Nate Silver: Underdog Story

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Speaker 3 Hey, y'all, quick correction and some updates before we get to our guest. On yesterday's pod, Adam delivered just this epic, widely shared rant about J.D.
Vance's disgusting attacks on Tim Walls.

Speaker 3 If you haven't seen it, you should definitely go check it out. One note on that rant, though.
He was using the Air National Guard ranks.

Speaker 3 He's from the Air National Guard, not the Army National Guard ranks. They're the equivalent rank, but different titles, if you will.

Speaker 3 Walls reached the rank of Command Sergeant Major and then retired as Master Sergeant. That distinction had some of the Army brats in the comments in a tizzy.

Speaker 3 So I just wanted to be clear on that in case you were sending that around to any MAGA friends who are, you know, whatever, trying to make this BS stolen valor charge on Tim Walls stick.

Speaker 3 One other thing, I did an interview with a contrarian conservative outlet called Unheard, where I made a pretty succinct case for why I think a conservative should vote for Kamala this year.

Speaker 3 I get asked from time to time by listeners what to send their on-the-fence friends. This might be a good one, especially if your friend is like one of those college-educated Romney voting types.

Speaker 3 So we'll put a link in the show notes, and you can have that if you want. One more thing: I get those emails, and I haven't done a mailbag in a while because there's been so much news.

Speaker 3 But you can email us at bulwarkpodcast at thebulwark.com. I will do a mailbag next week sometime.
Remember, questions are short and end with a question mark. Also, though, life advice.

Speaker 3 If you want life advice, we were given great life advice back when the news was boring. So you can send in some life advice questions and we'll see if we have any wisdom to offer.

Speaker 3 And just to promote my friends in the Borg Network here, over the weekend, there are other pods that we're putting out. Beg to differ, Mona Charon's panel show comes out on Fridays.

Speaker 3 Sarah Longwell's Focus Group, where you get to hear from the real Americans, comes out on Saturdays. Go subscribe to those feeds if you haven't.

Speaker 3 Lastly, a reminder that the playlist of outro songs is in the show notes on Fridays. And

Speaker 3 buckle up. my next guest, Nate Silver.

Speaker 3 Hello, and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
I'm delighted to be here today with Nate Silver, statistician, writer, and poker player. He was the founder of 538.

Speaker 3 You may have heard of that. And he's the author of the forthcoming book, On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything Out Next Week.
He also writes the Substack newsletter Silver Bulletin.

Speaker 3 What's up, brother?

Speaker 2 Hey, Tim, how are you?

Speaker 3 Man, i'm good i'm i'm happy to do this i was paging through the book last night and uh at the end of the podcast for gambling degenerates i'm excited to get get some tips from you uh you know so i was i was paging through it i i specifically focused on the politics and nba sections but there's some there's some other good stuff in there too but before we do that you know we got to do business here and discuss the state of the play in the presidential race uh you had a i think a tweet that was much shared in text messages across the country uh earlier this week that said the streams have crossed.

Speaker 3 Your model showed Kamala Harris for the first time as the favorite in the race.

Speaker 3 So talk about that and basically the trajectory of the race, what you've seen in your model over the last couple of weeks.

Speaker 2 Yeah, look, she's not much of a favorite. I think she's specifically at 53% to 47% for Trump as of this morning.

Speaker 2 But if you look at most polls now, I mean, it's harder and harder to find national polls that have Trump ahead.

Speaker 2 And more importantly, polls of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan tend to show Harris with about a one-point lead.

Speaker 2 There's a lot of fancy math that we're doing that kind of nets out to where the polls are currently.

Speaker 2 The model assumes, maybe incorrectly, that Trump is supposed to be in some afterglow convention bounce period. On the other hand, it wonders if Harris is outrunning the fundamentals.

Speaker 2 I mean, we had some rough economic news, relatively speaking, this week. Basically, a toss-up.
And if you had to bet, you'd probably lean toward Harris given the momentum and the polling so far.

Speaker 3 But you don't see any plus EV value right now in

Speaker 3 either of those two bets.

Speaker 2 Look, I mean, I would also say that we're at a time when we haven't quite experienced like the steady state of the race, right?

Speaker 2 Usually you'd say, okay, for months and months, the race was X, Trump plus two, Harris plus three, whatever.

Speaker 2 Then you had all these crazy events and it might revert back to some previous average, but we never really had a previous average before, right? We were running in motion from the start of the race.

Speaker 2 So look,

Speaker 2 if you want to say it's lean Trump or if you want to say it's a little bit of a heavier Harris favorite, then I'm not in the mood right now to argue with you too much.

Speaker 2 It's an unprecedented circumstance. The model is doing the best it can.
And those are all reasonable guesses, I think.

Speaker 3 How low did Biden get in the model before he stepped aside?

Speaker 2 I think the bottom was about 26% right when he stepped aside.

Speaker 2 And if anything, I think that was too generous for the reason that, look, the model is drawn based on presidential elections since 1968 or whatever.

Speaker 2 You haven't had a candidate who was as incapable of like the regular blocking and tackling of campaigning as Biden was.

Speaker 2 You were hearing reports about his fundraising declining by half or three quarters.

Speaker 2 Usually that's just overrated, but when it's that extreme a difference between default model assumptions and the reality, then that was, I think, going to be pretty material.

Speaker 2 I didn't have another debate, which might have been another disaster we would have had to see. My personal shortcut was taking the model and cutting that in half.

Speaker 2 So if model was Biden 26%, my view is Biden 13% or 10% to 15%. And now they have a 53% chance.
So roughly quadruple their chances with this candidate swap.

Speaker 3 I mean, that's dramatic. Did you expect such a dramatic switch?

Speaker 3 I mean, I know that both of us were on the side of absolutely, it would be, you know, the value would be better and having him step aside and having anybody else. But, I mean, that's pretty notable.

Speaker 3 I can't even think about a political, like a period of political time recently where one party's chances would have switched that dramatically over something, maybe 9-11.

Speaker 2 I got to be honest, I thought they would be smaller underdogs, right?

Speaker 2 That Harris would battle to like, you know, a tie in the national popular vote and have a disadvantaged Electoral College, but have a 30, 35, 40% chance, which is a lot better than Biden.

Speaker 2 I don't know what happened. Where was this version of Kamala Harris all along? I think she's been a very good candidate so far.

Speaker 2 I think even though it's a lot of the same people running the campaign, they've picked from a new kind of color palette of themes that just

Speaker 2 seem a lot smarter and sharper. And like the people who were like, yeah, look, I'm, I was going to say pleasantly surprised.
Yeah, that's fair to say, I suppose.

Speaker 2 You You know, I don't want to talk too much about my personal political preferences, but I think she's been off to a very good start.

Speaker 3 Well, let's just do that. I want to get more into the nerdy numbers in the states for a second, but you've led me to something I want to ask you about, which is Kamala Harris's performance.

Speaker 3 This video was going around yesterday. We even played it on the podcast of her talking to the UAW.

Speaker 3 Let's just listen to it first: of Kamala Harris on her game with the UAW.

Speaker 4 And then the outcome will be fair.

Speaker 4 And isn't that what we're talking about in this here election?

Speaker 4 We're saying we just want fairness. We want dignity for all people.

Speaker 4 We want to recognize the right all people have to freedom and liberty to make choices, especially those that are about heart and home, and not have their government telling them what to do.

Speaker 4 Our campaign is about saying we trust the people.

Speaker 4 We see the people. We know the people.
You know one of the things I love about our country?

Speaker 4 We are a nation of people who believe

Speaker 4 in those ideals that were foundational

Speaker 4 to what made us so special as a nation.

Speaker 4 We believe in those ideals.

Speaker 4 And the sisters and brothers of labor have always fought for those ideals.

Speaker 4 Always fought for those ideals. And we know we are a work in progress.
We haven't yet quite reached all of those ideals, but we will die trying because we love our country and we believe

Speaker 4 in who we are.

Speaker 4 And that's what our campaign is about. We love our country.

Speaker 4 We believe in our country.

Speaker 4 We believe in each other.

Speaker 4 We believe in the collective.

Speaker 4 We're not falling for these folks who are trying to divide us, trying to separate us,

Speaker 4 trying to pull us apart.

Speaker 4 That's not where the strength lies.

Speaker 3 There's a tweet that a guy named James Medlock, a Twitter character, sent that I felt very Nathan Silverish.

Speaker 3 He said, Kamala Harris is like a high-ceiling prospect that just never really put results together and then languished on the bench for years, but an injury puts them in the lineup, and all of a sudden they're hitting 330, and you wonder why you weren't playing them all the time.

Speaker 3 Is that what happened?

Speaker 3 Is there something else? Is it media? Like, how do you assess the Kamala Harris performance aspect of this?

Speaker 2 Look, I think some people elevate their performance under stress and some people decline. There's a little bit in the book about this.

Speaker 2 I mean, the Medlock tweet does reference the fact that she was once seen as a strong candidate, right?

Speaker 2 In 2020, when we had my totally subjective presidential tiers of all these Democrats running, my top tier consisted of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for totally different reasons.

Speaker 2 I thought, oh my God, that Harris prediction looks really dumb. And Betto.

Speaker 3 Was Betto your other one?

Speaker 3 Who was the third? Who else was in your top tier?

Speaker 2 I mean, I think Bernie was second. No, it was those two alone in the top tier, right? And then Bernie and Warren, but for almost forgot about our friend Beto O'Rourke.
A lot of problems.

Speaker 2 But look, I think in 2019, she was kind of caught up in this tropical storm of wokeness or whatever you want to call it, which I think did not play well for her. And then I kind of wonder if like,

Speaker 2 how much the White House, while she was vice president, was trying to stymie her or limit her.

Speaker 2 She got some rough assignments like the border and like voting rights, which is not inherently a tough assignment, but the one thing they weren't able to really do anything about.

Speaker 2 And the fact that until when did Briden drop out? Like only three weeks ago, right? The fact that until three weeks ago, the White House was like, oh, you don't want to run Kamala Harris.

Speaker 2 She said, well, she's your vice president, right? Why would you not want to run her if you picked her? So I think she's unburdened by what has been.

Speaker 2 And I think she got a lot of reps in as vice president, undoubtedly. And I think she's possessed of the moment.

Speaker 2 I mean, if you read the backstory, the TikTok stories about how she was prepared to sprint from moment one when Biden dropped out, right, and wrapped up that nomination within 24 hours.

Speaker 2 You know, sometimes the word ambition has a negative connotation when applied to women, but like I admire her ambition in seizing that nomination right away.

Speaker 3 And some people, as you said, some of this is in the book.

Speaker 3 Some people do well under pressure and some people do better as a decider, you know, and stressful situations calm them, you know, and I do think that part of maybe why the assessment of her political skill had declined a lot during her time as VP was that she was uncertain, right?

Speaker 3 Like, just being VP is naturally tough.

Speaker 3 Like, it might not be tough for Tim Wallace because he might be a natural cheerleader, but like for a certain type of person, I always thought like when she was answering questions, you could see the little hamsters like going in her head as she was trying to decide, like, how do I calculate this?

Speaker 2 So, I don't get in trouble with the boss, so I don't make any too much, you know, and now when it's like she, it's her at the top, that might have to use the word again unburdened her in a weird way to be a little looser i don't know what do you think about that yeah look i mean it's a weird job being vp you're nominally i mean you are second in line to the most powerful job in the world and at the same time you have like extremely few official responsibilities apart from casting a tied vote in the senate and you're in an awkward spot where you can't contradict like you said tim your boss it's an area of underperformance i suppose but look i just want to be honest like i she has had more raw talent than i would have expected So that's very good news for, or maybe it means I'm an idiot.

Speaker 2 It either means I'm an idiot or good news for Democrats or undoubtedly both.

Speaker 3 I was making the argument that she was underrated earlier this year because I had a friend that went to the White House and was like, you should pay closer attention to what she's been doing.

Speaker 3 She was doing better in a way that people weren't really noticing because of the Biden, like Biden and Trump just blocking out the sun and the absurdity of that race and the catastrophe.

Speaker 3 And so, but I don't think it's wrong. I will also say this.
She hasn't done a tough, tough, contentious interview yet. She hasn't done a debate yet.

Speaker 3 So you can be over-exuberant, but I think that it's fair to say based on what we have now that she was underrated and is overperforming.

Speaker 3 One thing that I have been paying closer attention to that I want your take on as more of a math guy is this gap between the national popular vote and the electoral college victory.

Speaker 3 And I think that there was some evidence that if Biden had been stronger, the Biden coalition would have narrowed that gap.

Speaker 3 Whereas like in past years, you know, the the Democrat needed to win by three or four points or something, five points, maybe even to guarantee Electoral College victory.

Speaker 3 Then it was maybe coming down. What do you think about the Harris coalition? How does that look? How does that bell curve shake out for you?

Speaker 2 Yeah, with Biden, we were showing about a two-point gap, which is lower than actually 2016 or 2020.

Speaker 2 So that means that if Biden had won the popular vote by two points, then the Electoral College is a coin flip, whereas the gap was three to four points in 2020.

Speaker 2 With Harris, we're actually now showing pretty much the same thing. It might be a tiny bit wider, 2.1 or 2.2 or something like that.
It's all relative.

Speaker 2 In relative terms, Biden's polling in exactly the states, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, was respectable. He was down.
I mean, after the convention, the RNC, then everything was a mess, right?

Speaker 2 But kind of before then, he was down by only a point or two in these states. And so that kind of gave him a plausible path to exactly 270 electoral votes.

Speaker 2 Harris is instead like a point or two ahead in those states, which is a big difference. But also, she has brought back all the alternative pathways, right?

Speaker 2 Nevada is a state where we have her tied now. Georgia is very close.
North Carolina is interesting. Arizona, you've seen some polls where it's close.

Speaker 2 So she now has a more robust pathway, even if the 270 blue wall pathway hasn't improved quite as much.

Speaker 2 And the logic here is that, like, you know, Biden was underperforming with all groups except old white people. Right.
And you have lots of old white people like in Wisconsin.

Speaker 2 But Harris is doing better with younger voters, voters of color, younger voters of color, especially. And so that brings like the Georgia's back more into play.

Speaker 3 So you're looking at Harris right now as it's basically a coin flip if she wins the Electoral College 5149. Well, I guess

Speaker 3 you have RFK in there. So if she wins the Electoral College 49, 47 or something with the other people at 40.

Speaker 2 So it's funny, if she runs the table with those three blue wall states,

Speaker 2 then she could win the Electoral College in a a very close popular vote, right?

Speaker 2 If she misses one of them, though, the scenario that Democrats have to worry about is that you lose Pennsylvania or Michigan or Wisconsin by half a percentage point, and then you lose Georgia by a point and a half.

Speaker 2 And the model tries to work all this math out. And, like, look, there has been a gap, a pretty big gap in 2016.

Speaker 2 Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.1 points or whatever, and lost Wisconsin by 0.7 or whatever. So it's a three-point gap.
So you have to be mindful of that history.

Speaker 2 It seems to have closed a bit, in part ironically, because like some of the very blue states, like

Speaker 2 every time you see a poll as a Democrat showing Harris, you know, only winning New York by 11 points or only winning California by 18 points or something, right?

Speaker 2 Like that's actually good news for Democrats, right? It means you have fewer wasted votes. Florida has a lot of voters.

Speaker 2 A poll that has Trump eight points ahead in Florida is also actually good news in terms of translating that popular vote to Electoral College gap.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And so the point is that since 2016,

Speaker 3 the Democrats have lost some ground among constituencies that are overrepresented in these states that are not competitive and gained a little ground among constituencies that are represented disproportionately in the swing states?

Speaker 3 Is that essentially how you'd assess that?

Speaker 2 Yeah, because look, I mean, these things shift around. In 2008, 2012, Obama performed really strongly.
I mean, he won the popular vote by sizable margins, right?

Speaker 2 But like he overperformed in swing states relative to the Electoral College. So this can shift around.
It's usually not that much of a permanent advantage.

Speaker 2 And we see probably, you know, some reversion to the mean here in terms of versus 2020.

Speaker 3 It's mostly because there's doing better among college-educated whites, and there are more of those in these swing states?

Speaker 2 But I'm here in New York. I mean, New York, New Jersey is what you've seen like actually kind of a conservative backlash, but not to the point where those states are going to be in play.

Speaker 2 And so that removes some inefficiencies from the Democrats' column.

Speaker 3 As you just look at the map, you seem to be intrigued by North Carolina. Is there anything that is contra-conventional wisdom that you're kind of eyeing as far as the the Harris path?

Speaker 2 I mean, maybe the North Carolina thing, a little bit. They have a very polarizing Republican at the top of the gubernatorial ticket.
It's maybe been a little bit neglected in the past.

Speaker 2 In a weird, uncanny way, it kind of reminds me of like Georgia in 2020, where it was like, oh, in theory, Georgia is a swing state now, right? But no one really believed it.

Speaker 2 And like, you know, I think people are a little superstitious in politics about like. Democrats have lost a lot of close elections in North Carolina recently.
But there's nothing mandatory about that.

Speaker 2 If you're down one.

Speaker 3 I was reverse superstitious about this when I was a Republican.

Speaker 3 Part of the reason I didn't think Trump could win in 2016 is I was like, I've seen the Pennsylvania Fools gold enough times in my career.

Speaker 3 You know what I mean? So like it can work both ways.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And the flip side of this, by the way, is Nevada, where we have Harris at only 50-50.

Speaker 2 And that's a state where if you look at the demographics, I mean, it's, you know, a lot of working class, Hispanic, black, Asian-American voters.

Speaker 2 And those are groups that, although Harris has regained some ground, was a big drop-off for Biden versus 2020.

Speaker 3 Okay, so rank the swing states for me based on what you think is best for Harris to what you think is worst.

Speaker 2 I'm not looking at my number. I'm just going subjectively here.
I think probably Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia,

Speaker 2 Nevada,

Speaker 2 North Carolina, Arizona, something like that. I mean, it's all blurry.

Speaker 3 You're putting Arizona last.

Speaker 3 It is a little blurry, but why? Well, just I'm just curious why your instinct pick was, why your blink decision was to have Arizona be last?

Speaker 2 For the simple reason that I think she has regained more ground with black voters than Hispanic voters. So not a very creative reason, but like that's probably why the model would show that.
Yeah.

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Speaker 3 You talk a lot in the book about game theory. Why don't you just explain what game theory is and then we'll do a little game theory.

Speaker 2 So game theory is the strategy that results when everyone's trying to maximize their position or their expected value is a more technical term.

Speaker 2 So game theory explains, for example, why are elections basically 50-50 all the time? You know, if we had a 54-46

Speaker 2 Harris election, that we call that a landslide, we'd be amazed, and yet that's still approximately 50-50. It's because the parties are actually

Speaker 2 usually, believe it or not, reasonably strategic about like identifying different voting blocks or different strategies to kind of play to the center.

Speaker 2 Trump clumsily is sort of trying to distance himself from the GOP extremism on abortion. for example, or Harris is unapologetically flip-flopping back toward the center to some degree.

Speaker 2 So that's kind of all, that's kind of where game theory applies in politics is why you have close election after close elections because people are actually trying to win.

Speaker 2 And when you're both trying to win, you kind of, it's like a game of risk or something where you kind of like carve out the map and you each take half the territories.

Speaker 3 This is good. Assuming that the other side is trying to win,

Speaker 3 but not assuming they have some strange superpowers that you don't have is

Speaker 3 something that I think a lot of political analysts miss on both counts.

Speaker 3 So let's look at it through the context of the news over the last 24 hours, which is this debate negotiation that is going on in public. Trump had agreed to a debate with Biden on ABC.

Speaker 3 Biden drops out. Trump backs out of that debate.
Trump then proposes just a Fox debate with a crowd, a ridiculous counter-proposal that would happen September 4th.

Speaker 3 Harris doesn't even really respond to that absurd counter-proposal. Calls him a chicken, I guess, basically.

Speaker 3 Trump then comes back and says, I propose three debates: Fox, ABC, and then a future one after ABC.

Speaker 3 And then Harris says yesterday, she'll definitely do the ABC one, and then they can talk about the one after.

Speaker 3 So through the prism of game theory, how do you assess what both sides are doing and who feels like they're in a stronger position?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, look, whoever is calling for more debates perceives that they're behind and wants a momentum change.

Speaker 2 And so that's a very bullish indicator for Harris that like the Trump campaign wants three debates now.

Speaker 2 And I think what they're worried about in particular is the idea that she kind of like we're not the clock is not the right phrase, but like have like a speed run where she never loses her momentum.

Speaker 2 Because ordinarily, if this were a longer campaign and it was March and she'd just been declared the nominee, I'd say, look, people are getting out over their skis right now and they're a little high on their own supply and like she's going to have periods where she fumbles and there's greater media scrutiny, et cetera.

Speaker 2 The polls will shift. Maybe not though.

Speaker 2 Maybe she has a Kamachi coming up in a week and a half and the fact that it's inherently a really interesting story because it's an underdog story where she was called into duty in this moment of crisis and she has a sitcom dad vice president basically and she might become the first woman president.

Speaker 2 It's kind of an underdog story and maybe she could sustain that momentum and usually be skeptical of that. And so Trump is trying to add hurdles to the race course.

Speaker 2 And of course, you know, they can't attest a mutual interest in debating because they would receive some penalty in theory for ducking the debates. So

Speaker 2 where the equilibrium is, I'm not sure. I mean, if I had to guess, maybe two debates, if she's asking for one and he wants three.
But it's for sure.

Speaker 2 I mean, it's not subtle to assume that the candidate who wants more variance in the race is concerned about their position.

Speaker 2 And so that's more of a tell than Trump bragging about fake internal polls or whatever.

Speaker 3 Trump didn't debate in the primary because he was winning the whole time. So I think that you don't need to be a fancy pants World Series of poker player to be able to just determine

Speaker 2 what the

Speaker 3 OK. But now let's look at this from Harris's perspective.
So because I don't know that it's as clear, the answer is as clear, right?

Speaker 3 Like if she believes the premise that you're pointing out, that her team does, that they can kind of like ride this momentum wave at least well into the early voting period, then it's kind of like, why participate in more debates and give them more, you know, hurdles to jump over.

Speaker 3 On the other hand, you know, maybe.

Speaker 3 I don't know, James Carville, some other smart people are out there saying that like maybe she should do a Fox debate because she would get kind of graded on a curve and that could maybe help her from a momentum standpoint to say, I'm tough.

Speaker 3 I went into the lion's den. I did it.
And so, I don't know. How would you kind of game that out, you think, if you were on Harris's side?

Speaker 2 Yeah, I would not be afraid to debate. I mean, apart from the Biden debate, the one Biden debate, Democrats won every debate against Trump in 2016 and 2020, according to the polls.

Speaker 2 I think she's probably, you know, as strong a debater, if not better, than Clinton or 2020 Biden. And, you know, apart from that first debate, I mean, Trump has often had a lot of bad debates himself.

Speaker 2 So, and I also think there's a tendency to, look, if you're playing in poker and you win a big pot and you double up your stock, it's easy to get complacent and say, oh, this is nice, man.

Speaker 2 I'm feeling great. You still have to win the tournament.
You still have to take some risk. And like, she's 50-50 or 55-45.
That still means she's going to lose like half the time almost.

Speaker 2 You still have this electoral college penalty. And so I think.
I don't know. I would not be afraid of debating

Speaker 2 if I were them.

Speaker 2 Maybe I tried to reduce the risk from like three debates to two i think to the point about like you know i think the fox news hosts do a relatively fair job in that particular capacity and if they don't then yeah you can try to work the refs a little bit but i don't think she should be too afraid of of debating here Through the contest of your book, the advantage, the expected value of a Fox debate, I just think that she has potential to grow, right?

Speaker 3 Because there is a perception of Brett Bayer and McCallum, who are both hacks in a lot of ways, but like there's a perception that they're Laura Ingram, right? And they're not.

Speaker 3 And they will feel that way, that they will feel like they have to be fair. They'll feel like they have to ask Trump some tough questions.

Speaker 3 She'll get tougher questions and maybe even some more unfair questions than she would have in the other debates. But if you do that and then do well,

Speaker 3 you know, potentially there's like growth value there. I don't know.
I think it's worth at least thinking about it.

Speaker 2 And I do think the

Speaker 2 news cycle about her not doing a lot of media appearances, I mean, although she does more off-record, I think. Like, that could metastasize into something.
I mean, there are vulnerabilities, right?

Speaker 2 There's vulnerabilities around all the things that made Biden vulnerable, including Biden himself.

Speaker 2 And, and, you know, I mean, the White House has been totally ignored by the press since Biden dropped out, which I think is probably good for Harris. But she does have vulnerabilities.

Speaker 2 And, like, odds are, I mean, we have like a lot of wobbliness in financial markets this week, for example.

Speaker 2 If you're entering some type of near recession, which things have recovered, but like, that's a scenario where she probably is an underdog.

Speaker 2 And so, I, yeah, I think you don't want to get too complacent and like, and there's maybe some value about standing up for democratic norms and things like that.

Speaker 2 They've de-emphasized that part of the campaign a little bit, but you know, we should have. I mean, we're used to having three debates.

Speaker 2 I don't know if you take the Biden-Trump debate and subtract that from the tally, but we should have a couple of debates.

Speaker 3 I think I saw you sent a tweet about this. Do you assess that like an economic shake-up to be the biggest risk for them right now? If you like, look at the potential risks on the board for Harris.

Speaker 2 barring you know unpredictable scandals or betting issues and yeah I mean that's you know the one thing

Speaker 2 attempts I mean that's a lot of like you know there are a lot of tail risk things that can happen who knows who knows but like of the the economic shakiness is the thing that you think is the most yeah I mean the one known unknown so to speak that our model accounts for apart from the polls is the is the economy and if you were to have some some downturn I'm not a macroeconomic guy, but you know, I mean, maybe she has like a little bit more distance from the economy than Biden does.

Speaker 2 But like if you're actually going into recession territory and you start getting bad jobs reports or things like that, then that's a serious risk factor. Absolutely.

Speaker 3 So your model, it's poll aggregating, and then you do have what, some economic indicators. What's in the gumbo?

Speaker 2 The default is to make an inference based on the economy and incumbency. So that actually says that basically the popular vote should be a tie.
Kamala Harris is not actually an incumbent president.

Speaker 2 She is the incumbent vice president, but not the incumbent president. The economy, if you average it out, is about average, the model thinks.
It looks at six different indicators.

Speaker 2 The jobs numbers are good. Some of the take-home disposable income numbers are not so good.
You know, stock markets wobbled around a little bit.

Speaker 2 So it thinks the popular vote should be, quote unquote, a tie in a non-incumbent election with an average economy. Not very creative, I suppose.
However, in the poll, she's actually polling.

Speaker 2 better than a tie right now. So it's actually, it's actually clipping her wings a little bit because of this prior, we call it, on the one hand.

Speaker 2 On the other hand, it assumes that Trump should be in a period now where, I mean, it's fading now, but like we're still only like two plus weeks removed from the convention.

Speaker 2 Typically, it's a strong time for polling for the party that just had its convention.

Speaker 2 His favorable numbers are actually, or were still elevated a little bit with the convention and the assassination attempt.

Speaker 3 How does your model figure in missing being assassinated by a centimeter?

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's the kind of thing where you have to add your own subjective prior.

Speaker 2 I mean, in principle, you would get a short-term bounce from that because now that feels like it happened three years ago or something, right?

Speaker 2 But look, when we have the DNC in roughly two weeks now, right? Or less than that, the model will assume that Harris then has to poll better than she is right now, right?

Speaker 2 It will expect to see Harris ahead by, you know, three, four, five points in some national polls. And then fading probably from there into the debates and the stretch run.

Speaker 2 So right now she's getting a little bit of a wind at her back from the convention bounce assumption, but that will reverse after Chicago.

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Speaker 3 One other political thing I want to talk to you about through this concept of assessing risk and

Speaker 3 game theory is Donald Trump's second term. One of the things that frustrates me about some of the people you write about in the book that you feature, these risk takers,

Speaker 3 living a life where you take a lot of risks and they pay off, is risk assessments also have to take into account downside risks, obviously.

Speaker 3 To me, it's like the tail risk of a Trump 2.0 is just off the charts compared to the tail risk of Kamala Harris with a conservative Supreme Court and probably a Republican Senate.

Speaker 3 Why do you think so many of the people in the kind of contrarian

Speaker 3 crypto, you know, Silicon Valley world don't share that assessment?

Speaker 2 I mean, for one thing, because they have fairly direct economic self-interest that contradicts that, right? If you're in Silicon Valley, you want less regulation and lower taxes and so forth.

Speaker 2 I think they meme themselves into the culture stuff too and believe it in some cases, but the economic realities loom fairly large.

Speaker 2 But yeah, I mean, look, the heuristic that, hey, Trump was president for four years and it wasn't that bad until the COVID stuff. And oh yeah, January 6th was bad, but we survived it.

Speaker 2 I mean, even though it's kind of a dumb heuristic and not very sophisticated, I mean, the fact that like

Speaker 2 it was a near miss January 6th, and we have Democrats in office now, I think it's just a little bit harder to persuade the public of that risk than you might think it should be.

Speaker 3 Isn't that kind of like saying, I got hammered, you know, in Vegas, and I drove 100 miles an hour back to L.A., and I almost spun off the road one time,

Speaker 3 but I managed to get back on. The car flipped around, you know, we circled.
I landed going straight, got home, fell asleep. So now I'm going to go to Vegas and get hammered and drive 100 back to L.A.?

Speaker 3 Isn't that the equivalent heuristic?

Speaker 2 It's survivorship bias for sure. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Look, I sometimes think the rhetoric on this gets overextended.

Speaker 2 When people say things like, oh, this is going to be the last Democratic election, lowercase D Democratic, unless Harris wins, like, okay, I'd be happy to bet that we'll have an election that's reasonably fair in 2028, right?

Speaker 2 But like, but it's that, it's the number one, like, kind of whatever, 5%, 10, 15% tail risk of really bad outcomes.

Speaker 2 And then kind of the general like pressure on the system, which by the way, won't go go away if Trump loses.

Speaker 2 It's not like, you know, you can't have a condition where Democrats have to win every election or democracy is over. If that's the case, then democracy is already over.

Speaker 2 But like the general weakening of the performance of the system, of trust in the system of the civil service, you know, that's almost guaranteed, locked in.

Speaker 2 And then the risk of, the tail risk of really bad outcomes is

Speaker 2 worth considering. But I think.

Speaker 2 I think the Harris campaign has been right not to emphasize that theme enough because, you know, that's kind of the theme that like to me is like a, I don't know what you want to call me, but like a centrist, vaguely speaking.

Speaker 2 To me, I'm like, oh yeah, that democracy stuff is great because January 6th was terrifying and absolutely has to be something you account for and disqualifying. But I'm not the voter you need, right?

Speaker 2 You need voters who are receiving messaging about abortion and freedom and Trump orange man bad and all this other stuff.

Speaker 3 But what's your personal assessment of a risk quotient of Trump 2.0?

Speaker 2 Tim, first of all, I wouldn't claim to have any kind of expertise here.

Speaker 3 Well, sure, but you have expertise in risk assessment.

Speaker 3 You're looking at the world and you're just saying, you know, just like any choice and every day, what's the risk of motorcycling without a helmet? What's the risk of Trump 2.0 to you?

Speaker 2 My personal view is that the left overrates how willing courts are to play ball with this stuff.

Speaker 2 And then if you look at the aftermath of 2020, that like, you know, Trump lost all but one court decision about litigating the Electoral College.

Speaker 2 It's been interesting, by the way, that despite the concerns about Biden's fitness, the government's performed pretty well. And

Speaker 2 maybe the courts and kind of very, very lowercase version in Comic Sans font of the deep state, like not the capital D, capital S state, but maybe there's more momentum in the system that you can survive four years of trying to undermine it a little bit.

Speaker 2 I would think we'd have an election in 2028, but I don't know. I mean, I defer to some extent to experts who think differently.
And I am concerned about the tail risk.

Speaker 3 Maybe putting there will be no more elections at one end and like Chris Lacevita at the other end saying I used to, or J.D.

Speaker 3 Vance at the other end saying, like, I used to think that Donald Trump was Hitler. And now I think it all things will just turn out fine.

Speaker 3 You find yourself like closer to which side of the bar, of the bell curve.

Speaker 2 There is no more elections is such an extreme position. And I don't know if people mean that like literally.
I mean, here's the other thing, Tim, is like Trump is not.

Speaker 2 very popular. I mean, if he gets elected, there's a good chance it'll be despite losing the popular vote again, or maybe he wins a popular vote by a point or so.

Speaker 2 And his lack of popularity, I think, constrains him.

Speaker 2 And you could probably find people that have studied populist movements in other countries and things like that, but he's not a very popular populist.

Speaker 2 You know, you do have the whole kind of fourth estate in the United States, meaning the media and things like that.

Speaker 2 Trump did not meaningfully threaten media freedoms in his first four years in office. So there are like things that

Speaker 2 push back.

Speaker 2 There's also what's called like thermostatic public opinion, which means that in general, when you seize power and exercise power, then actually that makes you less popular and causes a backlash, potentially.

Speaker 2 I don't know. I may be a little bit more optimistic about

Speaker 2 the kind of thermostatic effects in the system, but you don't want to say you're closer to J.D.

Speaker 3 Vance than you are to No More Elections, but you kind of think you might be. I don't know.
I don't know.

Speaker 2 I mean, No More Elections is a... pretty extreme.
Well, J.D.

Speaker 3 Vance is pretty extreme. Sucking up to Donald Trump and saying that we should just let him have full control of the government next time, I think is pretty extreme as well.

Speaker 3 But this is kind of a backway into what I wanted to talk about with the book. So in the book, the frame that you put out is that there are essentially two types of people.

Speaker 3 Why don't you explain to listeners the people that live in the river versus the villagers?

Speaker 3 Because I think both of us kind of live in an interesting space where we cross between the two, but maybe I'm more on one side and you're more on the other. Explain the concept to people.

Speaker 2 Let me start with the village because that term, the term villagers probably sounds somewhat familiar to people.

Speaker 2 But the village means kind of the establishment, D.C., New York, Boston, of government, of academia, and the media. So the most important village institutions are like Harvard and the New York Times.

Speaker 2 So this group has become quite progressive recently. They're very political.
The ultimate punishment in the village is ostracization or cancellation, if you prefer.

Speaker 2 So we kind of know who the village are, right? Whereas the river are people who are also elites, which is important to point out.

Speaker 2 Also elites who combine risk-taking, extreme competitiveness, and analytical skills. So like a poker player is a not very powerful person who is analytical, competitive, risk-taking.

Speaker 2 That's kind of where the book starts.

Speaker 2 But also some of the venture capitalists, some of the crypto people are also insanely competitive, have a skill set that is more similar to poker than you might think, and have the same kind of vocabulary.

Speaker 2 Some of the stuff we're talking about, like game theory and expected value and Bayes theorem, things like that.

Speaker 2 It's a cast of characters that thinks a certain way that has become more and more powerful as society has become more and more about tech and finance.

Speaker 2 I mean, tech and finance, if you look at the share of GDP they represent, are kind of eating the rest of the economy gradually.

Speaker 2 And they have a very high variant skill set where they could be very successful or they can crash and burn like Sam Bankman-Fried.

Speaker 3 I want to explore the groups in the context of politics. I mean, you talk about it a lot, and it looks super interesting on things like gambling and crypto.

Speaker 3 Maybe we'll have time for a little bit of that. But the river, just stereotypically, like the representatives of this have moved very much towards the Trump.

Speaker 3 We're painting with a broadbush here, but it's the Elon types. It's all-in podcast If we're in sports gambling, for nerds, it's Haral Bob, who has a famous NBA gambler.

Speaker 3 So these people are all maybe not MAGA hats, but they're getting Trump curious and they're hostile to the village, the Democratic establishment, if you will. And you use these groups of traits.

Speaker 3 So the one example that you offered to try to say where you fit was there's a simple proposition. Imagine you can have $500, no questions asked.
or you can roll one dice.

Speaker 3 And if it comes up a six, you get $5,000. And the book is about the people that roll the dice with no questions asked.
Like, those are people that are temperamentally

Speaker 3 towards risk-taking, but also towards probability and analytical skills. And I found that interesting because politically, I line more with the village these days, but like I'm pick up the dice.

Speaker 3 Like, I don't even think about it. Of course, I pick up the dice.
And so, temperamentally, I'm more in line with the river.

Speaker 3 And so, I feel like, and you kind of maybe are like the inverse of that equation.

Speaker 3 So, I'm curious what, uh, like, why you think I might not fit with like, what are the characteristic differences between somebody that would gamble but isn't really drawn to the contrarian-ness of the river?

Speaker 2 I mean, people that have worked inside campaigns, that is the one village profession where you do need to assess risk, especially in a primary campaign where you know you're inherently kind of an underdog, right?

Speaker 2 And you have to like be willing to roll the dice a little bit. So

Speaker 2 there is more overlap than people would let on, for sure. And look, to some extent, this political clash has grown more explicit over the course of the past year or so.

Speaker 2 Bill Ackman versus the Harvard University president is a classic confrontation of river versus village.

Speaker 2 Look, in some ways, I'm a little bit annoyed that like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are kind of now seen as the foremost representatives of the river.

Speaker 2 If you surveyed everyone in the community, you'd have a lot of libertarians. I bet you'd still have more, it might be close, probably have more Harris voters.

Speaker 2 than Trump voters, a lot of Chase Oliver voters. He's a libertarian candidate, for example.
But they have been been at the tip of the spear. You know, some of the culture war stuff motivates them.

Speaker 2 I mean, I think you have a clash in Silicon Valley between very progressive,

Speaker 2 quote-unquote, woke employees and less progressive capital owners, bosses. But again, it's also economic self-interest.

Speaker 2 For most of the history of the Republican Party, business elites have been aligned with the Republican Party. In the Obama years, it was kind of the one exception.

Speaker 2 And I think they feel like that now that implicit contract that, hey, I'm socially liberal, but fiscally conservative, like I, you know, I'm not sure how socially liberal they were in the first place, but like now that era has dried up, I think.

Speaker 2 And they're kind of back to maybe their economic self-interest.

Speaker 3 It's not as if everybody that's a risk taker is a Trumpy. I didn't want to say that, but I just mean within these political clashes like Ackman versus Harvard, I find myself falling on the other side.

Speaker 3 And I was like reflecting on that last night as I was reading the book. I was like, why? Like, why do I do it?

Speaker 3 And to me, I think it comes back to the question that I was trying to get at with the risk assessment of Trump.

Speaker 3 And I think that there is, you know, right now, both with Trump, with AI, with crypto, like there are a lot of these things that are very in vogue among the people in the river, in the book, that I find to have very high risks and also some rewards potentially that we should be much more cautious about going down that road.

Speaker 2 And so I find myself really more anti-river than pro-village because it's like these people I feel like using their risky personality traits to take us headfirst into some potentially very dangerous areas is there any intra conflict there i'm more anti-village than pro-river i think ironically i know there you go that's what i'm saying i think we have we can have an interesting dialogue over that look i think the trump campaign does smart little thing like i think you know there are not a lot of crypto as your number one issue voters but but there are some and i think they were smart to like to cater and curate to them a little bit you know maybe with harris there's a chance for a little bit of a reset on some of those issues.

Speaker 2 But yeah, I mean, you know, when you hear Sam Altman, head of OpenAI, who I have more sympathy to than a lot of people in the village, but talk about, yeah, we have to gamble on AI because it might destroy the universe.

Speaker 2 But in the times when it doesn't destroy the universe, we solve global poverty and create peace and happiness. I mean,

Speaker 2 what right does he have? to dictate that gamble for everybody else, right?

Speaker 2 At least the Manhattan Project, because, you know, some of the scientists were worried that something goes wrong when you're practicing detonating an atomic bomb and you light the atmosphere on fire.

Speaker 2 Oops. At least the Manhattan Project is a project of the American government, which is elected by the American people and

Speaker 2 so forth.

Speaker 2 Whereas like, you know, I don't know that private companies or anyone that doesn't have any check and balance should be experimenting with world-altering technology that by their own emission could cause very bad, misaligned outcomes that result in sapping human potential permanently.

Speaker 3 So why don't you think that's more, I guess my question is, a lot of Forever people acknowledge that we've seen negative externalities of the phones in society, particularly with young people.

Speaker 3 It's very obvious to think about what the potential negatives of our AI. Elon has said it himself.

Speaker 3 The potential negatives of Trump, like none of those people would have predicted that the Capitol would have been stormed before Trump.

Speaker 3 This risk-taking for the sake of it without considering like the basic

Speaker 3 risk-reward

Speaker 3 potential downsides of it. That's the thing that frustrates me the most about the river people.
And I just don't understand why there isn't more self-reflection on that inside the river.

Speaker 2 In part because there's survivorship bias, right? These are people that have usually won their first couple of bets.

Speaker 2 They invested in Bitcoin early, or they were one of the startups that clicked and worked. And so therefore, they think I'm kind of God's gift to X, Y, and Z.
I mean, that critique, I think, is true.

Speaker 2 I think also in part because like the village is somewhat asleep about this stuff. Tendency for people on the kind of online left to react and say, AI, haha, what a joke.

Speaker 2 These people are overrating this technology. And so they're dismissive

Speaker 2 instead of worried. And I think they should be perhaps partly worried because the fact is that large language models like ChatGPT

Speaker 2 were kind of...

Speaker 2 a little bit miraculous where people did not expect that, oh, it's just kind of have a computer read the entire internet and then like leave it on for six months with a lot of computing power and see what happens.

Speaker 2 And now it can like talk, like, that's pretty fucking miraculous. Like, will there be another leap forward? I don't know.
I'm actually a little bit more skeptical than the doomers.

Speaker 2 Maybe it was kind of a one-off where you can average out human speech and do a pretty good but not fantastic job and you can make incremental improvements. But still, people should be people

Speaker 2 in the village should not just look at all this stuff as being cringe. And also, the comparison between crypto and AI is, I think, often misgiven, right?

Speaker 2 I mean, you know, look, the blockchain may prove to be an interesting invention down the line.

Speaker 2 A lot of inventions that aren't, it's not obvious in the first 10 years or so what the impact will ultimately be, but like, but AI is a much larger order of magnitude question as far as impacts on society, et cetera.

Speaker 3 I have a much bigger affinity to people like Reid Hoffman, who are, I don't know where, I guess it's maybe a villager in Silicon Valley.

Speaker 3 I don't know where you would fit in your little construct, but who like, I'm for it.

Speaker 3 I think that there's a lot of potentially great stuff with AI, particularly around health, that is intriguing to me it's just the downside risk stuff the crypto thing is the other thing that i like i get frustrated with about the river people is you know in the book you write about the shit coins and bitcoin and you write about sand vanquen freed a lot and there's also there's kind of an aside about napster and i'm like all those people were thieves like they weren't risk like they aren't risk taking they're stealing and so i do feel like sometimes there's a line in in silicon valley that's like wait if the government does anything to stop us from stealing then they're then they're limiting innovation.

Speaker 3 That's another element of why I find myself being anti-river.

Speaker 2 I mean, the book is not kind to Sam Bankman-Fried at all.

Speaker 2 Of course not.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I didn't mean to apply it once, but I just meant like the ilk.

Speaker 2 I think part of it is that they feel, I think correctly. I mean, I'm a neoliberal capitalist apologist, more or less, right? I think over the course of human history, technology has done...

Speaker 2 tremendous good for human well-being.

Speaker 2 And I think people should look up economic history data and understand how much poverty has been reduced, how much lifespans have been increased, how much freedom there is in the world relative to 50 years ago.

Speaker 2 Agree. However, with the recent technologies, I think the track record's a little bit more questionable.
Is social media net good for society? Are mobile phones?

Speaker 2 I'd probably go no and yes, respectively. Crypto has some...

Speaker 2 some edge case uses, right, for countries with high inflation or things like, you know, verifying digital art, but that's a little bit more ambiguous. It's like not curing cancer exactly.

Speaker 2 And then AI, by their own own emission, carries both risk and reward. And so, yeah, I think they're kind of maybe riding on that track record a little bit.

Speaker 2 And now that we're kind of in more of a digital age, are these technologies good or bad? I think, I think, is more questionable.

Speaker 3 What I've decided is we basically agree on things. You're more analytical and better at math than me, and we're annoyed by different people.

Speaker 3 And I think that's about the main difference on which side of the balance beam we fall down on these questions.

Speaker 3 All right, finally, one of the other frustrating things about the book, which is frustrating just because I don't have the time to dedicate to this, is as somebody that enjoys gambling, enjoys gambling on sports, there's a lot dedicated in the book to like to get these plus EV advantages, to be a smart gambler, casual gambler, you need to get a lot, do a lot of information gathering.

Speaker 3 And I just, you know, I'm a parent and I've got a daily podcast and I just don't have the time for a lot of information gambling. So for us casuals, are we just blowing our money away?

Speaker 3 Or do you have any easy tips?

Speaker 2 You're blowing your money is a short version. So

Speaker 2 invest in index funds. If you go to a casino, don't play slots.
The house takes a lot more at slots. Play Blackjack.
It's only a 1% house edge. Find a table where Blackjack plays 3-2 instead of 6-5.

Speaker 2 I mean, I tried to bet the NBA for a whole season in the book, and there's kind of a long, you know, subsection about that. And I wound up making about like,

Speaker 2 if you break down the time I spent, about $8 per hour, right? So like, on the one hand, it's hard to beat the casinos for any amount. And I did that, so I'm proud of that.

Speaker 2 On the other hand, it's like literally less than the minimum wage relative to my

Speaker 2 time and stress level.

Speaker 3 This is where I'm toward because personally,

Speaker 3 I like living in the free state of Louisiana where I'm allowed to lose my money on NBA gambling.

Speaker 3 On the other hand, just the more I've thought about it and reading your book, do you worry about such easy access to sports gambling now? Do you think? How do you balance it out?

Speaker 3 Policy versus negative externality?

Speaker 2 I am kind of lowercase L libertarian, so I don't want to ban things unless I have to, but I think it's fine to have friction for things, right?

Speaker 2 You can drive to a casino and place a sports bet there. Of course, there are gray market, black market alternatives to think about.

Speaker 2 But yeah, the fact that it's so frictionless worries me because I'm used to years of playing online poker where you have to go jump through some hoops to deposit money and it's not always straightforward, right?

Speaker 2 Whereas you open up your DraftKings account and you're like, I want to bet $50,000 on Kansas City Chiefs today. And poof, your money is deposited within like a minute.
No questions asked.

Speaker 2 And like, there should be more friction, I think, to reduce the impulsiveness a little bit. And that's exactly what the gaming companies don't want.

Speaker 2 They want frictionless gambling, and I think probably the equilibrium that solves for some freedom crossed with utilitarianism probably involves friction-full gambling.

Speaker 2 And there's going to be battles about that, I would think.

Speaker 3 Thank God there was friction on online poker gambling during the Rounders years because

Speaker 3 I gave a lot of money to the Nate Silvers of the world during the mid-auds. The book's so interesting.

Speaker 3 The DraftKings part actually is one of the more interesting parts about how they gamble, about how the actual companies themselves gamble on the games.

Speaker 3 And, you know, a lot of the conventional wisdom about how they set the lines and stuff is different. So, if you're into all that sort of stuff, highly recommend it.

Speaker 3 On the Edge, The Art of Risking Everything is the book. Nate Silver, thanks for coming on to the Board Podcast, man.
Really appreciate it.

Speaker 2 Thanks so much, Tim. It's been fun.

Speaker 3 All right, we'll be back on Monday with Bill Crystal. See y'all then.
Peace. I wanna hold them like they do in Texas,

Speaker 3 stay with me. Love it.
Love game, intuition. Play the cards with spades to start.

Speaker 3 And after he's been hooked, I'll play the one that's on his heart.

Speaker 3 Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. I'll get him high, show him what I got.

Speaker 3 Oh, oh, oh, oh,

Speaker 3 oh, oh, oh, oh. I'll get him high, show him what I got.

Speaker 3 Carry my, carry my, no, we can't read the mind, oh, the place.

Speaker 3 I wanna roll with him, my heart pair we will be.

Speaker 3 A little gamble, and it's fun when you're with me.

Speaker 3 Russian roulette is not the same without a gun.

Speaker 3 And baby, when it's love, if it's not rough, it isn't fun.

Speaker 3 Oh,

Speaker 3 oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, I'll get him high, show him what I've got.

Speaker 3 Oh,

Speaker 3 oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,

Speaker 3 show him what I got.

Speaker 3 Carry my, carry my, no, we can't breathe in my older face.

Speaker 3 She doesn't love nobody.

Speaker 3 Carry my, carried by. No, we can't read a mother.

Speaker 3 She's got no love nobody.

Speaker 3 Buff up

Speaker 3 her face, pop up a curve.

Speaker 3 The Bulwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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