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Essays on Life of Pi

Prompt examples for "life of pi" essays, the power of storytelling.

Discuss the role of storytelling in "Life of Pi." How does Pi's storytelling shape his survival and coping mechanisms, and what does it reveal about the human need for narrative and imagination in difficult circumstances?

Survival and Resilience

Analyze Pi's journey of survival and his resilience in the face of adversity. How does he adapt to life on the lifeboat, and what inner strengths and survival strategies does he employ?

Religion and Faith

Examine the theme of religion and faith in the novel. How does Pi's multi-faith background and spirituality play a role in his survival and outlook on life? Discuss the symbolism of the animals in Pi's story.

Reality vs. Fiction

Discuss the blurred lines between reality and fiction in the novel. How does the narrative structure challenge the reader's perception of truth? Explore the different interpretations of Pi's story and its impact on the characters and readers.

The Human-Animal Connection

Analyze Pi's relationship with Richard Parker and the broader theme of the human-animal connection. How do the interactions between Pi and the tiger symbolize the complexity of human nature and the animal instincts within us?

Isolation and Solitude

Explore the theme of isolation and solitude in the novel. How does Pi cope with the loneliness of being stranded at sea for an extended period? Discuss the psychological effects of isolation on the protagonist.

Hook Examples for "Life of Pi" Essays

Anecdotal hook.

Imagine being stranded in the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean, your only companions a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker and your wits. This is the extraordinary journey of Pi Patel in "Life of Pi."

Question Hook

What does it mean to survive against all odds? How does faith shape our perception of reality? Yann Martel's novel "Life of Pi" poses profound questions about the human spirit and the power of storytelling.

Quotation Hook

"I have survived because I have remained sane through it all. I remain sane because I am a storyteller. A storyteller, in the beginning, is trying to be good. In the course of the trying, she'll become wise." These words from Yann Martel highlight the significance of storytelling and sanity in Pi's journey.

Survival and Resilience Hook

Explore the remarkable story of Pi Patel, a young boy who demonstrates incredible resilience and resourcefulness in the face of adversity. How does his will to survive shape the narrative of the novel?

Faith and Belief Hook

"Life of Pi" weaves a complex tapestry of faith, spirituality, and belief. Dive into the religious themes and philosophical questions raised by Pi's experiences on the lifeboat.

The Power of Storytelling Hook

As Pi tells his incredible tale, we're reminded of the transformative power of storytelling. Analyze how storytelling becomes a lifeline for Pi and a means of making sense of his ordeal.

Truth and Perception Hook

Is truth an absolute concept, or is it subject to individual perception? "Life of Pi" challenges us to consider how our beliefs and experiences shape our understanding of reality.

Human Story in Yann Martel's "Life of Pi"

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The Multifaceted Role of Religion in "Life of Pi"

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The Religious Symbolism and Metaphors in The Life of Pi

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The Character's Development and Controversial Sacrifice in The Life of Pi

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11 September 2001, Yann Martel

Philosophical fiction

Life of Pi tells the magical story of a young Indian, who finds himself shipwrecked and lost at sea in a large lifeboat. His companions are four wild animals: an orangutan, a zebra, a hyena, and, most notably, Richard Parker, a tiger. Soon there remains only Pi and the tiger, and Pi’s only purpose in the next 227 days is to survive the shipwreck and the hungry tiger, supported by his own curious brand of religion, an eclectic mixture of Christianity, Islam and Buddhism.

Within the story are themes of spirituality and religion, self-perception, the definition of family, and the nature of animals. Life of Pi is a rich and dynamic text full of discussion of morality, faith, and the ambivalence of what constitutes truth.

Piscine Molitor "Pi" Patel (narrator and protagonist), Richard Parker (Bengal tiger)

The novel has sold more than ten million copies worldwide. It was rejected by at least five London publishing houses before being accepted by Knopf Canada, which published it in September 2001. The UK edition won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction the following year. It was also chosen for CBC Radio's Canada Reads 2003, where it was championed by author Nancy Lee. Martel’s novel was adapted as a 2012 film directed by Ang Lee.

“It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.” “To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.” “You must take life the way it comes at you and make the best of it.”

1. Duncan, R. (2008). " Life of Pi" as Postmodern Survivor Narrative. Mosaic: A journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature, 167-183. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/44029501) 2. Karam Ally, H. (2020). ‘Which Story do you Prefer?’: The Limits of the Symbolic in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. Literature and Theology, 34(1), 83-100. (https://academic.oup.com/litthe/article/34/1/83/5717397) 3. Stephens, G. (2010). Feeding tiger, finding God: science, religion, and" the better story" in Life of Pi. Intertexts, 14(1), 41-59. (https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/76/article/400842/summary) 4. Martel, Y. (2002). Life of Pi. 2001. Vintage Canada. (https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/scl/2004-v29-n2-scl29_2/scl29_2art01/) 5. Allen, T. E. (2014). Life of Pi and the moral wound. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 62(6), 965-982. (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0003065114559834) 6. Mensch, J. (2007). The intertwining of incommensurables: Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. Phenomenology and the non-human animal: At the limits of experience, 135-147. (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4020-6307-7_10) 7. Browning, H., & Veit, W. (2020). Confined freedom and free confinement: The ethics of captivity in Life of Pi. (https://philarchive.org/archive/BROCFA-9) 8. Ashdown, B. K. (2013). ‘Faith is a house with many rooms’: Religion and spirituality in Life of Pi. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Brien-Ashdown/publication/256536875_Faith_Is_a_House_With_Many_Rooms_Religion_and_Spirituality_in_Life_of_Pi/links/00b7d52338f55637c9000000/Faith-Is-a-House-With-Many-Rooms-Religion-and-Spirituality-in-Life-of-Pi.pdf PsycCRITIQUES, 58(22).

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49 Life of Pi : Essay Prompts & Questions

Life of Pi is Yann Martel’s philosophical novel (2001) about an Indian boy who survived a shipwreck. There are many good Life of Pi essay topics to write an excellent paper. Check our list of Life of Pi essay prompts to get inspired.

🏆 Best Life of Pi Essay Prompts

📌 most interesting life of pi essay topics, 👍 catchy life of pi essay questions.

• Life of Pi: Key Characters, Plot, and Themes First of all, Life of Pi is about the need to change and the survival instinct and its manifestations in life-threatening conditions.
• The Role of Religion and God in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi as Influenced by Poe’s the Narrative of Arthur Grogon Pym of Nantucket As highlighted in the in the introductory part, religion is one of the themes that stand out in the Life of Pi.
• “Yann Martel’s “Life of Pi” Novel Analysis” Thus, the theme of Life of Pi is to show the difference between a human being and an animal and to indicate that no conditions can make it disappear.
• The Human and Animal Worlds in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi Thus, the animals on the boat and their behaviour reveal the degree of similarity between the world of animals and humans.
• Taming One’s Id in Yann Martel’s “Life of Pi” The novel Life of Pi by Yann Martel is a captivating chef-d’oeuvre that features three main parts, which follow the life of Pi and a tiger that is referred to as Richard Parker.
• Film Studies: “Life of Pi” by Ang Lee Pi has to find a way for survival and gets into the boat as he and the animals start getting thirsty and hungry.
• Dual Consciousness in the Novel Life of Pi In the novel, Life of Pi, by Yann Martel, the protagonist is found in a state where the realm of self-awareness and human consciousness fails to make the difference between reality and illusion.
• An Art of Literacy: “Life of Pi” by Yann Martel I took the liberty of talking to some of my old pals, and surprisingly enough, I realized we were actually not communicating. At the end of the day, they are all literacy arts and you […]
• Hope and Understanding: Comparing “Life of Pi” and “Bless Me, Ultima”
• How Tigers, Humans, and Animots Is Analyzed Through Yann Martel’s “Life of Pi”
• The Animals as a Representation of Emotions Through Piscine Molitor Patel’s Fight to Survive in “Life of Pi” by Yann Martel
• Storytelling as a Means of Survival in Yann Martel’s “Life of Pi”
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• How Negative Discoveries Can Lead to Positive Outcomes in “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin and “Life of Pi” by Yann Martel
• The Potential Framework of Human Nature in the “Life of Pi”
• The Will to Survive in “Life of Pi” by Yann Martel
• Similarities Between Human and Animal Characters in “Life of Pi”
• The Fictitious Story of Survival at Sea With Richard Parker in “Life of Pi” by Yann Martel
• “Life of Pi” and the Rise of Popular Literary Culture
• The Role of Religion in the “Life of Pi” and “The Scarlet Letter”
• The Concept of Ego in “Life of Pi” by Yann Martel
• The Journeys of Survival in Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist” and Yann Martel’s “Life of Pi”
• Finding Oneself in Yann Martel’s “Life of Pi”
• An Analysis of Self Preservation Through a Man’s Cooperation With Wild Animals in “Life of Pi” by Yann Martel
• An Analysis of Survival in “The Story of Keesh” and “Life of Pi”
• The Carnivorous Island as a Symbol of Religion in “Life of Pi” by Yann Martel
• Determination and Perseverance in “Life of Pi” by Yann Martel
• The Theme of Conflict in Human Life in Homer’s “The Odyssey” and Yann Martel’s “Life of Pi”
• The Element of Water and Its Effects on Pi in “Life of Pi” by Yann Martel
• Tracing Narrative Threads in “Life of Pi”
• The Theme of Making Choices in the Novels “Life of Pi” and “Larry’s Party”
• The Practice of Hinduism by Pi in “Life of Pi” by Yann Martel
• The Life-Changing Experience at Sea by Piscine Molitor Pi Patel in “Life of Pi” by Yann Martel
• The Existence of Cooperation and Competition in “Life of Pi” by Yann Martel
• Religion Presented in “Dark Materials” and “Life of Pi”
• Comparing and Contrasting Sacrificial Scenes in the Poem “Sacrifice” and Chapter Eight of “Life of Pi”
• An Importance to Write Dowm Your Thoughts in “Life of Pi” and “The Diary of Anne Frank”
• Vegetarian to Carnivore in “Life of Pi” by Yann Martel
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• The Manipulation of the Color of Blue and Green in “Life of Pi”
• The Symbolism of Animals in Yann Martel’s “Life of Pi”
• The Conflict Between Innate Evil and Good in “Lord of the Flies” by William Golding and “Life of Pi” by Yann Martel
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• Comparison of “Life of Pi” and “The Five People You Meet in Heaven”
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Life of Pi Themes

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Life of Pi Yann Martel

Life of Pi essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Life of Pi written by Yann Martel.

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Life of Pi Essays

Living a lie: yann martel’s pi and his dissociation from reality sean patrick ewart.

Piscine Molitor Patel, the protagonist of Yann Martel’s acclaimed novel Life of Pi, survives a horrific 227-day ordeal trapped aboard a directionless lifeboat with only a 450-pound Bengal Tiger, named Richard Parker, for company. Pi’s account of...

A Matter of Perspective: The Invention of a Story in Martel’s Life of Pi Justin Caleb Walters College

In Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi, Piscine “Pi” Patel is forced to relay his life story to condescending Japanese skeptics who refuse to believe his tale; they refer to it as nothing more than a fictional invention. Pi somewhat agrees with the...

Religion as a Coping Mechanism in Life of Pi Damien Rajvin Stanley 12th Grade

In the novel Life of Pi by Yann Martel, Pi Patel too uses his faith in God as a vital coping mechanism to survive in the vast Pacific Ocean. His faith in God proves to be a crucial part in Pi’s survival as it guides him through his ordeal. Pi, a...

Hope and Understanding: Comparing Life of Pi and Bless Me, Ultima Kelsey Braford 10th Grade

In tough times, it seems that many people turn to their faith. In moments of weakness, when it seems that everything is lost, many people find that a certain hope remains in God. Others turn to God for a "why"; a reason that circumstances are the...

Religious Allegories in Life of Pi Patrick Cole McAndrew 10th Grade

Religious Allegories in Life of Pi

Religion is a subject that has always been prevalent in literature. The most popular book of all time, and the first ever printed, is the Bible, which is comprised of many stories of faith. In Life of Pi, Pi is...

The Issue of Mortality in the Life of Pi Jamie Sung College

In Life of Pi, Yann Martel juxtaposes issues of morality alongside the primitive necessity of survival. Pi’s life-threatening experiences while stranded on the Pacific Ocean threaten the integrity of his morals and beliefs. His pluralistic faith...

Life of Pi: Spiritual Survival under Physical Stress Anonymous 10th Grade

Throughout the novel Life of Pi by Yann Martel, the protagonist, Pi Patel struggles with survival yet manages to maintain a level-headed outlook on his situation. He does not lose his belief in God, in whatever form He may take, although...

The Ambiguity of Sacrifice: Understanding Pi's Change of Character Dao Vu 12th Grade

Equivalent exchange, an absolute law in nature, dictates that one must give up something so that one may gain something that is equal in value. By this logic, sacrifice is, at its very core, a necessity in life; however, it is also a gray area...

Life of Pi: The Symbolism of the Color Orange Shrabonti Bhowmik 12th Grade

In Life of Pi, by Yann Martel, Piscine Molitor Patel, an Indian boy who is living in Pondicherry, is the main character of the story. From an early age, he is exposed to three different religions: Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam. Due to...

Performing Humans and Flesh Eating Boys: Deconstructing the Human/Non-Human Animal Divide in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi and Franz Kafka’s A Report to an Academy Anonymous College

The boundary between the human and the non-human animal is tested now more than ever with the prevailing field of Animal studies. Traditional theories in philosophical thinking from Aristotle to Descartes that regard the human and the non-human...

Semantics and Pragmatics: How the Writers of The Lost Continent and Life of Pi Portray the Theme of Exploration Georgiana Scott College

Throughout both novels, The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson and Life of Pi by Yann Martel, the protagonists are on a constant journey, throughout which they make many and continuing explorations. Their paths are lexically, semantically and...

Freudian Theory in Life of Pi Alyssa Wakefield 10th Grade

Many people are under the impression that humans have evolved past their origins, that they have risen above animalistic tendencies; however, mankind forever remains part of the animal kingdom, and such a truism is demonstrated within Yann Martel’...

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The situation of much of the novel is a contradiction between boundaries and freedom. Pi is surrounded by the boundless ocean and sky but is trapped in a tiny lifeboat, and within that lifeboat he has his own clear territory separate from Richard Parker . Pi marks his territory – the raft and the top of the tarpaulin – with his urine and “training whistle,” and Richard Parker has his territory on the floor of the lifeboat. From the very start of his tale Pi muses on the nature of animal territories, especially regarding zoos, as his father is a zookeeper. Pi explains that animals love rituals and boundaries, and they don’t mind being in a zoo as long as they accept that their enclosure is their territory. As a castaway at sea, Pi then uses his zoological knowledge to “tame” Richard Parker, presenting himself as the “alpha” of the lifeboat and keeping himself safe.

This idea of boundaries moves into the psychological realm with Pi himself, as he (possibly) creates the character of Richard Parker as a way of dealing with the darkness and bestiality within himself. By making his brutal actions belong to a totally different being, and not even a human being, Pi sets a clear boundary in his mind. Richard Parker disappears when Pi first crawls ashore, showing that the tiger (if he is fictional) was a part of Pi that existed only on the lifeboat, where he needed to do terrible things to survive. Pi is then able to move on with his life – he goes to school, gets married, and has children – because of that boundary between himself and Richard Parker. He kept himself sane and human by symbolically cutting off the animal part of his nature.

Boundaries ThemeTracker

Boundaries Quotes in Life of Pi

Sometimes I got my majors mixed up. A number of my fellow religious-studies students – muddled agnostics who didn’t know which way was up, who were in the thrall of reason, that fool’s gold for the bright – reminded me of the three-toed sloth; and the three-toed sloth, such a beautiful example of the miracle of life, reminded me of God.

Don’t we say, “There’s no place like home”? That’s certainly what animals feel. Animals are territorial. That is the key to their minds. Only a familiar territory will allow them to fulfill the two relentless imperatives of the wild: the avoidance of enemies and the getting of food and water. A biologically sound zoo enclosure – whether cage, pit, moated island, corral, terrarium, aviary or aquarium – is just another territory, peculiar only in its size and in its proximity to human territory.

In the literature can be found legions of examples of animals that could escape but did not, or did and returned… But I don’t insist. I don’t mean to defend zoos. Close them all down if you want (and let us hope that what wildlife remains can survive in what is left of the natural world). I know zoos are no longer in people’s good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both. The Pondicherry Zoo doesn’t exist any more. Its pits are filled in, the cages torn down. I explore it now in the only place left for it, my memory.

So you see, if you fall into a lion’s pit, the reason the lion will tear you to pieces is not because it’s hungry – be assured, zoo animals are amply fed – or because it’s bloodthirsty, but because you’ve invaded its territory.

The pandit spoke first. “Mr. Patel, Piscine’s piety is admirable. In these troubled times it’s good to see a boy so keen on God. We all agree on that.” The imam and the priest nodded. “But he can’t be a Hindu, a Christian and a Muslim. It’s impossible. He must choose…” “Hmmm, Piscine?” Mother nudged me. “How do you feel about the question?” “Bapu Gandhi said, ‘All religions are true.’ I just want to love God,” I blurted out, and looked down, red in the face.

To be afraid of this ridiculous dog when there was a tiger about was like being afraid of splinters when trees are falling down. I became very angry at the animal. “You ugly, foul creature,” I muttered. The only reason I didn’t stand up and beat it off the lifeboat with a stick was lack of strength and stick, not lack of heart.

Did the hyena sense something of my mastery? Did it say to itself, “Super alpha is watching me – I better not move?” I don’t know. At any rate, it didn’t move.

For two, perhaps three seconds, a terrific battle of minds for status and authority was waged between a boy and a tiger. He needed to make only the shortest of lunges to be on top of me. But I held my stare. Richard Parker licked his nose, groaned and turned away. He angrily batted a flying fish. I had won… From that day onwards I felt my mastery was no longer in question, and I began to spend progressively more time on the lifeboat… I was still scared of Richard Parker, but only when it was necessary. His simple presence no longer strained me. You can get used to anything – haven’t I already said that? Isn’t that what all survivors say?

It came as an unmistakable indication to me of how low I had sunk the day I noticed, with a pinching of the heart, that I ate like an animal, that this noisy, frantic, unchewing wolfing-down of mine was exactly the way Richard Parker ate.

“So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can’t prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?” Mr. Okamoto: “That’s an interesting question…” Mr. Chiba: “The story with animals.” Mr. Okamoto: “Yes. The story with animals is the better story.” Pi Patel: “Thank you. And so it goes with God.”

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The Will to Survive in Life of Pi, Novel by Yann Martel and Movie by Ang Lee

The Life of Pi by Yann Martel, is the story of a story about a boy that was stranded in the Pacific Ocean with an adult male Bengal tiger. This boy’s name is Piscine Molitor Patel and he was just a young Indian boy who was travelling with his family to Canada. In the Life of Pi, Martel is trying to convey that having the will to survive can, and most likely will, surpass one’s morals. This theme is portrayed in both the book and the movie because they describe everything that Pi has to give up in order to live.

In Life of Pi, the first part of the book is about his childhood, beliefs, and surroundings. He starts off by telling us how he got his name, which was after a swimming pool in France, Piscine Molitor. Since he was named after a swimming pool, the reader can hypothesize that later in Pi’s life he might be in water.

Shortly after learning about how Pi got his name, he tells us that his Mamaji (uncle) taught him how to swim when he was seven. Pi says, “He tried to teach my parents how to swim, but he never got them to go beyond wading up to their knees at the beach…. Ravi was just as unenthusiastic” (Martel 8-9). His learning how to swim also builds up that Pi might run into trouble with water later on and that the rest of his family might not make it.

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“ Ok, let me say I’m extremely satisfy with the result while it was a last minute thing. I really enjoy the effort put in. ”

In chapter 5, Pi tells us his primary school nickname, which was Pissing. His nickname, that bullies and even some teachers called him, shows that he suffered when he was young and the reader can pick up on the subtle hints that he will suffer later in life. Pi says, “I spent the last year at St. Joseph’s School feeling like a persecuted Muhammad in Mecca” (Martel 21), this is one of those subtle hints that he was suffering.

In the second part of the book, just after the ship has sunk and he is stranded with the tiger, Richard Parker (RP), and Pi has just experienced his first school of flying fish. Once he catches one, he knows what he has to do to it, but he is extremely reluctant to do so. Pi describes his inner turmoil as he has to kill the fish because he is a vegetarian and he doesn’t believe in the killing of animals. He recalls as he did the deed, “Tears flowing down my cheeks, I egged myself on until I heard a cracking sound and I no longer felt any life in my hands” (Martel 183). This moment had a huge impact on Pi’s life and helped him survive on the lifeboat because he was willing to kill another being and have that on his conscience in order to survive. Later on after much fishing has been done and Pi has given up on being a vegetarian, he says “It is simple and brutal: a person can get used to anything, even killing” (Martel 185). This shows just how much Pi has changed through his journey of survival. He went from a naive Indian boy, to basically a savage human that will do anything to live.

In the movie for Life of Pi, the filmmakers adapt the theme that the will to survive will surpass one’s morals by the actions that Pi does while he is on the lifeboat. When Pi is eating they show him just ripping the meat of the fish off of the skin with his teeth and the scales falling all over him. They also show him as very ragged and dirty which goes against the morals of most humans because hygiene is very important to us. At the end of the movie when Pi gives his alternative ending, he says he ate human flesh, which is the ultimate last resort of him losing his morals in order to survive.

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2.9 billion records, including Social Security numbers, stolen in data hack: What to know

An enormous amount of sensitive information including Social Security numbers for millions of people could be in the hands of a hacking group after a data breach and may have been released on an online marketplace, The Los Angeles Times reported this week.

The hacking group USDoD claimed it had allegedly stolen personal records of 2.9 billion people from National Public Data, according to a class-action lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, reported by Bloomberg Law. The breach was believed to have happened in or around April, according to the lawsuit.

Here's what to know about the alleged data breach.

Social security hack: National Public Data confirms massive data breach included Social Security numbers

What information is included in the data breach?

The class-action law firm Schubert, Jonckheer & Kolbe said in a news release that the stolen file includes 277.1 gigabytes of data , and includes names, address histories, relatives and Social Security numbers dating back at least three decades.

According to a post from a cybersecurity expert on X, formerly Twitter, USDoD claims to be selling the 2.9 billion records for citizens of the U.S., U.K. and Canada on the dark web for $3.5 million.

Since the information was posted for sale in April, others have released different copies of the data, according to the cybersecurity and technology news site Bleeping Computer.

A hacker known as " Fenice " leaked the most complete version of the data for free on a forum in August, Bleeping Computer reported.

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2025 COLA: Estimate dips with inflation, but high daily expenses still burn seniors

What is National Public Data?

National Public Data is a Florida-based background check company operated by Jerico Pictures, Inc. USA TODAY has reached out to National Public Data for comment.

The company has not publicly confirmed a data breach, but The Los Angeles Times reported that it has been telling people who contacted via email that "we are aware of certain third-party claims about consumer data and are investigating these issues."

What to do if you suspect your information has been stolen

If you believe your information has been stolen or has appeared on the dark web, there are a few steps you can take to prevent fraud or identity theft.

Money.com recommends taking the following steps:

• Make sure your antivirus is up to date and perform security scans on all your devices. If you find malware, most antivirus programs should be able to remove it, but in some cases you may need professional help.
• Update your passwords for bank accounts, email accounts and other services you use, and make sure they are strong and different for every account. Include uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and punctuation marks, and never use personal information that a hacker could guess.
• Use multifactor authentication for any accounts or services that offer it to ensure you are the person logging in.
• Check your credit report, and report any unauthorized use of of your credit cards. If you notice any suspicious activity, you can ask credit bureaus to freeze your credit.
• Be careful with your email and social media accounts, and beware of phishing, an attempt to get your personal information by misrepresenting who a message or email is from.

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The Ezra Klein Show

Nate Silver on Kamala Harris’s Chances and the Mistakes of the ‘Indigo Blob’

By Ezra Klein

Nate Silver on How Kamala Harris Changed the Odds

Nate Silver came to fame in American politics for election forecasting. But before Silver was in politics, he was a poker player. And after getting into politics, he went back to being a poker player. He’s been running through poker championships and out there on tables — partly because he’s been writing a book about risk.

The book is called “ On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything .” And it applies the frameworks of the gambler to politics, to A.I., to venture capital.

The way Silver thinks about politics I find very useful. So I invited him on my podcast to talk about how that thinking has guided him over the past year and how he’s thinking about the election going forward.

This is an edited transcript of part of our conversation. For the full conversation, watch the video below, or listen to “ The Ezra Klein Show .”

The election forecaster discusses 2024 and what politicians can learn from gamblers.

“Nate Silver came to fame in American politics for election forecasting. He built models that were pretty damn successful at predicting American politics.” “Nate Silver is the founder of fivethirtyeight.com, a polling website that correctly predicted the winner of 49 of the 50 states in the last presidential election.” “Election Oracle, ESPN’s Nate Silver, he predicted every state in the last presidential election.” “And once again, Nate Silver completely nailed it.” “The guy’s amazing.” “But before Silver was in politics, he was a poker player. And after getting into politics, he went back to being a poker player. He’s been running through poker championships and out there on tables —” “Savage, savage bluff by Silver. Oh, my God.” “— partially because he’s been writing a book about risks. The book is called ‘On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything.’ And it applies the frameworks of, I would say, the gambler, maybe say the poker player, to politics, to AI, to venture capital. Nate, the way he thinks about politics I find very useful. I find that he thinks more clearly about risk and probabilities than a lot of people do and maybe more people should follow. So I wanted to have him on to talk about how that thinking has guided him over the past year and how he’s thinking about it in the election going forward. As always, my email, [email protected].” [THEME MUSIC] “Nate Silver, welcome to the show.” “Thank you, Ezra. Happy to be here.” “Last I looked, your model has Harris winning the election at around 52 percent. It might be mildly different today. But this has been an unusual election. So how much stock do you put in your model right now?” “I think the model is balancing the different factors pretty well. I mean, there are some things you could argue are favorable to Harris, one of which is that for the past few weeks we’ve been in what the model thinks is supposed to be the convention bounce period for republicans, where typically you poll pretty well after your convention. There’s the afterglow of the new nomination and things like that — the afterglow of the VP pick, often, too. And Kamala Harris kind of stomped on Donald Trump’s news cycle. So maybe it’s an overly favorable assumption for Harris. There’s also in polls what’s known as nonpartisan response bias. So when voters get more enthusiastic, you’d rather have that than not as a candidate. But it also means that they sometimes are more likely to respond to polls. At the same time, her momentum has been pretty good, which usually I dismiss. We don’t really kind of know what the baseline is here, right? You know, Hillary Clinton, who was, I think, kind of a terrible candidate, won the popular vote by two points. Is she a little bit better than Hillary Clinton? Probably, right? So can she win by three or four? Well, if you win by three or four, then you win the electoral college in most instances.” “I don’t think many people expected — if you did, I’d like to know it — the turnaround in her numbers we have seen since she’s become the presumptive nominee. She’s gone to net favorables, which I would not have bet a ton of money on at this speed at least. People were looking at a lot of data on Harris and assuming that data was solid. That data was not solid.” “When a candidate’s a hypothetical candidate, you have to treat that polling very carefully. People are — I think it’s a weird thing to ask, you know, what if Gavin Newsom ran against Trump. It’s not the same thing as when you actually have the candidate in front of you, and have the advertisements, and have the news articles, and everything else to actually evaluate. I mean, I think this is, like, on the higher side for a jump in favorables, but, you know, she was amazingly well-organized at getting the entire establishment behind her within literally minutes [LAUGHS]: of Biden announcing that he was going to step down. And so that suggested that maybe she did have more support in the party than she let on. And also, you know, I don’t — I think the Biden people may have been in somewhat bad faith. Maybe not consciously, but I’m not sure they weren’t trying to undermine her. Because the obvious thing to do would be to have this qualified, if not always that politically adept, you know, much, much younger vice president take over for you when you’re about to be 82. But they gave her the border. They gave her voting rights, which is kind of the one major domestic policy area where they got very little done. So I don’t think they gave her a very good hand to play. But meanwhile, she’s getting a lot of reps, and giving speeches, and building connections, and played the game really well. I have a lot of respect for that.” “Well, the key thing, I think, is that Biden had a huge amount of influence over how the party viewed her in both directions. There was a long period, I would say, when the quiet signals out of Biden world were this isn’t going well.” “Yeah.” “And when there was pressure to push Biden off the ticket, those signals got louder — Harris cannot do this. If you get rid of him, you’re going to get her. You’re going to lose. But then the thing you saw happen is a moment Biden actually stepped aside and fully endorsed her. That was a signal so powerful that it functionally won the potential primary for Harris instantly. Nobody was going to go against Joe Biden in that moment. And so, in both directions, Biden had, and the team around him, a lot of influence. When implicitly Biden world told the Democratic Party Harris can’t do it, the Democratic Party believed them. And then when explicitly Biden himself told the Democratic Party and the world Harris could do it, the Democratic Party believed him. And by the way, from what I could tell, it seems he was right. And I don’t blame Biden, I think, for things that happened earlier in the administration. That was a lot of staff talk. And to be fair, it was based on some things. There were problems in her office. There were reasons to be skeptical. But he and they had tremendous power. In a way, this was not, to me, like a mini primary. This was a parliamentary process, right? The party came together and chose a leader through endorsements from elected officials. That’s functionally what happened.” “Yeah, it felt very British. It felt like —” “It felt very British.” “— the Liz Truss kind of thing or something, right, where, yeah. There’s a loss of confidence. Those are fascinating dynamics to study. But yeah, it’s interesting to have the inside view versus the outside view a little bit. And, you know, again, we talk about this in the book a little bit, but I come at a position where I’m more skeptical about the competence of people who work in politics. Right? Even if I like the candidates they endorse — I mean, I plan to plan to vote for Kamala Harris. I would not have voted for Joe Biden, by the way. I think it was deeply irresponsible to nominate him, and I would have voted libertarian or something. But I have a more skeptical view, and I think even the rationales they state out loud are sometimes maybe the rationales they believe or not. But, you know, I think human behavior is pretty strategic when you understand people’s incentives, and kind of information set, and things like that. And I think it was in Biden’s narrow self-interest to make Harris look weaker. And I think that plays a role at all sorts of subconscious margins in terms of how she was treated.” “Well, let’s talk about that skepticism. You and I have known each other a long time. We’re old-school bloggers. And my read of you is that somewhat over the 2016 election, then specifically over the pandemic —” “Yeah.” “— and your experience, I think, with online liberalism in the pandemic, you became much more disillusioned with the people who once felt to you like your group, your coalition, your tribe. There’s been a kind of an alienation for you. Is that a fair read?” “Yeah, I’d say it’s three things, right. Number one, the 2016 aftermath, I thought a lot of the kind of liberal and centrist news media, kind of were in denial about their own role in the ‘But her emails’ stuff and then picked scapegoats for Trump’s victory that were not the real reasons that he won. You know, Russian bot farms have approximately nothing to do with why Donald Trump won the 2016 election. And the Russia stuff, in general, I think was treated with an order of magnitude more importance than it probably objectively had. And blaming Facebook and the tech industry for that, I thought that was irresponsible. And also kind of the obsession over the polls in 2016, where I think there was some revisionist history where the polls actually showed a pretty close race. I mean, we had Trump with a 30 percent chance. And it was kind of the conventional wisdom that assumed that he was dead in the water. So the ability to conveniently lie a little bit or manipulate facts and spin facts, I mean, that was part one. Part two was the pandemic. Absolutely. And, you know, ‘orange man bad,’ I think, was often the reason that people believed a lot of what they believed. Because in some ways, the move to shut down society in some ways kind of went against the values of traditional liberalism, right? There’s a transfer of welfare from younger people [LAUGHS]: and people who are not able to work from home to wealthy suburbanites and older people who you’re protecting their health, but you’re undermining the education of millions and millions and millions of schoolkids around the country, and essential workers are still putting themselves at risk that you deem unacceptable for people who are able to work with laptops to take. So I thought it was very self-serving, and I thought kind of expertise was co-opted and corrupted by political partisans. And then third was the Biden stuff.” “Well, it seemed to me it happened for you before the Biden stuff.” “Yeah. I mean —” “And you were crosswise with a lot of liberals on Twitter. I mean, I came back to Twitter for three weeks during the height of Bidenmania to try to be sort of in touch with that sentiment and mostly stay away from it. But Twitter is a place that groups that exist outside the online hothouse purify inside the online hothouse. So there’s the public health community outside Twitter, and then there’s how it acts inside Twitter — political scientists outside Twitter and then inside Twitter, republicans outside Twitter, then inside Twitter. And my sense was that you ended up in a lot of fights with liberals who had a much lower risk tolerance than you did. And between that and what was, I believe, unfair criticism of the 2016 model, which got the election much more right than most did, that it sort of — you began to see habits of — you call it ‘the village.’ The village is your term for —” “Yeah. And that’s been a term that’s been used by other right. But the village is basically media, politics, government, progressive —” “The establishment.” “The establishment, ‘The New York Times,’ Harvard University.” “The regime.” “The regime. Yeah. The Democratic White House. Maybe not a Republican White House, but that’s a more complicated kind of edge case.” “Or maybe a different Republican White House.” “Yeah.” “Right? George W. Bush was part of the village.” “Absolutely.” “Maybe Donald Trump wasn’t.” “Absolutely.” “I think you’ve also called it the indigo blob in different ways, that you began to see it as a kind of set of aligned cognitive tendencies that you disagreed with. What were they?” “So one of them is the failure to do what I call decoupling. It’s not my term. Decoupling is the act of separating an issue from the context. So the example I give in the book is that if you’re able to say I abhor the Chick-fil-A’s CEO’s position on gay marriage — I don’t know if it’s changed or not, but he was anti-gay marriage, at least for some period of time — but they make a really delicious chicken sandwich. Like, that’s decoupling.” “I abhor their treatment of chickens.” “Yeah.” “I have a strong direct take on Chick-fil-A. I don’t like how they treat chickens.” “O.K. Or you can say or separate out, you know, Michael Jackson, Woody Allen, separate the art from the artist kind of thing. Right? You know, that tendency goes against kind of the tendency on the progressive left to care a lot about the identity of the speaker in terms of the racial or gender identity and in terms of their credentials. And this other world that I call ‘the river,’ the kind of gambling, risk-taking world, all that matters is that you’re right.” “The river is your name for the community of people who think about risk roughly the way you do and are willing to make big bets, willing to accept loss. The river is your — it’s your world of gamblers at all levels of society.” “Capital and lowercase g gambling.” “So hedge funds —” “Expected value.” “— venture capitalists.” “Yeah. And then you get kind of the more —” “Crypto.” “— groundwater stuff where it’s like crypto, and meme stocks, and things like that. It doesn’t matter who you are, it matters that you’re right and you’re able to prove it or bet on it in some way. And that’s very against, I think, the kind of credentialism that you have within the progressive Democratic left, which I also call the indigo blob, because it’s a fusion of purple and blue. There’s not a clear separation between the nonpartisan, centrist media and the left-leaning progressive media that’s kind of rooting for Democrats. Different parts of ‘The New York Times’ have both those functions in place. And as someone who’s kind of more on the nonpartisan side, even though, again, I would prefer to see Kamala Harris than Donald Trump, I think people are exploiting the trust that institutions have earned for political gain. And particularly in the kind of pre-Elon pandemic-era Twitter days, the pile-ons were kind of insane, and 98 percent of people don’t have the tolerance for that. But I didn’t really care because these people are not my friends, and I have a good life outside of Twitter, and because, you know, to some extent, even if you run a newsletter, being a little polarizing is O.K., right? If I have 10 random people yelling at me on Twitter and 10 people sign up to be paid subscribers to ‘Silver Bulletin,’ then I come out like way ahead in that deal. And so I think I couldn’t do my job without running afoul of this group of people.” “Let me ask you about the definition of decoupling there, because I think decoupling is interesting. And I found the examples you pick also interesting but contestable.” “Yeah.” “So in the Chick-fil-A example, I’m between a vegetarian and vegan these days, so I got my own issues with Chick-fil-a, but was not a believer necessarily in boycotting it if you didn’t have my issues. But I understood it as more like a boycott, that theory, right? You don’t want to give money to something that’s going to work against your interests. The question of decoupling art and artist, which I’m more on the side of decoupling, but also has a dimension of — those both strike me as versions of activism, right? What you want to do, what people who hold those positions are trying to do, is affect change in the world by applying consequences to beliefs. And maybe you don’t want that, or you don’t agree that the beliefs they are trying to affect should have those consequences on them. But it’s kind of different than the idea of things are being pressed together that don’t go together. I think an interesting sort of decoupling issue that happened in the pandemic was the same public health voices who were at one point saying you had to be so careful, even outside oftentimes were then pro joining the George Floyd protests, which a lot of people found very upsetting. What people were looking to the public health world for right then was not their views on protests but their views on distancing. And that felt like it coupled things in a way that undermined one to achieve another.” “Well, and they framed it in, like, oh, this is good for public health reasons, right? If they had said, look, I’m a big believer in racial equity; there is a little bit of risk here; but outside, wear a mask, and probably not a huge problem — I mean, that would be honest, right?” “Which ended up being true too.” “Yeah. But instead it was in the name of public health, right? I think people don’t do enough thinking about thinking and don’t read enough of the literature on cognitive biases. Ironically, this is kind of like the expert literature on how powerful the human mind is at confirmation bias, and how powerful a drug political partisanship is, and how smart people are maybe better rationalizes in certain respects. I mean, a lot of irrational traits are like rational on some halfway approximate different version of the universe. You know what I mean?” “My first book was on polarization. And what I understand you as doing in the book in part is making an interesting cut in society between people with different forms of both risk tolerance and thinking about risk. And you write something that caught my eye where you say, quote, ‘COVID made those risk preferences public, worn on our proverbial sleeves and our literal faces.’ And you go on to say, quote, ‘People are becoming more bifurcated in their risk tolerance, and this affects everything from who we hang out with to how we vote.’” “Yeah.” “Tell me about both sides of that — the way that it made risk tolerance visible, but then your view that since then risk tolerance is becoming a deeper cleavage in society.” “I mean, on the one hand, there are lots of signs that risk tolerance is going down, right? Among young people in particular, they’re smoking less, drinking less, doing fewer drugs, having less sex. A different type of risk tolerance, they are less willing to defend free speech norms if it potentially would cause injury to someone. That’s kind of a — free speech is kind of a pro-risk kind of take in some ways because speech can cause effects, of course. On the other hand, you have this boom and bust, and various booms and busts, in crypto. You have Las Vegas bringing in record revenue. You have record revenue in sports betting and things like that. You have the CEO of OpenAI saying, yeah, this might destroy the universe, but it’s worth it. It’s a good gamble to take. You have FTX and all this stuff. And the first trip I made after COVID was to a Casino in Florida, which is every bit the shit show that you think it might be. And the tournament drew record numbers of Poker players. And so it just seems to me like we are in a world now where institutions are less trusted. And some people respond to that by saying, O.K., I make my own rules now, and this is great, and I have lots of agency. And some respond by kind of withdrawing into an online world, or maybe clinging on to beliefs and experts that have lost their credibility, or just by becoming more risk averse. I mean, I think the pandemic also revealed that there’s a lot of differences in introversion versus extroversion. I just can’t deal with being cooped up inside all day. This doesn’t work for me at all. But I think some people kind of secretly like the idea that, O.K., there’s no more FOMO. I can kind of be cozy all day. And that’s fine. There’s differences in desire for human companionship and things like that too.” “Let’s talk about a couple of those people. One of the things that’s kind of fun about the book is you spend time with people whose approach to risk you find sophisticated and interesting.” “Yeah.” “One of them is Peter Thiel. What were your impressions of Peter Thiel? What did he learn spending time with him?” “The first impression is that he’s a weird dude. I interviewed him by phone. And the first question I asked him he took half an hour to answer. So he’s very thoughtful. And the question was what I thought was kind of a softball question. It’s like, if you ran the world 1,000 times or 10,000 times, how often do you think you’d wind up in a situation like the one that you’re in? And it was kind of a nerdy way to ask, do you think you got lucky. Which in Thiel’s case is interesting. There’s an anecdote in the book about this famous or infamous car trip he took with Elon Musk. They were going to pitch Michael Moritz at Sequoia Capital, and Elon had a new McLaren F1 and was going way too fast, and spun out of control in the middle of whichever Sand Hill Road or whatever, and they totaled the car. They could easily have been killed. And instead, they actually hitchhiked to this meeting and saved what was then called Confinity — it was like the future of Paypal, right? And so this twist of fate, twist of good fortune, kind of helped [LAUGHS]: Peter Thiel out. But most people understand, like —” “Wait, how did it help him out? I mean, he didn’t die.” “Well, he didn’t die. So he avoided — yeah, he avoided dying, I guess I’d say. So probably the expectation was not that he’d die. But the point is still that you can easily have a world in which Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are not a part of it if there’s a car going the wrong way and the other side of the road. So most people, when you ask that question — I asked Mark Cuban, for example — they’ll give the politically correct response. Which is, oh, of course I’ve been very lucky, and I’m a talented person, but of course it’s a 1 in a million thing. Right? And Thiel objected to the question. He said, you know, well, if it’s predetermined, then the odds are 100 percent. And if the world’s not predetermined, then the odds are probably approximately zero. But that doesn’t really make sense. Like, how can you perturb the world by exactly this amount? But I think he kind of believes in predestiny a little bit. And —” “As a spiritual thing or as a matter of classical physics?” “There’s a good book by I think Max Chafkin was the journalist — or ‘Chaff-kin’— I don’t how you say his last name — about Peter Thiel called ‘The Contrarian,’ which is convincing that Thiel is actually quite conservative, more than libertarian, and probably quite religious. But I also think that if you ARE one of these people, just the amounts of wealth, and success, and power that Silicon Valley has, I do think some of these people kind of pinch themselves and wonder if they have been one of the chosen ones in some ways or been blessed in some ways, or, maybe the nerdy version of it, think they’re living in a simulation of some kind. Like, what odds would you give yourself that that actually makes sense that you’re the protagonist of the story? It must be kind of weird, right?” “So I used to interview Thiel. Not super regularly but every so often. My impression of him, which has been my impression of a lot of the I would call them ideologist VCs, which is not all VCs, but the ones who are heavily behind or out online and sort of pushing a kind of what I would think of as like VC ideology that leans now right, talking to him always interesting. Because over the course of a conversation, he would offer like 15 or 20 ideas. I would call them more thought experiments than analytical arguments. They were not empirically backed, typically. And you would leave and be like, 13 of those seem genuinely ridiculous to me. Two of them might be very importantly right. I’m not 100 percent sure which are the two and which are the 13. And Peter Thiel, I think, is very — he is a sort of template of the VC mind, and a lot of VCs try to be him. And he’s been very successful. I mean, he’s a guy who has backed a number of very important companies, found a number of very important founders. He is able to do something there. But it is oriented towards being right in important and counterintuitive ways, like, three out of 20 times and doesn’t care about being wrong 17 out of 20 times. Whereas if you think about media, media is oriented towards being right 17 out of 20 times, and the three that it gets wrong are going to be really big because they’re going to be correlated across the entirety of American institutions. But it’s a very different way of thinking about risk. It’s like you want big payouts, not a high betting average.” “And that’s because this is core to the VC mindset. The two things that you hear from every VC, one is the importance of the longer time horizon. So you’re making investments that might not pay off for 10 or 15 years. But number two, even more important, is the asymmetric ability to bet on upside. They are all terrified because they all had an experience early in their career where Mark Zuckerberg walked through their door, or Larry Page or Sergey Brin walked through their door, and they didn’t give them funding. And then they wound up missing on an investment that paid out at 100x or 1000x or 10,000x. And so if you can only lose 1x your money, but you can make 1000x if you have a successful company, then that changes your mindset about everything, and you want to avoid false negatives. You want to avoid missed opportunities. And I think there’s a tendency for a certain type of smart person to provoke, to troll a little bit. I think he’s like that a little bit mean. This is also partly the thing on Twitter, right? I kind of us Twitter sometimes as a sketch pad [LAUGHS]: a little bit for slightly irreverent, half-trollish ideas that might later turn into newsletter posts or something like that, or might be developed further, and probing around and seeing what things land and what don’t. Like a stand mic night at a comedy show or something. And I think that’s how Twitter is meant to be used. But other people use it for enforcing consensus. But we’ve already talked about Twitter. But yeah —” “Well, you can never talk about it enough, particularly with these people. The one thing I will say on that, and I think this is true for virtually everybody I know who has been on that platform for a long period of time, is they will tell you that I have this persona on Twitter.” “Yeah.” “Right? Twitter is not real life. I mean, I use it to provoke. I’m having fun. I’m shitposting. I’m trolling. And people, over time, if they spend a lot of time there, become more like who they are there. That is true for Marc Andreessen, another person who you profile and talk to in the book. It’s true for lots of people in politics I know. Ted Cruz has become his Twitter persona even more than he once was. It happened in Democratic politics I think in 2020. Different campaigns became more like their Twitter incarnations than that person had been in politics before. And I think it has to do with social dynamics. Because over time, the people you get praise from become more persuasive and credible to you. The people who begin to hate you, you sort of repel from. People I think always think they can be playful in their social dynamics, but actually who you end up surrounding yourself, even online, you become them. It’s very, very hard to maintain that kind of separation.” “I mean, clearly, Elon Musk maintained a stance for a while that, oh, I’m just kind of a libertarian moderate. Like, no, he’s kind of like a right-pilled conservative.” “Yeah. And I’m just having fun. I’m posting funny things. He’s his Twitter persona now. You spent some time with Sam Bankman-Fried.” “Yeah.” “Tell me what you learned from him or learned about him.” “I think Sam is kind of insane [CHUCKLES]:, and I’m not very sympathetic to him. I mean, I’m sympathetic in the sense that this is this very dramatic reversal of fortune, where he’s kind of literally emerging and on top of the whole world, and shooting commercials with Tom Brady, and it kind of all collapses, and he becomes very abandoned overnight. So he’s kind of reaching out to a couple of journalists to have conversations because he basically no friends left in the Bahamas anymore. And his parents are there and two of his employees are there, but everyone else has fled the island. Sam is somebody who has to be owned by the river. But, you know, he is unabashedly a part of that world. I mean, he had his tentacles in every part of that world. He was active in Democratic and actually, under the radar, Republican political donations. He was trying to figure out how to get into sports betting legally and things like that. And so he is kind of everywhere. And of course, most of all, with the effect of altruists — in the original plan for the book, there was this awkward transition between the chapter on crypto and the chapter on effective altruism. I’m like, how do I have a natural transition? And then SBF is very important in both worlds, and it’s a very strange connection that somehow crypto profits are funding these people who want to cure malaria or something in Africa. But, you know, I think there are a couple of things. One is that I think people were overly impressed by SBF, partly because he was able to manipulate his self image. I mean, he’s not the most conventionally normal guy, right? But he was very aware that founders — the founder algorithm, the VC algorithm is like we can’t — weirdness is good for VCs. The fact that SBF would play video games in investor pitch meetings or things like that, or dress down, or have a fidget spinner, they’re like, oh, he’s a little bit on the spectrum, and that’s actually probably good for a founder because you want the single-minded devotion. And he’s a little weird, but you want variance, variance, variance.” “Sleeps on a beanbag. Right? There was a real mythos around him.” “Which is kind of carefully constructed. He’s kind of inhabiting a character which is inspired by some inner SBF. And he’s kind of playing that character and then kind of forgets what has ever inner core values, whatever they were, might have been. But he is not a very competent manager of risk. He invested all this money in this Democratic primary for a candidate named Carrick Flynn in Oregon’s — I forget which — six or seventh district, maybe eighth district. And the candidate had been ahead in the polls by 15 points and wound up losing by 15 points. Because to spend $8 million in a congressional primary is kind of insane if you’re not in the New York media market or something. So the candidate would go to people’s houses, and they’d be like, hey, I’m Carrick Flynn. I’m a candidate for the Oregon primary. And they’re like, oh, I have your literature and bring out a stack of 20 flyers that SBF’s super PAC had sent on behalf of Carrick Flynn and made him look like a weird freak backed by this mysterious crypto billionaire. So, yeah, he had a tendency — and this is based on testimony from both the court case and an interview I did with Tara MacAulay I think his her name, his original co-founder at Alameda. He had the kind of often good initial instincts, and being a good estimator is an important skill in my world, but then would kind of double down on that a lot and rationalize things a lot. And there was also a bystander effect problem where so many people vouched for him — Sequoia Capital and all these Oxford philosophers, these effective altruists. And he’s on stage with Bill Clinton or whatever, and he’s invited to the Met Gala, and Tom Brady is shooting commercials with him. So what could possibly be wrong with this guy? I mean, maybe he seems a little bit weird to me, but all these other people are kind of in his corner. But no one was doing the due diligence. And he kind of figured out that despite — there’s a little contradiction in the river, where on the one hand we tend to think of ourselves as being contrarian. On the other hand, we’re pretty big fans of markets, because we know that it’s kind of hard to beat the Las Vegas point spread or it’s hard to beat the S&P 500 Index funds or things like that. So the market judgment is that SBF is a credible actor, and how would I trust my own judgment over the market judgment a little bit. And there was too much deference toward that and too much actually groupthink about SBF, because the problems were evident the whole way. I mean, he told Tyler Cowen that if he could flip a coin to double the amount of utility in the world plus 1 epsilon or something but there’s a 50/50 chance of blowing the world up, that he would take the coin flip and repeatedly.” “So you’re actually getting two earths, but you’re risking a 49 percent chance of it all disappearing.” “And again, I feel compelled to say caveats here of how would you really know that’s what’s happening, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Put that aside. Take the hypothetical — the pure hypothetical. Yeah. Yeah.” “And then you keep on playing the game. So what’s the chance we’re left with anything? Don’t I just Saint Petersburg paradox you into non-existence?” “Well, not necessarily. Maybe Saint Petersburg paradox into an enormously valuable existence. That’s the other option.” “I remember seeing that Tyler Cowen interview and thinking, that’s nuts. But I think it gets at a kind of nuts that there is a bias towards in the world you’re describing. There is an aesthetic around talking in probabilities. There’s an ability to think in probabilities, and there’s an aesthetic around probabilities — people attaching, I would often say, almost random probabilities to things. I see this a lot in Silicon valley, people who I would call it like faux Bayesian reasoning where they’re given some probability, but they have no reason to base the probability — 50 percent of this. And it makes you sound much more precise. It makes you sound like what you’re talking about. SBF was known for always talking in terms of expected value. Which is very appealing to the kinds of people you’re describing, maybe the kind of person even that you are. And people who know how to talk like that get through a lot of filters, because you sort of assume, if they’ve converted everything into probabilities, and they’re great at math, and he worked at Jane Street. I worried about this a lot with effective altruists for a while, which is a group I have a lot more sympathy for than most people now have. But there can be this tendency, I think, to fetishize a certain form of discourse. It’s like the first people into that form of discourse are doing something valuable, and then, after that, I think it can become a kind of costume of sloppy thinking. This worries me about models too. I’m curious how you think about it, because I often find that people talk in terms of probabilities but people hear them in terms of certainties. That somehow talking in terms of probabilities makes people more willing to believe you without actually being skeptical or attaching a failure risk to you.” “Yeah. I mean, there’s two things here. One is just there is a kind of jargon. In some ways I liken being from the river to being from the South of the United States or something, where there’s just a lot of shared cultural norms and unspoken discursive tendencies — it’s just the way we communicate, I think, in the river. But also, it’s really easy to build bad models. Even in narrow problems, like I want to forecast the NFL or something or build an election model, it’s easy to build bad models. And on these open-ended problems, it’s really easy to fall in love with the incomplete model of the world and then forget that — what’s the Kamala Harris coconut tree quote? A model does not fall from a coconut tree. It exists —” “It exists in the context of all that came before it. Sure.” “So a model is supposed to describe something in the real world. And if you lose sight of the real world and it fails to describe the real world, then it’s the model’s fault and your fault for building the model and not the real world’s fault. And that’s a lesson that people, I think, have a lot of trouble learning.” “Bankman-Fried is in prison. Thiel might in some ways be responsible for destroying the Republican ticket this year. I mean, in a close election, JD Vance now seems to have about as much negative value as we’ve seen from a recent Vice President. I’m not saying Peter Thiel’s the only reason Vance got chosen for the ticket, but he is one of the key reasons Vance is in politics. Before now, you would said JD Vance was Peter Thiel’s political bet that paid off best.” “Yeah.” “And now it might be his political bet that pays off worst. You mentioned Bankman-Fried’s political donations, which were kind of disastrous in a direct way sometimes. Also ended up taking a lot of other people down over time. If these guys are so good at making bets or seem to be so good at making bets, what are they missing in politics? As somebody who straddles those worlds, what is not in their models? So both these groups, both the river and the village, are groups of elites. And I think, ironically, both groups’ critiques of one another are kind of true, right? I mean, they kind of can be epistemic trespassers, but they are not very data driven when it comes to politics. And part of it, too, is that if you’re a VC, and you’re evaluating a lot of pitches and a lot of opportunities, you have very quick twitch reflexes for saying, O.K., something about this founder seems smart. Let’s investigate further. Let’s do an initial seed round of investing. But it’s like thin slicing and not necessarily — for this part of the river, the VC part of the river — more profound analytical takes on things. And so you’re surrounded by people that are inclined to agree with you, and you kind of see enemies on the other side. He thought maybe that people had some deeper intuitive sense in 2016 that something was wrong with Hillary Clinton, even though she was ahead in the polls. And to his credit, he did back Trump at a time when that seemed like a big risk to take. It seemed like it was probably going to be the wrong bet, and it seemed like he was losing a lot of credibility. And now, it turns out that he was kind of ahead of the curve. You know, people like Peter Thiel thought that the village had been discredited by 2016 and other things. You can’t really trust the polls, and they said Trump would never do x, y or z. But no, I mean, these guys often are pretty dumb about [LAUGHS]: politics. And it’s the same — the guys in the hedge fund poker game that I play sometimes are the guys that are like, I think Gavin Newsom is going to replace Joe Biden on the ticket. And it’s like, you actually were kind of right about part of this, but why Gavin Newsom? What is the infatuation with Gavin Newsom.” “I heard so many versions of that. I always thought it was so crazy.” “Yeah.” “But, you know, it’s funny. I would say what they’ve often missed, and Thiel’s particular on this, is how human beings react to different human beings. So JD Vance, for instance, wildly underperforms in the Ohio Senate race. And Vance’s problem right now, he’s pushed onto the ticket by, as best we can tell, people like Steve Bannon, Don Trump, Jr., Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk — so the very online, very reactionary pale, the people around Trump. And what is missed about him is he’s kind of offputting. He doesn’t talk to other people in a way they would like to be spoken to. He’s able to make even popular ideas like a child tax credit sound completely bizarre when he talks about them in terms of punishing childless adults — that there is something here, I think, when people look at the world — and I’ve seen this in a lot of different dimensions of these kinds of folks — when they look at the world too much in numbers, the intangibles begin to dissolve for them.” “Although I think some of these tangibles aren’t so intangible. Right? Where you can look at JD Vance’s margins in Ohio, you can look at historically candidates who don’t have experience getting elected to some lower office and then ascending the ranks, underperform. It’s been a factor in our congressional midterm models for years, for example. But, look, in some ways, these VCs are obviously incredibly, deeply flawed people. And so, why do they succeed despite that? I think because the idea of having a longer time horizon, number one, and being willing to make these plus expected value, positive expected value, high risk, but very, very, very high-upside bets, and gathering a portfolio of them repeatedly, and making enough of these bets that you effectively do hedge your risk, those two ideas are so good that it makes up for the fact that these guys often have terrible judgment and are kind of vainglorious assholes — half of them, right? They’re interesting people too. I mean, they’re very interesting I think. And they — I’m happy that the book is able to present, I think, a complete journalistic portrait of some of them. But they have lots and lots of flaws, and it’s made up for by the fact that this is kind of a magic formula for making money.” “Let me get us back to the election. So we mentioned before Harris’s approval ratings have gone from significantly underwater to net favorable very, very fast. She’s now leading in head-to-head polls. More than that, there’s a real deep, whatever Republicans have convinced themselves to the contrary, organic enthusiasm that has unleashed itself around her. She turns out to be very memeable in a way I’m not sure people quite predicted. I know most Democrats didn’t predict this. I don’t think you predicted it. So what was missed here? What wasn’t in the Harris model that should have been?” “Yeah, maybe you really can meme your way to victory. [CHUCKLES]: I don’t know. I wouldn’t necessarily have thought that. I mean, there’s something about how it’s off trend a little bit, and it’s kind of unexpected a little bit. And there’s something about that, that I think people were ready for a vibe shift, right? I think people in politics neglect just how annoying the pedantic, dramatic, no fun tone of politics was and the having to be like serious all the time. And if the worst Republicans can say about Kamala Harris, oh, she laughs a lot, maybe it kind of suits the mood a little bit after so many years of doom and gloom. So maybe it was just spontaneous and lucky. I mean, it’s also the case maybe when Kamala Harris was a candidate for the nomination in 2019, I had these tiers, and the top tier was Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. And the line was always, O.K., I got one of those right and one of those about as wrong as possible. But she was seen as this rising, up-and-coming political talent, and maybe the combination of misaligned strategy in 2019 and then not being marketed well by the White House, and we debated before what the reasons for that are, maybe that was the underperformance. And the rising star that people thought she was kind of the real Kamala Harris after all.” “So Harris ended up choosing Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, as her VP pick. You made a case that it should have been Josh Shapiro. Tell me why.” “Pennsylvania, number one. There’s about a 4 percent chance in our model that Harris will lose the election because of Pennsylvania, where she wins the other Midwestern swing states but she’s 19 votes or fewer electoral votes fewer because of Pennsylvania. And if you’re a probabilist, then a 4 percent chance — because campaigns often don’t make a difference, right? If we go into a recession in the third quarter, then Harris will probably lose through no fault of her own. But in the worlds where campaign strategy can make a difference, then the VP being from Pennsylvania is a reasonably big upgrade. And the fact that he has demonstrated his popularity with this very diverse state that’s kind of a microcosm of the US as a whole — in Pennsylvania, you have the Northeast, you have the Midwest, and even you have a little bit of the South creeping in the Appalachian part of the state. You have the suburbs, you have rural areas, and you have one of the biggest cities in the United States. You have a big African-American vote. You have lots of famous colleges and things like that. You have everything there, and he’s 15 points above water approval-wise. And that’s pretty powerful information to work with. I happen to think that Tim Walz is an above-average pick, better than most, better than JD Vance. Not a particularly high bar, but better than a lot of the recent picks. I mean, I think he’s kind of memeable as America’s goofy dad kind of way, and he had a pretty moderate track record in Congress. And again, my premise is that, generally speaking, moderation wins. A lot of people disagree with that, but I think the empirical evidence is strong there. More progressive governance, of course, in Minnesota. But I think it was a somewhat risk-averse decision. Now, if you read —” “Why do you say that? I found this argument you’ve made very weird. So I think there’s a very good chance — I always told people on the VP pick my head says Shapiro and my heart says Walz.” “Yeah.” “I think that because I am a cautious person, if I were running for president, worried about losing Pennsylvania, I would have found it very hard not to pick Shapiro. Because if you don’t pick Shapiro, and you end up in a we lost Pennsylvania scenario, everybody’s going to blame you for blowing the decision that could have won Pennsylvania. In terms of the expected value, both on the front end and the back end, I understood Walz as a choice on vibes, this sort of energy, this momentum she has created. He was sort of able to upend and remake all Democratic messaging in a single morning Joe appearance. There is some intangible charisma to Walz that has made him — developed him overnight, this huge online fan base, that the cautious candidate, the one, listening to the consultants, the one reading Nate Silver polls, that candidate goes with Shapiro. Walz is something else. Why did you say that you understood Walz as risk averse?” “Because I think they were worried about news cycles where the left got mad, and/or the Gaza issue was elevated, and/or you had protests at the convention in Chicago in a couple of weeks. I think they were worried about that, and maybe kind of undermining what is clearly good vibes right now, and maybe overrating — I mean, maybe it’s not. Maybe I just think it’s the lower expected value decision of what gives Kamala Harris a higher chance of winning the electoral college in November.” “I think one of the questions I’ve been reflecting on — because I often think about, where do I disagree with writers I otherwise agree with? And I think I’m typically pretty aligned with you on a bunch of things, or Iglesias, or [INAUDIBLE], or some others. But a lot of you have really gotten into a view that I think takes the median voter theorem almost too seriously. That it’s like as if politics is unidimensional, and how close you are to ideologically the median voter is what decides elections. Which I do think moderation has an effect in. I mean, we see this in the political science research. But that doesn’t have a lot of room in that model for energy, for enthusiasm, for the mediation of politics — the thing that happens in between the candidate and the public for what is happening on social media, for what is happening on cable news. And you can often sort of back out explanations here and there. But I, for instance, think this sort of in retrospect explanation that what led Obama to victory was careful moderation — one of the things he did was moderate on some issues like gay marriage. Another thing he did was unleash astonishing levels of enthusiasm in the electorate for reasons orthogonal in many ways to his policy positions. And so I’m curious how you think about that. Because to me, one of the questions Shapiro and Walz raised, Shapiro and Harris sort of are a lot like each other. I think they sort of come off as the two smartest members of the law review. Right?” “Yeah, that’s interesting —” “Which is like kind of —” “— for sure.” “— not necessary the visual you want — maybe it is but might not be — and that there is something here that is I guess people call it vibes now. I feel like it’s a little dismissive. But how you play out in earned media, in social media, how much people want to talk about you, that feeling of enthusiasm, how do you think about that as somebody who builds models and handicaps politics?” “I mean, look, if you’re literally building a congressional model, there’s a model that forecasts the vote based on fundamentals, which means not the polls if you don’t have polling, for example, based on whatever it is, seven or eight factors. And one of those factors, if you’re incumbent, is how often do you vote with your party. And the more often you buck your party, actually the more often — like Susan Collins or Joe Manchin — then you tend to overperform in your congressional race. Now, that’s also one of eight factors. Right? And even when you have all eight factors, there’s still quite a bit of uncertainty in the race. So to me, it’s like this is something where if you’re used to looking at larger data sets, you can come up with counterexamples of Jon Tester is pretty progressive actually and somehow manages to get reelected in Montana with this kind of maybe Tim Walz-like folksy personality or something —” “Sherrod Brown. Sort of similar to that.” “Also pretty progressive. But if you take all the data from every congressional race since 1990, then it becomes clear in the aggregate, right? And I’d also say, if we could get progressives to the point where — I don’t know who we is in this sentence, because I’m not sure I identify as progressive — liberal but not progressive, I’d say — if we could get them to the point where they said, yes, the median voter theorem is mostly true but sometimes outweighed by other factors. But yeah, to get them to that point, instead of thinking, oh, you win elections by winning the base — I mean, that might have narrowly been true in an earlier —” “Wait, you’re turning this around on progressives. Because I’m asking it of you. I agree that progressives should take the median voter theorem more seriously. But I am asking you whether energy, enthusiasm, media — I just think attention in politics is undertheorized. I think if you look at Donald Trump, and you do a thing that I’ve seen people do, and say, look, he is more like the median voter on certain things like immigration, et cetera, or at least he was perceived as more moderate than Hillary Clinton and that’s why he won, I think that is an undertold story about Donald Trump that is somewhat true. I think that missing the showmanship of Donald Trump, the entertainment value, the energy he unlocks in people. There’s a reason that Trump had Dana White from the UFC and Hulk Hogan on his night of the RNC. So in 2020, Joe Biden’s view is that the election should be about Donald Trump, and Donald Trump’s view is that the election should be about Donald Trump. And that was a theory of attention they both agreed on, and it worked out for Joe Biden. In 2024, Joe Biden’s view is the election should be about Donald Trump. Donald Trump’s view was the election should probably be about Donald Trump. And that was a bad theory of attention. Biden had no way of shifting a narrative that wasn’t any good for him.” “Yeah.” “And so I guess this is what I’m getting at, that one thing that I worry about in some of this thinking among people I like is that attention is important. Candidates have different theories of it, but I don’t know that we know how to think about it as rigorously as I wish we did.” “Look, I agree. I mean, again, with Harris, maybe you do have to revise your views a little bit. I think also maybe in a campaign that’s a sprint and not a marathon, then maybe you never reach the long run. It seems possible. Usually, I’d say don’t worry about momentum over the next two weeks, because inevitably you’re going to have a bad news cycle later on. It’s just how the media works and it’s how elections work. It is possible they can just sprint their way to a memeified victory in this shortened, modified campaign. That they have a good convention, and that she wins whenever the debate is held, and then you’re in October and everyone’s crazy and explicitly partisan, they may be able to sprint to a narrow electoral college victory without having this skeptical news cycle. So that may be an argument for Walz, I think.” “One of the reasons on my mind is not actually Walz. And as I said before, because I do want to say this, I’m not sure who she should have picked as VP. I actually have very conflicted views on this, although I really, really enjoy Tim Walz, and really enjoyed interviewing him, and think he’s a pretty unusual political talent. But I think you could say the same about Josh Shapiro in different ways, and Pennsylvania is a very big state. But I’ve been interested in the shift in — look, you have a campaign staffed by many of the same people, particularly in the first two weeks, and yet the campaign’s tenor has completely changed. The tone of press releases is now they are trying to get you to talk about them and doing that by courting controversy, by being kind of mean in a way. Democrats have not been mean in a long time. That Tim Walz actually made a JD Vance couch joke in his introducing himself as her vice presidential pick speech — let’s put it this way, that is not something that Joe Biden campaign was going to do. They want people to talk about them. They want to court kind of controversy, outrage. They want attention. But I think the reason it’s all on my mind is what I am seeing in them is a radically different relationship to attention than the campaign that the same people were running two weeks ago.” “Yeah. And this why we rely on you for how much these people overlap. Like, that’s not something I really —” “They overlap tremendously.” “Yeah.” “I mean, it’s not the exact same people. Mike Donilon isn’t running things anymore. But there’s enough of the same people here that you’re not dealing with ‘nobody knew how to write these press releases’ a month ago.” “It is interesting that Joe Biden, based on the polling, would probably have been better off in election with low turnout. The one thing that might have saved him is if you get that special election, midterm election, lower turnout where people aren’t very happy about it, but they go to the polls and vote for Biden and the Trump people don’t bother to show up. Because unlike in the past, the marginal voters have been more likely to vote for Trump than for Biden. So maybe by having a really boring campaign, it kind of suited their interests. With Harris, who is bringing back some of the younger voters and some of the voters of color that had defected to Kennedy, or defected to Trump, or defected to sitting out the election, those are also some of the more marginal voters. And so, now, all of a sudden, she probably doesn’t mind as much higher turnout which is going to get young Latino women to vote for her or young Black men to vote for her when they might not have voted for Biden. And so it kind of matches the incentives of where you want to turnout to be on November 5.” “Tim Alberta in the Atlantic had a great piece on the way the Trump campaign was thinking about the race that came out around the time of the debate or right after the debate. And they felt they had Nevada, North Carolina completely locked up — and Georgia — and that this was really a race in three, maybe four states. My understanding is Harris and her team think they have re-expanded the map. They think that Nevada, Arizona, Georgia are for sure back in play. They think that North Carolina might be back in play. Do you think that’s true? Do you think the map has gotten bigger?” “I think that’s right. Because, again, look at the voters that Biden was falling off with. Nevada, people don’t remember, they think of it as kind of libertarian old miners, right? No, Nevada is extremely diverse, and it’s working class voters of color. Big fall-off constituency for Biden. Georgia, you have tons of young professionals, and tons of great colleges and universities, and, of course, tons of Black voters — the same groups that he’s declining from a little bit. North Carolina has been, interestingly, kind of close in the polls. Arizona is the one that didn’t seem to have moved quite as much, though there was one poll yesterday with Harris ahead there. But that’s right. I mean, I think the map has expanded, and it’s obviously plausible again now that she would win Georgia, especially with the Brian Kemp stuff not helping Trump one bit. At the moment — I was playing in a poker tournament, very on-brand, right — when Trump gets shot and has the iconic photo, which I’m not a Trump fan, but you kind of have to admire that, I think a little bit, I think a lot of people assume he’s going to win the election. I mean, with Biden already, he’s not going to lose after this. They try to shoot him, and he has this great photo opportunity, right? And then it seems like he’s at a high water mark. And then he picks JD Vance, and I think got a little arrogant.” [LAUGHS] “Because his initial instinct apparently was not to pick necessarily JD Vance and kind of talked out of it by his sons. And I don’t know what influence Peter Thiel or whatever had. But the VC guys were like, oh, JD Vance is kind of one of us. And he probably is smarter than the average VP or something. But that appeal has been demonstrated not to work. I mean, you saw it with Blake Masters for example, right? It works every now and then. I guess Rick Scott had a background in I don’t know what exactly, but like —” “Medicare fraud.” “O.K., yeah. [LAUGHS]: But for the most part, these —” “The guy the guy ran a health company that was convicted of the single largest Medicare fraud at that point in history.” “What I tell my VC friends is if you have a rich guy, just have him buy a basketball team or something. He’s not going to come across very well to the average voter. And I think they don’t understand that. And then, again, in a poker tournament or a poker home cash game, when you go from having a big stack and you’re kind of like, oh, this is so nice. Man, I’m going to go home and cash out my winnings. Maybe I’ll have a nice little whiskey at the bar or something. And this is going to be — I’ll text my friends about how well my session ran. And then you lose a big pot, and then you lose another big pot, and then you go on tilt. And before long, you have no chips left.” “What is tilt?” “Tilt is playing emotionally, particularly in poker or other forms of gambling. It’s often sparked by a bad beat. Meaning that you got unlucky. Or it can be sparked by getting bluffed and getting mad at your opponent. Or bad luck. Or sometimes you can actually have what’s called winner’s tilt too, where maybe this is what Trump had in picking JD Vance. You have a bunch of things that are going really well. I mean, this election was going about as well as it could for Donald Trump. He’s not a popular guy, yet he had moved ahead in some of the National polls by four or five points. It’s pretty hard to do. I mean, he’s lost the popular vote twice.” “Trump feels very on tilt to me. When you think about him, for Donald Trump, he had been pretty on his message. He was talking a lot about immigration. He was talking a lot about inflation. He was letting it be known that he was thinking about picking Doug Burgum. He seemed to be enjoying this idea that he was — people were longing for a stability They now associated with his presidency rightly or wrongly. They wanted the lower prices back. They don’t like the war in Gaza. They don’t like the war in Ukraine. Maybe Trump is a strong man who can bring it back. And he was kind of playing into that. And since the Harris switch and him beginning to fall in the polls, you feel this old Trump returning. The Trump who goes to Georgia and begins yelling at the governor — the Republican governor — of Georgia. The Trump that goes to the National Association of Black Journalists and begins to talk about how nobody knew Kamala Harris was Black. The Trump who is just trying out attack lines, trying to find something that will work no matter what the kind of cost might be. I mean, your description of him playing emotionally — he’s not listening to anybody right now. He’s flailing.” “And the fact that, according to the reporting, that they weren’t prepared for the eventuality when Joe Biden dropped out was kind of inexcusable. I mean, if you looked at prediction markets, it was immediately a live consideration after the debate. I think they overestimated the degree to which Democrats are a personality cult. I mean, they can be. There was maybe a personality cult around Obama, or Bill Clinton, or things like that. But there wasn’t one around Joe Biden. He was kind of always the candidate of the party. And it was not in the party’s interest any longer to have him as their nominee. And so the Democratic Party is capable and powerful in a way the GOP is not. And they extrapolated from their views to how Democrats would behave and underestimated the smart decision that the party was capable of making.” “I talked to Republicans about this, about why they weren’t more prepared, and one thing I heard from them is they just didn’t think Biden was going to step aside. I mean, if you’re a party that has completely bent the knee to Donald Trump and is now years and years into not being able to convince Donald Trump of functionally anything, it might shift your sense of how people in power, particularly the apex of power, act. It’s one reason — this is a place where you and I’ve been a little bit different — I’ve been more on the side of Joe Biden did something difficult that deserves praise. Because — and I think you see this in how Republicans were thinking — leaders just often don’t do this. The kind of personality that gets you to that point is not the kind of personality that leaves power gracefully. It’s why, when people are talking about dictators, there’s endlessly this talk of how to create golden parachutes for dictators. You’re dealing with a kind of human being that has told a story about their own essentialness. Going back to your point about Elon Musk and feeling like you’re the main character of global life — particularly you’ve become the American president — you sort of were the main character of global life for a while — that does something to you. Those people don’t give it up easily.” “No. And if you look at the history of — before there was whichever Amendment it was, 20-something Amendment —” “22.” “— that prevents you from running for more than two terms, it was pretty routine for candidates to tease — Woodrow Wilson had a stroke and wanted a third term. Harry Truman had like a 32 percent approval rating and wanted a third term, second full term. Old men are often pretty stubborn. And I think the most interesting thing is that if Harris wins — or maybe comes close, but mostly if she wins — what that will say about the primary system, right? Maybe we should go back to giving a larger role to superdelegates for example.” “I want to end on a part of your book I found really interesting, which is about the physical experience of risk — in gambling, but in other things. You talk about pain tolerance. You talk about how the body feels when you’re behind on a hand and you’re losing your chips. You’ve talked about being on tilt. But I see it in politics too. I mean, there is a physical question that comes into the decisions you make. I see it on this podcast. There are times when a question is physically uncomfortable for me to ask another person. Tell me a bit about how you think about this relationship between the body and the ability to act under pressure to make intuitive decisions in moments of very high stress.” “So human beings have tens of thousands of years of evolutionary pressure which is inclined to respond in a heightened way to moments that are high stakes, that are high-stress moments. If you’ve ever been in a situation where you saw someone’s life in danger or your own life was in danger — you know, I was in LA in January, and there was an armed robbery outside the place where I was trying to get just a cup of coffee. And time kind of slows down a little bit in situations like that. And you don’t realize how stressed out you are until I texted my partner and be like, LOL, almost got shot, ha, ha. And I was kind of like, oh yeah, I was too cool for school. And then an hour later, I’m getting some tacos or something and I almost break down. It’s like, oh my god, it could have gone really, really badly. Public speaking also triggers this for people because objectively it’s a pretty high-stakes thing. If you’re playing a $1 or $2 poker game, and it’s nothing for you, your body will when you’re playing a $100-200 game where it really matters — you will just know. You’ll experience that stress. Even if you suppress it consciously, it will still affect the way that you’re literally kind of ingesting your five senses. So if your heart rate goes up, that has discernible effects. But actually, your body is providing you with more information. You’re taking in more in these kind of short bursts of time. People who can master that zone — and I use the term zone intentionally, because it’s very related to being ‘in the zone’ like Michael Jordan used to talk about, or golfers, or hockey goalies, or whatever else — learning to master that and relish that is a very powerful skill. Because you are experiencing physical stress whether you want to or not.” “How much is that, in your view, in your experience, learnable, and how much of it is a kind of natural physical intelligence some people have and some people don’t?” “I think it’s actually quite learnable. It’s a little bit like if you’ve been on mushrooms before [LAUGHS]: then you kind of learn, oh, this is the part of the brain that is — this is the things that look a little funny when you’re on mushrooms, right? You can kind of maybe tone it up or tone it down a little bit. So it’s very much like that. I mean, it’s terrifying the first time it happens. But when you start to recognize it, and you kind of make a conscious effort to slow down a little bit, and take your time, and try to execute the basics, it’s not as much about trying to be a hero. It’s about trying to execute the basics. Because when everyone’s losing their shit, if you can do your basic ABC blocking and tackling, then you’re ahead of 95 percent of people. And keeping bandwidth free for dealing with emergency situations, that will take you very far.” “It’s funny, because that feels to me like a very important question that is hard to test in politics.” “Yeah.” “People have to make profound decisions under incredibly high stress. And we have simulacrums of it. The debate, in a way, is a simulacrum of that. Very, very high stress. Speeches on teleprompters are not very good analogies for that. But this question of how good is a person at that moment —” “I mean —” “— how do you evaluate that?” “I mean, Trump, after getting shot, kind of performed very well. And I think, again, the Harris moment of leaping right into action to secure the nomination also has to be seen as very good performance under stress. And Biden’s failure under stress — I mean, he went to some kind of spiral of some kind or another, physical, or mental, or whatever else. So those kind of three pivotal moments — the assassination, the debate, and then Harris seizing the nomination in record time — speak to the difference in performance. And that’s why the two of them, Harris and Trump, are still candidates for the presidency, and Biden is not.” “I was just reading Nancy Pelosi’s new book before I was reading yours, because I just had her on the show, and she talks about how, above all, she says, that what a Speaker of the House needs is intuition. They need to be able to act. And she says that the key thing is you have to act fast. Because every moment you don’t act, your options are diminishing. And I ended up thinking, then, when reading your book, of it. Because what she was describing is quite, I think, for her, physical. Like something in her knows how to act and is unafraid to act in those moments. The thing that was crucial about her, I think, in this process, inside the Democratic Party of getting Biden out, is she was willing to act in public to take the pressure of that in ways very few people were. And somebody had to be doing that in public to create space for others to be considering it in private. But you look at her career, and she has this sort of intuitive capability to know when to move. And there’s something in it that I don’t think she can explain how she does it, but it makes her a fascinating leader. People believe that she will act. And she will act because something in her knows when to act, and she’s unafraid.” “Yeah. So is gut instinct overrated or underrated? Well, it depends on how much experience you have, right? Poker players have — because now poker is actually kind of a solved game. There are computer solvers they’re called that spit out this very complicated solution to poker. Hard to execute in practice, but it’s technically speaking a solved game. However, the best poker players can have uncannily good instincts based on reading physical tells, just the kind of vibe someone gives off. And if — you know, I played a lot of Poker and writing this book, more live poker than I have in the past, and you develop a sixth sense. Not all the time. It helps if you’re well rested. But you develop a sixth sense for whether someone has a strong hand or something. Like they’re glowing green or something almost sometimes. And you can test it, because you can say, I know that I’m supposed to fold this hand here. It’s a little bit too weak to call against a bluff. But I just have a sense that he’s bluffing. And lo and behold, you’re right more often than you’d think — more often than you need to be to make that call correct based on the odds that you’re getting from the pot. So if Nancy Pelosi has decades and decades of experience in politics and reading the moves of how the coalition is moving, I mean, that’s something where intuition probably plays a pretty good role. And also the fact that being willing to work with incomplete information — I mean, I don’t know how much longer Biden could have — maybe they could have run out the clock [LAUGHS]: potentially.” “Oh, they 100 percent could of. That day when he sent that letter to congressional Democrats and said, I’m not leaving — this conversation is over, stop trying to overturn the will of the primary voters — I was getting congressional Democrats telling me, this is done. It’s a fait accompli. He’s quelled the rebellion. It looked to me like he had. I was talking to other people. They said, 10 percent shot he’s out. Nancy Pelosi goes on ‘Morning Joe’ two days later and says, we’re really looking forward to him making a decision. And I asked her about it. And I said, what was happening? I mean, he had just sent that letter. And she said, yeah, but that was just a letter.” “Yeah.” “I didn’t accept the letter as anything but a letter. I mean, there are some people who were unhappy with the letter. Let me say it a different — some said that some people were unhappy with the letter. I’ll put it in somebody else’s mouth. Because it was a — I don’t think — it didn’t sound like Joe Biden to me.” “I’m like, oh, you read a bluff.” “So I think Nancy Pelosi might be pretty good at poker.” “Good place to end. Always our final question — what are three books you’d recommend to the audience.” “So one book is pertinent to the discussion that we had a moment ago, which is called ‘The Hour Between Dog and Wolf.’ It’s written by John Coates, who is an academic economist who then became a derivatives trader, I think, for Deutsche Bank in New York and found out that the traders that he studied were really weird. Like these traders would have strange physical and mental stress responses to the market rising or falling. And he was so fascinated by it that he went back and became a neuroscientist and basically did studies of traders. So you test the testosterone of like an options trader or a guy who works at a hedge fund and see how it varies from day to day and correlates with performance. So yeah, so he studies the physical responses of risk-takers, and the book is called ‘The Hour Between Dog and Wolf.’ So that’s one recommendation. Number two, in a totally different direction, ‘The Making of the Atomic Bomb’ by Richard Rhodes. We didn’t talk as much about some of the AI stuff today, but at the end of the book there’s a pretty long, elaborate comparison between the Manhattan Project and the building of these large language models that some people think could be potentially very dangerous. And nuclear weapons are, I think, a pivot point in human history, and this book is kind of the best history of that. The third is called ‘Addiction by Design,’ by Natasha Schüll. And Natasha is an NYU anthropologist who studied Las Vegas as her thesis basically. She did a lot of reporting just about the properties of slot machines, and how addictive they are, and about the kind of casino gambling industry in general. And of course, she draws metaphors between that and the rest of society.” “Nate Silver, thank you very much.” “Thank you, Ezra.” [THEME MUSIC]

The last I looked, your model has Kamala Harris winning the election at around 52 percent — it might be a little different today. But this has been an unusual election. How much stock do you put in your model right now?

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