00:36:30 · Joe Weisenthal, Nate Silver, Nate Silver
[00:36:30] S3: So that means there are people who are going to be voting in this election that were, like, born during the Obama administration. [00:36:35] S2: Oh, my gosh. Oh, my God. [00:36:37] S3: Some of these things freak me out a little bit. Can you talk objectively about, like, is it unambiguous in your mind that AI has made it easier for you to build models and to do your job? [00:36:49] S2: Yeah, for sure. Look, I get to hire two world-class programmers, coders, for programming. whatever I pay for the max plans, right? A hundred or 200 bucks a month. So I have these complex projects that you definitely couldn't one shot or even come close to it. But I know this really well and I've quoted these things myself. And I know when you feed GPT or Claude a 10,000 word program and say, carefully audit this, it's quite sharp about it. Now I would still say on like two thirds of prompts, I have to provide quite a bit of guidance, right? It's not like, oh, cool, man. Next step. [00:37:31] S1: Right. [00:37:32] S2: But like, it's great. It's a great teammate, you know, to take something in a more obscure example. So we have an NFL model. The NFL has all these complex playoff tiebreakers, right? They're purely algorithmic. And last year when I built our model, it took me two and a half days to code them up. And like some of the code was buggy. We skipped a couple of tiebreakers. It was very slow. [00:37:54] S1: Right.
00:37:54 · Nate Silver, Nate Silver, Joe Weisenthal
[00:37:54] S1: Right. [00:37:55] S2: You know, now you have GPT or cloud do it and they do it in 15 minutes while you're at the gym, right? And it's code is 10 times faster. Now, again, there are dangers, like they can introduce bugs and kind of hide them from you. We built a soccer model too. And like in one version of soccer model, it had the ratings like looping back around. So like the 2026 rating would inform like the 1900 rating and it got, it would do things that were, it was quite weird. But you know, the combination of having like a lot of initiative and entrepreneurial spirit and expertise. Cause there's a certain type of person I meet. You guys are probably in that category, right? Where it's like, it's like people are saying me, I feel like I'm the most productive I've ever been. [00:38:36] S1: Right. [00:38:36] S2: I feel like I'm getting two days of work done in, in a 10 hour day sometimes. And I feel like that some of the time, but, but again, I'm probably in the 99.9th percentile of like, these models are helpful with the exact, I'm not really a coder, right? I understand model architecture. I'm an empiricist. I understand probabilities, but like, my coding was always the weak point. So it's like, this exact thing they're really good at and it's really valuable to me is the exact thing that they do very well. [00:39:04] S3: Your FIFA World Cup model did have Spain versus Argentina in the finals.
00:39:04 · Joe Weisenthal, Nate Silver, Nate Silver, Tracy Alloway
[00:39:04] S3: Your FIFA World Cup model did have Spain versus Argentina in the finals. [00:39:06] S2: We had a really good, yeah. And that's the thing about, so NFL, you know, you have good weeks and bad weeks and like, that's why, you know, maybe if Republicans win the House, with the Senate, we'd say, well, 25% things happen, right? It'd be great. But like, If they win the house, maybe we'll just make Silver Bulletin AI in a sports blog. Just give up. [00:39:24] S3: Just give up. Nate Silver, thank you so much for joining us on our Election Day special. [00:39:31] S1: Thank you, Joe. [00:39:45] S3: That was a fun conversation, Tracy. I think my favorite part of the conversation... was Nate preemptively parodying how he will sound if Abdul El-Sayed slightly underperforms. [00:39:57] S0: It was a good impression of himself. And Nate Silver. [00:39:59] S3: Doing the impression of an annoying white moderate guy was good. But that was fun. I'm glad. Happy Election Day, people. I'm glad Nate joined us for today. Yeah. [00:40:09] S0: By the time this comes out, I guess maybe some of the polls will have changed. [00:40:12] S3: Maybe some of the polls. [00:40:13] S0: We'll have some additional. [00:40:14] S3: Data, maybe. We'll have some more early voting data. [00:40:16] S0: Yeah, exactly. One thing I thought was really interesting was this idea of polls basically all becoming models now. [00:40:23] S3: Yeah. [00:40:23] S1: Right.
00:40:23 · Nate Silver, Tracy Alloway, Joe Weisenthal
[00:40:23] S1: Right. [00:40:24] S0: And like after years and years and years of being accused of, I guess, overestimating Democrats in the polls, everyone now is self-correcting. And so the question is, like, how big is that self-correction? [00:40:37] S3: Yeah. And it's interesting. And I guess we didn't go into the math specifically. But if you can empirically establish that your self-correction here makes no sense. [00:40:47] S1: Yeah. [00:40:47] S3: Then what you do learn is, as Nate said, pollsters are self-interested players. Because who is it? What was the famous pollster in Iowa? Selzer, Ann Selzer, who actually, you know, right before the 2024 election actually had Kamala Harris winning Iowa. Yeah. [00:41:04] S0: No one wants to poll a Selzer, right? [00:41:06] S3: It was so off that she retired from the game. And that's kind of, I guess, what Nate was saying, too, which is that if Republicans win the House, it's like, you know what, I think we're done. I think we're done trying to go into sports. These crazy American voters. We're done trying to understand anything about them because we have nothing. We have no usable information on them. Go ask your digital twin. [00:41:27] S1: All right. [00:41:27] S0: Shall we leave it there? [00:41:28] S1: Yeah, let's leave it there. [00:41:29] S0: This has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
00:41:29 · Tracy Alloway, Joe Weisenthal, Nate Silver
[00:41:29] S0: This has been another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway. [00:41:35] S3: And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow our guest, Nate Silver. He's at natesilver538. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Arman, Dashiell Bennett at Dashbot, Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks, and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano. And of course, you can chat about all of these topics 24-7 in our Discord, discord.gg slash allthoughts. And for more OddLots content, you can check out our daily newsletter, which you can find at Bloomberg.com slash OddLots. [00:42:03] S0: And if you enjoyed this conversation, if you like it when we do our Election Day specials, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And if you're watching on video, then please leave a comment or like or better yet, subscribe. [00:42:17] S3: And remember, if you're an OddLots subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. [00:42:27] S0: Thanks for joining. [00:42:28] S1: So