speaker 1: are in the past, Like, no, your record is zero
Speaker 1: for zero forfeited, what not? Not fifty two? That that
Speaker 1: was might be with Anthony Robbins model that was heavy
Speaker 1: on gold, have on bonds after a ten year gold
Speaker 1: bull market and a thirty year bond will market, both
Speaker 1: of which were unlikely to continue going forward. It was
Speaker 1: that overfitting predicting the past as opposed to looking forward. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, in the whole question of fascinated by is
Speaker 1: kind of you have this um tension between the fact
Speaker 1: that on the one hand, um, you know, the consensus
Speaker 1: is usually better than an individual forecast. It's very hard
Speaker 1: to beat the market when there's a robust market, you know.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, you know, understanding that there's group
Speaker 1: think and that everyone can kind of be delusional together,
Speaker 1: and that pension I'm kind of I'm kind of fascinated
Speaker 1: by as as we all are. Nate, thank you so
Speaker 1: much for being so generous with your time. Definitely this
Speaker 1: This has been really just an absolutely fascinating conversation. We've
Speaker 1: been speaking with Nate Silver of five thirty eight. If
Speaker 1: you enjoyed this conversation, look up an Inch or Down
Speaker 1: an Inch on iTunes and you can see all of
Speaker 1: the rest of our conversations. If people want to find
Speaker 1: your work, you're at Nate Silver five thirty eight and
Speaker 1: at spelled out five eight dot com. I want to
Speaker 1: thank Mike Batnick, who did a yeoman's job as our
Speaker 1: head of research, and Charlie Bohmer as as my producer. Um,
Speaker 1: you've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio