As the presidential election edges closer, all eyes are firmly focused on candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Nate Silver, the prophetic pollster and poker player who founded the website FiveThirtyEight, speaks with Walter Isaacson about his new book which details how — as in poker — risk-taking could be key to success in November.
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00:00Hello, everyone, and welcome to Amanpour and Company.
00:07Here's what's coming up.
00:08There's only one option that's delivered security and opportunity and a regional acceptance,
00:14and that's negotiated.
00:15As hopes for a Gaza ceasefire hostage deal hang in the balance and Kamala Harris prepares
00:21to deliver her presidential policies at the Democratic Convention, my conversation about
00:27global leadership with U.S. Ambassador Rahm Emanuel, then.
00:31This book is my testimony to the trial that never took place.
00:36She accused WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of sexual assault.
00:40Then came the hate.
00:42Swedish activist Anna Arden tells me why she believes there are no monsters, no heroes
00:47in this story.
00:49Also ahead.
00:50I think politics can be viewed as a strategic game.
00:53On the Edge, Walter Isaacson speaks to famed pollster Nate Silver about his new book and
00:58how risk defines our world.
01:19Amanpour and Company is made possible by the Anderson Family Endowment, Jim Atwood
01:25and Leslie Williams, Candace King Weir, the Sylvia A. and Simon B. Poyta Programming Endowment
01:33to Fight Antisemitism, the Family Foundation of Layla and Mickey Strauss, Mark J. Bleschner,
01:40the Philemon M. D'Agostino Foundation, Seton J. Melvin, the Peter G. Peterson and Joan
01:47Gantz Cooney Fund, Charles Rosenblum, Ku and Patricia Ewan, committed to bridging cultural
01:54differences in our communities, Barbara Hope Zuckerberg, Jeffrey Katz and Beth Rogers,
02:00and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.
02:08Welcome to the program, everyone.
02:09I'm Christiane Amanpour in London.
02:11More than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 7th.
02:16The health ministry there says it is yet another dark marker in this war, and with
02:21more than 100 Israeli hostages still not returned to their families, the focus is firmly on
02:27high-level talks in Doha today.
02:30Without a ceasefire hostage deal, America's global leadership is being sorely tested.
02:35And in this presidential election year, the stakes are extremely high, with war in Ukraine
02:41and strengthening relations between Russia and China presenting major challenges ahead.
02:47To get a feel for what's waiting out there for the next American president, we checked in with
02:51Ambassador Rahm Emanuel, the Biden administration's envoy to Japan at the heart of the vital
02:58Asia-Pacific alliance.
02:59He's a former congressman, White House chief of staff and mayor of Chicago.
03:04And I spoke with him from Tokyo today.
03:06Ambassador Emanuel, welcome from Tokyo.
03:09Thank you. How are you?
03:11Good. I want to ask how it's been for you, because some have called you a bull in a China shop.
03:17You called yourself lacking in patience.
03:20And people said, if you are going to make success in Japan, you have to take it slow like they do.
03:25What is the actual result?
03:28Well, my joke is that I've been here two and a half years, and for the Japanese, it feels like 25 years.
03:35But the truth is that the Japanese have made, in the last two and a half years on their own,
03:41some of the most momentous changes in policies, five of them, that are 70-year-old policies.
03:47They went from 1 percent to 2 percent of defense spending on GDP.
03:51They acquired 400-plus counter-strike capabilities.
03:55They lifted the export restrictions on defense equipment to countries that are not in conflict.
04:00They opened up a trilateral relationship with Korea that's been now normalized to a level that it's not even news anymore.
04:09And fifth, they rewrote their national security documents.
04:12And our documents are so parallel and complementary to each other.
04:17They help facilitate a cooperation and collaboration that the United States and Japan have not seen in 60 years.
04:23So the change has been momentous.
04:26And most importantly, the United States and Japan that, for years, were focused on what I call alliance protection,
04:33now, as true partners, is focused on alliance projection into the region.
04:38And it is the stability of the United States and Japan's relationship that has brought stability to this region.
04:43Do you believe, because you were very bullish on these partnerships in your region the last time we spoke,
04:49is this enough to counter what I think the U.S. thinks is its biggest strategic threat, which is China?
04:56The most important thing, Christiane, is when you go back and look at it,
05:01China's entire strategy in this region is to isolate the Philippines
05:06and use their economic, political, military pressure to break their will and their sovereignty.
05:11That's what they've tried with Japan on economic coercion.
05:14That's what they tried with Australia, is to take country A, isolate them,
05:19use all their political, economic and strategic muscle to force them to bend them to their will.
05:25Now you have the flip of the script.
05:27The isolated party is China, not a Philippines, not a Japan, not an Australia.
05:34And President Biden has designed a new architecture that has flipped the script on China and has made it more difficult.
05:42And I said then, and I believe this back in August of 18, a year ago,
05:47when the United States, Japan and Korea got on the same page, that was a really bad day for China
05:52and a really good day for America's interests in this region.
05:55Let's just play out, you know, game plan the election and who might win.
06:00Will Kamala Harris as president continue the exact same policies, let's just say, in the Indo-Pacific region?
06:10I do believe that, I mean, Kamala Harris, Vice President Harris, will build.
06:15You don't just continue, you build off of it.
06:18Now I'll give you one anecdote.
06:20She was here for former Prime Minister Abe's funeral and she had a private meeting with Prime Minister Kishida.
06:28Those were the early days when we were beginning to just scratch out this latticework architecture.
06:35There hadn't been yet a trilateral with Korea.
06:37There hadn't yet been even the concept of the trilateral of the Philippines.
06:41So she has put what I would call sweat equity into something right now that's standing the test of time.
06:47Just two weeks ago, Canada, the United States, Australia, the Philippines did a naval exercise in the islands.
06:53That is coalition building, China isolated, Philippines standing with allies, Canada, Australia and the United States.
07:00And she was an early, literally, shaper of that clay, shaper of the strategy,
07:05and came in and traveled here many times and put the miles.
07:07You've got to keep investing in it and strengthening it.
07:10And I think she'll do that.
07:12And conversely, if there's a Trump 2.0, many of the Asia-Pacific leaders have baked in their previous relationship with him.
07:20But on the issue of Taiwan, for instance, he just told Bloomberg, Taiwan should pay us for defense.
07:26You know we're no different than an insurance company.
07:29What did you think when you heard that?
07:30And what do you think could be the result of a Trump presidency in your region there?
07:36OK, well, as you know, I'd like to be ambassador.
07:39So ambassadors have, by law, have to stay nonpartisan, which is very hard for me.
07:45So I'm going to show a level of restraint that I'm not really good at.
07:48But I will just say, when you look at this region, President Biden accomplished a great deal.
07:55In this region, the United States is not going to be able to achieve anything without our allies.
08:01They are a force multiplier for the United States.
08:04You cannot do anything in the region as a deterrent to China without allies.
08:09Impossible. This is an away game for us.
08:12And so here in Japan, they have significantly increased their defense budget.
08:18That's the same of Korea that has made significant investments.
08:23So I, again, President Trump 2.0 can say what he wants.
08:31But I just know from a strategic game plan that the isolated party in the region is China.
08:38Making your allies feel more insecure makes our position all that more vulnerable.
08:44And that's all I'll say. You can draw whatever conclusion you want from that.
08:48OK, let me ask you what you'd say about the anti-Western alliance,
08:53the anti-U.S. alliance that's been building between Russia, China, Iran, North Korea.
09:00Most recently, China and Russia coordinating and cooperating more militarily on military exercises.
09:06I think today people see a challenge in that level that they hadn't seen before.
09:11And for China, I would just say supporting Russia has cost them serious economic and other political support in Europe.
09:19It's not cost free. Now, you called it anti-U.S.
09:25Well, there's no doubt we are a main focus.
09:29I would actually say it's anti both democratic, it's anti the economic order and rules based system.
09:36And I'll give you a classic example.
09:38I mean, China today constantly is engaged in economic espionage.
09:44Now, the system that China doesn't like is a system based on rules and laws.
09:48They want one where economic coercion is the norm.
09:50They want one where you can engage in economic espionage, intellectual property theft.
09:55So it's more than just anti-U.S., it's anti a set of values of trust based on a set of principles that we all share.
10:03That is what they're against.
10:05And you could say a similar dynamic is playing in Europe, where the Russian dynamic is anti-democratic, anti rule of law, etc.
10:14Now, while that might be out of your area, I want to know what you think the Biden administration has achieved.
10:20NATO is bigger. They've attracted more into NATO, which is against what Putin thought.
10:26And now Ukraine is moving into trying to change the dynamic on the ground.
10:31Where do you think a Kamala Harris president, if it happens, would stand in bolstering Ukraine's ability to defend itself?
10:41And where should it be?
10:42Let me do two things here. You called NATO bigger, which it is because you had Sweden and Finland.
10:48But I would also call it revitalized.
10:50I think, you know, the United States, through Democratic Republican administrations, were telling NATO based countries the consequences of what Russia was doing.
10:59Russia finally proved what we've been saying for decades true.
11:02I do think that the threat to Ukraine, if something were to happen to Ukraine, President Putin would not stop.
11:13He would not stop in Georgia. He would not stop at Moldova.
11:17He would not stop. Now, we are not exactly pure on that as a country.
11:21We've had our own violations. And so we're not we kind of have a glass house that we live in.
11:27That said, Ukraine's sovereignty, Ukraine's independence, Ukraine's desire to be as a people repeatedly have gone to the streets to be part of the West.
11:38Their aspirations to be part of something, the economic opportunity, the freedom that the that the West offers as a political principle,
11:46is something that people have sacrificed not only on the military battles, but also on the political battles.
11:51They see a future that's more promising to the West.
11:54They've also seen when Poland joined the West, how much economic prosperity has happened to Poland as opposed to what's happened to Ukraine.
12:01They want to be a part of that. And that's worth defending. We have defended that repeatedly in our history.
12:07It would be walking away from our own history not to stand by a country that's willing to fight for freedom and be part of the house of freedom.
12:18Further into the Middle East now, you know, we speak on a day where there's meant to be ceasefire negotiations.
12:24We don't know whether they're going to actually bear any fruit, but it's something that the Biden administration absolutely wants and needs for all sides in the Israel Gaza conflict.
12:34You wrote a pretty stiff op ed or article after October 7th atrocities in which you were very shocked by the intelligence failures that were partly enabling what happened on October 7th.
12:47I'm just wondering whether you still feel that way and whether you feel that Israel's conduct in the Gaza war has dangerously isolated it and compromised its own security.
12:58Look, I mean, that's a that's a 10 month piece of real estate. Look, I was shocked given the intelligence level.
13:06That Israel was caught flat footed in.
13:09But this is more less than intelligence because the facts have come out.
13:14In fact, many of the young women that were monitoring the cameras and many of the young women and intelligence operators of the Israeli IDF actually reported what they were seeing and said there's something happening here.
13:27And it's their higher ups that cast a judgment. It wasn't an intelligence failure.
13:32It was a political judgment failure. As you saw what I'm reading right now in Russia, there were some of their own intelligence officials said, look, something's happening here in Ukraine.
13:42And the higher ups dismissed it. That became what's now we're in day 10 of a serious black eye for Putin.
13:50That was more than just a black eye for Israel.
13:53Now, I do want to take one side note, which is and I know what the thrust of the question is.
13:58There have been in the last since 2005.
14:03Five different cease fires between Israel and Hamas, and each time those cease fires have been violated by Hamas.
14:12Israel has a right to defend itself when, in fact, 1200 people were killed and many, many women were raped and many, many children were killed in front of their parents.
14:26Any country that's invaded has a right to self-defense.
14:29How a country conducts a war, I grew up in a period of time where the IDF was respected not only for their capabilities, but for the ethics in which they conducted.
14:41That hasn't been all the case here, but they have a right to defend themselves and to do it in a way that's true to the values of the state of Israel.
14:53And they haven't been perfect at it.
14:54On the other hand, they have done other things that that have been in the sense of the safety and sanctity of human life, conducted things that other countries, ourselves included, have not done when it comes to urban warfare.
15:07So it's not just a broad brush stroke, but there's no doubt where Israel is today, where Israel is before.
15:15It's more isolated because of the length of this war and the conduct of it.
15:19So I don't need me to say that.
15:20That's self-evident.
15:22Yeah. But I do want to ask you, because it's important.
15:24President Biden has the historic American and personal relationship with Israel that his generation has.
15:32And you see the majority of American people and where they are and the pressures they're putting on the Democratic Party right now.
15:38Kamala Harris is a slightly different generation.
15:41I'm just wondering what you think should be a policy shift or not towards trying to resolve this unresolved decades long situation in the Middle East between Israel and the Palestinians.
15:58Well, I think let me say so somebody that goes back on this to President Clinton working both mainly Oslo was kind of independent,
16:09but the Y plantation and the Camp David efforts towards the end of the president's tenure and then worked on this with President Obama.
16:18There are three tracks. And the reason the United States is for a negotiated agreement.
16:24You look at the history of Israel. There's three tracks as it relates.
16:28Israel has tried a negotiated track. You've seen that with Egypt. You've seen it with Jordan.
16:32You've seen it with the Abraham Accords. The negotiated track has delivered both security as well as an acceptance for Israel into the writer region.
16:42And those peace agreements with those three Egypt in the late 70s, Jordan in the early 90s under President Clinton,
16:51the Abraham Accords under President Trump have delivered security, delivered economic opportunity and deliver a regional acceptance.
16:59The other option Israel's tried is unilateral, both in Lebanon and in Gaza.
17:06And that's led to Hamas and Hezbollah.
17:08The other option, the third option, which is divorce, which they've tried with the West Bank.
17:13There's only one option that's delivered security and opportunity and a regional acceptance.
17:19And that's negotiated. The United States president, by both parties, has never pushed this just because,
17:27well, we believe in an aspiration for a Palestinian self-determination.
17:34We've pushed it because we believe like many, many, many, many voices within the Israeli security establishment,
17:40a negotiated track is the one that has the most promise for peace.
17:45Now, I can understand when you have on the heels of Oslo buses blowing up in Tel Aviv,
17:52why you get very, very cynical that negotiations won't work.
17:56But, you know, the late Yitzhak Rabin once said, you fight terror as if there's no peace and you make peace as if there's no terror.
18:03And to me, that is still a truism.
18:07And the president's commitment to not only a two-state solution, but to a negotiated process,
18:13is because it has stood the test of time for Israel's own security.
18:18What I find now, which is most promising, and I don't think I'm, I'm not an optimist usually,
18:24I'm kind of cold, kind of pragmatist about this, is that there are many forces now for stability
18:32and for regional security that didn't exist.
18:36Gulf countries and neighbors to Israel in the Arab-Israeli border.
18:43They want stability because it's important for their own economic development.
18:48Instability, mainly driven by Iran and their surrogates, is the force here.
18:53But Israel, for the first time, has partners and allies who are seeking quiet,
18:58they're seeking stability, seeking kind of overall strategic alignment,
19:03so economic growth and political growth can happen.
19:08That's a big difference, and one that I think accrues to Israel's historic interest,
19:14is not only economic growth, but political acceptance in the region.
19:18And the forces, mainly driven, again, I want to repeat, by Russia, but most primarily by Iran,
19:24is one for instability versus those who've agreed for stability.
19:29That's a big difference, and the voices for stability are bigger today, larger today,
19:33than they've existed in the past.
19:35It's an important point.
19:36And finally, you were mayor of Chicago, Monday starts the Democratic Convention there.
19:41Are you going?
19:44No, you know, an ambassador, as I said in an earlier question, can't get involved in partisan politics.
19:50And when do you think your term as ambassador will be up, and what's next for Rahm Emanuel?
19:56Well, first of all, it's up at the end of this year, and Rahm Emanuel's going to run through the tape.
20:02Got it.
20:03I got it. It's an honor to serve. It's been an honor to be tapped by a president.
20:07And I don't believe in walking away from that, and I'll run through the tape.
20:10Ambassador Rahm Emanuel, thank you for joining us.
20:13Thanks, Christiane.
20:15Definitive statements from Tokyo.
20:17Now, when WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange walked free earlier this summer after pleading guilty to an espionage charge,
20:25he was cheered on by his supporters.
20:27But among the more surprising voices, glad to see him out of prison, was a Swedish activist, Anna Arden,
20:33who in 2010 was one of two women who said he had sexually assaulted them.
20:38He denied the allegations.
20:39She's now recounting the experience in her book, No Heroes, No Monsters,
20:44where she describes the barrage of hate and conspiracy theories directed at her after the accusation.
20:50Fourteen years on from that traumatic time, I spoke with her about her reflections on Assange, WikiLeaks, and rebuilding her life.
20:59Anna Arden, welcome to the program.
21:01You have written a book, No Heroes, No Monsters, what I learned being the most hated woman on the Internet.
21:08This is about your experience with Julian Assange.
21:11And it comes, you know, 14 years or so after that experience.
21:15Why now? Tell me about why you wanted to write this book.
21:20I mean, this book is my testimony to the trial that never took place.
21:25And it took 10 years to know that there was not going to be a trial for my case.
21:30And then it took me some while to get it translated into English and to find the energy to take all this again.
21:43Because it wasn't really like, I mean, there is no money in it.
21:47There is not much.
21:50You don't gain a lot personally from doing this.
21:54But I felt it was really important to pass on what I learned.
21:58Like I said, being the most hated woman on the Internet, that was just for a few days.
22:02But every day there is a new woman being the most hated.
22:05And many times it has to do with sexual abuse and sexual violence.
22:09And I want to give that to other people who have been abused.
22:14So, Anna, tell me in a nutshell what you accused Julian Assange of.
22:19I accused him of abuse, not rape, but that he was, in short, inseminating me without my consent.
22:30And that I don't know his motives, but I was guessing that he wanted to get me pregnant.
22:37And I didn't want that. So that was...
22:40I wanted to get him tested for HIV or for other sexually transmitted diseases,
22:46because I thought I might have been infected.
22:49And that's why I went to the police.
22:51So that was my accusation against him.
22:53And for people who don't understand what you mean by inseminating,
22:57what were the physical aspects of that?
23:02He broke the condom without me noticing it when it happened.
23:06And I mean, it was...
23:12I write about that in several pages, like exactly what happened,
23:17because it was not entirely voluntary.
23:20The situation was kind of violent as well,
23:25as this ripped condom that I didn't really have the chance to check.
23:29I heard this sound as if the condom had broke,
23:33but he was holding my hands like this and I couldn't really check what had happened.
23:39And it was a very uncomfortable situation.
23:43And it took me a long time to understand that this was an abuse
23:47and that it probably wasn't legal.
23:50So, of course, as you know, he denies everything.
23:53The statute of limitations has run out.
23:56The case was dropped.
23:58But I want you to read an excerpt of the complications, really.
24:03It kind of illustrates the title.
24:05You write, No Monsters, No Heroes.
24:08And you're saying something that is reflected
24:11in the way you have complicated emotions about him
24:14and about what I assume was a consensual relationship,
24:17despite this aspect of it.
24:20Can you read the first extract of when you saw him at a party
24:25right after this event?
24:27The Julian who attends the crayfish party is a completely different one
24:31than the Julian who humiliated and used me the night before.
24:36I decide not to see the horrible Julian anymore, just the nice one.
24:41And it appears as though I can make that choice.
24:45In the conversation tonight, I am once again an equal,
24:49someone worth listening and responding to.
24:52I write on Twitter about how wonderful it is to hang out
24:56with some of the smartest and most fun people,
24:59how warm the weather is and how light the evening is,
25:03how privileged I am.
25:05I have marks on my neck from the snapped necklace,
25:08a nagging worry about HIV, a broken heart,
25:12and the desire to show an ex-boyfriend I'm going to be fine without him.
25:19But I don't display that openly.
25:21Just as all people do, I choose to show a portion of myself
25:25and my feelings, a portion of the truth, not its whole.
25:30The entirety wouldn't fit into Twitter's 140 characters.
25:34There's rarely room in the light for the entirety with all its nuances.
25:40I find it really interesting because you keep referring to nuances.
25:44And again, your title of your book is very interesting.
25:48Why do you think you were under such, under his spell, so to speak?
25:53Did you kind of want to be part of the cool crowd you had worked at WikiLeaks?
25:59What was it about him that made you want to be in his domain, so to speak?
26:05I mean, there were a lot of reasons, of course,
26:08but mainly I was working for this organization
26:11who was criticizing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
26:15And we were opposing the United States and we were opposing war
26:21and we were opposing the logics of war.
26:24And we were a crowd and we were gaining momentum.
26:28And it was a fantastic feeling that we were on to something,
26:34being able to leak the secrets.
26:37And my conviction was that if we display the atrocities of war,
26:43we will be able to put an end to them.
26:46And beside that, like being in this, I mean, these discussions were like
26:53right in the center of the global politics by then.
26:57And for a young person involved in politics, that was amazing.
27:01And the other people at this party as well that I was talking to all night.
27:06I mean, the whole spirit was amazing.
27:10And you don't want to go and report like a small abuse in the middle of that.
27:17But in the end, that was what happened.
27:19And then the whole story unfolded.
27:22Yeah, I mean, it was an abuse that you did report to the police.
27:25But I just want to go back to the WikiLeaks, because that's also part of
27:29what makes this whole story so unique, really.
27:33Do you think in retrospect that you were,
27:37do you still support what WikiLeaks did?
27:40And do you think in retrospect you may have been naive about him and his work?
27:48Yeah, I mean, things are much more complicated,
27:50and there has been a lot of discussion after this, like
27:55I mean, I've been in touch with a lot of the activists
27:58that were engaged in WikiLeaks and much more people than me
28:02have been subject to different kinds of abuse, not only sexually.
28:07And I mean, WikiLeaks was not really working as an organization,
28:13and I didn't understand that at this point.
28:16And maybe it's always like this, that nobody's perfect
28:20and that the perfect organization doesn't exist.
28:22You always have criticism.
28:24And that's why I put in the title, there are no heroes,
28:27because there are no perfect people that are worthy of following
28:32and listening to 100% that everyone has to be...
28:38following the same rules.
28:39I mean, that was one of the principles of WikiLeaks,
28:42that you shouldn't be able to be above the rules
28:44just because you have power or just because you're an important person.
28:49And that goes for WikiLeaks and for Julian Assange as well,
28:52not only President.
28:53You said two things, there were other kinds of abuse at WikiLeaks.
28:57What?
28:59I mean, people were shut out of the organization.
29:02There were no democratic structures.
29:05It was very difficult to know where the money was going.
29:08It was, I mean, it was pretty much a one man show.
29:12And I have one example in my book
29:16of an activist who was organizing
29:19and he was trying to protect the people
29:23who appeared in the documents,
29:25that you couldn't leak details on private persons, for example,
29:29like people being homosexuals in Saudi Arabia
29:33could be a real threat to them if those kind of documents leaked.
29:39And Julian pushed these people to publish these documents,
29:43and they said, we cannot publish this
29:48because it will put people into danger.
29:50And Julian was yelling that you have to listen to me
29:53because I am God.
29:55He actually said that?
29:58He said that. He said that according to this activist
30:00in one of the big organizations in Sweden.
30:04I want to get back to your story, your personal story in a moment,
30:07but I want to ask you one more thing about WikiLeaks,
30:10because as we all know, Julian Assange then hid out.
30:13He went to the Ecuador embassy.
30:15You know, he was accused and charged by the United States
30:19for various infractions of national security.
30:22And as we all know, in June, he did plead guilty
30:25at an extraterritorial U.S. court in a Pacific island,
30:29and he's now free.
30:31You have said that you're glad that he's free and with his family.
30:36Yeah. Yeah, there is no reason that he should be in jail
30:41for these accusations that the United States had against him,
30:46in my opinion.
30:48And that has absolutely nothing to do with my case.
30:51I mean, they have been mixed up throughout all these years.
30:54Every time something bad has happened to him,
30:56I have been accused of being responsible for that.
30:59And that's completely out of my control
31:02and a completely different case as well.
31:05So you suffered a huge amount of abuse.
31:08I mean, at one point you were removed from your home nation
31:11of Sweden by the police there
31:14because they didn't think they could protect you.
31:15What did they do?
31:17They took you away for several years, right?
31:19You hid out in a different country.
31:22They took me away for just a few weeks from my country,
31:26but I had to...
31:27I was away from my apartment for quite a long time.
31:30And I normally say that it was about two years for me
31:34where I couldn't really work, where everything I said publicly...
31:38Because I was working as a press secretary
31:40and I was a public, like, semi-public person.
31:43I was writing pieces in papers and stuff.
31:47The subtitle is about being the most hated person
31:50on the internet.
31:51And all of this happened in a pre-MeToo world.
31:55Do you think it would have been different
31:57had all of these revelations and your story come out after 2017?
32:02Maybe. And a lot of those things were so difficult to explain
32:06because nobody had discussed anything near similar to this.
32:11But after MeToo, a lot of people were much more educated
32:14in the grey zones and in the behaviour of women
32:19after sexual abuse that you don't report immediately
32:24to the police normally, etc.
32:27But on the other hand, I think that, I mean,
32:30the structures are really deep.
32:32We saw, for example, the hate against Amber Heard
32:35in the Johnny Depp case.
32:37That was exactly the same arguments that were used against me
32:42several years earlier.
32:44So it was the same story for her.
32:48The hate, the accusations of ruining a man's life
32:52for telling what happened to you.
32:54Can you read the excerpt that we've asked you to read
32:58about that hatred that was expressed to you?
33:02Yeah, this was just like a week or a little bit more than a week
33:05after the abuse, the first wave of hate.
33:09And it says like this.
33:13It's from August 23rd, 2010.
33:17I've already been prejudged and it doesn't matter what I say.
33:21There's nothing I can do to improve the situation.
33:24People, the overwhelming majority of whom appear to be men,
33:29write, shout, Photoshop and even animate various degrading opinions,
33:34insulting language or threats of assault, bodily harm.
33:39And death.
33:41Women, even the ones who are furious at those who mock crime victims,
33:46calling them complicit in the crime, still defend Julian and deride me.
33:53Mothers and grandmothers chime in with a chorus of accusations,
33:58lies and conspiracies.
34:01Men, even those who believe that the death penalty should be applied to rape,
34:06think that I should be raped.
34:09Naming and shaming Julian goes hand in hand with naming and shaming me.
34:14The frenzy is directed at both of us.
34:18It's very powerful memories and testimony,
34:21and you dedicate your book for the feminists, every single one of you.
34:26But you also say and you've just said, you know, old allies,
34:30people at Wikileaks, the left feminists, many of them turned on you as well.
34:34Were you surprised by that?
34:37I, of course, I was it was so many things happening,
34:42so I was just surprised that it was so big.
34:44I was surprised that everything that happened, that it was the legal.
34:49It was like two tribunals at the same time, a lot of things happening legally.
34:53And then on the other hand, everything that go that went on in the media
34:58and on social media and in my inboxes.
35:02So it was just overwhelming.
35:04I didn't have the time to be surprised of anything.
35:07And I didn't, I mean, expect much.
35:12But what happened just like a few months after this in December,
35:19feminists started to mobilize, like to to give a different story,
35:24to to show a different perspective, to start talking about gray zones.
35:27There was this big campaign like pre-MeToo campaign,
35:31I would say, in Sweden called the Talk About It.
35:34That really changed my situation a lot
35:37where people started to talking about their their own experiences.
35:42And so but I mean, of course, there
35:46there have been a lot of feminists also apologizing for being like
35:50drawn into this frenzy of hate against me.
35:54How will you move on with your life now that you've written this?
35:58I mean, this book was very much for me like a way of closing this story,
36:03like giving my my testimony.
36:05And if people want to read it, I would be really happy
36:10because I think there's a lot of things that haven't been discussed yet in it,
36:16but also a way of like not being
36:21no feeling that I have to repeat the story over and over again
36:25to defend myself, because now it's I mean, people are still accusing me.
36:29But I have written the book.
36:31I did what I could to to give my truth in this.
36:36And I I'm a PhD student.
36:38I work on my thesis on on democracy and civic space
36:43for civil society organizations.
36:46And if it's it's not like global attention to this,
36:52but it's it feels important.
36:53And and I have my family and I have my life.
36:56I have my friends and things are
36:58things are working out pretty good right now in my life.
37:03Well, I'm glad to hear that.
37:05And I didn't thank you very much for being with us.
37:07Thank you so much for having me.
37:09Now, with the U.S. presidential election edging closer,
37:13all eyes are seriously focused on candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.
37:17Nate Silver, the prophetic pollster and poker player
37:21who founded the website FiveThirtyEight, has a new bulletin
37:24with all the latest analysis.
37:26He also has a new book detailing how much like in poker,
37:30risk taking could be the key to success.
37:33And Nate Silver is joining Walter Isaacson to discuss
37:37how bold action could be a game changer in November.
37:40Thank you, Krishan and Nate Silver.
37:42Welcome to the show.
37:44Thank you, Walter.
37:45You have a great new book out this week called On the Edge,
37:49and it's about everything from poker to cryptocurrency to politics.
37:53Let me start, though, with politics.
37:55People like me go to your substack,
37:58the Silver Bulletin, every day to see that election predictor,
38:02the election odds type thing.
38:05Tell me, what is it showing now in terms of Harris versus Trump?
38:09And how do you calculate the probabilities for that?
38:12So it shows that right now, Harris is about a three point lead in national polls.
38:16That's a number the Democrats are familiar with.
38:19Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by two points in 2016.
38:23Biden won it by four points in 2020.
38:25So she's kind of right in between those two benchmarks.
38:28However, there is a lot of uncertainty.
38:30We've seen the dramatic events that have
38:32unfolded in the campaign so far from Democrats changing their candidate
38:35to the assassination attempt against former President Trump.
38:38So probabilistically, we have her as about a 55-45 favorite.
38:43If you're a poker player, you'd rather have the 55 and the 45.
38:46But for regular people, it's a toss up.
38:48But what goes into that algorithm besides poll numbers?
38:52It's polls, but we also account for the state of the economy and whether
38:56the candidate is an incumbent or a challenger.
38:58In Harris's case, there's no incumbent in the election anymore.
39:02Biden is not running for another term.
39:03So and the economy is good by some measures, bad by some measures.
39:08We have it about average overall.
39:09So our model thinks that if you had
39:13average candidates, that it would be a toss up in the popular vote,
39:17a tie in the popular vote, which means in the Electoral College,
39:20which usually favors Republicans recently, she might be at a disadvantage.
39:23So she has a headwind where, you know, again, in 2016 and 2000,
39:26Democrats won the popular vote and lost the Electoral College.
39:29That could happen again.
39:30There's about a 12 percent chance of her model that she kind of comes so close
39:35to victory that she just comes a little bit short in Wisconsin,
39:38Pennsylvania, Michigan, despite winning the popular vote again.
39:41We've seen a lot of what we could call
39:43black swan events, things totally unexpected that disrupt everything,
39:48whether it's an outbreak of covid from China or Biden dropping out of the race.
39:54And we may have a lot more black swan
39:56events, who knows, a war in the Middle East or a Gaza ceasefire.
40:01How do you when you do probabilistic
40:05models calculate in the black swan events?
40:08We don't try to account for black swans per se, but we do understand that the
40:12further out you are from the election, the more uncertainty there is.
40:15So you'll see it's kind of like a little
40:17hurricane track where you kind of go out in time and space and the and the cone
40:22of the hurricane gets wider. That's basically how our model works.
40:24If the election were tomorrow, it would still be uncertain because
40:28the polling is close, but less uncertain than it is now,
40:30or less uncertain than an election in three months.
40:33In terms of calculating risks,
40:35one of the big risks the Democratic Party faced was during that period when Biden
40:41was thinking of staying in the race, dropping out of the race.
40:44You said that the risk of doing nothing was much stronger.
40:49Why?
40:50I mean, this is one core lesson from the book.
40:52And it's taken from people like H.R.
40:53McMaster that have been in military battles.
40:56Standing still is sometimes not a good option.
40:58If you're on the battlefield,
41:00you either want to retreat and live to fight another day or charge forward.
41:04Staying there as a sitting duck is not a great option.
41:07People conflate doing nothing with being
41:10the safe choice when sometimes in a lot of walks of life,
41:14we have to take bold action one way or another.
41:16In poker terms, you have to raise or fold.
41:18Sometimes calling is the worst choice.
41:22And that's what you talk about, what you learn from poker,
41:25which is, you know, those of us who are much more amateurs than you are.
41:28You've won all sorts of tournaments.
41:30You know, sometimes I don't know what to do.
41:32So we we don't fold.
41:34We don't raise. We just call.
41:36Tell me why that's a bad strategy.
41:39It's a bad choice because you want to dictate the action in poker.
41:42Yeah. Now and then I'll feel like a backyard
41:44game to friends in Brooklyn who are playing for the first time.
41:48And the hallmark of a bad amateur poker player is they just want to call and see
41:51what unfolds. And poker is a game about controlled aggression.
41:56How does that apply to politics then?
41:59Look, I think politics can be viewed as a strategic game.
42:03Among other things, it's much higher stakes than a poker game, for sure.
42:07But, you know, both parties are intelligent.
42:09They both have an incentive to win.
42:11In the long run, both parties win about half the time.
42:14I think one mistake that Trump made was
42:16to underestimate Democrats' willingness to change their candidate.
42:19Democrats do not have a personality cult
42:22around Joe Biden in the same way that the GOP does around Trump.
42:25They kind of selected Biden in 2020.
42:27Jim Clyburn and other people came behind Biden to kind of spark into the nomination.
42:31And they pushed him aside when it was
42:33in their strategic interest to pick another candidate instead.
42:36Well, in your book, you say your first love is not really politics.
42:40Your first love was poker.
42:41You were a great poker player.
42:43You played online.
42:44Then Congress passed some bill saying
42:46you couldn't collect your winnings from online.
42:48And that drove you into politics.
42:50Explain that to me.
42:52Yeah, I had a boring consulting job coming out of college.
42:55A friend of my network wanted to start a poker game.
42:58I played a little bit in college and I started practicing a lot.
43:00I'm a competitive guy, started playing free games on the Internet.
43:03But poker is a game meant to be played for money.
43:06So eventually deposited at one of the somewhat sketchy offshore sites.
43:11And it was a time when it was called
43:13the poker boom, but more like a poker bubble where you had a lot of dumb money
43:16in the game, maybe like the crypto bubble from a couple of years ago.
43:21So by being kind of mediocre, I was still better relative to the competition.
43:24The cliche about, you know, if you can't spot the sucker at the table,
43:27then you're the sucker. It's kind of the reverse of that.
43:29It was like everyone was a sucker and I was halfway decent.
43:32And so for a time, it was a good way to earn a living.
43:35Tell me about some of the lessons you
43:37learned from poker and how that applies to other things.
43:40Yeah, look, the great and late Doyle Brunson,
43:43maybe the best player of all time who I talked to before he passed away,
43:46preached the gospel of tight, aggressive poker, meaning you're selective about which
43:50hands you play, but when you play them, you play them aggressively and try to win.
43:54It's important to bluff in poker.
43:55Actually, the reason why poker works is
43:57because you have to bluff to induce your opponents to call when you have a strong
44:01hand, but there's also like a lot of emotional discipline that you face when
44:05you play poker, if you lose a big pot and lose half your stack,
44:09then you still have to battle as best you can for the next big hand that you have.
44:13Or vice versa.
44:14Sometimes people go on what's called tilt,
44:16meaning being emotional and not playing optimally.
44:18And that can happen when you're on a winning streak, too.
44:20I mean, a lot of people in my world,
44:22they're kind of the world I call the river of calculated risk taking.
44:25They go on a winning streak and then
44:27they get overconfident and that's a big risk as well.
44:30One of the characters in your book that's pretty big is Elon Musk.
44:34And he says that we used to be a nation
44:37of risk takers, but now we've become a nation with more referees than risk takers.
44:42Do you agree with that?
44:44I, I agree with that in part, I think.
44:47I mean, look, Silicon Valley is still the innovation capital of the world and AI,
44:51which might be the most important technology of the next generation.
44:55And the U.S. is a leader right now,
44:57you know, attracting immigrants from all around the world is very important.
45:00But at the same time, we saw, I think,
45:02COVID revealed that there's a streak maybe on the East Coast in particular
45:06of risk aversion instead of trying to weigh risk and rewards.
45:10But yeah, look,
45:12you know, the book in some ways is about American exceptionalism in certain ways.
45:16Our economy is still growing, whereas Europe has stagnated, for example,
45:20and risk taking countries tend to tend to win in the long run.
45:24Tell me about COVID and how we miscalculated,
45:27in your mind, risks during that period.
45:31Yeah, look, it's a hard problem to solve.
45:34It's the worst pandemic that the world faced
45:36in 100 years and maybe where our intuitions weren't very valuable there.
45:40But, you know, sometimes things that are hard to calculate,
45:43like the value of being able to have a social life or the value,
45:46more importantly, of being able to send your kids to school,
45:49that actually has huge consequences that will be realized years later when you have,
45:53you know, half a year of education permanently lost to poor students
45:58around the United States, you know, if you try to calculate that.
46:01I know it's hard, but like that has effects
46:03on well-being and the GDP and everything else.
46:06And so and so, you know,
46:09unfortunately, we have to make decisions, right?
46:10We can't just call again in the poker sense all the time.
46:13And I think in that sense,
46:14we could have been maybe bolder about shutting down more strictly at the start
46:19and then realizing after the first couple of months that we had to had to open up
46:23and pay a price, but that the consequences of not getting back to normal
46:27for education and other other sectors of the economy outweighed,
46:30you know, the frankly horrible death toll.
46:33But that's a tough choice that you have to make.
46:34You can't avoid you can't avoid tough choices sometimes.
46:37Did the partisan response to covid in some way shift your own political thinking?
46:44Yeah, look, one trend that you've seen
46:46for the past 15 or 20 years is that more and more people who go to college or
46:50especially have advanced degrees are liberals and Democrats, which is fine.
46:56But when you have communities where 95
46:59percent of people are are progressive Democrats, I think there can be more
47:02groupthink and especially in an election year.
47:04Remember, covid happened in 2020, the previous election.
47:07You can have a conflation between, you know, expertise for expertise's sake
47:11and using that for for a partisan weapon sometimes in terms of, you know,
47:16questions like the origins of covid seem highly ambiguous to me.
47:21But because President Trump was kind of on the side of the lab league,
47:25I think that suppressed valid discussion about this disease that we don't know.
47:29We still don't know yet.
47:30There's no scientific consensus on how it emerged.
47:32And that seemed to me, I mean, that, you know,
47:34that caused me a loss of trust in these institutions.
47:38And part of what the book's about is in a world where we feel like we have to fend
47:41for ourselves because, you know, every institution, but the military,
47:44from the Catholic Church to the media, has declined in perceptions of trust.
47:50And that is a kind of dangerous world in which you maybe have to make choices
47:54for yourself and make up your own mind.
47:56And that's that's what the book's about.
47:58To what extent is a taste for risk taking an ingrained trait?
48:04I think it's pretty genetic.
48:06I talked to a man named Victor Vescovo
48:09in the book was kind of the ultimate risk taker.
48:11He has climbed the seven summits,
48:13the seven highest mountain peaks on every continent.
48:15He's gone to the depths of the five oceans.
48:18He's gone into outer space.
48:20He's been a fighter pilot.
48:22And he's like, when I talk to other people
48:24who are taking these risks, because he knows if you're on a mountain
48:26twenty eight thousand feet high, right, you can't control every risk.
48:30There's some chance of an avalanche or a misstep.
48:32He's been in accidents before.
48:34And he talks to other explorers.
48:36He's like, yeah, there's just something innate, genetic.
48:40I don't know if he knows what it is,
48:41but some people just have a intrinsic desire to push boundaries, I think.
48:45Do you think that there's a
48:48fundamental difference between the physical risk takers, people who climb
48:52mountains, astronauts versus, say, somebody who just loves day trading
48:57on cryptocurrency or gambling on the roulette wheel rather than poker?
49:03When I started the book, I assume there was a difference.
49:05But by talking to both groups now, I think there probably actually isn't
49:09in part because when you play poker, your body for high stakes,
49:13your body perceives the risk.
49:15You actually see your heart rate increase.
49:18You see, you know, time perception can slow down a little bit.
49:22I mean, even in things like if you ever are giving a public speech
49:26in a high stakes situation where if you flub the speech,
49:29it's going to look badly on you, it might hurt your career.
49:31You can get stage fright on the one hand, but other people become possessed
49:35and they become kind of in the zone and they can be better under pressure
49:38than other people having that skill.
49:39And the good news, by the way, is that it can be learned.
49:42I think Kamala Harris is an example
49:44of a candidate who was not very good in her first campaign in 2020,
49:48but had a lot of practice giving speeches all around the world.
49:51And now it seems like a much better candidate, at least subjectively to me.
49:55So you can train yourself to when you're
49:56operating on a different operating system and your body has a stress response,
50:01you're actually picking up more information from your environment.
50:03And you'll sometimes hear people say,
50:05like Michael Jordan, talk about how I'm in the zone and I see more things.
50:09And time slows down.
50:10I can think really clearly that's a rare trait.
50:13But if you possess it and if you if you practice in that zone,
50:17then you can actually accomplish tremendous things.
50:19If you were advising, let's start with the Harris campaign,
50:23which risk calculated risk would you be willing to take and which would you avoid?
50:28I mean, I think there's a case that she should have picked
50:31Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania as a running mate.
50:33That's kind of the percentage play,
50:34given how important Pennsylvania is to the outcome.
50:38I think now she has to worry a little bit about the risk of complacency.
50:42You know, she's a little bit ahead in the polls right now.
50:44She'll probably continue to be ahead of the convention.
50:47But the polls have been wrong before.
50:49We saw with Hillary Clinton in 2016 how
50:51having a two or three point lead is far from a guarantee of success.
50:55And what about the Trump campaign?
50:58What risks do you think they should be taking now?
51:00Yeah, look, I mean, the term that we use
51:02in poker sometimes as a player, like I said, is on tilt where they're playing
51:05emotionally and some of Trump's recent decisions are hard to rationalize.
51:10I think going after Kamala Harris's race or
51:13complaining about AI enhanced crowd sizes when there's a lot of, you know,
51:16low hanging fruit in terms of voter concerns about inflation in the economy,
51:20in terms of immigration and the border, in terms of Harris running very far to her
51:24left in 2020, look, Trump thought he had a winning hand.
51:29He thought he had the campaign in the bag.
51:30And with Biden as a candidate, he might have.
51:32But he has to he has to adjust and recalibrate.
51:35They've been very slow on the draw as
51:37Democrats redefined J.D. Vance negatively and Tim Walz positively.
51:41And, you know, there's no much not much more time to make up at this point.
51:45Einstein once said that all great ideas come from intuition.
51:50But he said all great intuition comes
51:52from processing a whole lot of earlier experiences.
51:55You talk in the book about quantifying intuitions.
51:59Explain that.
52:01So in poker, you kind of can actually develop like a sixth sense based on
52:05someone's mannerisms, the way their their posture, things like that.
52:10If you see their heart beating in their in their neck, for example, you develop
52:13an intuition where you correlate that with whether they have a strong or weak
52:17hand, although it's very contextual.
52:19Some players get more nervous when they're bluffing.
52:21Some players get more nervous when they
52:22have a strong hand and they end up trying to win a huge pot.
52:25So we have some maybe semantic
52:27vocabulary deep in our brains that we develop over time.
52:30But it has to be practiced.
52:32Intuition provides us with data.
52:34If we know how to correlate that with behavioral traits, I mean, another person,
52:38you know, Nancy Pelosi talked about her intuition with Ezra Klein for
52:42understanding how the Democratic caucus behaves.
52:44And I believe in her intuition.
52:46She understands like nobody else how
52:48Democrats think, maybe not swing voters, but Democrats, Democratic legislators,
52:51for sure. But it's a matter of practice and skill.
52:55It's a matter of not just trusting your gut because you're being lazy and don't
52:59want to think through a problem.
53:00But when you actually have thousands
53:02of hours of experience with it, then it can be helpful.
53:04At the end of your book, you talk about certain things we could do to have a better
53:10society, you talk about agency, you talk about plurality, and you also talk
53:15about reciprocity. Let me deal with the reciprocity one.
53:19That seemed the most interesting and what we most need now.
53:23Explain that to me.
53:24So this comes partly from game theory and game theory is what evolves when both you
53:29and your opponent are playing strategically and roughly rational,
53:33roughly optimal in your decision making in the United States.
53:36Both parties win elections roughly half the time because they do adapt.
53:40I mean, Donald Trump understood that maybe
53:43there were opportunities among white working class voters that were being
53:46neglected by the Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan types of candidates.
53:51Recently, though, I think there's a risk
53:52that both parties get caught up in their own bubble and don't give the other side
53:57credit for adapting intelligently.
53:59I think this is most obviously the case
54:02with the Trump campaign's inability to foresee Democrats switching their
54:05candidate, which was the right strategic moves.
54:08So I think if you assume your opponent's
54:11playing their hand well and play your hand as best you can, given that that's
54:15reciprocity, sometimes you get lucky and your opponent makes a mistake.
54:19But that's easy to win.
54:20Most of the time, it's hard to actually make good bets.
54:23It's a competitive market.
54:25It's a competitive economy.
54:26And so give your opponents credit and then adapt from there.
54:30Nate Zilver, thank you so much for joining us.
54:33Thank you, Walter.
54:35And after that, the world, all of us will be watching and waiting
54:39to see whether and what risk candidates Harris and Trump could take and if they pay off.
54:44Finally, the queen of salsa, Celia Cruz,
54:48conquered the world of music and now she's bringing her rhythm to the U.S.
54:52quarter. That is the 25 cent coin.
54:55The Cuban singer who died in 2003 becomes
54:59the first Afro-Latina to appear on a U.S. currency.
55:03Her contagious stage presence and signature azúcar motto, which means sugar
55:08in Spanish, turned her into a household name to legions of salsa lovers.
55:13Her hits like Life is a Carnival and now anthems in Latin America.
55:19And that's it for our program tonight.
55:21If you want to find out what's coming up every night, sign up for our newsletter
55:25at PBS.org slash Amanpour.
55:27Thanks for watching.
55:28And now we leave you with some of the inimitable Celia Cruz.
55:32Join us again tomorrow night.