In his third appearance on Conversations with Tyler, Nate Silver looks back at past predictions, weighs how academic ideas such as expected utility theory fare in practice, and examines the world of sports through the lens of risk and prediction.
Tyler and Nate dive into expected utility theory and random Nash equilibria in poker, whether Silver’s tell-reading abilities transfer to real-world situations like NBA games, why academic writing has disappointed him, his move from atheism to agnosticism, the meta-rationality of risk-taking, electoral systems and their flaws, 2028 presidential candidates, why he thinks superforecasters will continue to outperform AI for the next decade, why more athletes haven’t come out as gay, redesigning the NBA, what mentors he needs now, the cultural and psychological peculiarities of Bay area intellectual communities, why Canada can’t win a Stanley Cup, the politics of immigration in Europe and America, what he’ll work on next, and more.
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Recorded July 23rd, 2025.
Read the full transcript
Thanks to a listener who sponsored this transcript “in memory of Eileen Thompson, my beloved aunt who would have appreciated Mercatus and its mission.”
TYLER COWEN: Hello, everyone. Welcome to Conversations with Tyler. Today, I’m chatting with Nate Silver live in New York. We are here to commemorate the paperback edition of Nate’s On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, a book that last year, I described sincerely as absolute fun on every page. We’re also going to revisit some of our earlier predictions from a year ago and nine years ago, and talk about everything I want to talk about. Nate, welcome.
NATE SILVER: Tyler, always a pleasure.
COWEN: At current margins, do you learn anything from studying expected utility theory?
SILVER: Well, I probably spend a tenth of my time playing poker, and certainly in that respect, you’re quite explicit about calculating things like that.
COWEN: But you are learning new ideas, new theories, new concepts? Or you’re just applying what you learned, say, 13 years ago, whenever?
SILVER: No, it still feels fresh to me. When I’ve talked about the book to people, people understand the expected value part. That’s easily explicable to economics 101 people. I think the equilibrium part — solve for the equilibrium — is something that people don’t get as much. It’s like what’s the equilibrium that should emerge, given everyone has their incentives to play this hand optimally, so to speak. Or everyone has different incentives, but they’re all being rational in some capacity.
That kind of thing I think about a lot when it comes to even online discourse, for example. Why are people behaving a certain way on Twitter or X, for example?
COWEN: Let’s say random Nash equilibria — do you take that seriously? It seems to hold with soccer kicks, but in poker, anything you do — do you ever use the concept?
SILVER: Oh, sure. I will literally randomize sometimes. Where you look at the tournament clock, and if it’s a high number, then you’ll bluff, and if it’s a low number, then you’ll play more passively, for example. You can look at the rotation of your chips or things like that.
COWEN: Do you think some of the other people do it too?
SILVER: Yes. You can tell there’s a certain look. You see people are looking up at the clock, and it looks like they’re daydreaming, and they’re waiting for a number. You can rotate your cards.
One thing people didn’t realize until they actually solved the Nash equilibrium for poker is how many mixed strategies there are. Basically, every hand is a mix of some kind. The flip side to that is that if you have any tell or read on your opponent at all, you move from literal indifference toward a dominant strategy in that context. So, I believe actually reading players’ tells, picking up on the moment, and how you are perceived and how your table image shifts a lot. But no, poker has gone further than anything else in the literal manifestation of game theory in real life.
You also see it in football and things like that. I’m working on an NFL model now. I wonder if NFL teams are optimally mixing up their strategies, for example, but you see it there. A draw play on third and long, has a higher expected value because it’s not expected and because you’re supposed to always pass there.
Economics is amazing in the sense that it predicts human behavior, I think, fairly well when you have repeated trials and people that have good feedback and incentive to be optimal.
COWEN: Your ability to read tells — does it help you at all in real life? And if so, how?
SILVER: There’s probably some people-reading, but it’s very specific. I was on the subway getting here. I didn’t have a seat on the train. I was like, “Oh, that person’s going to stand up. I can tell.” I was wrong. The tells are not always 100 percent reliable.
COWEN: If someone wants to learn how to read tells, other than just say, playing a lot of poker or doing the thing, how do they do that?
SILVER: I think there is not a substitute for how it correlates to real-world scenarios, because it’s so contextual and semantic.
I was at the World Series for most of June. Played in the main event, which is a $10,000 tournament. There was a guy who had a very rapid heartbeat. You could see his carotid artery. His heart’s beating in his neck. That’s obviously often a tell. However, some people get more nervous when they’re bluffing; some get more nervous when they have a strong hand. So, you have to correlate that with behavior, and that’s contextual. The fact that he was an intermediate player and not a really good player or a complete novice — fish, we call them in poker.
You’re building up an implicit database in your head just by watching a lot, including watching when you’re not involved in a hand. In poker, you’re folding most of the time. I’m watching people and making a little prediction, “Oh, that feels strong,” something he did. Then, if you’re right 60 percent of the time — 60 percent instead of 50 percent random — that’s a huge edge. In gambling, any 55 percent-45 percent edge is enormous; 60 percent-40 percent or 65 percent-35 percent will make you a very winning player.
COWEN: If you’re watching an NBA game, is there any meaningful way in which you can read tells, like, “Oh, Luka has a bad attitude tonight.”
SILVER: You can tell from the body language of a team sometimes. I had a fairly good year betting the NBA playoffs. I’m like, “Does the team have it tonight?” That should be, in principle, actionable, I would think. You would think that markets might pick up on that. There are things like, this team is tired. They don’t have the personnel. The nuggets in that . . . They’re a great team. They beat my expectations, but they’re not going to be able to keep up with this team for four quarters.
But that’s not a physical read so much as . . . again, it’s a little bit of physical observation and a lot of priors in context.
COWEN: What was the last interesting thing you learned from the academic political science literature?
SILVER: Oh boy, this is going to seem like an insult. [laughs]
COWEN: No, no, we’re all for insults here.
SILVER: Look, I read a lot of Substacks and things like that. Oh, my gosh. I don’t know.
COWEN: I think that might be the right answer, to be clear.
[laughter]
SILVER: I think in some ways, what has come out of academic circles has been interesting. I think effective altruism has been interesting, for example. Certainly, critical theory or whatever, the origins of wokeness have had a lot of influence on the discourse more broadly. But I don’t really read a lot of journal articles anymore. Also, a lot of it’s gone on Bluesky, I think, and I can’t tolerate Bluesky, really. It’s too much of a circle jerk.
I think academics have maybe lost influence in that respect. Even though I have great experiences talking to academics, and I’ll do events at universities a couple of times a year.
They also fall into this trap where it’s so reflexively anti-Trump, a lot of it. I’m anti-Trump, in most senses of that term, but something about it has melted the brains a little bit of the nuance and the subtlety. And the slow-cooking method of academia, where you’re supposed to take more time with things, is not always a good match — you being one of the major exceptions — for rapid-fire reaction to the news cycle.
COWEN: If there were a paper you wish someone would write — is there such a thing? Something you’d like to know, but you don’t know now, and in principle, an academic could do it.
SILVER: Yes, maybe papers is the wrong part of the curve right now, where a Substack newsletter that you take a couple of days with, or a blog post. Or a book — I’m still a big believer in books, where you go into a conclusion more in depth than anyone has before. Or investigative journalism. I was just listening to that on the way over to the Ross Douthat podcast with the woman who helped to break the story of Jeffrey Epstein for the Miami Herald. She’s like, “This was a major story featuring all types of people that are extremely well known and notorious internationally.”
People are lazy. There were not a lot of reporters really pursuing every detail of that case. I think that 90 percent of academic papers would work perfectly fine as blog posts. Including the tone of like, “Okay, I ran some regressions” instead of having Greek symbols and things like that, and the pretense of all of it.
I think that 90 percent of academic papers would work perfectly fine as blog posts. Including the tone of like, “Okay, I ran some regressions” instead of having Greek symbols and things like that, and the pretense of all of it.
COWEN: You can say what you think and let the world sort it out.
SILVER: Say what you think. Also, one of the things I like about writing a newsletter is, I can use my tone to say, when am I speculating a little bit more? When am I making a joke? When am I being more serious, presenting some original finding, and things like that? That can be lost with the dry, sterile tone of a typical academic paper.
COWEN: When you think about maximizing expected value, how obsessed should you be with longevity? Should you be the next Bryan Johnson?
SILVER: Yes, I ask myself a lot of these questions. I don’t know. I think if you hyper-optimize for every parameter in your day-to-day life, then you probably wind up being fairly miserable. It’d be hypocritical if I said I was terribly concerned about longevity. In your 40s, both by choice and by force, you are required to be a little bit more careful about certain things, I suppose. Yes, I haven’t gotten on that bandwagon quite as much. I’m sure I will. Probably if we do this again in three years, I’ll be some health nut or something. For now, I’m making serious but incremental improvements, I guess.
COWEN: As a bettor, do you take Pascal’s wager seriously?
SILVER: I take the notion that we’re profoundly uncertain about the nature of the universe seriously, right?
COWEN: Why not believe? It would seem to maximize expected value. Just jump right in. You don’t have to say you know the answer, but you would say, “Well, this is the most likely path I have for getting to the answer.” It’s to start by believing something.
SILVER: Well, I don’t really believe in heaven as such, or I don’t believe in Pascal’s. I put p=0.001.
COWEN: Well, not p=1, but there’s some chance, right?
SILVER: There’s some chance. Look, a lot of problems in, I guess it’s called infinite ethics. You now have this big debate over shrimp welfare, for example. I’m like, we have enough problems that are in the terrestrial tractable realm, right? Well, I’m just not going to worry about those things so much. As thought experiments, they can be helpful and fine, but I think if you ignore the 1 percent of edge cases . . . It’s probably good to have some people — Will MaCaskill or whatever — worrying about those things — the shrimp people having some influence on that, but I’m trying to move in the realm of the tractable.
I’ve always been more poker. What matters is what hand you have. What matters is the read that you have. The theory matters, but information you have that’s local and specific, and actionable always predominates that.
COWEN: You dismiss Pascal’s wager in short?
SILVER: I don’t worry about Pascal’s wager, I guess. Again, as I said, I’ve evolved toward being more affirmatively agnostic as opposed to atheist, I suppose, but that’s not because of Pascal’s wager per se, just because of the strangeness of the world. I do think that some of the AI stuff ought to have people asking a few more questions about the nature of reality, I suppose.
COWEN: Now, there’s plenty of material in your book about people who take a lot of risk. The subtitle is The Art of Risking Everything. How much do you think people segregate areas of risk-taking? For instance, people might say, “Well, Tyler, you travel to some dangerous locations.” But I’m totally afraid to scuba dive. I feel I’m very strongly segregated. I either take a fair amount of risk or close to none at all. Is that your model of most humans?
SILVER: That’s pretty normal. Yes. The example I think I use in the book is Ezekiel Emanuel, telling people you shouldn’t go to restaurants because we still have some COVIDs like now, in 2022, 2023, right? But he rides a motorcycle, which is known to be one of the most dangerous things per mile that you can do. People are usually not super meta-rational about risk.
COWEN: But should they be? Should you have one general risk attitude? Is that more meta-rational?
SILVER: Look, I think things that seem irrational are often rational [laughs] on a higher plane, right?
COWEN: Sure. Yes.
SILVER: Like loss aversion. I had a pair of headphones stolen from me the other day, and I felt very guilty about that. We hadn’t locked the door of our car, and it was my fault.
COWEN: This is in New York?
SILVER: Actually, in upstate New York. You’ve got to be careful in upstate.
COWEN: Real home of thieves. Sure.
SILVER: You’re like, “Oh, okay. I can afford a new pair of headphones. It’s not that big a deal.” If you were chronically sloppy about things like that, then that would cause more hardship and would be wasteful, and so, loss aversion, things like that — they come from flawed iterations of rationality that might serve a higher purpose or might have served an evolutionary purpose earlier in human civilization.
COWEN: Can you think of cases of people who have truly integrated attitudes toward risk? That is, they have some level of risk-taking, and they apply it more or less evenly to all the things they do. Are those people just in jail? [laughs]
SILVER: Look, I think some of Silicon Valley has that attitude a little bit. It tends to be correlated with other things that might be less desirable. The calculated risk-taking part [laughs] is hard, I think. If you’re very successful . . . One thing you see when you do play poker is, people play very differently when they’re on a winning streak. People play very differently when they’re confident. They usually play better, quite a bit better, in fact. Probably true for human beings, too.
But I’ve had moments in my career where I flew way too close to the sun, and you begin getting worse feedback from people. That’s very damaging, where people are sycophantic around you, potentially, where you shut off criticism. Elon seems to have this problem a little bit, although Elon didn’t concede to Trump on tariffs and skilled immigration, things like that, so he had some values at least. But that’s a very big problem, I think. You’re surrounding yourself with yes men.
COWEN: Why haven’t you been to Oklahoma yet?
SILVER: I’d like to go. I was hoping the Knicks were going to play OKC. Then I’d have gone for a couple games there. It’s cheaper to fly to OKC, stay in Ramada or maybe even a nice hotel, than to go to Madison Square Garden for playoff games.
COWEN: I was thinking of trying to see a playoff game in OKC, not the finals. The tickets were so cheap, I was stunned because I’m used to Bay Area and New York City prices, which I won’t buy, but I look at them, and then I say, “Oh, that’s too much.”
SILVER: New York City is crazy. I think one thing people have figured out is, all the high-taste things that rich people really like — there’s been huge inflation. This is like the world’s tiniest violin problem in high-end sushi omakase, for example.
COWEN: I don’t do it anymore.
SILVER: Yes. Or the US Open used to be something really fun, going to the US Open in Flushing Meadows. You’d go to one of the early sessions. You can go to any of the 17 courts or whatever. It used to be a pretty good deal. You get in for 50 bucks, and now it’s 200 bucks, which is kind of a fair price. You see now Delta using AI tools to price discriminate —
COWEN: That’s right.
SILVER: — a little bit more, which I think we probably should have.
COWEN: That’s going to be bad for you.
SILVER: Yes, probably. We should probably have some law, although in New York we can fly on multiple carriers to almost everywhere. No, I think —
COWEN: But if they all price discriminate using a common algorithm, it’s not literally collusive, but it’s, in a way, like collusion.
SILVER: Is that legal or not? You would know more than me.
COWEN: There are pending court cases. I’m not sure how they’re all being decided, but it will be an increasingly important issue.
SILVER: Yes. I think some of this is short-sightedness in the sense that we’ll probably have a pretty profound backlash to it, I would think. It rubs you the wrong way intuitively.
COWEN: If you’re betting on NBA games or just trying to enjoy them, how much does it help you to have seen the team live? If you go to see Oklahoma a few games, do you learn anything?
SILVER: Given that the edges are pretty small in general, in sports betting, you’re probably either losing by 1 percent ROI or winning by 1 percent ROI. Then any of that is helpful, I think. Also, sometimes the markets are a little bit behind. If you’re there in the arena, it’s called courtsiding. You can potentially pick up on things.
COWEN: So, it is helpful?
SILVER: I think so, yes. Again, if it improves you by like 0.5 percent ROI, that becomes pretty meaningful in the context of a sports bet.
COWEN: Ranked choice voting — does it really matter in affecting outcomes?
SILVER: It potentially can matter. Particularly, you’ve seen candidates adopt different strategies for it by cross-endorsing, for example. Although, I think I’ve turned mildly anti-RCV for a couple of reasons.
COWEN: Why?
SILVER: One is that it’s not Condorcet optimal. The order in which candidates are eliminated — hopefully I’m saying that name correctly, right?
COWEN: Yes.
SILVER: The order in which candidates are eliminated can affect who wins. Brad Lander, for example, is the compromise candidate between Mamdani and Cuomo in the New York mayoral race. It’s plausible he would have won any head-to-head matchup, but he was eliminated third from last, or I guess second from last, so he didn’t get to the final two.
COWEN: But would he have had a head-to-head matchup under a normal voting rule?
SILVER: It’s plausible you could. I don’t know, or I guess a traditional run-off wouldn’t be any better, potentially. Fair enough. You also almost had Mamdani wind up winning the first-choice vote.
Although in 2021, Eric Adams nearly lost to Catherine Garcia despite being way ahead in the penultimate round, and Garcia nearly was eliminated by Maya Wiley in the round before that. So, it’s more gameable than you might think.
Also, it takes a really long time to count the votes and all the tallies. Just yesterday . . . we’re taping this — what is it? July 21st, I think. Three or four weeks after the election, you finally get the official tally of how all the ballots transferred. I’m not being that close, but I think we need it more of a norm in American elections toward counting votes within 24 to 48 hours.
COWEN: Brazil does it, right?
SILVER: India does it. I was doing a little work on the Indian election, which was fascinating in different ways. They have a physical polling place up in the Himalayas and things like that. I don’t know how many languages they speak and how diverse in every respect that country is, and they count their results very quickly.
They also have better exit polling in international countries, where in the US, the exit polls are trying to ask this 100-item-long, proper political-science, demographically weighted survey. Whereas in Europe and Latin America, places like that, it’s, “We just want to know who’s going to win.” To make for more exciting TV, they just ask them one question: “Who’d you vote for?” They do it in a very organized way. Exit polling is quite good in foreign countries and quite bad elsewhere. I don’t think there should be a Republican talking point that we want the vote counted quickly, and not taking days and weeks.
COWEN: If you could wave a magic wand and bring proportional representation to the United States at the national level, would you do it?
SILVER: I think I’m enough of a critic of the two major parties that I’d have to say yes for the most part, although I don’t know. We have more veto points in the American system. That’s probably been good for capitalism and economic growth and maybe a certain type of liberty, I suppose. I think a question I’d like to see addressed more — maybe there’re some good books — is like, I see the US and Europe as diverging more and more. Canonically, Europe is getting longer and longer lifespans. We’re not really. We still have fairly good economic growth, and they don’t really. How much of that is culture?
COWEN: But, our Europeans have long lifespans, right?
SILVER: That’s what I’m saying.
COWEN: If you’re a Japanese-American woman born in New Jersey, isn’t that the world’s longest lifespan?
SILVER: New England is almost like Scandinavia or something, including being slightly boring in certain ways. [laughs] The food’s a little plain. I’m a big proponent of New England. It’s not where I want to live, but New England exceptionalism–they did much better under COVID. Boston had a very big outbreak early, but Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine had much lower COVID cases than anywhere else, by far, in the United States. They’re doing something clearly right.
COWEN: If I look at some of the prediction markets, at times, I’ve seen Trump at 6 percent to 7 percent likely to be the next Republican nominee to run for president. Is that long-shot bias that it’s hard to shorten those markets? Do you think it’s the right number? Is it just expressive bettors who want to see Trump again, and they’re willing to lose some money to send that message? What do you make of that?
SILVER: The prediction markets — and I consult for Polymarket — have gotten quite a lot better. They’ve gotten quite a lot more liquid. But you still see some obvious mispricings, like Zohran actually had a 7 percent chance of becoming the Democratic nominee when that market launched at Polymarket. He was born in Uganda, so there’s no workaround to that, I don’t think.
I think on the papal betting markets, they didn’t have Pope Leo priced higher than 1 percent or things like that, and I think they got overconfident about a system where they had no inside knowledge, and the outside view was maybe only marginally useful, and things like that.
Look, I don’t know. We talked a little bit before about how some of the academic historians, political scientists have gotten enraptured by this anti-Trump thing. I do think the scenario where Trump runs for a third term — I don’t say it’s zero. I’d say if it’s 2 percent, then that’s still alarmingly high, but it’s probably two and not [laughs] six or seven. My question is, in that world, are we even having an election in the first place? If you’re just flagrantly ignoring the constitution that much, I think there are workarounds.
COWEN: It’s common that weird nondemocratic governments have elections of some kind, right? Even the Soviet Union had “elections.”
SILVER: They do, but for that transition to occur in the US . . . Also, Trump is not particularly popular. His ratings fell pretty fast early — because of, I think, predominantly tariffs — and then recovered. Now they’ve fallen again. I don’t know how much of that is more tariffs versus, frankly, the Epstein stuff, [laughs] for example. A lot of the scenario — it helps for populists to be popular. We certainly have enough checks and balances in the US. People are not being force-fed information from any one source. I worry about a lot of things with Trump. That’s probably not the foremost concern.
COWEN: I’ve seen Stephen Smith, the ESPN sports commentator — you probably even know him — but as high as 9 percent in the market to be Democratic nominee. What do you think his actual number is?
SILVER: Maybe 2 percent. [laughs]
COWEN: I think it’s 4 percent or 5 percent. I don’t think it’s crazy.
SILVER: We had a draft of the 20 most likely Democratic nominees. I think Stephen Smith was a ninth-round draft pick.
COWEN: What does that scenario look like, where he wins?
SILVER: I think it’s where Democrats feel really . . . Well, the reason why I would not be as optimistic as you are is, I think that other people with the platform will emerge. I had not, frankly, heard of Zohran Mamdani’s name when we taped our last conversation a year ago. He might now be one of the five most recognizable names in the party. The fact that he’s from Uganda prevents him from running for president.
You’ll see other people emerge. I think there is probably some indication that you’re going to have more energy on the left, more energy from people who are explicitly partisan, maybe to the point of being a little bit paranoid.
There is a little bit of election denialism among certain threads of Democrats, for example, that Trump stole the election from Kamala Harris. It’s nascent for now, but I think a partisan fighter . . . and also, you’re filtering out. People get confused because they’re like, “Why is Democrat electorate . . .” Because Cuomo did very well, always in New York City when running statewide. Hillary Clinton did very well in New York City. It diverted Bernie Sanders’ campaign in 2020.
It’s because people in the center have migrated away from the Democratic Party, so you’re having these two things that go on at once. I do think there’s a chance that Democrats will overestimate how tolerant the rest of the country is for progressive governance. But with that said, I think JD Vance is also a pretty flawed candidate. I think any other non-Vance candidate is going to have a lot of trouble escaping the shadow of Trump, so I’d regard Democrats as a 55–45 favorite for 2028, pricing in some chance they’ll nominate what I would think of as a suboptimal — from an electoral standpoint — candidate.
I’m not telling anybody who they should nominate in terms of whose values they have. I think people neglect the importance of the primary system and the optionality, and the revealed preferences of voters. It is a pretty good proxy for running a general election campaign, is running a primary campaign that goes through all 50 states, and you’re raising money, you’re giving speeches, things like that.
I think the idea of an external savior who’s a centrist is becoming a bit less likely than I would’ve thought a year ago.
COWEN: Do you think the major tech companies have proprietary information where they can predict elections better than anyone or anything? They may not even bother to do it, but is it there in principle?
SILVER: I tend to doubt it. One nice thing about polling, for all the flaws that polling has — and I think polling has, I wouldn’t call it a crisis, but on the route to a crisis — is you do have a good baseline to compare with. You can say we are going to go back to 1936 — I think was the first time Gallup issued a presidential election poll — and look empirically at how accurate those polls are at X number of days from the election. Whereas there is just nothing to calibrate AI-type models. You could probably predict how an individual voter will vote, if they’re gathering . . . The amount of things I tell —
COWEN: But if you spent a lot of money, and you have everyone’s, say, Facebook posts, and you just fed it into a sufficiently complicated model, wouldn’t that be the best predictive model?
SILVER: If I know just your name and your zip code, I can probably predict with 90 percent accuracy who you’re going to vote for. From the name, you can infer gender, race, age. From the zip code, you can infer socioeconomic status.
COWEN: Oh, sure.
SILVER: That gets you pretty darn far. The issue with elections is that they operate almost like 1 percent or 2 percent margin. The polls will have a disaster because one candidate gets 51 percent instead of 47 percent. That’s still pretty good. If you’re estimating how many jelly beans there are in a jar and you’re like, “Oh, 51 percent of them are purple, and it’s really 47 percent,” then that’s not too bad. But you need a lot of precision for election polling, and you have plenty of ways to get to a blunt, approximate view, but I think those would not be superior to the other ways, like polling, namely,
COWEN: Do you have a prediction for most likely Democratic Party nominee? We may be doing another of these in three years, right?
SILVER: AOC was the first pick in the draft I did. I think that would be reinforced by the New York mayoral race. I think she’s a very bright person who has demonstrated some tact in certain areas. Look, again, I am not a socialist or democratic socialist, but even I am someone who likes seeing new faces in the parties, who had no affection for the Clinton dynasty or the Cuomo dynasty or the Bidens, who can’t seem to stay out of the spotlight. I think she’s smart enough and fresh enough, good enough on social media. No one’s higher than 15 percent, but if you gave me a free bet, I think I’d pick her.
COWEN: Now, speaking of predictions, a year ago, we talked about how long will it take AIs to be as good as human superforecasters? You made a prediction, where you said at least 10 to 15 years. Now, a year later, do you want to revisit that and revise?
SILVER: I think it’s probably about right. I would say, relative to a year ago, AI is about at the 40th pe rcentile of progress I would’ve expected. I’d be curious what you would think.
COWEN: A year ago, I said two to three years. Right now, I’m going to say one to two years, which is the same prediction. I think you’re way too pessimistic in your timetable.
SILVER: It depends on how competitive the exercise is. If it’s like a —
COWEN: Like a Math Olympiad tournament. They just did gold medal performance. I said this last year. I said, “In a year, they’re going to do gold medal.” A year ago, they weren’t sure how many r’s were in the word strawberry. You don’t think on superforecasting, they can —
SILVER: I think it’s very different when you’re dealing with a static problem as compared to a dynamic system where the inputs are changing all the time. Currently, the large language models are very, very bad at poker. They’re not trained on poker data. I’m sure if you did train them . . .
There are these things called solvers that are trained on poker data that do very well, but they cannot quite impute the general patterns just from mediocre text data or an amateurish kind of hand analysis. If you probe them on why they’re bad, they’re like, “Yes, maybe it’s tough for us when you have a complicated, evolving game theory dynamic, and you have to develop exploitative strategies very quickly.”
If you have a computer solve a poker hand to get to one where there’s enough loss minimization, a very strong computer can take minutes, whereas a poker player makes those calculations implicitly in a handful of seconds, for example. I don’t know. I worry, with the Math Olympiad stuff — there’s a little bit of teaching to the test where, because you set this as the goal that a large language model should have, that therefore there’s a lot of prestige when you meet that goal, potentially —
COWEN: Isn’t teaching to the test what we should do, even with humans in a sense. The test is what you think is important, and that’s what you ought to teach.
SILVER: Well, but the poker example, or chess — I think AI models are very poor at chess, from everything that I’ve heard, for example.
COWEN: Other AI models play chess great.
SILVER: Correct. This gets me to the question of, what’s it mean to be generally intelligent? We’ll probably have scaffolding of model on top of model, and you’ll now patch different things. Right now, you can’t really very effectively make a plane reservation using ChatGPT, but I’m sure if you dedicate a resource to that, then you have these agentic models now, or agent models are just creeping into the system, a little bit.
COWEN: Those will work in less than a year, I think. There’s an agentic model now from OpenAI.
SILVER: This is where I get to rough AGI versus superintelligence. I am less convinced that we’re going to have some intelligence explosion than I would have been maybe . . . I don’t think I was ever convinced of it, but this emergent superintelligence, where you train it on relatively simple data and it extrapolates beyond the data set. I think they do reason. Sometimes I think they’re quite smart, and I no longer am bashful about saying, “Oh, ChatGPT thinks this.” I used to avoid that term, think.
But there’s a big gap between approximate general intelligence for desk jobs, and then superintelligence on the one hand, or AGI for physical labor on the other hand. I think people are much too quick to make that leap. I think the Math Olympiad, in part because maybe the answers are somewhere latent in the training data, but even if they’re not, if you try to solve, what’s a Lucas critique? Whatever else, right? There’s a version of that, I think, for AI models.
COWEN: My intuition is that if you took five superforecasters and just had them write a five-page prompt for GPT-5, which will be out this summer, that we’d be there already. I don’t think it would be superintelligence. You could say it’s not AGI. But the human superforecasters, they’re not that impressive. They’re not Einsteins. They just have good methods, and they’re disciplined.
SILVER: It requires so much on general knowledge, I think, both general knowledge of how the world works and heuristic. I think it might be a little tougher. I don’t know. Can you train on a thought process? I try to do that in real life sometimes. My partner is an artist and has a very good eye for art, and I don’t. I maybe have a B, B+. I can train myself on him and say, what does he like in art? That probably caps me at a B+ understanding, potentially. In markets, a B+ trader is often on the losing side of a trade.
COWEN: How good do you think you could become at appreciating art? Let’s say you put in two to three years — not full-time, but made it one of your two or three big things after basketball?
[laughter]
SILVER: I’d probably be very studious about it. Look, I have confidence that when I devote myself to things, I can get quite good at them. I think there’s no physical limitation there. Still, I have four or five hobbies that occupy all my time, some of which have already become professions.
I think maybe architecture more. In the Silver DNA, there’re some architecture genes. We’re related not by blood to Frank Lloyd Wright. My grandma was an architect, designed the home I live in part-time now in Westchester County. My uncle is an architect. That would be more the direction where I would go. I like things that are spatial. I have a very good spatial memory. If I’ve been to a restaurant before, even if it was a different restaurant 10 years ago, I remember that space very well. Whereas art — I have just an okay eye for it.
COWEN: Now, nine years ago in our first conversation, we discussed why more professional athletes had not come out as gay. You and I both thought then that over the forthcoming time period, more players from the NBA would come out as gay. I asked ChatGPT. They said Jason Collins came out 12 years ago, and since then it’s been zero. Now, why is that? What did we get wrong?
SILVER: There’s been a little bit more of a conservative backlash in sports, where you see more outspoken Trump supporters.
COWEN: But that’s very recent. You have a nine-year period, there’s 2020, the extremes of woke are part of this period. Gay marriage is really quite solidified in American life, and no one comes out.
SILVER: It is surprising, I think, in a lot of ways. Look, I am not so PC . . . There may be some selection mechanisms. I don’t necessarily know that they’re genetic, but maybe it becomes easier for gay people to come out in high school and things like that. They’re attracted to fields apart from sports. Gay men typically are quite in shape and quite athletic relative to straight men of the same demographic cohort otherwise, so it’s not a physical ability thing, but selecting into sports.
The sports become more professionalist — not the right term — at the high school level, but you’re tracked into Cooper Flagg, whatever. He didn’t spend all his high school in Maine. He went to Montverde Academy or whatever else it was. If anything distracts you from that, whether it’s questions about your identity or anything else, you get off track. Maybe it’s harder to make that up later on.
COWEN: GPT also claims that 44 players in the WNBA have come out as something other than standard hetero. It’s a big gap, right?
SILVER: It’s a big gap for sure. I saw Caitlin Clark and Fever against the New York Liberty last year. The WNBA is fascinating. It’s a very, very, very different demographic than any sporting event I’ve ever been at before. I think it’s great. It’s getting more cultural salience, I think.
COWEN: Does betting help it in relative terms?
SILVER: There’s probably not a ton. Two years ago, I had a really good time betting the women’s NCAA basketball tournament before the markets had adapted, but I think people figured out, “Okay, these are pretty soft lines.” The issue is, in any type of betting, if you’re any good, you’ll get limited if you have repeated success or even waitress at Look EV plus bet casino, you’ll also get limited quite quickly.
Betting women’s sports — there’s probably some smart kid out there, some smart college kid who’s going to make a lot of money betting WNBA women’s college basketball, women’s anything really.
COWEN: He’s building a model or just using intuition? Or reading a lot on the internet? How might he be doing that?
SILVER: My guess is the model, combined with knowledge of a league, can get you pretty far. Injury data, for example, is much worse for women’s sports than for men’s sports. They don’t have the same reporting protocols, even for the NCAA tournament. We actually were trying to use injury data in our women’s NCAA model, and you have to do one-by-one individual Google searches for it. Yes, there’s still a reward to having knowledge that nobody else has, or that few other people have. People are basically pretty lazy and don’t necessarily do the legwork on that.
COWEN: You mentioned Cooper Flagg before. As you know, he was drafted number one by the Dallas Mavericks, who are quite a good team. You have what? Houston and Philly drafting two and three? Wizards draft number six?
SILVER: Yes.
COWEN: Do we need to redesign the NBA draft lottery?
SILVER: People complained before that there was too much tanking, and now I guess they’re saying that it doesn’t reward tanking teams enough. I think it’s probably fairly optimal. This year was weird in the sense that all the top three teams are accomplished in certain ways, or have other things going for them. I like the old — was it the Mike Zarren — proposal for the wheel, where every team gets the first pick once every 30 years, and you know ahead of time which one it is.
I don’t like incentivizing failure [laughs] in any context. I don’t think fans mind rooting for leagues where one team is great and the other’s a perpetual underdog. The most popular sport in the world, of course, is soccer. There, you have teams that are winning teams every year for a century almost, in some cases. It doesn’t seem to bother people as much. It’s fair we have American sports — it’s a cliché — are socialist, and European sports are more capitalist, basically.
COWEN: Is there a crisis in NBA regular-season design?
SILVER: I had been kind of a naysayer of this until I watched this year’s playoffs and how much higher octane they were and how enjoyable it was to watch a game from start to finish. Look, I think it’s a moving target. If you shorten the season to 66 games or 72, people will still complain about that being too many. I used to live near Madison Square Garden, and for a regular Knicks game, the get-in price could be $200. I understand why they might not want to change it, but I think you probably want to go to, maybe not 66, but maybe 72 or something like that, and see how that goes.
COWEN: There were so many decisive injuries this year. I forget the whole list, but it seems almost half the important players, including the seventh game of the finals, were decided, in essence, by injury.
SILVER: Look, in every other sport — in football, you’re only playing half the downs roughly. In hockey, apart from the goalie, you’re playing . . . There are three or four lines that shift. In baseball, you’re only in the field half the time. The continuous strain on NBA basketball played at such a high — it’s a totally different sport. You go back and watch clips from the ’70s or the ’80s, and it’s a totally different sport. I think it’s a much better sport now.
I don’t know. It sucks to see these guys. Jayson Tatum is a very graceful player. Haliburton’s a little herky-jerky, but has a certain grace in how he steps. I think the league has to . . . You see that in baseball too with Tommy Johns surgeries and things like that.
There are always downsides to achieving optimization to a degree we didn’t necessarily expect and pushing things to the brink. Now, the equilibrium probably is that players always are pushing things to the brink. They’re very competitive. They’re extremely well compensated. There is, appropriately, demand for coaches and trainers and everything else for high effort. You also have short-term incentives. Teams don’t really care that much about what happens to their star player who’s on the end of his contract, in theory.
COWEN: They might be happy.
SILVER: Yes, but I think you probably have to trim a few games off schedule, or have something where maybe you say the individual player limit is 75 games, and every player is guaranteed at least seven days’ rest, and you are required to publish them in advance. So, if I’m going to see Giannis play for Milwaukee, I have no interest in seeing the Bucks without Giannis in their current form, for example. Maybe something like that could be an intermediate step.
COWEN: Let’s say you’re advising LeBron James, and this coming year possibly is his last or certainly his next to last. The Lakers are not good enough to really go anywhere in the next year. Probably you agree with that. But he has a signed contract for what, about $50 million?
SILVER: Yes.
COWEN: What do you advise LeBron? Just as a human being, “LeBron, what should you maximize?” What do you tell him?
SILVER: LeBron’s in a funny place because, I think, he’s clearly, by the career metrics, now the best NBA player of all time.
COWEN: I agree.
SILVER: I don’t think he’ll ever win the hearts of people. You could argue LeBron was not as good as Jordan at the peak. You could argue Kareem’s peak was also higher, maybe very early in his career. So, there’s nothing LeBron could do, short of winning three more titles. That would put him ahead of Jordan in that conversation. I want LeBron to go to a young team where he can win a title and mentor some guys. Go to the Spurs, for example. That might be a lot of fun.
COWEN: But they’re not going to win a title with LeBron, not this year.
SILVER: Oh, I think the Spurs with LeBron James this year could potentially win a title.
COWEN: Really? That would shock me. I would give that, I don’t know, 4 percent or 5 percent.
SILVER: Wemby is very, very good. He was playing at a level where . . . There’s this DARKO NBA metric that tracks performance in real-time, which is usually not relevant for a 30-year-old mid-career player, but for someone like Wemby, it’s relevant. He was probably the fifth-best NBA player by the time he shut down his season.
COWEN: The chance that he’s still on the court by the end of the year, and as such a young player. You look at the other true greats over time. Kareem won something very early, but usually, people need . . . Michael Jordan needed some years, LeBron needed —
SILVER: You don’t think Wemby and LeBron would be . . . and they have —
COWEN: No, I don’t bet, but I’d love to bet against them.
SILVER: Next year, maybe then, right? They have one more year of maturity. They probably feel like maybe Dylan Harper’s a positive value asset at that point, and LeBron can sign a minimum contract in San Antonio.
COWEN: Anyway, we know that’s your advice.
What do you think of the hypothesis that in a given season, there’re only a few teams that can win it all, and you know in advance who they are? Maybe last year it was Boston, Oklahoma, possibly Denver, and you should just bet on those teams. Anything else is a true long shot. What do you think?
SILVER: I think every basketball fan believes in some stylized version of that, but I think it’s become a little bit overstated. Many of the teams now, the Nuggets people — until Jokić was seen as this ultimate beast of a postseason player, people were very skeptical about their ability to thrive in the postseason. Toronto didn’t fit the paradigm a couple of years ago. Even Giannis had struggled in the postseason before they found success later on.
Look, you don’t have that many years of relevant NBA history. I think people maybe over-indexed a bit to the Bulls and Warriors dynasty.
COWEN: Why are the core young players of the Wizards mediocre, as you suggested in a recent Substack?
SILVER: [laughs] They haven’t had that many elite picks in the most valuable drafts. They’re probably doing okay. That was, I think, my co-author saying that they were mediocre, although I agreed with him, to be fair.
COWEN: Haliburton was what, number 12? Steph Curry was number 7. I forget all the numbers, but not everyone’s a top pick who’s great.
SILVER: I haven’t looked at how persistent skill in NBA drafting is. To me, it seems fairly persistent for San Antonio or OKC to consistently pick up players, or even Miami. That seems to be a pretty consistent, persistent skill set.
COWEN: What’s your current update on the Philadelphia 76ers? You were bullish last year, and I was down on them. I want to claim victory on that one.
SILVER: Yes, Daryl Morey, who . . . Have you had him on Conversations with Tyler? You should.
COWEN: No, but would he do it?
SILVER: Yes, of course. Daryl is a big geek. He loves chess, loves a lot of things like that.
COWEN: Okay.
SILVER: He will tell you that his strategies are very high variance. If Embiid is healthy, and if Edgecombe is good in his first year, and if Paul George is . . . If they won 56 games next year — 56 is a lot — 52, 53, would that be shocking to me? Not totally. The East is pretty wide open. They have this second timeline that now is a little bit more optimistic. We have this piece now, where we’re ranking all 30 NBA teams by their long-term, 10-year chance of winning a championship, and they’re right in the middle for me, I think: 15th out of 30.
COWEN: Who are the most important mentors in your life, including for basketball?
SILVER: For sports writing in general, Bill James is somebody who’s a mentor.
COWEN: What did you learn from him personally, other than reading? He’s a great writer.
SILVER: Bill is kind of a wise ass, but understanding that good writing about technical subjects can still be good writing, period. If you’re an 8 out of 10 as a writer and 8 out of 10 as a statistician, that might be more valuable than being a 10 out of 10 and a 2 out of 10 in the other area, potentially, in this era where we’re on Substack and things like that. Richard Thaler is somebody I got to know at Chicago a little bit and someone I’d consider a mentor. I followed you for a long time, Tyler, as well.
I’m also someone who — it’s a cliché — but always blazed my own trail a little bit. In terms of election forecasting, there’re some people — Robert Erikson’s a professor at Columbia, who had pretty good election models early on, but in general, all this was done badly. I’m like, “Okay, the product I want doesn’t exist. I’m going to have to go ahead and make it myself.”
COWEN: What do you feel you need mentors for now?
SILVER: I don’t know if I have mentors for [laughs] as much. I just want people that are interested —
COWEN: I need mentors to learn what’s new in AI. I can follow it myself, but I need a lot of help.
SILVER: Maybe mentor is not quite . . . For AI stuff readings, is it Mowshowitz, right?
COWEN: Yes.
SILVER: He is a mentor for following AI developments because he’s very levelheaded about it and very comprehensive. He’ll write a novel every week, basically, on AI.
[laughter]
COWEN: But he thinks it’s going to kill us all. It’s funny you would call him levelheaded. He might think he’s correct, but —
SILVER: Look, I do think that that AI safety/rationalist community — it is a bubble. If you go to the Manifest conference, for example — have you been?
COWEN: No, but I know what it is.
SILVER: Yes. How would I put this diplomatically? I’ve been around a lot of weird people. These people are weird and proudly so, even relative to the other weird people [laughs] in that cohort, I think, in ways that allow them to be very experimental and open-minded about everything from polyamory to whatever else. I do think they maybe don’t recognize, (a) political constraints, (b) the adaptability of human beings potentially, as I talked about before.
It’s not at all obvious to me that you leap from rough AGI to comprehensive AGI, and then to comprehensive AGI for the physical realm, and then to ASI. I think the AI 2027 forecasters . . . When I was at Manifest, I said, “Okay, our timelines have moved out by a couple of years.” That seemed an interesting update, for example.
So, I wrote a new preface to On the Edge, and I wrote this back in, I guess, February and March, at a time when Elon had a lot of influence in the White House, when they were pressing the accelerator on AI stuff more, when tariffs were going into effect. I wrote then that my P(doom) had increased relative to the book.
COWEN: You just don’t think it can be a superforecaster, but it can do us all in.
SILVER: I worry about humans killing other humans with AIs that make making weapons easier, or certain types of terrorism easier, or chemical compounds could be dangerous. I worry about all of that.
COWEN: That wouldn’t be doom. Those would be some bad events. Right now, drones can be very bad, and they are every day.
SILVER: You’ve said this before, too. We have not lived with nuclear weapons for that many generations. That’s still a little bit frightening. You get to get some of the Nick Bostrom stuff, where eventually, when we have some technology we unfortunately invent, where it’s asymmetric, where any one crazy person can maybe destroy the world if they get access to the right systems that can’t be that well protected, and things like that.
Look, in some ways, I think the AIs are more human-like than people expected, and that, to me, seems like a positive update.
COWEN: If you think about the Manifold types in terms of the framework in your book, how they think about risk — is there a common feature that they’re more risk-averse, or that they worry more? Is there a common feature that they like the idea that they hold some kind of secret knowledge that other people do not have? How do you classify them? They’re just high in openness, or what is it?
SILVER: They’re high in openness to experience. I think they’re very high in conscientiousness.
COWEN: Are they? I don’t know.
SILVER: Some of them are. Some of them are, yes.
COWEN: I think of them as high variance in conscientiousness, rather than high in it.
[laughter]
SILVER: The EAs and the rationalists are more high variance, I think. There can be a certain type of gullibility is one problem. I think, obviously, EA took a lot of hits for Sam Bankman-Fried, but if anything, they probably should have taken more reputational damage. That was really bad, and there were a lot of signs of it, including his interviews with you and other people like that. It contrasts with poker players who have similar phenotypes but are much more suspicious and much more street smart.
Also, the Bay Area is weird. I feel like the West Coast is diverging more from the rest of the country.
COWEN: I agree.
SILVER: It’s like a long way away. Just the mannerisms are different. You go to a small thing. You go to a house party in the Bay Area. There may not be very much wine, for example. In New York, if the host isn’t drinking, then it’d be considered sacrilege not to have plenty of booze at a party. Little things like that, little cultural norms. You go to Seattle — it feels like Canada to me almost, and so these things are diverging more.
COWEN: Why is belief in doom correlated with practice of polyamory? And I think it is.
SILVER: If you ask Aella, I guess, she might say, if we’re all going to die or go to whatever singularity there is, we might as well have fun in the meantime. There’s some of that kind of hedonism. Although in general, it’s not a super hedonistic movement.
COWEN: It seems too economistic to me. Even I, the economist — I don’t feel people think that economistically. There’s more likely some psychological predisposition toward both views.
SILVER: I guess you could argue that society would be better organized in a more polyamorous relationship. People do it implicitly in a lot of ways anyway, including in the LGBTQ [laughs] community, which has different attitudes toward it potentially. and if there’s not as much childbearing, that can have an effect, potentially. I think it’s like they are not being constrained by their own society thing that is taken very seriously in that group. There’s enough disconnectedness and aloofness where they’re able to play it out in practice more.
That creeps a little bit into Silicon Valley too, which can be much more whimsical and fanciful than the Wall Street types I know, for example.
COWEN: Why can’t Canada win the Stanley Cup?
SILVER: [laughs] I remember —
COWEN: It’s 1992 the last time. Is that correct?
SILVER: I’ve forgotten when. Writing about this in the New York Times in 2012?
COWEN: 2013, maybe?
SILVER: 2013, right?
COWEN: Yes.
SILVER: I remember.
COWEN: And it’s still true.
SILVER: Yes. I go into one of my favorite sports bars. They have the article printed out in the bathroom there, let people see articles in the bathroom while you’re taking a shit. You can read some article. I’m reading my own article in the bathroom.
Look, tax laws matter a little bit, where Florida has no state income tax in a league with a salary cap. Actually, a good friend of mine is the assistant general manager for the Florida Panthers, Sunny Mehta. Yes, if you’re making de facto 10 percent or 15 percent more in a hard-capped league, that matters quite a bit.
COWEN: If you’re playing in Canada, isn’t your endorsement income higher, maybe? Or is that not true?
SILVER: It’s a smaller market overall. It’s less wealthy than us. If you’re a Canadian NHL superstar playing in the US — I don’t think Sidney Crosby has any trouble. I don’t know if he’s on Tim Horton ads, or whatever. Yes, I don’t know.
COWEN: Around the world, we used to talk about which countries are immune to the populist right sentiment or whatever you want to call it. Now, Japan is flirting with populist right sentiment. Canada — not at the national level, but it almost happened in some way.
SILVER: The truck driver thing a couple of years ago in Ottawa. Yes.
COWEN: What’s your update since the last few times we’ve spoken? Is it just going to come everywhere? Is anywhere immune? In Ireland, do you see signs of it? They may not win the next election, but it seemed to be totally absent a few years ago. Now, Conor McGregor is running, and I don’t think he’ll win, but he’ll have some kind of impact.
SILVER: I think parts of Europe and maybe Canada that are maybe anti-US may become more resistant to populist sentiment, for example. I have a friend who is Irish, actually, and gay, and moved here when he was 20. He’s like, “When I was growing up in Ireland, it was quite anti-gay. It was a very religious country.” Now it’s almost aggressively pro-LGBTQ+.
COWEN: It could be both. As you know, the head of AFD in Germany — she’s lesbian with a Sri Lankan partner. Is that correct?
SILVER: Something like that, yes.
COWEN: She’s populist right, and she is pro-gay rights, and openly and proudly so.
SILVER: Look, I mostly believe in thermostatic effects in politics, where people run in the opposite direction of the status quo more and more. I think there were reasons why anti-incumbent and populist spirit rose from the pandemic onward, but we might have been at a high-water mark for it, potentially, in parts of the world.
COWEN: But totally it seems we’re not at a high-water mark. It’s rising in quite a few other nations.
SILVER: I guess I’m speaking about Canada, Western Europe, other high-income countries. Maybe I’m wrong.
COWEN: Something that’s puzzled me, and I’ve even asked prime ministers this. I’ve never gotten a good answer. It seems to me, really, a lot of European voters in some key nations want much lower immigration, whatever you and I might think. They clearly want it, and they don’t get it. The populist parties on the right continue to rise. Why don’t they get it? Why don’t the centrist politicians in power just do something? Hold their noses if they don’t like doing it, but just do it, and stay in office.
SILVER: You have seen some of that in Denmark. For example, you’ve seen much less immigration. Even Justin Trudeau has said we need to cut down the amount of legal immigration as well as illegal immigration.
COWEN: Germany’s not doing it, UK’s not doing it, Ireland is not doing it. Netherlands is now doing it, but it just seems to be a very slow process, given how I think about democratic accountability on most other issues.
SILVER: They used to be more restrained of it on the left in the US, where Bernie Sanders, for example, would have issues like immigration, where he’s a little bit more cautious. If you have a generous welfare state and admitting somebody new to it is potentially going to cost everybody. I think all this might reverse within a few years, where the world realizes we have a shortage of young people in general, a fertility crisis, if you want to call it that, and an aging population, and will want to have people who are willing to work hard and are skilled in particular, so maybe they’re skating to where the puck is going.
The US also has, I think, particularly efficient political outcomes in some ways. People take for granted the fact that you have these coalitions that are 50–50 approximately very consistently. Trump remade the GOP in a lot of ways, but still, every election is roughly 50–50 with a different coalition than you had before. Maybe our electoral technology [laughs] is better. Right now, America is quite pro-immigrant compared to most of the world.
COWEN: Sure.
SILVER: Because of backlash, Trump becoming at least nominally more pro-immigrant again, it would have been interesting —
COWEN: I’m not sure that’s true, though. I know all the polls that people cite, but when I look at the electorate’s willingness to tolerate, say, ICE activity, my sense is they’ll just put up with it.
SILVER: Look, I think the consensus is that we have some bad guys, as Trump would call them, and people are not particularly sympathetic to them. I think people are broadly tolerant toward the migrant worker class for the most part. I think people are broadly supportive of skilled immigration. People want more border enforcement. There is a consensus there that the two parties can’t seem to actually reach a consensus on.
I agree with the polling issues a little bit. If you ask people, “How do you feel about this 10-item list of questions on immigration?” They’ll side with the left. “Then, who do you like more? Trump or Democrats?” They’ll still say we trust Trump a little bit more. Democrats do have this problem a little bit, where you give them an inch and they’ll take a mile. I think people correctly are worried about those excesses.
During COVID, for example, I was very cautious in the first three months, really, of COVID. I remember the first time I went outdoors to a restaurant. It was June or something. I was terrified. I hadn’t been around other people apart from a couple of friends, if we’re being honest, in months. But then you realized that half of the public health people wanted no real socialization until we had vaccines and maybe not even after that. So, people are worried that if you let progressives have some power, then things do get taken too far, even though, nominally, the incrementals said they might agree with the liberal side.
COWEN: Two last questions. First, do you have a surprising prediction for the United States?
SILVER: How long will the US last? I don’t know. I don’t know if I have a prediction there exactly. It’s hard to have surprising predictions, Tyler. [laughs]
COWEN: It is, but do you have a surprising prediction for the NBA? Like, I think the Lakers will do poorly this year. I’m not sure it’s surprising.
SILVER: In my records, the Lakers ranked relatively high, actually.
COWEN: Our last session, you said Luka was properly rated. I now see his own team didn’t want him. LeBron is not crazy about having him around. Earlier, Jalen Brunson didn’t want to play with him. To me, that’s a lot of negative information, so I think the Lakers will do poorly.
SILVER: I’m looking more like a long-term brand intangible, which I think does seem to matter a lot in the NBA. They have new ownership now that can spend all the luxury tax that they want. Look, when I saw Luka last year, he didn’t seem quite like himself, but it’s actually a reason why you want to . . .
Do you want to bet on the overachieving athlete? No, they’re already overachieving, they’re maximizing. Whereas an athlete who has a problem, has a drinking problem — not drinking — having too many beers or being a little bit lazy. He has much more potential to grow if he gets his act together, like fully healthy Luka. Their salary cap situation’s pretty good in the long run. Could be a powerful team.
COWEN: Larry Bird is an example on your side, but I tend to bet against such people mentally when it comes to it. Maybe that’s a difference between us.
SILVER: People who are maximizing currently?
COWEN: No, people who have some problem, like they drink too much, or they’re not conscientious enough, or bad attitude.
SILVER: But you want high variance here, right? You want high variance here, and maybe if Luka takes Ozempic or something, then all of a sudden, you have Lakers championship.
COWEN: Again, a plug for the new paperback edition, On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything. The final question is, what will you be doing next?
SILVER: I’m working on an NFL model currently. I miss having a book project, Tyler, because every day, even days when you’re struggling to write or an interview doesn’t come through, whatever else, having these big projects that I work on, I find to be very important.
COWEN: No one’s stopping you, so what’s it going to be?
SILVER: I know.
COWEN: Or you’re still looking.
SILVER: First of all, the newsletter, Silver Bulletin, did quite a bit better than I expected last year. That’s the short-term project. I have a couple of ideas for books when I write the next book, which might be in a few years. I have ideas for books about sports. I don’t want to give away too much. That might surprise people a little bit. I still think of poker as a little bit of a project. It’s satisfying to be really good at something like poker.
But for now, the newsletter — building toward that is the three-and-a-half-year plan here until the next election. Then maybe I finally escape the election treadmill, maybe after that. I say that every time. This might be the last one, ’28. We’ll see.
COWEN: Nate Silver, thank you very much.
SILVER: Thank you, Tyler.