Scared Money

In this episode (recorded 9/4/18), Atief and Robert discuss the upcoming midterm elections in the US. We talk about what information we use to forecast the midterms; whether the median voter theorem still holds; local races in Missouri and Hawaii as well as other races we find interesting; and the importance of voter turnout.

Listeners who are interested in trying PredictIt to make real bets on political events like the midterm elections—check out our interview with PredictIt’s Will Jennings here—can get up $20 of their first deposit matched by using this promotional link:

www.predictit.org/promo/NONPROPHETS20

Don’t forget to submit your interesting forecasting questions to us at (nonprophetspod [at] gmail.com) for a chance to win a genuine collectible Korea Singapore Summit coin.

You can find NonProphets on Blubrry, iTunes, Stitcher and Google Play. The intro music for this episode is a clip from “Midnight” by A Tribe Called Quest. As always, if you have questions, ideas for future episodes, or would like to suggest a possible black swan event, you can use our contact page or e-mail us at (nonprophetspod [at] gmail.com). If you enjoy this podcast, please rate us and recommend us to your friends.

Everything’s on the Table

In this episode (recorded 4/23/18), we play a game we call “Everything’s on the Table”. In this game, Robert suggests possible news items and Atief and Scott say whether or not they think those stories could plausibly happen in 2018. We weigh important questions ranging from whether North and South Korea might announce they are exploring reunification, to whether Special Counsel Robert Mueller might name President Trump an unindicted co-conspirator in money laundering and bank fraud, to whether Attorney General Jeff Sessions might have the only copy of the Wu-Tang Clan’s “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” destroyed.

You can find NonProphets on Blubrry, iTunes, Stitcher and Google Play. The intro music to this episode is a clip from A Tribe Called Quest’s “Scenario”. As always, if you have questions, ideas for future episodes, or would like to suggest a possible black swan event, you can use our contact page or e-mail us at (nonprophetspod [at] gmail.com). If you enjoy this podcast, please rate us and recommend us to your friends.

Kathryn Cochran Interview

In this episode (recorded 1/23/18), we interview Good Judgment Chief Scientist Kathryn McNabb Cochran about forecasting question design. Dr. Cochran leads Good Judgment’s question development team and helped design Good Judgment’s new Future of Europe Index.

We talked with Dr. Cochran how forecasting can make organizations more agile; about how to design clear, meaningful forecasting questions; about how forecasting makes us smarter consumers of news; about the value of forecasting question clusters; about how we could improve the forecasting ability of US intelligence; and about the Nicaragua Canal and little green men.

You can read Dr. Cochran and Cdr. Tozzi’s Center for a New American Security essay, “Getting It Righter, Faster,” here. The announcement for Good Judgment’s Future of Europe Index is here.

You can find NonProphets on Blubrry, iTunes, Stitcher and Google Play. As always, if you have questions, ideas for future episodes, or would like to suggest a possible black swan event, you can use our contact page or e-mail us at (nonprophetspod [at] gmail.com). If you enjoy this podcast, please rate us and recommend us to your friends.

Darkness Rises

In this episode (recorded 12/22/17), we give our thoughts about what will happen in 2018. We start by talking about how we’ve been able to make money forecasting on PredictIt before looking back briefly back at our 2017 forecasts.

Next we make some predictions about 2018: where Amazon will put its second headquarters, whether there will be more disclosures about the US government’s UFO program, the implications of the Mueller investigation, whether Anthony Kennedy will retire, whether Democrats will retake Congress in 2018, whether Bitcoin prices will keep going up, the prospects for bipartisanship in the US, the future of autonomous vehicles, whether we should expect more “doughnut politics”, and where the Star Wars franchise is going.

Our thanks to the superforecasters who talked about 2018 with us. You can find NonProphets on Blubrry, iTunes, Stitcher and Google Play. As always, if you have questions, ideas for future episodes, or would like to suggest a possible black swan event, you can use our contact page or e-mail us at (nonprophetspod [at] gmail.com). If you enjoy this podcast, please rate us and recommend us to your friends.

Sichere Prognosen (Bruno Jahn Interview)

In this episode (recorded 11/1/17), we interview superforecaster Bruno Jahn. Bruno is a forecasting consultant with an M.A. in Islamic/Middle Eastern Studies from the Freie Universität Berlin.

We begin by talking about how Bruno got involved with Good Judgment and how he became a superforecaster. Then we go through a number of Good Judgment Project forecasting questions we did poorly on and discuss whether our forecasts were really inaccurate or whether we were just unlucky. We go on to consider whether expertise can sometimes be an obstacle to forecasting.

Next Bruno tells us about his forthcoming book on forecasting, Sichere Prognosen in unsicheren Zeiten (“Certain Forecasts in Uncertain Times”), which comes out in April 2018. Bruno says that modern forecasters play a similar social to Roman augurs and talks about the value of “common-sense Bayesianism”. He also argues that serious forecasting can serve as an antidote to fake news. We close the podcast by talking about what supeforecasters are like. whether we will see a “Jamaica coalition” in Germany, and why center-left parties seem to be collapsing in Europe.

You can find NonProphets on Blubrry, iTunes, Stitcher and Google Play. Links to our other superforecaster interviews are here. As always, if you have questions, ideas for future episodes, or would like to suggest a possible black swan event, you can use our contact page or e-mail us at (nonprophetspod [at] gmail.com). If you enjoy this podcast, please rate us and recommend us to your friends.

Homage to Catalonia

In this episode (recorded 10/4/17), we begin with a discussion of the Catalan independence referendum (Catalan President Carles Puigdemont just issued a confusing suspended declaration of independence while we were posting this). We go on to talk about how we can reduce the impact fake news in the wake of fake stories that emerged after the Las Vegas Strip shooting. We close with a conversation about the chance of a copycat shooting and the prospects for gun control in the US.

The intro music is a clip from “Ibitha” by Lonely Island. You can find NonProphets on Blubrry, iTunes, Stitcher and Google Play. As always, if you have questions, ideas for future episodes, or would like to suggest a possible black swan event, you can use our contact page or e-mail us at (nonprophetspod [at] gmail.com). If you enjoy this podcast, please rate us and recommend us to your friends.

Episode 18: Hitler’s Mac and Cheese

In episode 18 (recorded 2/1/17), we talk to friend of the podcast and small business owner James about Trump’s “two-for-one” executive order on reducing regulation and about how new technologies like real-time video manipulation might affect our ability to know what is real. Atief goes on to argue that Trump’s supreme court nominee Neil Gorsuch is somehow like Hitler’s macaroni and cheese recipe. We close the podcast with a discussion of the recent corruption amnesty protests in Romania.

You can also find NonProphets on iTunes and Google Play. As always, if you have questions, ideas for future episodes, or would like to suggest a possible black swan event, you can use the contact page or e-mail us at (nonprophetspod [at] gmail.com). And if you enjoy this podcast, please rate us and recommend us to your friends.

Episode 12: Fake News, Real Consequences

In Episode 12, we look at how “fake news” and affects politics and our ability to forecasting political events. We share how we go about figuring out what to trust in the news. We also recommend going to AllSides to see how stories are being covered by media outlets with different partisan orientations. Then we go on to talk about national elections in Austria and France in light of the the surge of far-right nationalism around the world. Next week we will be back with a special holiday forecasting podcast!

As always, if you have questions, ideas for future episodes, or would like to suggest a possible black swan event, use the contact page or e-mail us at (nonprophetspod [at] gmail.com). And if you enjoy this podcast, please rate us on iTunes and recommend us to your friends.