Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
108 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“I think so, yes. Again, if it improves you by like 0.5 percent ROI, that becomes pretty meaningful in the context of a sports bet.”
02 / commitment
“You can say we are going to go back to 1936 — I think was the first time Gallup issued a presidential election poll — and look empirically at how accurate those polls are at X number of days from the election.”
03 / belief
“I think that 90 percent of academic papers would work perfectly fine as blog posts.”
04 / belief
“LeBron’s in a funny place because, I think, he’s clearly, by the career metrics, now the best NBA player of all time.”
05 / belief
“I’m looking more like a long-term brand intangible, which I think does seem to matter a lot in the NBA.”
06 / belief
“I would say, relative to a year ago, AI is about at the 40th pe rcentile of progress I would’ve expected.”
07 / belief
“Look, in some ways, I think the AIs are more human-like than people expected, and that, to me, seems like a positive update.”
08 / uncertainty
“If you’re a Canadian NHL superstar playing in the US — I don’t think Sidney Crosby has any trouble. I don’t know if he’s on Tim Horton ads, or whatever.”
09 / belief
“I think one thing people have figured out is, all the high-taste things that rich people really like — there’s been huge inflation.”
10 / belief
“I think parts of Europe and maybe Canada that are maybe anti-US may become more resistant to populist sentiment, for example.”
11 / commitment
“Oh, sure. I will literally randomize sometimes. Where you look at the tournament clock, and if it’s a high number, then you’ll bluff, and if it’s a low number, then you’ll play more passively, for example.”
12 / uncertainty
“I don’t know. I don’t know if I have a prediction there exactly. It’s hard to have surprising predictions, Tyler.”
13 / belief
“I think, obviously, EA took a lot of hits for Sam Bankman-Fried, but if anything, they probably should have taken more reputational damage.”
14 / uncertainty
“I don’t know how many languages they speak and how diverse in every respect that country is, and they count their results very quickly.”
15 / uncertainty
“I think I’m enough of a critic of the two major parties that I’d have to say yes for the most part, although I don’t know.”
16 / belief
“I think all this might reverse within a few years, where the world realizes we have a shortage of young people in general, a fertility crisis, if you want to call it that, and an aging population, and will want to have people who are willing to work hard and are skilled in particular, so maybe they’re skating to where the puck is going.”
17 / belief
“Also, a lot of it’s gone on Bluesky, I think, and I can’t tolerate Bluesky, really.”
18 / belief
“Oh, I think the Spurs with LeBron James this year could potentially win a title.”
19 / belief
“I think there were reasons why anti-incumbent and populist spirit rose from the pandemic onward, but we might have been at a high-water mark for it, potentially, in parts of the world.”
20 / belief
“We had a draft of the 20 most likely Democratic nominees. I think Stephen Smith was a ninth-round draft pick.”
21 / belief
“Two years ago, I had a really good time betting the women’s NCAA basketball tournament before the markets had adapted, but I think people figured out, “Okay, these are pretty soft lines.”
22 / belief
“We have this piece now, where we’re ranking all 30 NBA teams by their long-term, 10-year chance of winning a championship, and they’re right in the middle for me, I think: 15th out of 30.”
23 / belief
“Look, I think the consensus is that we have some bad guys, as Trump would call them, and people are not particularly sympathetic to them.”
24 / belief
“I think some of this is short-sightedness in the sense that we’ll probably have a pretty profound backlash to it, I would think.”
25 / belief
“I think the equilibrium part — solve for the equilibrium — is something that people don’t get as much.”
26 / belief
“Look, I think some of Silicon Valley has that attitude a little bit. It tends to be correlated with other things that might be less desirable.”
27 / belief
“Given that the edges are pretty small in general, in sports betting, you’re probably either losing by 1 percent ROI or winning by 1 percent ROI. Then any of that is helpful, I think.”
28 / belief
“Particularly, you’ve seen candidates adopt different strategies for it by cross-endorsing, for example. Although, I think I’ve turned mildly anti-RCV for a couple of reasons.”
29 / prediction
“I think any other non-Vance candidate is going to have a lot of trouble escaping the shadow of Trump, so I’d regard Democrats as a 55–45 favorite for 2028, pricing in some chance they’ll nominate what I would think of as a suboptimal — from an electoral standpoint — candidate.”
30 / recommendation
“I’m not being that close, but I think we need it more of a norm in American elections toward counting votes within 24 to 48 hours.”
31 / evaluation
“As thought experiments, they can be helpful and fine, but I think if you ignore the 1 percent of edge cases .”
32 / evaluation
“I think the Math Olympiad, in part because maybe the answers are somewhere latent in the training data, but even if they’re not, if you try to solve, what’s a Lucas critique?”
33 / evaluation
“I think if you hyper-optimize for every parameter in your day-to-day life, then you probably wind up being fairly miserable.”
34 / evaluation
“The example I think I use in the book is Ezekiel Emanuel, telling people you shouldn’t go to restaurants because we still have some COVIDs like now, in 2022, 2023, right?”
35 / evaluation
“Economics is amazing in the sense that it predicts human behavior, I think, fairly well when you have repeated trials and people that have good feedback and incentive to be optimal.”
36 / evaluation
“I think there is not a substitute for how it correlates to real-world scenarios, because it’s so contextual and semantic.”
37 / prediction
“His ratings fell pretty fast early — because of, I think, predominantly tariffs — and then recovered.”
38 / evaluation
“I worry, with the Math Olympiad stuff — there’s a little bit of teaching to the test where, because you set this as the goal that a large language model should have, that therefore there’s a lot of prestige when you meet that goal, potentially —”
39 / belief
“I also can focus and work pretty hard, so I think I would have wound up in interesting places a lot, but I feel very blessed and lucky to have wound up in this particular place.”
40 / belief
“Now, that’s a Knicks fan coming out, although he was, I think, fifth or sixth in the MVP voting potentially this year.”
41 / belief
“I think there is a lot to be said for having — skin in the game is a term that I didn’t invent.”
42 / belief
“If you talked to Sunny, he’d say maybe two-thirds of the teams are fairly smart, and one-third of them are still dumb. I think we’ve probably passed the low-hanging fruit from Moneyball gains stage.”
43 / belief
“You would therefore have three one-term presidents in a row for the first time since, I think, 1892-ish.”
44 / belief
“I think in general that history is often quite contingent on very flawed human beings.”
45 / belief
“I think there might be something to that, and there are lots of people in the book that probably would be classified as being on the spectrum or would classify themselves that way.”
46 / belief
“I lost a fair bit of money trying to bet against the Mavericks in the playoffs, so I can’t call him overrated, I guess. I think Luka is properly rated.”
47 / belief
“I think things like classifying strategies in soccer and football, where you have a lot of things happening at once, and you can’t have your nice little regression model, as compared to, say, baseball, where baseball’s very easy to represent with classical statistics.”
48 / belief
“I think prediction is actually a pretty hard skill that probably life experience helps.”
49 / belief
“I think there probably is some notion of critical mass when you have enough liquidity and enough volume to have relatively efficient pricing.”
50 / belief
“I think election forecasting is an oddly hard problem, where the mathematical structure of it is fairly complex.”
51 / belief
“You wouldn’t want to take that risk constantly, but I think you have to live a little bit.”
52 / belief
“I think Peter Singer, too, talks a little bit about how he almost thinks people that are somewhere on the spectrum are actually better moral reasoners in some ways.”
53 / belief
“I think he is quite insane, irresponsible and insane, but I think he was very literal about being willing to take the St.”
54 / belief
“I think people might not realize that this is one of the highest peaks of any player in NBA history.”
55 / belief
“I know Daryl Morey pretty well. I think he’s probably a fan of yours. I’d say yes, I think.”
56 / belief
“Hopefully, I’ll find other ways to hire more of them in the future, but people who are a little bit more directed, I think, and organized.”
57 / belief
“Maybe a little bit, but if you go watch footage of a game from the ’90s or something, this is more aesthetically appealing. It shows off some of the athleticism, I think, but the fact that you have less variety — this is true in poker too, by the way.”
58 / belief
“We talked before about how I’m a little bit rambunctious and easily dissatisfied, and at this point, I think I’ve traveled — not like you, but been to a lot of different places and talked to a lot of people.”
59 / belief
“I think people are actually more intuitive, probabilistic reasoners than maybe the conventional wisdom holds.”
60 / belief
“People who are very competitive — and I put myself in that category, I think — can sometimes be a little bit irrational about continuing to fight even after they’ve already won.”
61 / belief
“I think I still probably have too much of a short-term bias in terms of not doing enough things to help extend my lifespan.”
62 / belief
“I think you of all people may be underestimating the efficiency gains that are to be had when there are proper incentives and proper technology — basically, the combination and just the sheer volume of the number of nodes on the game tree that have been explored.”
63 / belief
“Look, I think most of the studies on gambling say that it’s a good transaction in terms of people getting some degree of enjoyment and excitement out of it, but maybe you have 5 percent of the population that becomes very addicted, and that 5 percent can account for a large share of volume.”
64 / belief
“If drugs are one way to get to role-play a different person a little bit, then I think that probably is helpful for a fair number of people.”
65 / belief
“Some of Sam Bankman-Fried’s confidants, who are I think are in a very different category than these mountain climbers — they would say things like, “Well, he was miserable anyway, so he wouldn’t necessarily mind going to jail because in his day-to-day life, he was depressed and unhappy, so therefore .”
66 / belief
“I tend to be pretty analytical about really important career and life-choice decisions, I think.”
67 / belief
“I think that the time horizons might be too long to be actionable necessarily. In the same way in sports betting, you can probably make money on futures bets.”
68 / evaluation
“Everyone assumed that because he has such prestigious coattails, that he’s hanging out with Anna Wintour and hanging out with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, and he has his name up on a basketball arena in Miami, and he’s getting his praises sung by everybody in Sequoia Capital, and things like that.”
69 / evaluation
“” Now, they don’t even try to advertise it as a skill game anymore, which in some ways is a mistake because the appeal to the male ego is a huge way to get new customers for sports betting and things like that.”
70 / evaluation
“Also, the incentives in the NBA — and if you try to model out what the true discount rate is for sports general managers, they have some absurdly high discount rate, like 30 percent or something like that, or 50 percent, because their jobs last for five years on average.”
71 / preference
“Twice a year, I’ll have a friend who is like, “Let’s just go play blackjack for an hour and have a couple of free drinks,” and things like that. But I like to make bets where I think, at least in principle, I have an edge, or at least can fool myself into thinking I have an edge.”
72 / evaluation
“It’s contextual because I think we’ve gotten to the point now where offensive rebounding has gotten underrated, actually.”
73 / evaluation
“When you’re playing a poker tournament, everything is contingent because the tournament could last five more days or five more minutes.”
74 / evaluation
“You might get fired if someone finds out, but the retail books are like, “Yes, we can put bets up that a knowledgeable person could make money on because we won’t let the knowledgeable people bet in the first place.”
75 / evaluation
“A lot of people — like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, for example — they had childhood trauma but not so traumatic, and they had enough privilege in different ways that they were able to still have people take their phone calls and things like that. But it’s often people where something, I think, went a little bit haywire, and they’re not necessarily strictly rational in some sense.”
76 / preference
“I need somebody like that because I’m running all over the place, and I can run a little hot and cold and be a little bit moody.”
77 / evaluation
“Yes, uniquely in basketball, because it’s five players in a lineup at any given time, and a good player can control half the offense or more, literally — a Luka-type player or a Steph Curry-type player.”
78 / uncertainty
“Obviously, in some ways, the climate could be as fertile as ever for some type of third candidate running, but Bloomberg, I don’t know.”
79 / belief
“I think the biggest outlier is the number of intentional walks that Barry Bonds drew.”
80 / belief
“I think he’d push things in their way and have someone who might just be at the risk of pissing off the liberal base, but the Republicans have to look ridiculous opposing, as opposed to the other way around.”
81 / uncertainty
“I don’t know that much about international politics, even enough to have fun sitting like this to speculate all that much.”
82 / belief
“I’m enough of a lowercase L libertarian where I think that the government ought to have a stronger reason to intervene in choices that people are making instead of a lesser reason, necessarily.”
83 / observation
“The problem is that all those errors were in the same direction, so Republicans won when a lot of races around the country that they were underdogs in — not huge underdogs, except Virginia was almost a major upset.”
84 / belief
“You have this relatively stable, long boom politics and economics from the ’50s to the ’90s or the early 2000s, thereabouts, and that could potentially reverse itself. Again, looking at examples outside of the United States I think is instructive.”
85 / belief
“I think underrated. You probably saw my list a few weeks ago where, it’s short but it’s in a very dynamic section of town.”
86 / belief
“For me, a lot of the joy is in thinking through the process of it, so reading a book like this is really useful, because I talk about a process I think is pretty great.”
87 / belief
“A little bit of work, working 20 percent of the time, I think reduces your enjoyment by 70 percent.”
88 / belief
“Dickey, that already discernibly affects the success of both pitchers. But I think there is a second thing, which is that sports tends to engender conformism.”
89 / belief
“I think he should be more at two to one or something, so not a dramatic mispricing.”
90 / belief
“See, I think that might be the last field where — [laughter] Where you would have a lot of — and I don’t say that in a pejorative way at all.”
91 / belief
“I believe in the notion of a filter bubble, where people surround themselves where they’re getting like information and not confronting themselves with unpleasant facts, necessarily.”
92 / belief
“We get ourselves in a little bit of trouble I think at FiveThirtyEight at times, because we are fairly combative.”
93 / belief
“The other kind of statistical way to think about it is that when you have something which is unusual, then there’s a bigger error bar around it, so you could say, “Well, I think Trump is, on average, going to get less of the vote than someone who’s much higher than him in the polls,” but he has a much longer tail on the other side, and so therefore that’s one reason to not be dismissive of him, at least in the early going, when everyone is kind of a long shot, at least.”
94 / uncertainty
“There are a few individual like models for winter weather that do. But I don’t know, it’s been kind of interesting, in my shoes, going from someone who was a total outsider, to someone who has more reputational risk.”
95 / belief
“I did think though that I, and a lot of people, overrated the ability of the Republican Party to stop what I think is, in some ways, a radical insurgency within the GOP.”
96 / evaluation
“Tiger Stadium is a park conducive to low batting averages to begin with, a little high home run totals. It’s not obvious to me that it was the best move, but it is interesting that, all of a sudden, baseball teams and football teams become, in general, more strategically correct when they have more on the line.”
97 / belief
“I think the markets are fairly close to correct right now. But I’ve been a Rubio optimist for a while, on the theory that he is the only candidate who really has appeal to all the various sectors and constituencies within the GOP, which may be a fraying party, but still, he has the highest favorability ratings in the party.”
98 / belief
“I think that — [laughter] The market would say that people find online services fairly useful.”
99 / preference
“” For example, I highly prefer — this is going off on a tangent — but I prefer regression-based modeling to machine learning, where you can’t really explain anything.”
100 / commitment
“Literally, and we built the system for ESPN a few years ago, where the only data that’s been kept in the long term in soccer is goals and bookings, red cards and yellow cards.”
101 / prediction
“Conditional on having won the GOP nomination, Trump will have had to display some staying power, some acumen, because sooner or later he will have to get beyond 35 percent to win 50 percent or so, and probably will have done something to improve his image with people who are not in his core constituency.”
102 / prediction
“That is important, I think. I got a little frustrated, because a lot of people were saying, “Trump’s instantly going to evaporate in the polls.”
103 / evaluation
“When underdogs win, they tend to win narrowly, and if Clinton wins some of the races she should have won or should have lost — because superdelegates turn a narrow Bernie win by a field goal into, “Oh, after further review, we’re going to have an overtime quarter.”
104 / evaluation
“In the very high-end restaurants of New York, it’s like so competitive that I think your rule about, order the weirdest thing on the menu, I think there are parts of New York where that probably isn’t true, because it’s so hyper competitive that the menu couldn’t afford to lead people astray.”
105 / recommendation
“In terms of areas that I would like us to focus on at FiveThirtyEight a little bit more than we do now, criminality and criminal justice is an interesting area, in part because you have lots of issues with data.”
106 / evaluation
“Basketball is less noisy, I will grant you, but in general, I think the Spurs are fairly analytics friendly, and the Rockets and the Warriors.”
107 / observation
“People also, when I go — and I used to do more Yelping and stuff like that — if I go to a mom-and-pop place in a small town somewhere and it’s not very good, there’s almost no way that I’m going to leave a negative review for that place.”
108 / evaluation
“It’s really hard to improve your lot in New York, at least at the neighborhood level. But I don’t know, it’s hard to find good hole-in-the-wall places to eat in the — although there’s some ramen shops that are getting better.”