204. Nate Silver Says: “Everyone Is Kind of Weird”

[0] Hey, Nate.

[1] Hey.

[2] Hey, it's Stephen Dubner.

[3] How's it going?

[4] Good.

[5] Good to talk to you.

[6] First off, just tell us in, you know, 60 seconds or less what you actually do now in a given day.

[7] So I am the editor -in -chief of the website 538 .com, and I don't know that I have a lot of consistency from day to day.

[8] Sometimes I'm writing, sometimes I'm running models, sometimes I'm editing, sometimes I'm managing, sometimes doing media.

[9] So it's a job that is always really fun and challenging.

[10] in the sense that you're not doing too much of the same thing, but I have to think carefully about how to budget my time.

[11] Nate Silver is America's favorite statistical guru of the past, well, maybe ever.

[12] He has been devilishly accurate in predicting electoral outcomes.

[13] Before that, he joined the small but influential fraternity of stat heads who work with data in sports, particularly in baseball.

[14] He's written an excellent book called The Signal and the Noise, which is essentially about the folly of prediction.

[15] And today, he is our guest on the latest installment of Frequently Asked Questions in which we compel a noteworthy person to tell us some important truths, such as their favorite sport.

[16] I don't know.

[17] Bowling, I suppose.

[18] Just how devoted they are to their work.

[19] I don't even always watch, like the State of the Union, for example.

[20] And what you learn about life as you get a bit older?

[21] One of the most profound lessons to me about adulthood is that everyone's kind of weird.

[22] From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything.

[23] Here's your host, Stephen Dupner.

[24] What do we do on the show?

[25] Pretty simple.

[26] We ask questions, hopefully the sort of questions you might like to ask, and we ask them to the sort of people that you might like to hear from.

[27] Nate Silver, for instance, he is chiefly known as the proprietor of 538 .com.

[28] Yeah, so the kind of elevator pitch is that 538 is data journalism.

[29] The problem is once you get past the first five words, then it becomes a little bit more complicated to define, right?

[30] You know, but really we think it's empirical analysis, quote unquote, the scientific method is applied to journalism, but it's entirely compatible with traditional reporting approaches too.

[31] But the idea is just it's kind of, we believe there are skill sets that are underwent.

[32] underused in journalism, including computer programming, coding, Cisco analysis, of course, in particular.

[33] And we think that journalists could benefit from having more of that.

[34] These days, 538 covers a lot of territory, sports, the economy, pop culture.

[35] But it is politics, especially political elections, that make up its foundation.

[36] That is where the site got its name from the number of votes in the electoral college, which determines who wins the presidency of the United States.

[37] I started just as kind of a blogger .com blog back in 2008 during the campaign then.

[38] It kind of blew up during 2008.

[39] I licensed it to New York Times from 2010 to 2013, and then it was acquired by ESPN after that.

[40] I'm kind of a big poker player, and I've played in the World Series of poker a couple of times.

[41] times, never done extraordinarily well.

[42] But to win the World Series of Poker, when there are like 7 ,000 entrants, you have to get really, really lucky a couple of times, right?

[43] And it kind of feels like in 2008 and again in 2012, I won a couple of really big pots and key circumstances when things get broken against me. During those elections, Silver compiled polling and demographic data for many sources.

[44] He aggregated, weighted, and analyzed these data.

[45] forging predictions that turned out to be remarkably accurate.

[46] So, you know, sometimes I feel like I'm playing on house money a little bit, but, you know, I'm also trying to turn that into something more sustainable and, you know, build out a staff of really talented journalists and really great people, and that's kind of where I'm mostly focused on right now.

[47] We spoke back in early March when Nate Silver had two things to celebrate, the one -year anniversary of 538 on ESPN .com and the paperback publication of his book, The Signal and the Noise.

[48] First and foremost, congratulations.

[49] Does it feel like a time to sit back and appreciate yourself or not really?

[50] That's the problem is like you can't really stay still.

[51] And we have like, you know, March Madness this month and the UK election coming up.

[52] And so, yeah, there's, I mean, you can kind of be content or happy, but kind of not both at the same time.

[53] I found is one of the consequences of being, having a lot to do and kind of being people's boss and stuff.

[54] Where do you find people that fit your worldview?

[55] Because your worldview, while it's pretty popular in some circles, including, I should say, the circle of people who listen to a show like this, it's not overwhelmingly popular.

[56] It's certainly not quite mainstream yet.

[57] And furthermore, it's new -ish.

[58] So how do you find people that you think will fit?

[59] I mean, I think one sort of problem we have is, is that the skill set that we're hiring for is a place where people would have a lot of options in addition to journalism.

[60] I tend to buy into the notion that there's a shortage in the United States of STEM talent, and we're hiring from that pool a little bit.

[61] But still, you know, there are a lot of organizations, news organizations that are trying to be more data -driven.

[62] You know, a lot of college programs are training people in coding and computer programming and statistics in addition to journalism as part of their curriculum.

[63] So it's getting better over time, but, you know, we do sometimes feel like we have more ideas than we have the capacity to execute on right now.

[64] But it's also kind of part of being a startup and having a lot of creative people on board.

[65] And let's say you find a perfect candidate or 10 perfect candidates who are all the perfect data nerds who are really good with the math and the statistics and even have good taste, but don't do journalism at all.

[66] Is that more coachable than the inverse?

[67] I'm not sure.

[68] I mean, I think there are a lot of parts to being a journalist that are hard to teach other than through experience.

[69] You know, one of them that we noticed our people have that maybe some people that academia lack is just a sense for how other people see the world.

[70] So, no, I'm not sure it's been our experience so far that one skill set is easier than the other to teach.

[71] Obviously, a lot of the work is collaborative too, or you might have someone who's more experienced in getting on the phone, are traveling somewhere and talking to people, and someone else who's more versed in the number crunching.

[72] You're the perfect person for me to ask this question of, in the last, I don't know, three, four, five years, the phrase big data has become so used, maybe abused, that it really has become a cliche in a pretty short time, and it's used in corporate advertising slogans and so on.

[73] And to me, and I may be totally wrong on this, But to me, it's received in some quarters as a sort of magic bullet.

[74] No, I agree with almost all of that, really.

[75] It's kind of one of the themes of my book.

[76] And there are a couple of things to unpack.

[77] You know, one is the term big data itself.

[78] And there are some people who would say, well, big data has to be really large, not the sort of stuff you could crunch on a regular computer.

[79] You know, for example, we launched Interactive recently where it looks at a different way of looking.

[80] at which flights actually get you there the fastest, what's the best airline for logistics, and that relies on data from about six million flights.

[81] That sounds impressive, but you can still run that program in about 10 or 12 minutes on a laptop, right?

[82] People wouldn't really say it's big data when all those records are pretty carefully scrutinized.

[83] But that said, people, I think, when they say big data often mean analytics, really, and statistical analysis, applied statistics.

[84] you know it's not all about the data necessarily you know oftentimes not about the amount of data you have but how much you vetted that data if a data set is virginal as I call it no one's looked at it before really you're going to have a lot of problems and one problem with a really large data set is that if you're running some algorithms some quick and dirty way to find the most influential data points a lot of times those are bugs and outliers right and the reason why you have big anomalies because someone coded it in wrong or or you made some mistake in the analysis.

[85] You know, I also think there aren't necessarily the skills in the training.

[86] So one thing I talked about in my book is how when the personal computer became commonplace in the workforce, the 1970s, then in the home in the early 1980s, it took a while before there were any tangible signs of productivity gains in the economy, meaning like 10 or 15 or 20 years even.

[87] So I think people love new technology, but they overestimate how much the kind of human factor gets in the way.

[88] I'm not trying to be cute about that.

[89] I just mean that, you know, people need to learn how to use these tools, what they can do, what they can't do.

[90] You know, no amount of data is a substitute for scientific inference and hypothesis testing and kind of structured analysis of a system.

[91] I think one of the false promises that was made early on is that, well, if you have a billion data points or trillion data points, you're going to find lots and lots of correlations through brute force.

[92] And you, will, but the problem is that a high percentage of those, maybe the vast majority, are false correlations, are false positives, where they're statistically significant, but you have so many lottery tickets when you can run analysis on a trillion data points that you're going to have some one in a million coincidences just by chance alone.

[93] If you bet all your money on them, you might wind up looking very foolish in the end.

[94] How is 538 doing, I guess, overall, editorial, But also from a traffic and business perspective, you know, whenever there's a web debut as high profile as yours leaving the New York Times for ESPN, there's a lot of noise, but then the noise recedes.

[95] And I'm curious, are you making boatloads of money for ESPN?

[96] Are they having mega buyers or Morris because you're so expensive?

[97] How's that working?

[98] You know, in the first year, I mean, it's a pretty young staff.

[99] And a lot of people were doing what they were doing for the first time.

[100] And the expectations were pretty high.

[101] So it kind of took some time to.

[102] to hit a groove, I think.

[103] I try to make an analogy sometimes to opening a new restaurant where you might have a lot of ambition for it, but to reproduce something every day, it's very much, I mean, we after the first day we published, which was March 17th, 2014, we kind of all got beers after work, and we were really pleased, and we'd like literally, or at least I had, I won't play my employees.

[104] Yeah, I'd forgotten that, oh, crap, we have to publish this website.

[105] every day for the rest of our lives, right?

[106] And so, seeing, that kind of consistency takes a little bit more time.

[107] But, you know, if you are looking at kind of indicators, I mean, traffic is up about two times year over year.

[108] It often happens when you launch a product, but that's good.

[109] It's happened to us, too.

[110] We're growing our staff in a slow but sustainable way.

[111] We have, you know, 25 or 30 people now, depending on how you count.

[112] But we're just able to do more things at once.

[113] I mean, in this period here in the kind of early spring, we're launching an interactive on airlines and the NCAA tournament and the U .K. election in a historical perspective of an NBA basketball.

[114] So four or five things in addition to the work we're doing from day to day.

[115] So that success thus far notwithstanding at the New York Times, 538, which was a much, much, much smaller operation than it is at ESPN.

[116] 538 was more essential, certainly to the New York Times website than 538 is to E .S .P .N., which was more essential, certainly, certainly, to the New York Times website than 538 is to E. SPN, which is a sports behemoth, what's the difference for you being, you know, now you're a prominent and I don't know what size fish in a really big pond.

[117] At the times, you were prominent and gigantic fish in a big pond, which came about, I know, organically and maybe even surprisingly to you, but it did happen where you were driving so much traffic, you personally, with a couple colleagues to the New York Times website.

[118] What's the difference now for you psychically and editorially?

[119] It's funny, I mean, in terms of, and we don't obsess too much over traffic, right?

[120] But the election day peak was really high at the times, and that's the people figure site.

[121] And the median month, though, we now get, you know, five or six times more traffic, more visitors than we did at the time.

[122] So, you know, I think sometimes people grasp on to outliers, including when they talk about us in 538.

[123] So ESPM, when it signs a deal with a sports league like the NPA, that's a 10 -year deal.

[124] And they literally will be contemplating technologies that don't even exist yet.

[125] The thing about traffic now is that you can measure so much in real time, you know, so we might be able to say, hey, if we wanted to publish a story that would maximize page views right now, we would say, oh, there's been an alien invasion, right, and President Obama has been kidnapped and beamed up to Mars.

[126] I mean, everyone on the Internet would look at that story for about five minutes, and then no one hopefully would ever read our site again.

[127] And there's no metric yet for kind of what's the long -term value that you're generating from a stupid article that you post today to get a lot of page views or the loyalty you develop with your customers.

[128] So we saw this in baseball a little bit where for a while people were able to measure offense really well and not defense really well.

[129] And so the sloppy conclusion there is that, oh, we can't measure defense, therefore it doesn't matter.

[130] Well, it turned out that when people actually found better ways to measure defensive ability, it turned out to matter.

[131] at least as much maybe more than the conventional wisdom had held.

[132] So we're, we're aware of that and that, you know, it's some things you can judge with metrics, some things you can't, and that's a tricky part of the media business now.

[133] How long do you think you'll do 538 for?

[134] Hopefully for the foreseeable future.

[135] I mean, obviously we have a big election coming up in 2016, but, you know, people when they're taking jobs here assume it's going to be an organization that builds and grows for the long term.

[136] Isn't my imagination, or has ESPN loosened up on talking about sports gambling, which traditionally the NFL, among others, has been really nervous about.

[137] But it feels like this past NFL season, there was a lot more discussion on ESPN about betting lines.

[138] Well, look, I mean, Grant Lamb, which is our sister brand and Bill Simmons, I mean, they've always talked a lot about sports gambling.

[139] And, I mean, look, you can kind of.

[140] see from the examples you cite that I don't think ESPN has too many hangups about it.

[141] The leagues, increasingly, especially the NBA, have fewer hangups about it too.

[142] But this is one of those weird things that Americans are pretty puritanical about.

[143] I mean, before I started 538, I made my living playing poker for a couple of years.

[144] So, you know, they knew what they were getting into.

[145] And, you know, gambling and betting is very important in markets, too, and where that line drawn, I'm not quite sure.

[146] But, you know, I mean, they're not saying, hey, go give me your Vegas picks, but we get no pushback at all from our bosses or from readers when things are framed in that way.

[147] What do you think will be the first of the four major sports leagues to have a franchise in Vegas?

[148] The NHL, that's kind of not a trick question, but the NHL is actively pursuing placing a team in Las Vegas.

[149] You know, I'd say the NBA, since it seems, more gambling friendly they've had i believe an all -star game or two in vegas seems like the next most likely i'm not sure that baseball where you need to turn out uh you know 30 or 40 000 people 81 times a year is as good an area where um where the population isn't that high necessarily and i don't think baseball has become an event in the same way that an NBA game has for for example one of my questions too is when you're going to have the first major political convention in Las Vegas.

[150] Because you think, hey, it's a swing state.

[151] You could not have more hotel space there, especially in the midsummer.

[152] But I think both parties are terrified of what might happen or the implications of the story.

[153] God, can you imagine the prop bets day of?

[154] That would be so much fun, right?

[155] Yeah.

[156] It'd be a lot of fun.

[157] Maybe I'm sure the libertarians do lots of fun things in Las Vegas, but not Democrats or Republicans yet.

[158] Coming up on Freakonomics Radio, we put our standard set of frequently asked questions to Nate Silver.

[159] Even if you're a hardcore Nate Silver fan, you'll learn a thing or two.

[160] So I was born on a Friday the 13th.

[161] I've been thinking about trying to formulate like a kind of Friday the 13th birthday club or organization or something.

[162] And if you're a hardcore Freakonomics fan, you should circle on your own.

[163] calendar, Tuesday, May 5th.

[164] That's the day we release our latest book.

[165] It is called When to Rob a Bank and 131 more warped suggestions and well -intended rants.

[166] It's a compilation of our favorite posts from 10 years of blogging at Freakonomics .com among the questions we try to answer.

[167] Why don't flight attendants get tipped?

[168] If you were a terrorist, how would you attack?

[169] And why does KFC always run out of fried chicken?

[170] That's when to rob a bank, published on May 5th, and available now for pre -order at booksellers everywhere.

[171] From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio.

[172] Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

[173] Today we are talking with Nate Silver.

[174] He's the editor -in -chief of 538 .com, the author of The Signal and the Noise, and as you will hear soon, a would -be curler.

[175] It's in the sport of curling, seriously.

[176] We are now about to subject Silver to what we call our frequently asked questions in the past.

[177] We've tried this with Boris Johnson, the mayor of London.

[178] You plan to make this a regular feature, but this is the first time that you've tried it on some guinea pig.

[179] We did it with Kevin Kelly, the technology maverick.

[180] I tell you, there's nothing more boring than hearing someone's assing trip.

[181] And now it's Nate Silverstone.

[182] Who would you say has been the biggest influence on your life and work and why?

[183] And I guess I mean here not so much personally but professionally.

[184] So maybe it's the intellectual influence.

[185] I mean, you know, I admire Bill James a lot for what he did with baseball statistics, in part because he was way, way ahead of his time.

[186] I mean, you know, kind of preceded Moneyball literally by 20 years or thereabouts, but also because he's a good communicator and kind of a humanist at heart, right?

[187] You know, he's not just interested in statistics for statistics sake, but how they're used to kind of vest life.

[188] and our understanding of sports and other things with a lot of meaning instead.

[189] And also wasn't operating at the White Hot Center of either statistics or baseball or media, for that matter, and quite the opposite.

[190] No, he did not jump on the pagan, right?

[191] He kind of jumped into the row when there was no bandwagon even approaching at all.

[192] And maybe got run over a couple times and then led the bandwagon now.

[193] What's one thing you spend or have spent way too much on but don't regret.

[194] And I realize as I asked you that question, now it sounds like I'm talking about money, but I guess spending could also be time.

[195] I mean, I invest a lot of time and a lot of money in eating.

[196] Well, it's one of those things that I think in the market like New York where I live really rewards effort, where if you spend the time to try different places and sometimes spend the money, although there's great cheap eats in New York, too, you know, I just find that it's a product where where it's a fun way to experiment and something where you have to eat every day, right, so you might as well put some thought into it.

[197] What's your favorite food?

[198] I know you're partial to burritos, but are they your favorite or are there many?

[199] I mean, I particularly like Mexican food, Japanese food, and Italian food, I kind of see as being pretty iconic.

[200] You know, I'm part because they're cuisines that emphasize not a lot of pretense, really, right?

[201] It's kind of fresh and simple ingredients a lot of the time, as opposed to sort of the kind of French classical tradition where I think they're sometimes trying to dazzle you with presentation and style.

[202] So it's elegantly simple those cuisines, I think.

[203] What, in your view, is the perfect burrito?

[204] So I went to a place called La Takeria in San Francisco.

[205] which won our first national burrito bracket last year.

[206] And that was the best burrito I ever had.

[207] And what kind of burrito did you have?

[208] So it had chorizo, but it was kind of cooked.

[209] It was called Dorado style.

[210] So it's kind of golden brown on the outside and just kind of, you know, it's California.

[211] So all the produce is really fresh and the ingredients are perfectly mixed.

[212] There's not kind of lumping in a bunch of guacamole where it shouldn't be and whatnot.

[213] not.

[214] So on kind of both artistic achievement and technical merit, it scored very highly.

[215] What is one story that your family always tells about you?

[216] When I was in nursery school or pre -K, one day decided to just count numbers just to see how high I could count.

[217] It was pretty insistent about it.

[218] I think I got to like 2000 or something before my mom picked me up that afternoon.

[219] And they realized then what your future contained, yes?

[220] Yeah, I think that was an early sign.

[221] What do you collect, if anything, and why?

[222] I used to collect baseball cards when I was a kid.

[223] I'm trying to think, you know, I kind of collect books.

[224] I mean, I have a pretty significant bookshelf that kind of keeps growing over time.

[225] One of the things about writing a book, as you probably know, is that you get sent an awful lot of books, too.

[226] And do you keep most of those ones you're sent, or do you start to triage?

[227] Yeah, I still have an issue with throwing away books.

[228] I just think it's bad, it's bad karma.

[229] Giving away, maybe, but throwing away now.

[230] Favorite book or author?

[231] You know, I kind of often talk about Daniel Kahneman and thinking fast and slow was kind of just, I think, a really great overall kind of modern guide to thinking if that isn't a little too pretentious, or too precious, rather.

[232] But that's one of my favorite books.

[233] Good choice.

[234] Favorite music, artist, band, singer, songwriter?

[235] I used to be really into my buddy Valentine in college this is kind of shoe gazer post -punk band you know so but I think music is maybe one of those things where it gets frozen in time a little bit where kind of the favorite bands I have now at 37 the same ones I might have said at 2021 favorite sport to play you know I like to watch sports I don't know bowling I suppose or my partner actually owns a bowling ball oh I thought you're going to say an alley A ball is not that much.

[236] Oh, an alley, that would be quite something.

[237] You know, I've never been curling.

[238] I really want to go curling.

[239] My partner and I had this idea when time to capitalize on like the curling frenzy.

[240] Which was when I missed that.

[241] Well, every four years, people, there's a kind of cultish affection for the sport of curling, which having grown up in Michigan with Canadian television on all the time, I appreciated.

[242] But the idea was to have some hideously expensive plan for building a curling rink in Central Park.

[243] and just having such good, like, design and PR around it that people wouldn't realize it was just kind of a very elaborate inside joke.

[244] Now, let me ask you this.

[245] Don't you think you have the creativity and reputation to go to Donald Trump and say, look, Woolman Rink, once it's up, it's up all winter, and you could just carve out a nice little curling, I don't know what you call it, a curling lane.

[246] What do you call it, the area where one curls?

[247] That's a good, yeah, I don't think it's an alley, right, or a rink or something.

[248] I have no idea.

[249] You know, I think if Donald Trump kind of carefully read what we wrote about him when he was, quote, unquote, running for president in 2011, he probably wouldn't return my phone call.

[250] Okay, so your favorite sport to play, your official answer seemed to be bowling?

[251] Is that right?

[252] Sure, we'll go with bowling.

[253] What's the highest you've ever bowled?

[254] I think I got like a 180 one time, which is not good for a highest ever score.

[255] You know, I was with Levitt once he bowled a 222, which is, you know, but for a few pins, he was.

[256] close to perfect, actually.

[257] And this was bowling kind of cross -lane, like, wrong way for a right -hander with, like, a 12 -pound ball that didn't curb at all.

[258] And he just threw it very, very, very straight repeatedly, kind of like an automaton.

[259] And it was, we were convinced he was ready for the senior PBA after that.

[260] I've tried to figure out what the relationship is between bowling and beer consumption.

[261] It's kind of a laffer curve, I think, or something, right?

[262] But, like, after, like, 1 .8 beers, I think you're in peak bowling shape.

[263] Well, although you can probably identify the peak of that curve a little bit more easily with bowling than with the laffer curve, no?

[264] Does anyone really know where the laffer curve peaks?

[265] I think not.

[266] I mean, there is a curve, it seems to me. But, you know, I guess even with bowling, there's some complications where you probably warm up to the lane and feel a little bit better.

[267] So you'd have to do a control.

[268] This could be another 538 thing.

[269] Tell us something that most people, even if they think they know quite a bit about you, don't.

[270] know about you.

[271] So I was born on a Friday the 13th.

[272] I've been thinking about trying to formulate like a kind of Friday the 13th birthday club or organization or something.

[273] John Walsh, who's the former president of ESPN, I think, was at least also January 13th birthday.

[274] I think it was a Friday the 13th too.

[275] But, you know, kind of from my very beginning, I guess there was some kind of something slightly cosmic about numbers in me. What is one thing that people seem to know about you that is in fact not true.

[276] Maybe not to listen to this interview, but I think people think that I take myself way more seriously than I do.

[277] You know, I mean, for some reason when you're associated with numbers and data, you know, and look, there are other places out there where they can be a little bit pedantic sometimes, but, you know, I'm kind of a little anti -establishment and still anti -authoritarian and that kind of goes back a long way, And we try in our newsroom at 538 to have a lot of fun and to poke fun at one another, you know, to see kind of the reader as a peer and not someone who you're educating.

[278] And that doesn't always come through, I think, in kind of how 538 or how kind of my career is portrayed.

[279] You are just a regular burrito -loving wannabe curler who bowls once in a while and drinks.

[280] Yeah, I mean, you know, it's pretty normal.

[281] in some respects and completely strange and in other respects.

[282] But, you know, that's one thing you learn, one of the most profound lessons to me about adulthood is that everyone's kind of weird.

[283] What's the biggest upside of being well -known?

[284] Gosh, I mean, you know, sometimes you get, I think, slightly better service at restaurants.

[285] As I mentioned food before, right?

[286] Where, you know, one time I had a waiter kind of tip me off that, oh, someone, I think she was on our first day on the job.

[287] He's like, um, um, she was like, oh, my manager handed me a card saying I'm supposed to treat you well.

[288] I guess she was kind of very literal minded and explicit about it.

[289] So I would imagine that every time that happens, there's a hundred times that, that it doesn't happen potentially.

[290] But, you know, in my perfect world, I would be like kind of, um, you know, influential without being famous, if that makes any sense.

[291] You know, I don't mind if I get recognized out somewhere.

[292] Um, by the way, it follows a lot when you're on TV.

[293] If you're on TV, if you're on you'll have like a half -life where people recognize you quite a bit.

[294] But that half -life is pretty fast, isn't it?

[295] It really...

[296] It's really fast.

[297] Because by seven days later, they've seen a thousand other faces and yours is starting to recede.

[298] At some point you're kind of on the hedonistic treadmill, I guess, where each pet it becomes normalized pretty fast, right?

[299] And you're like, okay, so now, you know, every 18th time I go out, someone will say hello to me, and it's almost always friendly.

[300] And it's a nice thing.

[301] It would be jarring if it had never.

[302] never happened to you before, but, you know, but then you also get in environments where so, so a year ago, I went to the Vanity Fair Oscar party where you just realize that like there are whole orders of magnitudes of fame that, you know, I am just like totally, by as kind of a quasi -nerd celebrity, you're just dwarfed by, you know, it's not like people are 20 times more famous or like 20 ,000 times more famous.

[303] And you get in a room like that and you're like kind of literally the least famous person there and it's it's kind of fun to be a fly on the wall again what's something that you believed for a long time to be true and then decided that you'd been wrong oh gosh this is a tricky a tricky question i mean you know a little bit of it kind of gets into the critique we were talking about a bit about big data earlier where um where i kind of thought well just be quantitative and then that's better categorically than being qualitative and that'll solve all your problems.

[304] I mean, I still believe to a very rough approximation, people need to be more quantitative, but I think it needs to be a much more kind of structured investigation of the data.

[305] And kind of realizing, this is one of the challenges, one of the reasons that kind of betting and markets are interesting, is that whenever you have a belief that kind of differs a lot from the consensus, then that's a very complicated place to be.

[306] We are more than two years out, but I'd be an idiot not to ask you if you today had to bet a $1 ,000 with, let's say, me, which if you were still at the New York Times, you wouldn't be allowed to bet with me, I guess, but you could now, presumably.

[307] Who's going to be present in 2016?

[308] Well, you know, I don't know that anyone has more than a 50 % chance.

[309] You know, I think the plurality favorite is a pretty easy question, which is Hillary Clinton.

[310] If you figure to it 50 -50, well, to an approximation, it's 50 -50 in the general election, which is probably about right in these circumstances.

[311] She is the dominant contender for the Democratic nomination where the GOP field is quite split.

[312] So she, you know, she would certainly be the frontrunner in that sense.

[313] Does political data analysis start to bore you after a while?

[314] A little bit, but I think I'll be reinvigorated by 2016.

[315] So midterm elections are big letdowns relative to how fun presidential years are.

[316] 2010 happened to be super interesting because you have this very large Republican wave that had very tangible consequences as far as President Obama's ability to continue to enact and affect his agenda.

[317] So that almost had kind of a presidential type storyline to it.

[318] The midterms last year were pretty dull.

[319] I got to be honest.

[320] They were interesting from a forecasting standpoint and that there was some uncertainty about.

[321] what the polls said and which party would win the Senate.

[322] But I don't expect any problems like that in 2016.

[323] We're going to have at least one really compelling primary.

[324] We should have a close general election.

[325] There's kind of a cottage industry covering Hillary Clinton, even if it's sort of a field of one.

[326] So, you know, that's really fun.

[327] In some ways, the presidential primaries are much more interesting and in some ways kind of a better design process than the general election in that you have to perform well continuously over time.

[328] It requires more organization.

[329] You can't get hot on one day.

[330] It's like having to win a seven -game series instead of just one game.

[331] Right.

[332] Yeah.

[333] But it sounds like you, and maybe I'm wrong on this, but just from this conversation, from what else I've read of yours, it just sounds as though sports is more fun generally than politics, or you like sports more than you like politics as shallow a characterization, that is?

[334] Yeah, I mean, look, I am really into kind of election data, but I'm not like a fan of politics per se, right?

[335] Like I don't take any...

[336] You didn't collect political cards when you were a kid, in other words.

[337] No, you know, I didn't kind of take joy in, you know, I don't even always watch like the city of the union, for example, whereas I very much do enjoy watching and spending income on going to sports games.

[338] You know, I think in some ways the fact that I'm not kind of a, I mean, I am a politics geek, right?

[339] but I don't love politics.

[340] I think that's helpful potentially.

[341] I think in Washington in particular, there's a lot of reverence for the political system that leads to less criticality in coverage that leads, I think, really to people sometimes lacking perspective on which stories resonate or not.

[342] So one interesting thing is at the time we're recording this, there's a big controversy over Hillary Clinton's email records.

[343] There's good reporting on that, excellent reporting from the New York Times.

[344] but you have some pundits who are saying, oh, this is a huge blow to her candidacy.

[345] If you go to betting markets and they have these in the UK now, some of the U .S. ones were shut down, but Hillary Clinton's probability of winning the nomination or the general election haven't budged one bit.

[346] I'm not promising you the markets are right.

[347] It can be slow to pick up on information, but it's interesting that the scandal that is considered to be a huge deal by the political press, bettors are kind of saying this is literally nothing at all.

[348] And so I think sometimes people don't realize that things that are great reported stories, right?

[349] And deserve to be, you know, I believe in transparency, government and everything else, right?

[350] But they might lack perspective on what things people outside of the proverbial cocktail party are really talking about.

[351] Nate, thanks.

[352] This was a blast.

[353] You were great, and it was a lot of fun.

[354] But most of all, just congratulations.

[355] I'm super happy.

[356] for all your successes, and I hope they just keep going.

[357] Absolutely.

[358] I really appreciate it.

[359] And remember, on May 5th, Steve Leavitt and I publish our latest Freakonomics book.

[360] It's called When to Rob a Bank.

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[385] And coming up next week, on the podcast.

[386] Sometimes doing things differently and simply and with a kind of joy and triviality leads you to a really special place that as an adult you don't get to go to very often.

[387] How thinking like a child can make you a better problem solver.

[388] That's next time on Freakonomics Radio.

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