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Nate Silver is a risk taker. On top of boldly and publicly forecasting elections as part of his website FiveThirtyEight, he’s a regular poker player, and in just one season of basketball, he bet nearly 2 million dollars on games. He still doesn’t have the foolproof winning formula figured out – even though that’s the ultimate forecaster’s promise – but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t bet on him, or along with him. I have no interest in Vegas, but I can still apply Nate’s life lessons about how to work hard, ask the right questions, and embrace failure as information.

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Transcript

SPEAKERS

David Duchovny, Nate Silver

David Duchovny  00:06

I’m David Duchovny, and this is Fail Better, a show where failure, not success, shapes who we are. Nate Silver is a statistician, a writer and a poker player who analyzes baseball, basketball and elections. He’s the founder of 538 and co host of the podcast Risky Business. Much of Silver’s approach can be characterized by using probabilistic? Probabilistic and statistical modeling to try to understand complex things. I can’t even say it, let alone understand it probabilistic. Basically, he’s a math whiz. Again, that’s not me who has a knack for predicting things correctly, but of course, he doesn’t get it right all the time. For instance, he, like most people, predicted Hillary Clinton to win the 2016 presidential election, but Nate’s model also gave Trump the biggest chance of winning, I think, like 30% which is part of what thrust him into the spotlight. He was essentially less wrong, less off than most of the other guys who are predicting which feels very fail better to me, his latest book on the edge, the art of risking everything, explores the world of professional risk takers like poker players and hedge fund managers to learn about how they impact our world and navigate uncertainty. Nate is a real smart guy and a guy who definitely cleaned me out at the poker table. So I’ve got things to learn from him. So get ready for a little bit of math and a whole lot of guesswork. Here’s Nate Silver.

 

David Duchovny  01:39

Hey Nate, nice to meet you.

 

Nate Silver  01:41

Definitely man, I’m happy to be on.

 

David Duchovny  01:44

Just taking bets, Nate gonna be late.

 

Nate Silver  01:49

I’m not as late as I used to be. That reputation used to be correct, but, but now I’m on time like two thirds the time, I’d say.

 

David Duchovny  01:56

Lateness is something I’ve thought about a lot in life, because when you’re an actor, you’re supposed to be on set at a certain time, and, you know, you kind of bristle against it sometimes, because you want your own life. And, you know, I try to game the traffic and the system, but, and then, you know, I once heard that being late was like latent hostility, you know, it’s like, it’s like passive aggressive hostility.

 

Nate Silver  02:18

Show a bit of contempt. I think, right? It’s like my time is more important than yours.

 

David Duchovny  02:24

Yeah, okay, but thank you for being on time. And it’s easy for me to be on time. I’m home, so I can’t really, it’s not really even a test for me, and I’m so excited to talk to you, because there’s just so much, I my head is just filled with so many ways to go. So forgive me, if we, if we jump around.

 

Nate Silver  02:42

It’s no problem, yeah.

 

David Duchovny  02:43

What I want to say right off the bat is your approach, or your your your obsession with with risk and probability and statistics and all that, it kind of it kind of dovetailed beautifully with something that I’ve been obsessing about for the last five or 10 years, which is, I don’t know if you, if Did you read the book Sapiens, did you? Did you? I read, I read part of it. Not exactly. That’s, that’s the it’s a, it’s, it’s almost as long as your book.

 

Nate Silver  03:15

I think we were looking at benchmarks for books that were like we figured if you’re under 600 pages, that you don’t get the reputation for being like a Robert Caro length book. Yeah, it’s on the long side for sure.

 

David Duchovny  03:29

Well, in in Sapiens, there’s kind of a theoretical discussion of Neanderthals versus Homo sapiens, and what the author kind of comes to and what struck me is it’s true that wherever we find Neanderthal settlements, they never moved past the horizon. They kind of always stayed where they were. They lived and they died where they were. From here, the author supposes that there’s something in the DNA of Homo sapiens that risks that’s that looks at a horizon, sees nothing, as we do primitively, and says, Hey, maybe I like to go there, which is actually nowhere, you know. But I kept thinking about that when I was reading your book, and I wonder if that resonates with you in any way.

 

Nate Silver  04:20

Yeah, look, I mean, some of this is based on 10s of 1000s of years of evolution in general. I mean, it’s going to be a very poker player like way to put it right, in general, people are risk averse, or at least maybe the Neanderthals were even when it has a positive expected value, meaning that, on average, you wind up better off when you take more risk. That implies that the riskier members of the tribe or the riskier genetic line will actually prevail in the long run. They’ll get better outcomes. Maybe, if you’re having conflict or war of some kind, they’re superior at that. I mean, it’s kind of a brutal picture in some. Ways of human civilization. But now that does, that does resonate with me. And I feel like, you know, look, we’re no longer kind of seeing the horizons beyond us, and so we kind of take these virtual forms of risk. I mean, plus Las Vegas, in some ways, is a shrine to excess risk, right? It’s people who feel boredom unwim saying that word, right in their lives, and therefore go to, like, prove their bravery and there, you know, and there are some gender components to this too, but yeah, I mean, some people, if you talk to people, you know, I talked to, for example, a guy who is an explorer named Victor Vescovo in the book, who has, like, climbed the World Seven Summits and gone in a submersible to the bottom of the four oceans, or five oceans, whatever it is. And he’s like, yeah, it’s just genetic. It’s just something I’m born with. And if you talk to other people in my community, which is a small community, they have the same trait. It’s something innate, and they can’t really put it down.

 

David Duchovny  05:55

The community that you refer to is the river. You think that small community is that what you’re referring to?

 

Nate Silver  06:00

So the river refers to this community of calculated risk takers. So people in venture capital, or people on Wall Street, I guess, poker players. One thing is being very cool under pressure. You know, some people, actually. I mean, as an actor, you probably get some of this right. If you, if you have some issues, right, you’re not going to survive for very long and and, you know, when I’m giving like, a speech or something, it’s like, sometimes you can, like you’re tired, you’re tired, you can barely form a sentence. You’ve just been through a grinding day. And then you get on stage and the pressure’s on, and you actually, all of a sudden are much more articulate, right? Some people have that trait to perform well under stress. It’s very important in in poker to play well when you have the bigger pots where there’s more money on the line.

 

David Duchovny  06:40

Can you just explain, for people who haven’t read the book yet, your major distinction in the book is between the river and the village. Now, I’m a village person. I’m part of the village people. I don’t know if you can tell by my my outfit, but I am. But I need you to take me to the river. I need you to Al Green, or talking heads, Take Me to the River, or take our listeners to the river, and just give a short explanation. And then I want to take you way back to young Nate Silver, who grew up in a village, I’m sure. And I want you to tell me the odds of you becoming the person that you are, and what were the factors that you can see in retrospect that led to that prediction.

 

Nate Silver  07:19

So the river is these people who are, like I said, calculator, risk takers, and they have an overlap of two traits that don’t often go together, one of which is they are very analytical. They are mostly data driven people, but they’re also really competitive. They’re extremely individualistic, to the point of being difficult and contrarian sometimes. And they really, they really want to win. Now, how could, you know, I grew up, yeah, I grew up in an academic household, although I have some recessive risk taking DNA, right? But, yeah, look, I’ve always been those two things I mentioned before. I’ve always been interested in numbers and data, and I’ve always been really competitive. You know, I always felt like I didn’t quite fit in. I was a, you know, gay kid growing up in the right, 80s, 90s and like so I, you know, and I always did, like high school debate team and badly played youth sports of different kinds, and video games and like things like that. And just always, I know, I mean, that seems kind of innate to me, you know, people want inner peace, but only some people have this chip on their shoulder, but they feel like they have to, like, prove it to the rest of the world too.

 

David Duchovny  08:25

Yeah, well, that’s one thing that comes up in discussion on this podcast, to me, is that, you know, because I’m talking mostly, you know, the weird thing about talking about failure is, I’m talking to successful people about failure, mostly, you know, and it’s a, it’s a bit of a cheat, but because, you know, okay, we’ve got a happy ending that we’re shooting for. So the failure is kind of Toothless when we’re talking about it, because, like, Oh yeah, you failed there. But, you know, here was the resilience and here was the the end of the story that was happy. But what I get from a lot of these people, you included, is that they have a kind of wherewithal as kids. And what you’re describing, whether or not it was you being gay or you being not as good an athlete as you wanted to be, but you were looking at systems. You were looking at games. Let’s say they’re all games. You were looking at games and you were saying, Okay, I can’t win at that one. I’m not going to win at that one. There was, there was some kind of sober self reflection that went, I can’t win at that game. Where’s the game that I can win? Can I find? Can I find the game that I can win? Is that an appropriate way to talk about your childhood? Was there ever any consciousness like that, or was it just an organic kind of maturation?

 

Nate Silver  09:40

That probably is more self possessed than I was as a kid. But I definitely relate to the notion of, like, trying to learn the rules of the system. You know, if I am writing a newsletter, I write a newsletter called Silver bulletin that’s about politics and all the other things I cover. You know, trying to learn the game of, when do you have. Like, a free newsletter versus a paid newsletter. This is kind of boring, mechanical stuff, right? But you’re thinking about, like, what are the rules of this, of this implicit game I’m playing, and how do I get ahead? Now, I don’t think that way, in terms of, like, everyday social interaction, which I think is kind of a brutal thing to do, but like, in terms of like, in terms of, like, my businesses, and trying to figure out, kind of, how am I optimizing the time I spend working? I think it’s important and worthwhile to do that.

 

David Duchovny  10:30

And as a kid, did you and this is something I come back to a lot because I’m interested, you know, personally, and it is when you were looking at those games and thinking young Nate is not going to be a professional baseball player. Young Nate is not going to marry the prom queen. Was there ever any setbacks in those were there emotional setbacks? Was was there, or was it really just a, I use the word sober, kind of assessment of, okay, well, that game isn’t going to work for me. Was there any kind of sense of, I feel like a failure, I feel like I’m not a good enough person to win those games. Was there an emotionality attached to it?

 

Nate Silver  11:11

Oh, sure. I you know, I spent a lot of years feeling pretty lost, right? I mean, I think in high school, you just, oh, you always go away to college and then, and then you figure it out from there, right? But after college, I had a job I I didn’t like and spent, well, I don’t know. I channel myself in different ways, right? I mean, frankly, I’m in my young 20s, and I’m spending a lot of time like partying and things like that. I also, though, began working during the work day at my consulting job on other projects, on forecasting baseball players, I began to learn how to play poker, and I’d stay up all night and play poker and kind of straggle into work. So look, on the one hand, look, I think you have people who are more easily dissatisfied with their current situation, and that can be helpful. But like, I think there’s a lot of luck involved. Luck involved, whether you channel that into productive or destructive ways.

 

David Duchovny  12:07

Right, if I look back and I if I tried to give the odds of, you know, success in the acting field or whatever, even in arts in general, they’re, they’re terrible, and I didn’t do anything like that. Everything was kind of gut, was kind of intuitive, of just not happy where I’m at. There’s something not satisfying about this life that I’m leading. I’m hearing that that’s similar to you, even though you had different kind of coping strategies.

 

Nate Silver  12:39

Yeah, there’s another former poker player named Annie Duke, who wrote a book about quitting, about quitting, and she studied a lot of research that, in general, people are more happy when they make a difficult choice to make a change in their life.

 

David Duchovny  12:54

Do you think it’s fair to say that if you fail authentically, if you fail at something you’re passionate about that. The feelings that you get are not those of shame that can be attended to failure, but more like just completion or serenity. It seems to me that that’s the case.

 

Nate Silver  13:14

I think you may have that, David, and maybe I have some of that. I don’t think that’s so typical, right? And I have other friends who were actors or filmmakers. And you know, if you’re trying to get a film into Tribeca, you can look at the data, and about one out of 100 applications gets accepted, depending on what kind of line that you’re in. And to, like, mentally prepare yourself for the fact that there’s a 99 out of 100 chance of failure and you have to try many times. I mean, that’s, yeah, that’s hard for most people. Most people are a not that great with probabilities in general, but really, don’t do these things that are the high risk, high reward things where you’re hoping to get noticed, you’re hoping to be in the right place at the right time, hoping something clicks, and you have to try over and over again. I think that’s it’s really hard for most people.

 

David Duchovny  14:00

It’s painful, that’s what it is. I mean, and I have a card written down here, and one of the things I’m trying not to give away my towels, because I’ve got cards around me that. And I don’t know why I have this idea that I want you to think it’s all in my head, not not actually at my fingertips, but it, you know, I do have some help for myself. But I had written, there’s a card that says, tolerance for pain, tolerance for discomfort, tolerance for loss, tolerance for uncertainty. And these are all necessary things to attempt a career or a life in a low probability success career. And you need those things? Do you think it’s just things that we’re born with? Or, can you grow tolerance for pain? Can you grow tolerance for discomfort? Resilience? Can you grow resilience?

 

Nate Silver  14:51

I think so, like, if you look at the people that are successful founders who found companies, they are what I call in like the mezzanine. Of privilege so they’re in the stadium. They’re usually men, because venture capitalists probably have a bias toward men, for example, they can’t have things that are so crippling that they never kind of get into the stadium. But they’re not the ones who are born on third base, right? The people who have the combination of failure that motivates them. And often, revenge seeking can be a big motivation, which is not a particularly serene feeling. You know, some of them might be more self actualized, especially as they get older, but that’s, I think, where part of the part of the competitiveness comes from. Now, one thing you definitely can control is the value of optionality, is the kind of academic way to put it. But you know, if you have or if you’re all in on one bet. And sometimes you have to be, if you’re founding a company, then you’re expected to be all in on that. For me, I like to have different things going at different times.

 

David Duchovny  15:52

You’re more of a fox and not a hedgehog, more of a fox and a hedgehog, to.

 

Nate Silver  15:55

Use the Isaiah Berlin terms of hedgehog knows one big thing. A fox knows many little things. And even this is a little cheesy motivational speak, but you know, even things like one thing I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older is that, like, it’s really important to maintain your relationships in life, even when you get busy, I think it’s quite important to say yes to invitations of different kinds more than you might think from being tired on a given evening, because you never know when you’ll meet somebody who’s a life partner or a lifelong friend, or who helps you a lot in a business sense, or who gives you an idea or that you learn from.

 

David Duchovny  16:35

So I maybe luck can be increased by saying yes is what you’re saying.

 

Nate Silver  16:41

Yeah, I mean the metaphor, if you, if you walk through the hallway that has more doors, right, then sometimes you’ll find an open door, versus consigning yourself to the path that you’ve always taken you.

 

David Duchovny  17:19

You know, with with polling and obviously you have your secret sauce. You have a proprietary kind of a system, but I imagine that the questions you ask are different. You know, you’ve got this guy, Alan lickman, or whatever his name is, he’s got 13 factors. They don’t change.

 

Nate Silver  17:34

Oh, they do. Yeah, they do. I didn’t know all the 13 factors, 11 are subjective, basically, yeah.

 

David Duchovny  17:42

Yeah, right. So that’s the change in system. So yours, so if you’re estimating Trump’s chances of winning, the questions that you asked in 2016 are different from the questions that you’re asking in 2024 are they not? Are they the same?

 

Nate Silver  17:56

No, they’re not. In fact, this is, it’s kind of the opposite, where the fact that you have, you know, the model I basically design 16 years ago in 2008 right? And there are small revisions, but the idea here is that you are following a rigorous process where, where there’s less room for subjectivity. Because if there were more room for subjectivity, then you know, certain results would be better for me in different ways. You know, I have political opinions and certain things that make me look good or look bad, and so it’s a matter of like, totally trusting the process, because people lose their minds in an election campaign, and having rules you agree upon ahead of time and being more rigorous, I think, is the comparative advantage.

 

David Duchovny  18:42

But have you refined that system since 2008 does it get refined all the time? Every year? Is that part of your daydreaming to say, Okay, I’ve got to refine this part of it?

 

Nate Silver  18:52

So each election year, I’ll collect notes about like things that I might want to re examine four years later or two years later for a midterm, but I don’t want to change in midstream, because I think that makes that you get in the subjectivity part of it that you’re trying to that you’re trying to avoid now, and I think in general, you know, look, the issue with elections, we’ve been talking about things where, like poker, we get to simulate out 1000s of hands. Or every year there’s a new New York Nick season, elections, you only get one time every four years. And people, I think, actually make the problem of fighting, of fighting the last war a lot, right? Whatever happened last time, they assume will happen again, right? And a lot of punditry is just saying, I’m betting on the same thing happening as last time when I’m trying to examine, kind of, the broader history.

 

David Duchovny  19:38

But if you’re asking the same questions, I guess what I’m getting at is you must, you must adjust a little bit. You have you must, I think.

 

Nate Silver  19:47

I you’re refining, but it’s the same basic because also people don’t, you know, you can have the same process, and you have things that are basically random, right? Yes, look a few. Months ago, somebody shot at Donald Trump and raised his ear. He happened to turn his head to, like, look at a billboard. Basically a few seconds beforehand, that didn’t happen. We’re in a different world, or in 2000 the result in Florida was basically random. There was an issue of ballot design in Palm Beach County that probably cost Al Gore a few 1000 votes and that so these things can literally be be close to random, or at least unforeseeable, even with the same inputs.

 

David Duchovny  20:26

Well, there’s two things I want to get to about this without belaboring it for you. And one is just to ask about every lit majors favorite scientific theorem, which is the Heisenberg Principle. Of course, you know, in Breaking Bad, the main character’s name was Heisenberg So Vince Gilligan, hats off to you, but you are as a pollster, as somebody who is interested in trying to prophesy an outcome of an election and publishing that giving people access to your interpretation. Do you ever feel like you know the Heisenberg Principle generally, is that you can’t observe a phenomenon without affecting it. There’s no such thing as an objective observation of something in nature that doesn’t change that thing in nature at least temporarily. Are you concerned with that? Ever do you factor that in? Do you become part of the system of that is swaying people’s minds, and not just reporting on people’s minds.

 

Nate Silver  21:25

So what I say is that what I do is a subspecies of media coverage of the campaign. And yeah, media can influence people in different ways, you know. But look, the conceit of polling is that we are involving the common man woman on the street in the democratic process, somehow, if a New York Times reporter or Washington Post reporter goes to a scene and they then they are reporting based on their biases and their predilections and maybe their political preferences, although, although that gets uncomfortable to talk about, whereas with the polling, then you in theory, just randomly dialing people on the phone and and tallying what they have to say. So the romantic notion is that, like you know, this is actually closer to the ground truth. In some ways. I know the academic literature is there’s no consensus on what effect forecasts or polls have. I mean, the one thing that is clear is that when you have a closer race, and more people turn out, because people are actually pretty rational. They know that your vote is worth more in Pennsylvania than New York or California or Hawaii or whatever.

 

David Duchovny  22:26

Right, so, I mean, just hypothetically, we could say because you got the 2016 you gave Trump 29% chance of winning, as opposed to one to 1% to 5% of just about everybody else you in effect, could be saying, hey, people, it’s going to be closer than you think. You could be responsible for getting more vote out in that sense, that’s just a hypothetical there.

 

Nate Silver  22:50

Look, I mean, if you read the 538 where I was then working in 2016 and I was quite insistent on saying, because you could say, oh, it’s 7030 Clinton, Rodney Clinton, right? But because people just couldn’t conceive of Trump winning, by the way, partly I had made the mistake in the GOP primaries, right? I had been like, Oh, he’s just a flash in the pan, and the minute he stops being on CNN all the time, you know, Republicans will find a more normal nominee. So that experience was a failure, where I’d been very wrong, and it kind of scarred me.

 

David Duchovny  23:24

Scar you. You just felt like I don’t know what I’m doing, or.

 

Nate Silver  23:27

Just, I think I had gone out of my way to deny that that Trump could win this primary, which he clearly could do until, until pretty late in the day, until he started winning Iowa and other states and things like that, or didn’t win Iowa actually won New Hampshire. Because what I saw myself doing is, you get dug in into a position, and then it’s hard to it’s hard to change your mind and hard to admit error, right? You get dug in and you start to, you know, you see on Twitter or something, oh, here all the people who agree with me, and I’m going to retweet them, and it’s hard to it’s hard to change your mind, especially in public when you’re, you know, known or supposed to be an expert, an expert yeah.

 

David Duchovny  24:10

Yeah, so that’s kind of a self reinforcing narrowed mindedness that you have to overcome. You know, where your success at forecasting kind of made you a less good forecaster. In some way.

 

Nate Silver  24:25

In some ways, your incentives get worse, right? I mean, the other thing you can do is you can become really risk averse, where you’re never really saying anything about anything, because, hey, you have a good life, and why take the chance on ruining it potentially. But yeah, reputation is a hard thing to navigate, and people, people change their reputation of you probably quick, more quickly than they should, right? I mean, I have been relative this weird, nerdy world I’m in, you know, in moments where you’re ascending or or descending, and the degree to which people treat you differently is profound and. And I think not entirely healthy.

 

David Duchovny  25:02

Right, do you see, I was just when I was just meditating a little before coming to talk to you, I thought, can you see the election as a card game? Because I thought, okay, every vote is a card that doesn’t sound like a card game. That’s just, you know, that would be a true democracy in which the person that got the most votes was the winner. But some cards in this game were playing of the election are worth more than others, and they’re in, apparently, five states. And this is how the game was rigged by the founding fathers, by creating the Electoral College. For whatever reason they did it, it’s now rigged that some votes are more important than others. As a poker player and as a pollster, are those the cards that you’re really looking at? Are those the cards that you’re basically focusing on?

 

Nate Silver  25:52

Yeah, look, you have to play as though it’s a game. I mean, according to game theory, electoral politics meets a definition of a game by game theory. Of course, the stakes are really high, but, like, that’s all the more reason. Like, before Joe Biden was kind of forced out of the race, yet a lot of Democrats were like, well, it’s just not how things are are done, right? You can’t kick this guy to the curb. Yeah, he’s been a good president. And, you know, I was insistent that, like, based on the polls, that anybody but Biden would have a better chance against Trump. And if you, if you think this is a existential question, then, then you have to be strategic about it. You know, look for better or worse, Republicans have been more strategic about, for example, about the courts, about making sure that their highest priority is to appoint conservative Supreme Court justices. And lo and behold, despite Democrats having won the popular vote in all these years, you know, you have a six to three conservative majority, and so that reflects playing the game, so to speak well.

 

David Duchovny  26:55

You I think in poker, it’s very interesting. As an acting because it’s hard to train your body to not freak out or go on tilt, as you say in the book, when you’re faced with extreme stress. And of course, with poker, it becomes more complicated, because you don’t want to give away to other players that you know. You don’t want to show that you’re blushing, you don’t want them to see your hand shaking a little bit. But all these things you can tame as a player, but you can’t tame your body to never not do that. Is that correct?

 

Nate Silver  27:53

That’s correct more or less. I mean, look, I think as you move up and play higher stakes games, then the stress level changes. If you’re used to playing a $50 $100 game, then a 5-10 game might seem like a walk in the park, but no for sure, and in fact, you don’t want to tame that, according to the experts that I spoke with, yeah, evolution trains us to have more of a response when we have a high stakes situation and your heart rate goes up, and you also become more intuitive, right? This can be in a flow state or a zone, but a lot of people panic. They’re like, Oh, my God, my heart is racing. And in poker, like you mentioned, David, like, now you’re giving away physical signals. And so you do to be careful about that. And, and they panic and say, I am having a panic attack and and their mind goes blank. And, you know, I think you can learn to live with that to some extent. You can trust yourself to say, if I’m on stage and I have stage fright, that if I just say the words that I know right, that actually it’s going to come out fine, right? I shouldn’t think too much. That’s been the experience, my experience, anyway, and the experience anyway, and the experience of people in the book.

 

David Duchovny  29:02

Yeah, well, one of when I was first starting to act, I remember reading this book on acting that was, I don’t remember if it was any good, but, but one sentence stuck with me, which was, tension is talent trying to get out, you know? So it is the response to a high pressure situation is appropriate because it’s high pressure, and you need, you need all your wits about you, but the feeling of all your wits coming to at once can be a little disconcerting, right?

 

Nate Silver  29:28

It’s a question of experience, and it’s a question of kind of how much free mental bandwidth that you have, right? You know, because if you’re in this kind of flow, elevated heart rate state, it’s just a different operating system, and you kind of it’s harder to consciously conjure things up. So what you want is to have, like, a lot of experience in ordinary situations, so that when an extraordinary situation arises, that you can over perform and have extra bandwidth cycles, basically. So the. I talked to also was a former fighter pilot who trained pilots in the Navy at the Academy that’s sometimes called Top Gun. And he was perturbed by the movie Maverick, because Tom Cruise is telling all these junior pilots, oh, just trust your gut, right, which works well, if you’re Maverick, because you have had so much experience that now you can operate on some higher level, but doesn’t work well if you’re a trainee, then you just want to execute the game plan as much as you can, because that will require that’s twice as hard as it might be in a less stressful circumstance, right?

 

David Duchovny  30:31

It’s the redundancy of performance in a way. And when I was talking to SALLY JENKINS, who’s a wonderful sports writer, and she was telling me about, you know, the way that Brady and Belichick practiced was super high stress, you know. And part of what you might say about practice and professional sports is, you know, take it easy on them. It’s a long season. You don’t want them to get too banged up. But their philosophy, which I think was proven, you know, very effective, was that if you play under game stress. Now, I’m not sure how you can convince yourself it is game stress, but if you play under game stress, then the stress of the game is going to seem a familiar place to you, and you’ll be able to operate your game plan better under that stress.

 

Nate Silver  31:14

I think that probably differs a lot from person to person. But yeah, some people, I think, need to preserve their energy. I mean, I’m sure it’s a chemical on some level, preserve their energy for high stress moments. I mean, one thing you learn as a poker player, if you play in a tournament, especially toward the end, where every hand the stakes are really high, you know, you will often kind of limp into bed, right? Because you learn how to drain yourself to say, I’m going to allocate exactly this much energy until the tournament ends, and then, you know, you might have plans. I’m gonna go meet a friend for a drink. And so many times it’s happened, I’ve just kind of, you know, gone back to my hotel room to change, and then just collapsed on the bed, right? And so people, I think, get better at learning how to how to manage their performance.

 

David Duchovny  31:55

Well, it’s also, you say, somewhere in the book, and I don’t have it in front of me, but just, I’m gonna paraphrase that, poker is, you know, long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of panic, and in a way that resonated with me too as an actor, because I don’t know if you’ve ever been on a set, but they’re boring. You’re there for 12 to 14 hours a day, and the time that you’re actually playing, time that you’re actually on camera is minutes, maybe 20 minutes of that of those 12 hours. So you do have to learn how to manage this cyclical stress, and it does go from zero to 100 and it does go quickly. So that’s something that I’ve had to learn over time. And I wonder if that was a a learning curve for you as well.

 

Nate Silver  32:41

Yeah, and that phrase has been adapted by poker players, but originally comes from like World War One, where you have soldiers in the trenches and you don’t know when you’re going to be called to defend your position or attack and and, yeah. I mean, I don’t know if this phenomenon has a name, but all of a sudden, you know, there’s not always this transition between being at rest and being suddenly thrust into into action, right, right? And, yeah, that can be stressful. And poker, in particular, you might be minding your own business, but you inherently have to take some risk to succeed at a poker game. And so all of a sudden you’re in what was a small pod, and it’s a war of escalation, and you’re in the thick of things and and you have to, just within seconds, be operating at at your top level. And that’s that can be, that can be hard. And there are things, by the way, even in poker, things like your fatigue level and your nutrition. I mean, poker players have the reputation of being kind of like slobs eating donuts and whatever. I’d say half the player pool now is quite physically fit. They understand that paying attention is a physical process, that there is some degree of acting in poker, and that can be quite physical.

 

David Duchovny  33:56

Should you be allowed to wear sunglasses and hats like I would think? Like that? It’s almost like being able to take steroids as a poker player. It’s like you could put a bag over your head.

 

Nate Silver  34:05

So some people have taken advantage of like, the liberalized masking rules under COVID. So with the sunglasses in particular, most good players don’t wear them for a couple of reasons. Um, one is that you reduce your peripheral vision and a lot of tells or reads you get from other players come out of the corner of your eye.

 

David Duchovny  34:25

That’s fucking fascinating.

 

Nate Silver  34:27

Yeah, the other is that people are relatively aware of what they’re doing with their eyes, and so they’re less likely to involuntarily give off. Tells with them, whereas like so if you’re feeling nervy, then wearing something that covers your neck is important, because people have their heartbeat.

 

David Duchovny  34:50

Yeah, you can see the heartbeat in the neck.

 

Nate Silver  34:52

Things having to do with so when it was playing a lot, while people were still wearing masks, right? You could detect heavy breathing. Uh, really easily. Now what you don’t know is why somebody is breathing heavily, right? Some people get very nervous when they have a bluff. Some people are, you know, extremely calm when they are bluffing, and get extremely nervous when they have a big hand and they’re trying to win a huge pot and so, but yeah, people give and things like people’s posture, it’s, it’s very hard, and how people talk about their hands and their timing, and people’s hands themselves reveal a lot of information, or hands communicate a lot, and we don’t think about that consciously very much.

 

David Duchovny  35:30

Can you tell me some things you’ve read in hands without giving too much away of your of your in your arsenal?

 

Nate Silver  35:37

I mean fidgetness In general, right? Can mean different things for different players. But if people are making a show where it looks like they’re deliberating with their hands, right, they’re kind of going back and forth to their chip stack and things like that, that I think, tends to be a strong hand, what they’re trying to do is, the motto in poker is that strength means weakness and weakness means strength, right? So if they’re trying to involuntarily communicate hesitancy, then that means they’re trying to lower your impression of what hand they have. And therefore it might be, might be a good hand, right? But sometimes it’s just like, you know, one of the best poker players I talked to is a guy named Jason coon who grew up in West Virginia in a very destitute family, like abusive father and things like that. And he’s very good under stress, in part because he had a stressful childhood. He’s like, Yeah, for my operating system, stress is normal, right? It’s almost when things are calm that I go a little bit haywire. And he just said, yeah, it’s just at some level, it’s just like an aura that you pick up from somebody. It’s probably 10 or 20 little intangible signals that you tie together based on having this lifetime of experience. By the way, if you’ve never played poker before, then don’t try to pick up people’s reads or do just to kind of get your database intact. But, like, don’t try to go off that, right? But it’s just a lifetime of experience, I mean, and we have it like in everyday life too, right? You can if you’re having a conversation with somebody, there are a million ways you can tell if they’re comfortable or not.

 

David Duchovny  37:06

Suddenly, I’m very uncomfortable talking to you. I have to tell you one of the things that struck me about your discussion of poker, and I’m not. I’m not. I mean, I know how to play, but I’m not a player because I grew up with a mother who was scarred by the depression and to risk any money in my household was considered the highest act of folly. You know what? You know, we barely, the family, could barely scrape two nickels together. You know, you’re not going to go bet that. I mean, you could definitely go another way. Well, it was like, why not? Why not? One of it, but it’s not in me to play with my money in that way. But what I in fact, whenever I’ve gone to Vegas, whenever I play poker, I’m like, I can’t wait to lose all my money, because then I can get the fuck out of here. You know, it’s like, that kind of a feeling. I don’t know if you’ve, if you’ve encountered that kind of feeling before.

 

Nate Silver  37:59

I mean, there are various things that happens that you see late in the poker tournament. One is that some players get imposter syndrome, you know. One is that they can have survivorship guilt. All their friends busted out of the tournament and they didn’t, you know, a third is just the cumulative stress. I mean. So, you know, one thing that I found is like you should try never to make like a dinner or plane reservation after when you’re playing in a high stakes tournament, if you’ve made day three of a big tournament, because you will, like, find a way to say, Yeah, I made a little money. And wouldn’t it be nice to just get on the flight and have a, you know, have a nice little glass of whiskey or something, and fly home and sleep my own bed and like, and you’ll find ways to to lose and look, I mean, there are people who have self destructive tendencies that are channeled through gambling. I mean, look, I think a lot of the characters in the book, including people who are like successful entrepreneurs, have some self destructive tendencies, where, where they’re, you know, highly functional self destructive people that have creative abilities as well.

 

David Duchovny  39:00

Yeah, and my impression from reading the book is, you know, you could program AI to be a good poker player, but probably not the best poker player for these reasons of emotional intelligence that you’re talking about. But also, I think, if I’m getting this wrong, tell me, but what I get from your style of playing, or the style of playing that you admire, is that, yes, there’s somebody who’s in control of all the numbers and can count cards to a certain extent, and knows strategy and knows the right play and knows the statistically the winning probabilities. But in order not to have a tell at all, in order not to be predictable, you have to randomize. You have to somehow, sometimes, and even randomly randomized. You can’t even, you know, you can’t be a random, random player. You have to just be fully random play badly at sometimes it reminds me of football coaches that will just try a play early in the game, just getting information, you know, they just, they know it’s not a winning play. They’re not expecting it to be a winning play, but they’re getting it from. So there’s this idea of as all this studying, there’s all these numbers, there’s all these percentages of probability, and then it’s just like, fuck it. I’m gonna let chaos in. I’m gonna let random in. I’m gonna let God in, whatever you want to name that thing. And is that a is that an appropriate way to talk about what you’re saying?

 

Nate Silver  40:18

Well, ironically, the computers do a lot of randomization, so they’re actually now like poker is basically a solved game. So it’s solved under game theory. So if you saw a beautiful mind, John Nash came up with the Nash equilibrium, which is a state where you’re basically playing perfectly and you can’t be defeated. And because it’s so important not to reveal predictable information in poker that you do a ton of randomizing with many hands, you sometimes call and sometimes raise or sometimes raise a small amount, sometimes raise a large amount. It’s very important to bluff in poker, and it’s very important not to be predictable above all else. Now, because people are predictable, then you can instead adapt what’s called an exploitative strategy, which is, I try to outwit you. If we’re playing rock paper scissors, and you always throw rock, then I’ll always throw paper. The problem with that is that if you pick up on my strategy, then you can one up me and then do scissors, and then I’m screwed. And so it’s a cat and mouse game where you’re trying to stay, you know, one step ahead of people. If you want to opt out of that game, then you can literally randomize. I have a friend who literally brings like, 100 sided dice, like Dungeons and Dragons dice, to the poker table, and we’ll roll it to generate a random number. That’s a little bit extreme. It’s probably reviewing too much. You probably don’t want your opponents to know that you’re randomizing. But like, yeah, people will, like, yeah, people will, like, look at the clock and see how many what the second hand says of the clock, and make a decision that way, for example. And yeah.

 

David Duchovny  41:51

I mean, I can relate this to acting, because if I’m feeling tight or predictable, which is death for an actor as well, I will roll the dice and I’ll say to myself, and sometimes, if I’m feeling weak, I’ll, I’ll announce it to everybody else so they know I’m intentionally trying to be bad. And I’ll just say, I’m just gonna, this is gonna be terrible. I’m gonna scream this one, or I’m gonna do this one in a German accent. Or I just have to, I have to somehow clear my mind of strategy, of rationality, of numbers, and try to get to try to bust it open, in a way, because I’m assuming both people at the poker table have the same access to the same information, can process it as well as one another. So the idea of when to call on God or or whatever, or chance or fate, or luck or randomization is really what it’s all about. To me, that’s what that’s what makes that’s what opens the window and lets the air into the room for me.

 

Nate Silver  42:47

Yeah, look, part of what you try to gain through experience in poker is learning exactly how much to trust your intuition. I think ironically, you know a time when you probably shouldn’t trust it as much as when you’re tired or fatigued, that’s when you might get, like, a little bit paranoid. And in poker, poker is a relatively unforgiving game to certain types of mistakes. You know, whereas acting maybe you give a bad take or maybe it turns out to be a good take some of the time, like, it’s not right, catastrophic. But in poker, anyone hand can bust you out of the tournament or cost you your whole stack. And so, right? So that makes the heuristics like a little bit different, but yeah, look, I think people in this community called the river naturally, they naturally like to do a bit of randomization. They don’t necessarily need to have that much of a routine, because they want to experiment and collect data. And they can have more variety in life too. But I can relate to that for sure.

 

David Duchovny  43:40

Well, like you. Let’s end on this. Like like you as a poker player and as a statistician. Do you feel like giving writing a book like this, or giving away the game in a way, giving away your approach to the game? Do you make it tougher for you as an outlier? Do you Is it harder to harder and harder to be an outlier as we as we move along.

 

Nate Silver  44:01

I don’t think it’s harder to be an outlier. In fact, I think it’s probably more important to be an outlier than ever before. If you look at like, what AI is doing, you know, if AI can replicate pretty good human performance, we can talk about whether we would ever get superhuman or not, then being differentiated or being really good at a specialized field, I think will be like, more rewarded in the economy. But, yeah, I’m not look I it’s a book that I felt like I had a duty to put out into the world, and a duty that I had to write to help, like, understand myself. And you know, it kind of started with, why do I feel like so estranged in this field politics that I’ve been kind of or thrust myself into? I shouldn’t use the passive voice. I think the book was the most important creative thing that I’ve done in my life.

 

David Duchovny  44:46

I think it’s, it’s a terrific book, and it’s, it’s a lot, you know, yeah, I mean, I don’t mean that as in any negative way, but it’s something that you can come back to in a way. Today. It reminds me of the Bill James extract that I used to love to look at. I don’t call it a toilet book, you know, because you can just, you can just pick it up for a few pages and and come up with something. There’s something interesting every three pages in that book. And it’s, there’s a lot of pages, so there’s a lot to contend with. And it’s hard to it’s hard to summarize it. It’s hard to summarize it. And I thought I and I commend you for writing it, and I really, I’m moved by the fact that you did it in a way to make sense of yourself, to yourself, you know, I think is, in a way, it’s your autobiography, let’s say, in some weird way.

 

Nate Silver  45:36

It’s a little bit, it’s, you know, it’s a memoir. We also love about lot about poker and gambling. So it’s interesting book.

 

David Duchovny  45:43

Yeah, I appreciate your time today and your candor. And I really enjoyed talking to you. I’m completely out of my depth, but I had a good time.

 

Nate Silver  45:53

It was great. David, I really enjoyed talking to you, too.

 

David Duchovny  45:55

Hello hey, some post Nate Silver thoughts. What a fascinating cat that is. I love saying fascinating cat like I’m a 50s hipster, yeah, I guess I, what I’m missed asking maybe, I don’t know if we got into this, but, you know, on the edge this book that we’re talking about, his book, is it a self help book? You know was, was the idea that these behaviors that he’s describing in in the book, these these risk taking behaviors, is it possible to get better at at risk, to living in the uncertainty, to living with the prospect of failure, whether it’s monetary or spiritual or professional, whatever. Does he think of this book as a self help book? And does he think of living with risk as an aspect of self help, which is something interesting to think about, because, you know, most of us, I think when I when I think of self help, I think of, how do I get content with what I have? How do I feel happy with what I have, and not strive for more, or not be comparing myself to others, or, you know, I’m okay, you’re okay. That kind of that’s pulling an example from years and years ago that shows you my interest in self help books, which is pretty much nil. But I do think of this as kind of a self help podcast a little bit. And I wish I brought that up, but I have all these note cards here, you know, and I can’t get to them all. Can’t get to them all.

 

CREDITS  48:08

There’s more Fail Better with Lemonada Premium. Subscribers get exclusive access to bonus content like more of my behind the scenes thoughts on this episode. Subscribe now and Apple podcasts. Fail Better is a production of Lemonada media in coordination with King Baby. It is produced by Kegan Zema, Aria Bracci, and Dani Matias, Paula Kaplan. Our engineer is Brian Castillo. Our SVP of weekly is Steve Nelson. Our VP of new content is Rachel Neil. Special thanks to Carl Ackerman, Tom Karpinski and Brad Davidson, the show’s executive produced by Stephanie Wittels Wachs, Jessica Cordova, Kramer and me, David Duchovny. The music is also by me and my band. Lovely Colin Lee. Pat McCusker, Mitch Stewart, Davis Rowan and Sebastian […]. You can find us online at @LemonadaMedia and you can find me @DavidDuchovny. Follow Fail Better wherever you get your podcasts or listen ad free on Amazon music with your Prime membership.